Preface

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.