And as I pass out, still in that stream, I notice that the temple area is crowded with all kinds of merchandise, stalls of all sorts, just as outside. Vendors of everything, from mud pots up to jewels, are roaming over the place crying their wares, as if they had been in a market; and right in the middle of them the worship goes on at the different shrines and before the different idols. There it is, market and temple, as in the days of our Lord; neither seems to interfere with the other. No one seems to see anything incongruous in the sight of a man prostrated before a stone set at the back of a heap of glass bangles. And when someone drops suddenly, and sometimes reverently, in front of a stall of coils of oily cakes, no one sees anything extraordinary in it; they know there is a god somewhere on the other side of the cakes. On and out, through the aisle with its hundred pillars, all stone--stone paving, pillars, roof; on and out, into the glare and the sight of the goats again. But one hardly sees them now, for between them and one's eyes seem to come the things one saw inside--those men and women, hundreds of them, worshipping that which is not God. Is Pan dead? . . . Pan is dead! Oh, Pan is dead! For, clearer than the sight of that idolatrous crowd, I saw this--I had seen it inside those temple walls:--a pile of old, dead gods. They were bundled away in a corner, behind the central shrine--stone gods, mere headless stumps; wooden gods with limbs lopped off; clay gods, mere lumps of mud; mutilated and neglected, worn-out old gods. Oh, the worship once offered to those broken, battered things! No one worships them now! For full five minutes I had sat and looked at them-- "Gods bereavëd, gods belated, With your purples rent asunder! Gods discrowned and desecrated, Disinherited of thunder!" There were withered wreaths lying at the feet of some of the idols near; there were fresh wreaths round the necks of others. There were no wreaths in this corner of dead gods. I looked, and looked, and looked again. Oh, there was prophecy in it! And as I came out among the living people, the sight of that graveyard of dead gods was ever with me, and the triumph-song God's prophetess sang, sang itself through and through me--Pan is dead! _Quite dead!_ "'Twas the hour when One in Sion Hung for love's sake on a cross; When His brow was chill with dying, And His soul was faint with loss; When His priestly blood dropped downward, And His kingly eyes looked throneward-- Then, Pan was dead. "By the love He stood alone in, His sole Godhead rose complete, And the false gods fell down moaning, Each from off his golden seat; All the false gods with a cry Rendered up their deity-- Pan, Pan was dead." CHAPTER XXIV "Married to the God"