Time . . . time, and light, and pain, they had all started again. He was crouching in some kind of ditch, on all fours in the mud. His face stung and his eyes, in this bright light, were full of fog. He looked up from his mud-blotched nakedness to a blurred, radiant figure standing above him. Light fell in glory on white hair, the long folds of a white cloak. The eyes gazed at Ganil, the voice spoke to him: “You lie in the Grave. You lie in the Grave of Knowledge. So lie your forefathers forever beneath the ashes of the fires of Hell.” The voice swelled out: “O fallen Man, arise!” Ganil managed to get to his feet. The white figure was pointing: “That is the Light of Human Reason. It guided you to the grave. Drop it.” Ganil realized he was still holding a mud-sodden black stick, the torch; he let it fall. “Now rise,” the white figure cried in a slow exaltation, “rise from darkness and walk in the Light of Common Day!” Hands reached to Ganil, helping and hauling him up. Men knelt offering him basins and sponges, others towelled him, rubbed him down till he stood clean and warm, a grey cloak round his shoulders, amid the chatting and laughter, coming and going, in the bright spacious hall. A bald man clapped his shoulder. “Come on, time for the Oath.”

“Did I-did I do all right?”

“Fine! Only you held up that damn fool torch so long. Thought you’d keep us growling around in the dark all day. Come on.” They led him over black pavement and under the very lofty, white-beamed ceiling, to a curtain that dropped, pure white, in a few straight folds, thirty feet from roof to floor. “Curtain of Mystery,” somebody said to Ganil in a matter-of-fact tone. Laughing and talking had died away; they stood all round him, silent. In silence the white curtain parted. Ganil stared foggily at what was revealed: a high altar, a long table, and an old man in white.

“Postulant, will you swear our Oath with us?”

Somebody nudged Ganil, whispering, “I will.” “I will,” Ganil stuttered.

“Swear then, Masters of the Rite!” The old man raised up a shape of silver: an X-cross, supported by an iron shaft. “Under the Cross of the Common Day I swear never to reveal the rites and mysteries of my Lodge—”

“Under the Cross . . . I swear . . . the rites . . .” muttered all the men around Ganil, and propelled by another nudge he muttered with them.

“To live well, to work well, to think well—” As Ganil finished repeating this a voice whispered in his ear, “Don’t swear.”