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Updated: June 15, 2025
This was the sum of it From the beginning of the world, as he expressed it, that is, from thousands and thousands of years ago, this Mountain had been the home of a peculiar fire-worship, of which the head heirophant was a woman. About twenty centuries before, however, the invading general named Rassen, had made himself Khan of Kaloon.
Then it was for the second time since we had dwelt in this land of Kaloon that of a sudden the fire flamed upon the Peak. When we had seen it before, it had appeared to flash across the heavens in one great lighthouse ray, concentrated through the loop above the pillar, and there this night also the ray ran far above us like a lance of fire.
Show us what thou art, thou flitting night-owl, who thinkest to frighten me with that livery of death, which only serves to hide the death within." "Cease, I pray lady, cease," said Oros, stirred for once out of his imperturbable calm. "She is the Minister, none other, and with her goes the Power." "Then it goes not against Atene, Khania of Kaloon," she answered, "or so I think. Power, forsooth!
"I go to ask a certain question of the Oracle on yonder mountain peak. With your will or without it I tell you that I go, and afterwards you can settle which is the stronger the Khania of Kaloon or the Hesea of the House of Fire." Atene listened and for a while stood silent, perhaps because she had no answer. Then she said with a little laugh "Is that your will?
From the surface of this lake rose smoke and gases that took fire as they floated upwards, and, mingling together, formed a gigantic sheet of living light. Right opposite to us burned this sheet and, the flare of it passing through the needle-eye of the pillar under us, sped away in one dazzling beam across the country of Kaloon, across the mountains beyond, till it was lost on the horizon.
Over him, a dagger in his withered hand yes, about to strike, in the very act stood the old Shaman, and on the floor hard by, gazing upward with wide-set eyes, dead and still majestic in her death, lay Atene, Khania of Kaloon.
"Lord," he said, in the same corrupt Grecian dialect which was used by the courtiers of Kaloon, "I will not ask if you are hurt, since from the moment that you entered the sacred river and set foot within this land you and your companion were protected by a power invisible and could not be harmed by man or spirit, however great may have seemed your danger.
"Aye," she answered, "ere night the weather will be wilder even than my heart. No longer shall they cry for water in Kaloon! Mount, Holly, mount! The advance begins!" and unaided she sprang to the saddle of the mare that Oros brought her. Then, in the midst of the five thousand horsemen, we moved down upon the ford.
With the exception of a columned and towered edifice that crowned the city and seemed to be encircled by gardens, we could see no great buildings in the place. "How is the city named?" asked Leo of Simbri. "Kaloon," he answered, "as was all this land even when my fore-fathers, the conquerors, marched across the mountains and took it more than two thousand years ago.
Now, this letter from the Mountain that the head-priest Oros sent to your court a while ago?" and he selected a parchment from a pile which lay upon the table and looked at her. "Read," she said, "I would hear it again." So he read: "From the Hesea of the House of Fire, to Atene, Khania of Kaloon.
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