Not the dark companion of Sirius, brightest of all stars--not our own

chill and spectral planet rushing toward Vega in the constellation of

Lyra--presided at the birth of millions born to corroborate a bloody

horoscope.

But a Dark Star, speeding unseen through space, known to the ancients,

by them called Erlik, after the Prince of Darkness, ruled at the birth

of those myriad souls destined to be engulfed in the earthquake of the

ages, or flung by it out of the ordered pathway of their lives into

strange byways, stranger highways--into deeps and deserts never

dreamed of.

Also one of the dozen odd temporary stars on record blazed up on that

day, flared for a month or two, dwindled to a cinder, and went out.

But the Dark Star Erlik, terribly immortal, sped on through space to

complete a two-hundred-thousand-year circuit of the heavens, and begin

anew an immemorial journey by the will of the Most High.

What spectroscope is to horoscope, destiny is to chance. The black

star Erlik rushed through interstellar darkness unseen; those born

under its violent augury squalled in their cradles, or, thumb in

mouth, slumbered the dreamless slumber of the newly born.

One of these, a tiny girl baby, fussed and fidgeted in her mother's

arms, tortured by prickly heat when the hot winds blew through

Trebizond.

Overhead vultures circled; a stein-adler, cleaving the blue, looked

down where the surf made a thin white line along the coast, then set

his lofty course for China.

Thousands of miles to the westward, a little boy of eight gazed out

across the ruffled waters of the mill pond at Neeland's Mills, and

wondered whether the ocean might not look that way.

And, wondering, with the salt sea effervescence working in his

inland-born body, he fitted a cork to his fishing line and flung the

baited hook far out across the ripples. Then he seated himself on the

parapet of the stone bridge and waited for monsters of the deep to

come.

* * * * *

And again, off Seraglio Point, men were rowing in a boat; and a corded

sack lay in the stern, horridly and limply heavy.

There was also a box lying in the boat, oddly bound and clamped with

metal which glistened like silver under the Eastern stars when the

waves of the Bosporus dashed high, and the flying scud rained down on

box and sack and the red-capped rowers.

* * * * *

In Petrograd a little girl of twelve was learning to eat other things

than sour milk and cheese; learning to ride otherwise than like a

demon on a Cossack saddle; learning deportment, too, and languages,

and social graces and the fine arts. And, most thoroughly of all, the

little girl was learning how deathless should be her hatred for the

Turkish Empire and all its works; and how only less perfect than our

Lord in Paradise was the Czar on his throne amid that earthly paradise

known as "All the Russias."




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