cave within the wall of rock facing directly south. The inner walls of the cave were a dull grey, free of any embellishment except for benches and recesses hewn out of the rock. Here the rock was red, burned by the fires on the hearths, of which traces still remained. Only the ceiling had a single ornamentation carved out of the rock in the shape of a hemisphere as large as a loaf of bread and incrusted with a thick, gleaming rim of gold to resemble a corona. This was an ancient Tukholian sanctuary where members of the younger generation came to offer up their prayers to the highest creator of life, the sun-god Dayboh, whose gold-encircled image was carved on its ceiling.
Although the Tukholian people had long ago been baptized by the Christian monks and went to pray to the Christian God at the Catholic church in Korchenia, still they never quite completely neglected the god of their forefathers, so that the path to the Glade of Light never became entirely grown over and the everlasting campfire in the center of it was never allowed to die out (it was called the “Glade of Light” because of this perpetual campfire) and before the small side altars of “Ladi” and “Did” there often smoked the fragrant balsam fir and jerked spasmodically the sacrificial doves provided by the youths and maidens.
However, as time went on, the people gradually began to forget and neglect the old gods and the old customs until only a few of the elders clung to the liberal and purely communal precepts of their ancient, benevolent religion which did not frighten the people with threats of punishment and suffering after death but considered the greatest punishment to be death itself, the physical and spiritual deterioration of perfidious individuals, disbelievers in a Benevolent God.
The new religion originating in the East and brought to our lands united itself with our old religious beliefs and only in this combination was it able to survive peacefully in the
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