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Show 251 incense burning in shallow vessels, and domes rising in the distance, and beyond them, rustling against a hot sky, groves of olive trees with cool dark branches weighted with clusters of whimpering doves. Lorin listened intently to the words spoken in a quiet voice by the branch president, punctuated by moans from Sister Heinmiller, whose head tossed back and forth on the pillow under their twelve priestly hands, because he might have to do this himself some time. He was familiar with the language of invocations, benedictions, baptisms, confirmations, grave dedications, ordinations, patriarchal blessings, blessings on the sacrament, anointing the sick with oil, but as he had during the endowment ceremony in the temple, he was now hearing things he had not heard before. He had never been to a dedication of a new temple, but he knew that the dedicatory prayer was exhaustive. Walls were blessed against earthquakes, electrical circuits against malfunction or brownouts. Heating and plumbing systems were consigned to God's protection, likewise staircases, that they might not fall, and windows, that they might not shiver. At the end, he had heard, came the bone-chilling Hosanna Shout, repeated three times by the selected congregation in the temple, followed by dead silence. What Lorin was hearing now had this same kind of thoroughness. He was hearing names of enemies, pronounced slowly one after another, as though one after another were being probed for. It was eerie to feel you had control over things you couldn't see. Something was in the poor woman that wasn't going to come out if it didn't have to, and the branch president was closing in by naming it and telling it it had to. Lorin suspected that casting out devils was something like conduction by touching wires. He suspected that a lot of healing was done by conduction, like the transfer of potassium ions from oil of wintergreen into a nerve that was low in potassium. He had meant to ask Sorenson |