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Updated: June 3, 2025
Woe is me that ye would not listen when I called, but turned every man to his own devices and the following after idols? Nay now, what will ye do in extremity? Will ye chant hymns to the Sun? Lo, he is deaf and blind for all his golden glory, and is but a taper set in the window of the sky, to be extinguished at God's good pleasure! Will ye supplicate Nagaya?
Pausing, they flung wreaths and garlands among the people, and continued: "O happy Bride! for thee are past all Sorrows and Sin, "Thou shalt never know shame, or pain or grief or the weariness of tears; "For thee no husband shall prove false, no children prove ungrateful; "O happy Bride of Nagaya! how glad a fate is thine.
Thou shouldst be either or both, to array thyself in opposition against the High Priestess of Nagaya, whose relentless Will hath caused empires to totter and thrones to fall!
To propitiate and pacify an unseen Supreme Destroyer is the aim of all religions, and it is for this reason we add to our worship of the Sun that of the White Serpent, Nagaya the Mediator.
He, the oppressor of all Nature and of his brother man, he, the insolent, self-opinionated tyrant, yet bound slave of the Earth on which he dwells ... why should he live again and carry his ignoble presence into the splendors of an Eternity too vast for him to comprehend? ..Nay, nay! ... I perceive thou art one of the credulous, for whom a reasonless worship to an unproved Deity is, for the sake of state-policy, maintained, . . I had thought thee wiser! ... but no matter! thou shalt pay thy vows to the shrine of Nagaya to-morrow, and see with what glorious pomp and panoply we impose on the faithful, who like thee believe in their own deathless and divinely constituted natures, and enjoy to the full the grand Conceit that persuades them of their right to Immortality!"
Slowly she withdrew her fingers from his clasp. "Thou art bold!" she said, with a touch of indolent amusement in her accents. "But in thy boldness there is something of the hero. Knowest thou not that I, Lysia, High Priestess of Nagaya, could have thee straightway slain for that unwise speech of thine? unwise because over-hasty and somewhat over-familiar.
O Lysia, UNvirgined Priestess of the Sun and Nagaya, how gloriously art thou arrayed in sin! ... O singular Sweetness whose end must needs be destruction, was ever woman fairer than thou! ... O love, love, lost in the dead Long-Ago, and drowned in the uttermost darkness of things evil, wilt thou drag my soul with thee again into everlasting night!
Why, above all men, do they not seize Khosrul? a veritable madman, for all his many years and seeming wisdom! Hath he not denounced the faith of Nagaya and foretold the destruction of the city times out of number? ... and are we not all weary to death of his bombastic mouthing?
Again in imagination he beheld the burning "Temple of Nagaya" in his Dream of Al-Kyris, again he saw himself carrying the corpse of his FORMER Self through fire and flame, and again he heard the last words of the dying Zabastes "I was the Poet's adverse Critic, and who but I should write his Eulogy?
Moreover this mad Khosrul of whom Niphrata spoke lately, thunders angry denunciations of Lysia and Nagaya in the open streets, with so much fervid eloquence that they who pass by cannot choose but hear, . . he hath a strange craze, a doctrine of the future which he most furiously proclaims in the language prophets use.
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