Page:Georges Eekhoud - Escal Vigor, a novel.djvu/36

12 the women were dominated by much of that same sanguinary hysteria that had erstwhile inflamed the tormentresses of good Bishop Olfgar.

By that strange law of contrasts, in virtue of which extremes meet, these islanders, though devoid of any definite religion, remained superstitious and fanatical, like the natives of most countries subject to phantasmal mists and fallacious meteors. Their love of the marvellous descended to them from remote theogonies, the gloomy and fatalistic cults of Thor and Odin; but eager appetites were mingled with their fantastic imaginations, intensifying their affections as well as their aversions.