These also carried wooden platters, and on them blooming flowers.
At a sign they struck up a religious chant and began to walk forward through the passage that led from the first court to the second.
Arriving in front of the altar they halted and one by one, first a priest and then a priestess, set down the platters of offerings, piling them above each other into a cone.

Next the priests and the priestesses ranged themselves in lines on either side of the altar, and Harut took a platter of corn and a platter of flowers in his hands.

These he held first towards that quarter of the sky in which swam the invisible new moon, secondly towards the rising sun, and thirdly towards the doors of the sanctuary, making genuflexions and uttering some chanted prayer, the words of which we could not hear.
A pause followed, that was succeeded by a sudden outburst of song wherein all the audience took part.

It was a very sonorous and beautiful song or hymn in some language which I did not understand, divided into four verses, the end of each verse being marked by the bowing of every one of those many singers towards the east, towards the west, and finally towards the altar.
Another pause till suddenly the doors of the sanctuary were thrown wide and from between them issued--the goddess Isis of the Egyptians as I have seen her in pictures! She was wrapped in closely clinging draperies of material so thin that the whiteness of her body could be seen beneath.

Her hair was outspread before her, and she wore a head-dress or bonnet of glittering feathers from the front of which rose a little golden snake.