The Virgin of Zesh & the Tower of Zanid by L. Sprague de Camp

there was a human spirit struggling to express itself behind that façade, but that did her no good. Furthermore, she could not forget how unwilling he had been to bring her to Zesh until Kirwan had bullied him into it.
    Kirwan returned to the hut to wash for supper with clenched fists and grinding teeth. “The fiends!” he howled. “The foul Firbolgs! I’ll tear ’em to bits and dance on the gory remains!”
    “What now?” asked Bahr.
    “They’re putting on something called a folk drama; some rite of the equinox or some such nonsense, and wanted me to work on it. Well, says I, the great Brian Kirwan turns out as fine a piece of verse as any lad in Ireland, so if they’d like some lyrics—but no! A felly they call Euripides has already written the play. Well then, did they want me to act? Devil a bit. What d’ye think they did want?”
    “What?” said Althea and Bahr in chorus.
    “A stage hand! An assistant scene shifter, to crawl around tacking up pieces of burlap to symbolize the decadent Social Capitalism of Earth! The black shame of it! And if I was good, they said, maybe they’d let me carry a torch in the final procession that symbolizes the triumph of natural Roussellian man over the evils of civilization. Imagine that!”
    ###
    The Temple of Zesh stood in a rocky part of the island, two or three hoda from Elysion. Althea Merrick, Gottfried Bahr, and Brian Kirwan felt their way along the trail leading to this structure. They were helped by the fact that, for a short period, all three moons were in the sky at once.
    Suddenly, they were in front of the temple. To Althea, it looked like an oversized salt cellar with a light in the top.
    They approached it warily. Kirwan said, “D’you see anything that looks like a bell-button, now?”
    They looked around the door, but no knocker or other means of announcing their arrival appeared.
    “Well,” said Kirwan, the sweat on his forehead glistening in the moonlight, “we can’t stand here all night.”
    He smote the door with his knuckles. Nothing happened. Althea looked more closely at the structure. From the recent advancement of the Záva, she had the impression that the building must be of late origin. The weathered look of the stones, however, belied this. She whispered a question to Bahr.
    “It is not known,” he replied. “Possibly the tower was built back in the time of the Kalwm Empire, and later the tailless Krishnans who built it abandoned the island for one reason or another. My archaeological colleagues have not settled the question yet, albeit by radioactive methods it should be possible the date of construction to fix—”
    The door opened silently, framing a cloaked black figure. Bahr fell silent, and Kirwan recoiled with a start. The figure and the Terrans regarded one another silently, until Althea began to fidget.
    “The door of the righteous,” said the figure at last in Portuguese, “is ever open to the legitimate visitor. Do not let in all the flying things of the night.”
    They entered the door, which swung silently shut behind them, and followed the figure. The apparition led them through a short hall, lit by one feeble oil lamp, into a big central chamber with a dais in the middle. On this dais was mounted a curious metal tripod. The figure heaved itself up on the tripod and settled cross-legged.
    Several lamps lit the octagonal chamber. The walls bore weathered bas reliefs. Although blurred by time, the reliefs illustrated the amatory adventures of some hero or godlet. Althea, feeling herself blushing, saw that Bahr had lost himself in impersonal contemplation of these decorations.
    Although her own heart pounded, Althea pulled herself together. “Are you the Virgin of Zesh?”
    “The name of a thing is that which speakers commonly apply to the thing, whether or not it be well-applied.”
    A little taken aback, Althea decided that this oracular reply meant yes. She said, “We are three new arrivals at Elysion—one member