This done, Ishtar stepped back a pace or two to review her handiwork.

'You are beautiful,' she said flatly. 'Not Cleopatra or the mother-goddess Isis herself was ever more so. The master will be pleased. Come, now, eat…'

Cleopatra? Isis? Marianne shook her head, as though to rouse herself from some bad dream. What had ancient Egypt to do with it? This was the nineteenth century and they were in a city full of ordinary people, under the protection of her own country's army! Napoleon was master of the better part of Europe! How dared the old gods raise their heads?

She felt the breath of madness touch her cheek. In an effort to bring herself back to earth, she tried the food which was brought her and drank a little of the wine, but the dishes seemed tasteless and the wine without flavour. It was like food eaten in a dream, tasting of nothing…

She was embarking, without relish, on the fruit when it happened. The room began to revolve slowly about her, it tilted unnaturally and everything in it seemed suddenly withdrawn to an immense distance, as though she had been sucked into a long tunnel. Her sense of hearing and of touch became infinitely detached… Before she was borne away on the great blue wave which rose up suddenly before her, Marianne had just time to understand in a lightning flash what had happened: this time, her food had been drugged.

Yet she was conscious of neither anger nor alarm. Her body seemed to have broken all its earthly moorings, including all capacity for fear, suffering or even disgust, and to be floating weightlessly, marvellously airborne amid a brilliantly coloured universe made up of all the glowing hues of dawn. The walls had fallen away. She was no longer in prison: a vast, shimmering world, shot through with all the colours of Venetian glass, opened up before her, full of rippling light and movement, and in a kind of trance, Marianne sped towards it. She seemed to find herself all at once on a tall ship… perhaps the very ship whose coming had for so long figured in her dreams, steered by a green siren? High up on the prow, she sailed towards strange shores where fantastically-shaped houses shone like metal, where the plants were blue and the sea purple. The sails sang and the ship drove on over a richly-coloured Persian carpet, while the sea air carried the scent of incense, and Marianne, breathing it in, was no longer astonished at the strange sense of animal well-being which spread through every fibre of her being.

It was a weird sensation, a joy which tingled in the minutest nerve-endings, even to her fingertips. It was a little like the moment after love when the body, satisfied, wrought to the ultimate pitch of sensation, wavers on the very verge of oblivion. It was a kind of oblivion. For all at once everything changed, darkness was everywhere. The fabulous landscape melted into thick night and the soft, scented warmth gave way to an air cool and damp. Yet still Marianne floated on in the same tranquil happiness.

The darkness through which she moved was gentle and familiar. She could feel it all about her like a caress: the darkness of the prison, squalid but wonderful, where for that one, only time in her life, she had given herself to Jason. Time rolled back. Once again, Marianne could feel the rough boards of their nuptial couch beneath her bare back, their harshness an apt counterpoint to the touch of her lover's hands.

She could feel that touch now. It slid over her body, lapping her in a web of fire beneath which her own flesh flamed and opened like some hothouse flower. Pressing her eyes shut, Marianne held her breath in the effort to hold on to the miraculous sensation which was yet only a prelude to the supreme delight to come… She felt her throat swell with unuttered moans and cries of pleasure but they died unvoiced as the dream changed again and plunged into the absurd.

Far off at first, but growing nearer, moment by moment, there was the sound of a drum beating slowly, terribly slowly, like some dreadful knell. It quickened gradually until it was like the pulse-beat of some gigantic heart, throbbing faster as it came nearer, beating faster and faster, louder and louder.

For a moment, it seemed to Marianne that it was Jason's heart she heard, but then, as the sound grew clearer, so the amorous darkness thinned and melted like a fog and became tinged with a red light. And suddenly she was hurled from the heights of her dream of love into the very midst of the nightmare from which she had seemed to have escaped.

She seemed in some strange way to have become two people, for she could see herself stretched out in her transparent black draperies which lay like a dark veil over her nakedness. She was lying on a low table made of stone, like an altar, beyond which rose a brazen serpent with a golden crown.

The place itself was a grim, windowless cavern, with moisture dripping from the low, vaulted roof and slimy, pitted walls lit by great black wax candles which gave off a greenish light and an acrid smoke. Below the altar sat two of the black women in their sombre draperies, holding small round drums between their knees, on which they were beating rhythmically. Only their hands moved: everything else remaining perfectly still, even their lips which yet emitted a kind of musical humming, a strange, wordless melody. To this weird music, Ishtar was dancing.

She was quite naked, except for a slim, golden snake which was coiled about her loins, and the candlelight shone blue-black on her gleaming skin. Eyes closed, head flung back and arms upraised, stressing the curve of her heavy, pointed breasts, she was turning in circles on the spot, whirling faster and faster, like a top…

Abruptly, Marianne's wandering spirit which had been floating in a kind of limbo of detachment above this extraordinary scene, re-entered her prostrate body. And with the return came fear and dread, but when she tried to move, spring up and run away, she found that she could not stir. Nothing bound her to the stone table, no bonds that could be seen or felt, yet her head and limbs refused to obey her, as though she were in a trance.

The sensation was so terrifying that she tried to cry out but no sound came. Beside her, Ishtar was now whirling madly. Sweat ran in shining trickles down her black skin and her overheated body gave off an almost unbearable wild beast odour.

Marianne was unable even to turn away her face.

Then she saw Matteo Damiani loom up out of a dark corner of the cavern and she wished that she could die. He came towards her slowly, his eyes wide open and staring blankly, bearing in both hands a silver cup containing some bubbling liquid. He was dressed in a long, black gown, not unlike the one Marianne had seen him wearing on the dreadful night at the Villa Sant'Anna when she had snatched Agathe from his devilish rites, but this one was patterned with long snakes in green and silver thread and was open down the front to reveal a fat, grey, hairy chest, breasted almost like a woman's.

At his approach, Ishtar ceased her frantic dance abruptly. She dropped, panting, to the ground, pressing her lips to the man's bare feet. Matteo continued to advance as though he had felt nothing, pushing the woman aside with the toe of his black sandal.

Reaching Marianne, he stretched out a hand to grasp the muslin tunic, and ripped it off in a single movement. Then, taking a small tray from the floor, he placed it on her stomach and set the silver cup upon it. After this, he dropped on to his knees and began chanting strange verses in some foreign tongue.

From the depths of her paralysing trance, Marianne realized with sick horror that he was going to perform on her the same satanic rites which she had witnessed in the ruins of the little temple, only this time she was at the very centre of the black magic. It was her own body which was to be made the altar for this sacrilege.

Ishtar had risen and was kneeling beside Matteo, playing the role of acolyte in the infernal ceremony, chanting the responses in the same unknown language.

As her master seized the cup and drained it to the last drop, she uttered a wild shriek blending into an incantation, as if she were invoking for him the protection of some dark and terrible deity, probably the gold-crowned serpent whose emerald eyes seemed to glitter with ominous life.

Matteo had begun to shake. He seemed to be possessed by some kind of religious mania. His eyes were dilated and rolled in their sockets and there was foam on his lips. He was making a low rumbling sound in his chest, like a volcano about to erupt. At this point, Ishtar handed him a black cockerel and he severed its neck at a stroke with a great knife. The blood flowed, splashing over the girl's naked body.

At that, the horror that welled up in Marianne broke through the paralysing power of the drug that held her in thrall. She found her voice in the utterance of one fearful, inhuman shriek which seemed to tear itself from her rigid throat. It was as if her vocal cords had come to life of themselves and in this feeble effort had used up all her strength, for scarcely had the echoes of that dreadful cry died away in the cavern than Marianne mercifully lost consciousness.

She did not see Matteo, at the height of his madness, cast off his robe and lean over her with outstretched hands. She did not feel him throw himself with all his weight upon her bloodstained body, possessing her with all a madman's fury. She was far away in a world without colour or sound where nothing could reach her.

There was no way of knowing how long she remained unconscious like this, but when she surfaced at last in the real world again she was lying in the great pillared bed and she felt deathly ill.