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Waving their palm-boughs to and fro, they paced along past the King and down the centre aisle of the Temple, then turning, they came back again to the lowest step of the Shrine and there they all prostrated themselves, while the children who stood near the incense-burners flung fresh perfumes on the glowing embers and chanted the following recitative: "O Nagaya, great, everlasting and terrible!

In the next row and in the rest of the niches are angels with their hands folded in prayer; and in the next row angels again, bearing the souls over, of which they had charge in life; and this is, I think, the most gloriously carved of all those in the vaulting. Then martyrs come bearing their palm-boughs; then priests with the chalice, each of them; and others there are which I know not of.

Hitty rested her weary head against the window-frame and sent her wearier thoughts upward to the stars; there were the points of light that the Chaldeans watched upon their plains by night, and named with mystic syllables of their weird Oriental tongue, names that in her girlhood she had delighted to learn, charmed by that nameless spell that language holds, wherewith it plants itself ineradicably in the human mind, and binds it with fetters of vague association that time and chance are all-powerless to break, Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgunebi, Bellatrix and Betelguese, sonorous of Rome and Asia both, full of old echoes and the dry resonant air of Eastern plains, names wherein sounded the clash of Bellona's armor, and the harsh stir of palm-boughs rustled by a hot wind of the desert, and vibrant with the dying clangor of gongs, and shouts of worshipping crowds reverberating through horrid temples of grinning and ghastly idols, wet with children's blood.