George moved slowly backward toward the curtain and parted it with his two hands, still facing them. Then reaching back he grasped a heavy object behind him and dragged it into the centre of the stage, the curtains closing behind him. He stood back now and they could see what looked like a large ebony chest. He knelt before it, and Ruth could see that there was more of reverence than utility in his attitude, as he lifted the deep lid that seemed to divide the chest in half. Before her eyes she saw forming the altar she had twice seen before. The side of the lifted top made a wide platform. It was there that _It_ would lie. From a compartment in the lifted half he took an antique lamp, which he set on what now looked like the base of the altar. Ruth had removed the revolver from her girdle—the cold metal saved her from screaming aloud as George lit the lamp—a pale blue flame from which, on the instant, heavy, odorous spirals of smoke began to rise, filling the silent room with the insidious perfume of idolatry. For a moment the smoke seemed to blind her eyes. Then she saw— CHAPTER XVII A sigh, more like a gasp, ran through the room—from nowhere apparently, by some trick of slight of hand, by some optical illusion, by some power of hypnosis, they all saw a huge snake coiled on top of what had been an ebony chest, but was now an altar, and before it knelt a priest whose last incarnation had surely been thousands of years before kind Buddha came to bless or curse the world with his doctrine of annihilation. Then for the first time Karkotaka moved his lips in audible speech—swaying on his knees before the altar, he chanted what no one could doubt was a hymn of praise and supplication to the snake that lay coiled inert above the lamp. For some moments he chanted while they waited with held breath, fascinated, repelled, frightened, for once in their sophisticated lives, into silence.