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Apart from that there was only Sheol, a sombre region of the under-earth, to which the dead descended, and there remained without consciousness, abandoned by God. “Immortal!” Mary, with great wondering eyes, would echo. “Immortal!” “Yes; but to become so,” Sephôrah replied, “you must worship at another shrine.” “Where is it?” Sephôrah answered evasively.
When the Passover had come and gone, Sephôrah detected that Mary had ceased to be a child; and of the gods and goddesses with whose adventures she was wont to entertain her, gradually she confined herself to Mylitta; and in describing the wonderlands which she knew so well, she spoke now only of Babylon, where the great tower was, and the gardens that hung in the air.
At the mention of the sacred canon, Sephôrah would smile with that indulgence which wisdom brings, and smooth her scanty plaits, and draw the back of her hand across her mouth. “Burned on tiles in the land of the magi are the records of a million years. In the unpolluted tombs of Osorapi the history of life and of time is written on the cerements of kings.
The early chapters suggest "Imperial Purple," which appeared a year later and upon which he may well have been at work at this time. There is a foreshadowing, too, of "The Lords of the Ghostland" in a very amusing and slightly cynical passage in which Mary as a child listens to Sephorah the sorceress tell legends and myths of Assyria and Egypt. Mary interrupts with "Why you mean Moses!
She told her of these things, of others as well; and now and then in the telling of them a fat little man with beady eyes would wander in, the smell of garlic about him, and stare at Mary’s lips. His name was Pappus; by Sephôrah he was treated with great respect, and Mary learned that he was rich and knew that Sephôrah was poor.
It was all very marvellous and beautiful, and Sephôrah described it in fitting terms. There was the Temple of the Seven Spheres, where the priests offered incense to the Houses of the Planets, to the whole host of heaven, and to Bel, Lord of the Sky. There was the Home of the Height, a sheer flight of solid masonry extending vertiginously, and surmounted by turrets of copper capped with gold.
“That,” said Sephôrah, “is the worship Mylitta exacts.” As she spoke she drew herself up, her height increased, an unnatural splendor filled her eyes. “I,” she continued, “am her priestess. I sacrificed at Byblus, but you may sacrifice here. There is a dovecote, yonder is a cistern, beyond are the cypress and the evergreens that she loves. Mary, do you wish to be immortal? Do you see the way?”
It is from these lands and monuments the Thorah comes; its verses are made of their memories; it gathered whatever it found, and overlooked the essential, immortal life.” And Sephôrah added in a whisper, “For we are descended from gods, and immortal as they.” The khazzan had disclosed to Mary no such prospect as that.
Beyond was the Bitter Sea, the stars dancing in its ripples; and there in the shadow of the evergreens was the hut in which that Sephôrah lived to whom long ago Martha had forbidden her to speak. Through the lattice came the scent of olive-trees, and with it the irresistible breath of spring.
From the lattice at which she used to sit she could see the wide white road begin its descent to the Jordan, a stretch of almond trees and oleanders; and just beyond, in a woody hollow, a little house in which Sephôrah lived—a woman who came from no one knew where, and to whom Martha had forbidden her to speak.
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