But I knew that this would be against the implied condition of my being there at all, and might have had disastrous consequences to her whom I had come to save.

It might even frustrate my scheme, and altogether destroy my opportunity.

At that moment it was borne upon me more strongly than ever that this was not a mere fight for myself or my own selfish purposes--not merely an adventure or a struggle for only life and death against unknown difficulties and dangers.

It was a fight on behalf of her I loved, not merely for her life, but perhaps even for her soul.
And yet this very thinking--understanding--created a new form of terror.
For in that grim, shrouding darkness came memories of other moments of terrible stress.
Of wild, mystic rites held in the deep gloom of African forests, when, amid scenes of revolting horror, Obi and the devils of his kind seemed to reveal themselves to reckless worshippers, surfeited with horror, whose lives counted for naught; when even human sacrifice was an episode, and the reek of old deviltries and recent carnage tainted the air, till even I, who was, at the risk of my life, a privileged spectator who had come through dangers without end to behold the scene, rose and fled in horror.
Of scenes of mystery enacted in rock-cut temples beyond the Himalayas, whose fanatic priests, cold as death and as remorseless, in the reaction of their phrenzy of passion, foamed at the mouth and then sank into marble quiet, as with inner eyes they beheld the visions of the hellish powers which they had invoked.
Of wild, fantastic dances of the Devil-worshippers of Madagascar, where even the very semblance of humanity disappeared in the fantastic excesses of their orgies.
Of strange doings of gloom and mystery in the rock-perched monasteries of Thibet.
Of awful sacrifices, all to mystic ends, in the innermost recesses of Cathay.
Of weird movements with masses of poisonous snakes by the medicine-men of the Zuni and Mochi Indians in the far south-west of the Rockies, beyond the great plains.
Of secret gatherings in vast temples of old Mexico, and by dim altars of forgotten cities in the heart of great forests in South America.
Of rites of inconceivable horror in the fastnesses of Patagonia.
Of.

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