And on the Eighth Day by Ellery Queen

Obviously there is something in the sanquetum that one of your people wants. Tell me everything that is in the forbidden room. Leave nothing out.”
    The lids came down over the black-blazing eyes as the old seer looked into his memory.
    “There is a tall jar containing scrolls of prayers. There is another jar containing scrolls of prayers. There is the holy arque in which the Book of Mk’h is kept—”
    “The book—”
    “—and the front of this arque is of glass. And there is also the treasure.”
    “What treasure?” Ellery asked slowly.
    The old man’s eyelids opened; Ellery could see the pupils widen as they were exposed to sudden light.
    And he said, “The silver.
    “And now the time has come, Elroï Quenan, for me to answer the question you were about to ask last night. Let us seat ourselves at the Crownsil table.”
    It was The Year of the First Pilgrimage, a name not given to it until much later. The Teacher was then a youth living with his father and mother in San Francisco, but not happily. The friends who shared their faith were equally unhappy.
    On the one hand, the city (or so it seemed to him) was seething with sin. Drunkards reeled down the hilly streets; their obscenities fouled the air. Saloons stood on every street corner, ablaze with gaslight and noisy with cheap music to tempt the weak and unwary. Gambling dens swallowed the money needed to feed men’s children, families were made paupers overnight. Dishonesty was the boasted rule in commerce; the few who refused to cheat went to the wall, without credit from the coarse multitude for even the honesty that had put them there.
    No man’s son was proof against the temptations of the vile Barbary Coast, which made of the human body an article of commerce. Even though shame, disease, and death lurked like jungle beasts, no man could be sure even of his own daughter.
    Was not the whole city a gaudy sink? Was not the whole country?
    A farmer or rancher might feel safe from the distant corruption; he soon felt the pain of nearer ills. He found himself slave to the railroad, whose unchecked tolls robbed him of most of his profit; the plaything of speculators, who juggled the prices his produce sold for.
    While in the nation’s capital a man of war—said to be a drunkard—sat in the highest office of the land! Political places were bought and sold by his lieutenants without scruple. Huge corporate combines, with the connivance of his administration, scandalously plundered the people’s resources.
    It was a black time for the God-fearing. Where to turn? Where to go?
    The self-contained world of the Latter-Day Saints seemed to offer a way and a destination; but it was open only to those who professed the Mormon faith. And this, for the Teacher’s people, was impossible.
    Ellery leaned forward eagerly. “Why, Teacher?”
    “Because of our own faith,” replied the old man.
    “Yes, of course. But what is it? Where did it come from?”
    The Teacher shook his Biblical head. The roots of Quenan’s faith, he said, went so deep into the past that not the oldest member of the holy community—even in the Teacher’s childhood—could say whence it grew. It could be traced through many generations and countries, but the trail became fainter and more difficult to follow, until at last it vanished altogether in the wilderness of time. Communicants had fallen by the wayside, but always a small hard core of the faithful remained to keep the faith alive.
    Ellery’s persistent questions turned up little. The Bible apparently played no direct role in the beliefs of the Teacher’s people, although it colored their traditions and theology. The sect (if that was what it was) had once had a way of life, it appeared, that had been “lost” in the long march of the centuries; the tradition of this vanished way of life had been handed down from Teacher to Teacher, the old man said, and he made a vague reference to the pages of Pliny and Josephus (there it was