ALVARADO                                              Old friend, admit,
            You have not crossed this river Styx before,
            But I and that long-suffering soldier have,
            And seen such sights to make your codstones crawl:
            I mean the hell of human sacrifice.
            When trumpets howl, and myrrh infects the air,
            A wall-broad drum resounds a thundering knell,
            To call the cultists to their grisly pyramid.
                                               A drum is heard, repeating at intervals.
            One victim strains across the clammy slab,
            A ghoul down-wrenching at each tortured limb,
            To keep the spinal shambles tautly arched;
            To see the black, satanic hangman leer,
            With clotted snarls of hair, and clawlike nails,
            Lifting the cutlery to tremble skyward,
            And to this brittle bird cage plunge the flint;
            He loots the poor chest of its jewel. The heart,
            Exhumed, hot from the plundered cavity,
            Reluctant to desist its wonted pulse,
            Still shudders in the fiend’s vampiric gripe,
            Which he uprears to slake the smoldering sun.
            Unearthly, braying like a beast possessed,
            And, wielding disarticulated joints-
            The fleshless femurs of a ****** maid-
            Or, glaring through a mask of patchwork flesh,
            The druid forges down the crannied steps,
            Cascading with a rill of molten marrow.
            He kicks the corpse to tumble in the throng,
            Who spring to ****** his gobbets for their dish,
            And chant (the word goes) “Now our gods are coming . . .”
                                                                                                     *They exit.