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 blasphemous imprecations, although the language he used was unfamiliar to me. Next he arranged a copper chafing-dish over a blue flame and began to stir the ingredients, esoteric powders and crystals of bright colours. Now he lovingly lifted a crystal viol, filled with a purple liquid, and poured the contents into a porcelain bowl. Instantly, there was a faint detonation and a thick cloud of violet vapour mounted spirally to the ceiling. All the time, occasionally referring to the grimoire on the table, and employing certain unmentionable symbolic objects in the manner prescribed, he muttered incantations in the unknown tongue. The room swam with odours and mists, violet clouds and opopanax fogs. So far, the invocation was pretty and amusing but it resembled the arcane rites of Paul Iribe more than those of Hermes Trismegistus.

Now Peter pulled three black hairs from the cat's tail, which Lou Matagot delivered with a yowl of rage, springing at the same time from the table to the top of the cabinet, whence he regarded us through the mists and vapours, with his evil yellow eyes. The hairs went into the chafing-dish and a new aroma filled the room. The claws of an owl, the flower of the moly, and the powder of vipers followed and then Peter opened a long flat box which nearly covered one end of the huge table, and a nest of serpents, with bellies of rich turquoise blue and backs of tawny yellow, marked with black