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to the intimate personal touch requiring imagination and initiative.
As Paul emerged onto the ramp at the far side of the building, he heard the
bells calling the
Evening Rite at Alia's Fane.
There was an odd feeling of permanence about the bells.
The temple across the thronged square was new, its rituals of recent devising,
but there was something about this setting in a desert sink at the edge of
Arrakeen -- something in the way wind-
driven sand had begun to weather stones and plastene, something in the
haphazard way buildings had gone up around the Fane. Everything conspired to
produce the impression that this was a very old place full of traditions and
mystery.
He was down into the press of people now -- committed. The only guide his
Security force could find had insisted it be done this way. Security hadn't
liked Paul's ready agreement. Stilgar had liked it even less. And Chani had
objected most of all.
The crowd around him, even while its members brushed against him, glanced his
way unseeing and passed on, gave him a curious freedom of movement. It was the
way they'd been conditioned to treat a Fremen, he knew. He carried himself
like a man of the inner desert. Such men were quick to anger.
As he moved into the quickening flow to the temple steps, the crush of people
became even greater. Those all around could not help but press against him
now, but he found himself the target for ritual apologies: "Your pardon, noble
sir. I cannot prevent this discourtesy." "Pardon, sir; this crush of people is
the worst I've ever seen." "I abase myself, holy citizen. A lout shoved me."
Paul ignored the words after the first few. There was no feeling in them
except a kind of ritual fear. He found himself, instead, thinking that he had
come a long way from his boyhood days in Caladan Castle. Where had he put his
foot on the path that led to this journey across a crowded square on a planet
so far from Caladan? Had he really put his foot on a path? He could not say he
had acted at any point in his life for one specific reason. The motives and
impinging forces had been complex -- more complex possibly than any other set
of goads in human history. He had the heady feeling here that he might still
avoid the fate he could see so clearly along this path. But the crowd pushed
him forward and he experienced the dizzy sense that he had lost his way, lost
personal direction over his life.
The crowd flowed with him up the steps now into the temple portico. Voices
grew hushed. The smell of fear grew stronger -- acrid, sweaty.
Acolytes had already begun the service within the temple. Their plain chant
dominated the other sounds -- whispers, rustle of garments, shuffling feet,
coughs -- telling the story of the
Far Places visited by the Priestess in her holy trance.
"She rides the sandworm of space!
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She guides through all storms
Into the land of gentle winds.
Though we sleep by the snake's den, She guards our dreaming souls.
Shunning the desert heat, She hides us in a cool hollow.
The gleaming of her white teeth
Guides us in the night.
By the braids of her hair
We are lifted up to heaven!
Sweet fragrance, flower-scented.
Surrounds us in her presence."
Balak! Paul thought, thinking in Fremen. Look out! She can be filled with
angry passion, too.
The temple portico was lined with tall, slender glow-tubes simulating candle
flame. They flickered. The flickering stirred ancestral memories in Paul even
while he knew that was the
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file:///F|/rah/Herbert,%20Frank/Dune%202%20-%20Dune%20Messiah.txt intent. This
setting was an atavism, subtly contrived, effective. He hated his own hand in
it.
The crowd flowed with him through tall metal doors into the gigantic nave, a
gloomy place with the flickering lights far away overhead, a brilliantly
illuminated altar at the far end. Behind the altar, a deceptively simple
affair of black wood encrusted with sand patterns from the Fremen mythology,
hidden lights played on the field of a pru-door to create a rainbow borealis.
The seven rows of chanting acolytes ranked below that spectral curtain took on
an eerie quality: black robes, white faces, mouths moving in unison.
Paul studied the pilgrims around him, suddenly envious of their intentness,
their air of listening to truths he could not hear. It seemed to him that they
gained something here which was denied to him, something mysteriously healing.
He tried to inch his way closer to the altar, was stopped by a hand on his
arm. Paul whipped his gaze around, met the probing stare of an ancient Fremen
-- blue-blue eyes beneath overhanging brows, recognition in them. A name
flashed into Paul's mind: Rasir, a companion from the sietch days.
In the press of the crowd, Paul knew he was completely vulnerable if Rasir
planned violence.
The old man pressed close, one hand beneath a sand-grimed robe -- grasping the
hilt of a crysknife, no doubt. Paul set himself as best he could to resist
attack. The old man moved his head toward Paul's ear, whispered: "We will go
with the others."
It was the signal to identify his guide. Paul nodded.
Rasir drew back, faced the altar.
"She comes from the east," the acolytes chanted. "The sun stands at her back.
All things are exposed. In the full glare of light -- her eyes miss no thing,
neither light nor dark."
A wailing rebaba jarred across the voices, stilled them, receded into silence.
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