In his grief and desperation, Lunithi resolved to seek the Occlith and to question it anent the possibility of slaying the Voorqual. If, by any mortal means, the demon could be destroyed, he would remove from Lophai the long-established tyranny whose shadow fell upon all things from the sable pyramid.

It was necessary for him to proceed with utmost caution, to confide in no one, to veil his very thoughts at all times from the occult scrutiny of the Voorqual. In the interim of five days between the choosing of the victim and the consummation of the sacrifice, he must carry out his mad plan.

Unattended, and disguised as a simple herder, Lunithi left his palace during the brief night of universal three-hour slumber, and stole forth toward the desert through fields comparatively free of the serpentine growths. In the dawn of the balas-ruby sun, he had reached the pathless waste, and was toiling painfully over its knife-sharp ridges of dark stone, like the waves of a mounting ocean petrified in storm.

Soon the rays of the green sun were added to those of the other, and Aphom became a painted inferno through which Lunithi dragged his way, crawling from scarp to glassy scarp and resting at whiles in the colored shadows. There was no water anywhere; but swift mirages gleamed and faded; and the sifting sand appeared to run like rills in the bottom of deep, flaming valleys.

At setting of the first sun, Lunithi came within sight of the pale mountains beyond Aphom, towering like a precipice of frozen foam above the desert’s darker sea. They were tinged with evanescent lights of azure and jade and orange in the going of the yellow-red orb and the westward slanting of its binary. Then the lights melted into tourmaline and beryl, and the green sun was regnant over all, till it too went down, leaving a twilight whose colors were those of shoaling sea-water. In the gloom, Lunithi reached the foot of the lower crags; and there, exhausted, he slept till the second dawn.

Rising, he began his escalade of the white mountains, which rose bleak and terrible before him against the hidden suns, with cliffs that were sheer as the terraces of Titans. Like the king who had gone before in the ancient myth, he found the precarious way that led upward through narrow, broken chasms. At last he came to the vaster fissure, riving the heart of the white range, by which it was possible to reach the legendary lair of the Occlith.

The beetling walls of the chasm rose higher and higher above him, shutting out the double daylight but creating with their pallor a wan and deathly glimmer to illumine his way through the dusk. The fissure was such as might have been cloven by the sword of a macrocosmic giant. It led downward, steepening ever, like a wound that pierced the heart of Lophai.

Lunithi, like all of his race, was able to exist for prolonged periods without other nutriment than sunlight and water. He had brought with him a metal flask, filled with the aqueous element of Lophai, from which he drank sparingly as he descended along the chasm; for, like Aphom itself, the white mountains were waterless; and he feared to touch the rills and pools of unknown fluids upon which he came at intervals in the gloom. There were sanguine-colored springs that bubbled from the walls, to vanish in fathomless rifts; and sluggish brooklets of mercurial metal, green, blue, or amber, that wound beside him like liquescent serpents and then disappeared mysteriously in dark caverns. Acrid metallic vapors rose from clefts in the chasm-floor; and Lunithi felt himself among strange alchemies and chemistries of nature. In this fantastic world of stone, which the plants of Lophai could never invade, he seemed to have gone beyond the Satanic tyranny of the Voorqual.

At last he came to a clear, hueless pool, that almost filled the entire width of the chasm, leaving on one side a narrow, insecure ledge along which he was forced to scramble. A fragment of the marble stone, loosened by his passing, fell into the pool as he gained the opposite edge; and the clear liquid foamed and hissed like a thousand vipers. Wondering as to its properties, and fearful of the virulent hissing, which did not subside for some time, Lunithi hurried on, and came after an interval to the end of the fissure.

Here he emerged in the huge crater-like pit that was the home of the Occlith. Fluted and columned walls went up to an overwhelming height on all sides; and the sun of orange ruby, now at zenith, was pouring down a vertical cataract of gorgeous fires and shadows.

Addorsed against the further wall of the pit, Lunithi beheld that fabulous being known as the Occlith, which had the likeness of a high cruciform pillar of blue mineral, shining with its own esoteric luster. Going forward, he prostrated himself before the pillar; and then, in accents that quavered with a deep awe, he ventured to ask the desired oracle.

For awhile the Occlith maintained its aeonian silence. Peering timidly, the king perceived the twin lights of mystic silver that brightened and faded with a slow, regular pulsation in the arms of the blue cross. Then, from the lofty, shining thing, by means of no visible organ, there issued a voice that was like the tinkling of mineral fragments lightly clashed together, but which somehow shaped itself into articulate words.

“It is possible,” said the Occlith, “to slay the plant known as the Voorqual, in which an elder demon has its habitation. Though the flower has attained millennial age, it is not necessarily immortal: for all things have their proper term of existence and decay; and nothing has been created without its corresponding agency of death… . I do not advise you to slay the plant… but I can furnish you with the information which you desire. In the mountain chasm through which you came to seek me, there flows a hueless spring of mineral poison, deadly to all the ophidian plantlife of this world…”

The Occlith went on, and told Lunithi the manner in which the poison should be prepared and administered. The chill, toneless, tinkling voice concluded:

“I have answered your question. If there is anything more that you wish to learn, it would be well to ask me now.”

Prostrating himself again, Lunithi gave thanks to the Occlith; and, considering that he had learned all that was requisite in regard to the Voorqual, he did not avail himself of the opportunity to question further the strange entity of living stone. And the Occlith, cryptic and aloof in its termless, impenetrable meditation, apparently saw fit to vouchsafe nothing more except in answer to a direct query.

Withdrawing from the marble-walled abyss, Lunithi returned in haste along the narrow chasm; till, reaching the clear pool of which the Occlith had spoken, he paused to empty his water-flask and fill it with the angry, hissing liquid. Then he resumed his journey.

At the end of two days, after incredible fatigues and torments in the blazing hell of Aphom, he reached Lospar in the time of darkness and slumber, as when he had departed. Since his absence had been unannounced, it was supposed by everyone that he had retired to the underground adyta below the pyramid of the Voorqual for purposes of prolonged meditation, as was sometimes his wont.

In fearful hope and trepidation, dreading the miscarriage of his plan, and shrinking still from its audacious impiety, Lunithi awaited the night preceding that double dawn of summer solstice when, in a secret room of the black pyramid, the monstrous offering was to be prepared. Nala would be slain by a fellow-priest or priestess, chosen by lot, and her life-blood would drip from the channeled altar into a great cup; and the cup would then be borne with solemn rites to the Voorqual and its contents poured into the evilly supplicative bowl of the sanguinated blossom.

He saw little of Nala during that brief interim. She was more withdrawn than ever, and seemed to have consecrated herself wholly to the coming doom. To no one—and least of all to his beloved—did Lunithi dare to hint a possible prevention of the sacrifice.