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_ "See now the place where I have slept for these two thousand years,"
said Ayesha, taking the lamp from Leo's hand and holding it above her
head. Its rays fell upon a little hollow in the floor, where I had
seen the leaping flame, but the fire was out now. They fell upon the
white form stretched there beneath its wrappings upon its bed of
stone, upon the fretted carving of the tomb, and upon another shelf of
stone opposite the one on which the body lay, and separated from it by
the breadth of the cave.
"Here," went on Ayesha, laying her hand upon the rock--"here have I
slept night by night for all these generations, with but a cloak to
cover me. It did not become me that I should lie soft when my spouse
yonder," and she pointed to the rigid form, "lay stiff in death. Here
night by night have I slept in his cold company--till, thou seest,
this thick slab, like the stairs down which we passed, has worn thin
with the tossing of my form--so faithful have I been to thee even in
thy space of sleep, Kallikrates. And now, mine own, thou shalt see a
wonderful thing--living, thou shalt behold thyself dead--for well have
I tended thee during all these years, Kallikrates. Art thou prepared?"
We made no answer, but gazed at each other with frightened eyes, the
whole scene was so dreadful and so solemn. Ayesha advanced, and laid
her hand upon the corner of the shroud, and once more spoke.
"Be not affrighted," she said; "though the thing seem wonderful to
thee--all we who live have thus lived before; nor is the very shape
that holds us a stranger to the sun! Only we know it not, because
memory writes no record, and earth hath gathered in the earth she lent
us, for none have saved our glory from the grave. But I, by my arts
and by the arts of those dead men of Kôr which I have learned, have
held thee back, oh Kallikrates, from the dust, that the waxen stamp of
beauty on thy face should ever rest before mine eye. 'Twas a mask that
memory might fill, serving to fashion out thy presence from the past,
and give it strength to wander in the habitations of my thought, clad
in a mummery of life that stayed my appetite with visions of dead
days.
"Behold now, let the Dead and Living meet! Across the gulf of Time
they still are one. Time hath no power against Identity, though sleep
the merciful hath blotted out the tablets of our mind, and with
oblivion sealed the sorrows that else would hound us from life to
life, stuffing the brain with gathered griefs till it burst in the
madness of uttermost despair. Still are they one, for the wrappings of
our sleep shall roll away as thunder-clouds before the wind; the
frozen voice of the past shall melt in music like mountain snows
beneath the sun; and the weeping and the laughter of the lost hours
shall be heard once more most sweetly echoing up the cliffs of
immeasurable time.
"Ay, the sleep shall roll away, and the voices shall be heard, when
down the completed chain, whereof our each existence is a link, the
lightning of the Spirit hath passed to work out the purpose of our
being; quickening and fusing those separated days of life, and shaping
them to a staff whereon we may safely lean as we wend to our appointed
fate.
"Therefore, have no fear, Kallikrates, when thou--living, and but
lately born--shalt look upon thine own departed self, who breathed and
died so long ago. I do but turn one page in thy Book of Being, and
show thee what is writ thereon.
"/Behold!/"
With a sudden motion she drew the shroud from the cold form, and let
the lamplight play upon it. I looked, and then shrank back terrified;
since, say what she might in explanation, the sight was an uncanny
one--for her explanations were beyond the grasp of our finite minds,
and when they were stripped from the mists of vague esoteric
philosophy, and brought into conflict with the cold and horrifying
fact, did not do much to break its force. For there, stretched upon
the stone bier before us, robed in white and perfectly preserved, was
what appeared to be the body of Leo Vincey. I stared from Leo,
standing /there/ alive, to Leo lying /there/ dead, and could see no
difference; except, perhaps, that the body on the bier looked older.
Feature for feature they were the same, even down to the crop of
little golden curls, which was Leo's most uncommon beauty. It even
seemed to me, as I looked, that the expression on the dead man's face
resembled that which I had sometimes seen upon Leo's when he was
plunged into profound sleep. I can only sum up the closeness of the
resemblance by saying that I never saw twins so exactly similar as
that dead and living pair.
I turned to see what effect was produced upon Leo by the sight of his
dead self, and found it to be one of partial stupefaction. He stood
for two or three minutes staring, and said nothing, and when at last
he spoke it was only to ejaculate--
"Cover it up, and take me away."
"Nay, wait, Kallikrates," said Ayesha, who, standing with the lamp
raised above her head, flooding with its light her own rich beauty and
the cold wonder of the death-clothed form upon the bier, resembled an
inspired Sibyl rather than a woman, as she rolled out her majestic
sentences with a grandeur and a freedom of utterance which I am, alas!
quite unable to reproduce.
"Wait, I would show thee something, that no tittle of my crime may be
hidden from thee. Do thou, oh Holly, open the garment on the breast of
the dead Kallikrates, for perchance my lord may fear to touch it
himself."
I obeyed with trembling hands. It seemed a desecration and an
unhallowed thing to touch that sleeping image of the live man by my
side. Presently his broad chest was bare, and there upon it, right
over the heart, was a wound, evidently inflicted with a spear.
"Thou seest, Kallikrates," she said. "Know then that it was /I/ who
slew thee: in the Place of Life /I/ gave thee death. I slew thee
because of the Egyptian Amenartas, whom thou didst love, for by her
wiles she held thy heart, and her I could not smite as but now I smote
that woman, for she was too strong for me. In my haste and bitter
anger I slew thee, and now for all these days have I lamented thee,
and waited for thy coming. And thou hast come, and none can stand
between thee and me, and of a truth now for death I will give thee
life--not life eternal, for that none can give, but life and youth
that shall endure for thousands upon thousands of years, and with it
pomp, and power, and wealth, and all things that are good and
beautiful, such as have been to no man before thee, nor shall be to
any man who comes after. And now one thing more, and thou shalt rest
and make ready for the day of thy new birth. Thou seest this body,
which was thine own. For all these centuries it hath been my cold
comfort and my companion, but now I need it no more, for I have thy
living presence, and it can but serve to stir up memories of that
which I would fain forget. Let it therefore go back to the dust from
which I held it.
"Behold! I have prepared against this happy hour!" And going to the
other shelf or stone ledge, which she said had served her for a bed,
she took from it a large vitrified double-handed vase, the mouth of
which was tied up with a bladder. This she loosed, and then, having
bent down and gently kissed the white forehead of the dead man, she
undid the vase, and sprinkled its contents carefully over the form,
taking, I observed, the greatest precautions against any drop of them
touching us or herself, and then poured out what remained of the
liquid upon the chest and head. Instantly a dense vapour arose, and
the cave was filled with choking fumes that prevented us from seeing
anything while the deadly acid (for I presume it was some tremendous
preparation of that sort) did its work. From the spot where the body
lay came a fierce fizzing and cracking sound, which ceased, however,
before the fumes had cleared away. At last they were all gone, except
a little cloud that still hung over the corpse. In a couple of minutes
more this too had vanished, and, wonderful as it may seem, it is a
fact that on the stone bench that had supported the mortal remains of
the ancient Kallikrates for so many centuries there was now nothing to
be seen but a few handfuls of smoking white powder. The acid had
utterly destroyed the body, and even in places eaten into the stone.
Ayesha stooped down, and, taking a handful of this powder in her
grasp, threw it into the air, saying at the same time, in a voice of
calm solemnity--
"Dust to dust!--the past to the past!--the dead to the dead!--
Kallikrates is dead, and is born again!"
The ashes floated noiselessly to the rocky floor, and we stood in awed
silence and watched them fall, too overcome for words.
"Now leave me," she said, "and sleep if ye may. I must watch and
think, for to-morrow night we go hence, and the time is long since I
trod the path that we must follow."
Accordingly we bowed, and left her.
As we passed to our own apartment I peeped into Job's sleeping place,
to see how he fared, for he had gone away just before our interview
with the murdered Ustane, quite prostrated by the terrors of the
Amahagger festivity. He was sleeping soundly, good honest fellow that
he was, and I rejoiced to think that his nerves, which, like those of
most uneducated people, were far from strong, had been spared the
closing scenes of this dreadful day. Then we entered our own chamber,
and here at last poor Leo, who, ever since he had looked upon that
frozen image of his living self, had been in a state not far removed
from stupefaction, burst out into a torrent of grief. Now that he was
no longer in the presence of the dread /She/, his sense of the
awfulness of all that had happened, and more especially of the wicked
murder of Ustane, who was bound to him by ties so close, broke upon
him like a storm, and lashed him into an agony of remorse and terror
which was painful to witness. He cursed himself--he cursed the hour
when we had first seen the writing on the sherd, which was being so
mysteriously verified, and bitterly he cursed his own weakness. Ayesha
he dared not curse--who dared speak evil of such a woman, whose
consciousness, for aught we knew, was watching us at the very moment?
"What am I to do, old fellow?" he groaned, resting his head against my
shoulder in the extremity of his grief. "I let her be killed--not that
I could help that, but within five minutes I was kissing her murderess
over her body. I am a degraded brute, but I cannot resist that" (and
here his voice sank)--"that awful sorceress. I know I shall do it
again to-morrow; I know that I am in her power for always; if I never
saw her again I should never think of anybody else during all my life;
I must follow her as a needle follows a magnet; I would not go away
now if I could; I could not leave her, my legs would not carry me, but
my mind is still clear enough, and in my mind I hate her--at least, I
think so. It is all so horrible; and that--that body! What can I make
of it? It was /I/! I am sold into bondage, old fellow, and she will
take my soul as the price of herself!"
Then, for the first time, I told him that I was in a but very little
better position; and I am bound to say that, notwithstanding his own
infatuation, he had the decency to sympathise with me. Perhaps he did
not think it worth while being jealous, realising that he had no cause
so far as the lady was concerned. I went on to suggest that we should
try to run away, but we soon rejected the project as futile, and, to
be perfectly honest, I do not believe that either of us would really
have left Ayesha even if some superior power had suddenly offered to
convey us from these gloomy caves and set us down in Cambridge. We
could no more have left her than a moth can leave the light that
destroys it. We were like confirmed opium-eaters: in our moments of
reason we well knew the deadly nature of our pursuit, but we certainly
were not prepared to abandon its terrible delights.
No man who once had seen /She/ unveiled, and heard the music of her
voice, and drunk in the bitter wisdom of her words, would willingly
give up the sight for a whole sea of placid joys. How much more, then,
was this likely to be so when, as in Leo's case, to put myself out of
the question, this extraordinary creature declared her utter and
absolute devotion, and gave what appeared to be proofs of its having
lasted for some two thousand years?
No doubt she was a wicked person, and no doubt she had murdered Ustane
when she stood in her path, but then she was very faithful, and by a
law of nature man is apt to think but lightly of a woman's crimes,
especially if that woman be beautiful, and the crime be committed for
the love of him.
And then, for the rest, when had such a chance ever come to a man
before as that which now lay in Leo's hand? True, in uniting himself
to this dread woman, he would place his life under the influence of a
mysterious creature of evil tendencies,[*] but then that would be
likely enough to happen to him in any ordinary marriage. On the other
hand, however, no ordinary marriage could bring him such awful beauty
--for awful is the only word that can describe it--such divine
devotion, such wisdom, and command over the secrets of nature, and the
place and power that they must win, or, lastly, the royal crown of
unending youth, if indeed she could give that. No, on the whole, it is
not wonderful that, though Leo was plunged in bitter shame and grief,
such as any gentleman would have felt under the circumstances, he was
not ready to entertain the idea of running away from his extraordinary
fortune.
[*] After some months of consideration of this statement I am bound to
confess that I am not quite satisfied of its truth. It is
perfectly true that Ayesha committed a murder, but I shrewdly
suspect that, were we endowed with the same absolute power, and if
we had the same tremendous interest at stake, we would be very apt
to do likewise under parallel circumstances. Also, it must be
remembered that she looked on it as an execution for disobedience
under a system which made the slightest disobedience punishable by
death. Putting aside this question of the murder, her evil-doing
resolves itself into the expression of views and the
acknowledgment of motives which are contrary to our preaching if
not to our practice. Now at first sight this might be fairly taken
as a proof of an evil nature, but when we come to consider the
great antiquity of the individual it becomes doubtful if it was
anything more than the natural cynicism which arises from age and
bitter experience, and the possession of extraordinary powers of
observation. It is a well known fact that very often, putting the
period of boyhood out of the question, the older we grow the more
cynical and hardened we get; indeed many of us are only saved by
timely death from utter moral petrifaction if not moral
corruption. No one will deny that a young man is on the average
better than an old one, for he is without that experience of the
order of things that in certain thoughtful dispositions can hardly
fail to produce cynicism, and that disregard of acknowledged
methods and established custom which we call evil. Now the oldest
man upon the earth was but a babe compared to Ayesha, and the
wisest man upon the earth was not one-third as wise. And the fruit
of her wisdom was this, that there was but one thing worth living
for, and that was Love in its highest sense, and to gain that good
thing she was not prepared to stop at trifles. This is really the
sum of her evil doings, and it must be remembered, on the other
hand, that, whatever may be thought of them, she had some virtues
developed to a degree very uncommon in either sex--constancy, for
instance.--L. H. H.
My own opinion is that he would have been mad if he had done so. But
then I confess that my statement on the matter must be accepted with
qualifications. I am in love with Ayesha myself to this day, and I
would rather have been the object of her affection for one short week
than that of any other woman in the world for a whole lifetime. And
let me add that, if anybody who doubts this statement, and thinks me
foolish for making it, could have seen Ayesha draw her veil and flash
out in beauty on his gaze, his view would exactly coincide with my
own. Of course, I am speaking of any /man/. We never had the advantage
of a lady's opinion of Ayesha, but I think it quite possible that she
would have regarded the Queen with dislike, would have expressed her
disapproval in some more or less pointed manner, and ultimately have
got herself blasted.
For two hours or more Leo and I sat with shaken nerves and frightened
eyes, and talked over the miraculous events through which we were
passing. It seemed like a dream or a fairy tale, instead of the
solemn, sober fact. Who would have believed that the writing on the
potsherd was not only true, but that we should live to verify its
truth, and that we two seekers should find her who was sought,
patiently awaiting our coming in the tombs of Kôr? Who would have
thought that in the person of Leo this mysterious woman should, as she
believed, discover the being whom she awaited from century to century,
and whose former earthly habitation she had till this very night
preserved? But so it was. In the face of all we had seen it was
difficult for us as ordinary reasoning men any longer to doubt its
truth, and therefore at last, with humble hearts and a deep sense of
the impotence of human knowledge, and the insolence of its assumption
that denies that to be possible which it has no experience of, we laid
ourselves down to sleep, leaving our fates in the hands of that
watching Providence which had thus chosen to allow us to draw the veil
of human ignorance, and reveal to us for good or evil some glimpse of
the possibilities of life. _
Read next: CHAPTER XXII - JOB HAS A PRESENTIMENT
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