Ahriman awaited also the harlot who, elsewhere, at that period, was holy. Yet in lapses, confession and repentance sufficed for remission, provided that in praying for forgiveness the sinner forgave those that had sinned against him. If he lacked the time, were he dying, a priest might yet save him with words whispered in the ear. That was the extreme unction, hardly administrable, however, in case of wilful omission of the _darun_, which was communion. This sacrament, the most mystic of the Church, was observed by the Incas, who also confessed, also atoned, who, like the Buddhists, were baptized, but who, like the Persians, worshipped the sun and, with perhaps a finer instinct of what the beautiful truly is, worshipped too the rainbow.[14] [Footnote 14: Garcilasso: Commentarios reales.] Huraken, the winged and feathered serpent-god of the Toltecs, was adored in temples that upheld a cross. The Incas lacked that symbol. But they had a Satan. They had also the expectation of a saviour, belief in whom could alone have consoled for the advent of Pizarro. Over what highways of sea or sky, the living Word, which Ormuzd spoke, reached them, there has been no somnambulist of history to divine. But in the splendour that Cuzco was, in the golden temples of the town of gold, along the scarlet lanes where sacred peacocks strolled and girls more sacred still--vestals whom Pizarro's soldiers raped--in that City of the Sun, the Word re-echoed. The mystery of it, reported back to the Holy Office, was declared an artifice of the devil. Less mysteriously, through the obvious vehicle of cognate speech, it reached the Norse, stirred the scalds, who repeated it in the Eddie sagas. Loki and his inferior fiends are, as there represented, quite as black as Ahriman and his cohorts. The conflict of good and evil is almost as fully dire. But Odin is a colourless reflection of Ormuzd. The aesir, the angels of the Scandinavian sky, are paler than the izeds. The figure of Baldr, the redeemer, faints beside that of Mithra. Valhalla, though perhaps less fatiguing than Garo-demana, was more trite in its wassails than the latter in its hymns. What these abstractions lacked was not the Logos but the light. However brilliantly the Iranian sun might glow, in the sullen north its rays were lost. The mists, obscuring it, made Valhalla dim and set the gods in twilight. It stirred the scalds to runes but not to inspiration. There is none in the _Eddas_. Nor was there any in the _Nibelungen_, until the light, almost extinct, burst suddenly in the flaming scores of Wagner. Transformed by ages and by man, yet lifted at last from their secular slumber, the Persian myths achieved there their Occidental apotheosis, and, it may be, on steps of song, mounted to the ideal where Zervan Akerene muses. III AMON-RA "I am all that is, has been and shall be. No mortal has lifted my veil."