第83章

"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 Ismote the 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 lifenot 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 it touching us or herself, and then poured out what remained of the liquid upon the chest and head.

Instantly a dense vapor 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 as 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 _i_ She _i_ , 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 himselfhe 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 cursewho dared speak evil of such a woman, whose consciousness, for aught we knew, was watching us at the very moment?