Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/73

Rh I knew some way that this temple of the imagination, and the cult that worshipped there, was an ancient and established thing on earth, but that she did not tell me this for fear of misunderstanding.

It was Tanil, I saw now, and her body was now as transparent as her gown had been before. She laughed at my revealed thoughts, and her laugh was the endless echo of all the desires of all youths everywhere, and the answer to that desire, and I knew love. We walked and my eyes could not leave her swaying figure beside me, but looked at her and through her into paradise within her, to which she was the door. I drank and ate of the irresistible strength that vitalized her beauty, that was her beauty, and from that drink I grew to be something greater than myself—a mighty lover with his love.

Now behind her I sensed, far behind and over us, an ancient and familiar presence; the witch-mother of Kyra, who seemed tonight to be the mother of vastly more than Kyra. Beside her was the daughter, Kyra herself!

Her white, loved face seemed strained and worried and sorrowful over losing me to Tanil. Yet her face was also promising; promising me the fulfillment of the yearning toward her which had long been my inner life. I could not understand the paradox of her thought.

We traversed a landscape not of this world, and I know those spiraling tree forms, with their multitude of great blossoms, those green skies, this shadowed, dim lighting, revealed only sparingly yet so mysteriously beautifully a garden land that was not earthly. I knew from the thought that softly connected me with Tanil, that this was her homeland, a planet other than earth.

"We are entering the temple of Tanit, an ancient Goddess of earth as well as of this planet, which is my homeland in space. Tanit is symbolic of love, but her love is a different thing than men conceive love here on earth."

Tanil's thought was talking, soft dream-talk that yet left a stronger image of meaning than ever did waking conversation.

Looming now before us was the temple, built, I knew, to the worship of Tanit, a goddess whose teaching contradicts all that made medieval religion such a sterile and unpleasant affair.

Tanil's whisper made clear what was to come, as we entered the red transparent rock of the door, that glowed with an inner light as a ruby's fire.

"In the Temple of Tanit, love is glorified in the same way that we glorify "virtue," or our sterile concept of virtue. It differs only from the love concept of the Christians in its greater emphasis on the love of man for woman, and it offers opportunities for the expression and development of ideas which the Christian religion has left more or less dormant. This worhsipworship [sic] of our Goddess Tanit is another reason for our secrecy and our hiding. Little of what goes on here would be understood or allowed in the surface world.

My mind revolved the words "surface world" questioningly, and hearing my thought in the dream, Tanil answered.

"You will learn that there is, on every planet, a subterranean world. Some of these subterranean worlds of other planets are lived in although the surface is uninhabitable. The subterranean world of this planet earth is better known on many other worlds than it is on your own surface world. You have much to learn."

The temple floor was a shimmering, brilliant emerald stone. The vaulted roof was sapphire, glowing with peculiar fires of flickering blue flames.

The ruby altar, shaped like a heart, and serving as a warm backdrop to the white and flawless beauty of the near-nude dancer, was symbolic of the love-base of the religion of Tanit.

For that matter, the dancer, expressing with her silken gleaming flesh all the promise of ecstasy that woman is to man, was symbolic of Tanit's worship, too. I stood held by all the mystery and the terrible strength of that lure of love that was in her expressed—and alive.

N THE red altar burned a fire, that flickered far away, as though mysterious distance lay some how imprisoned within the ruby. From this fire radiated