She
Kallikrates, art the father, and in a sense thou art likewise the
son; and wouldst thou avenge thy wrong, and the wrong of that
far-off mother of thine, upon me, oh Kallikrates? See,” and she
slid to her knees, and drew the white corsage still farther down
her ivory bosom—“see, here beats my heart, and there by thy side
is a knife, heavy, and long, and sharp, the very knife to slay an
erring woman with. Take it now, and be avenged. Strike, and
strike home!—so shalt thou be satisfied, Kallikrates, and go
through life a happy man, because thou hast paid back the wrong,
and obeyed the mandate of the past.”
He looked at her, and then stretched out his hand and lifted her
to her feet.
“Rise, Ayesha,” he said sadly; “well thou knowest that I cannot
strike thee, no, not even for the sake of her whom thou slewest
but last night. I am in thy power, and a very slave to thee. How
can I kill thee?—sooner should I slay myself.”
“Almost dost thou begin to love me, Kallikrates,” she answered,
smiling. “And now tell me of thy country—’tis a great people, is
it not? with an empire like that of Rome! Surely thou wouldst
return thither, and it is well, for I mean not that thou shouldst
dwell in these caves of Kôr. Nay, when once thou art even as I
am, we will go hence—fear not but that I shall find a path—and
then shall we journey to this England of thine, and live as it
becometh us to live. Two thousand years have I waited for the day
when I should see the last of these hateful caves and this
gloomy-visaged folk, and now it is at hand, and my heart bounds
up to meet it like a child’s towards its holiday. For thou shalt
rule this England——”
“But we have a queen already,” broke in Leo, hastily.
“It is naught, it is naught,” said Ayesha; “she can be
overthrown.”
At this we both broke out into an exclamation of dismay, and
explained that we should as soon think of overthrowing ourselves.
“But here is a strange thing,” said Ayesha, in astonishment; “a
queen whom her people love! Surely the world must have changed
since I dwelt in Kôr.”
Again we explained that it was the character of monarchs that had
changed, and that the one under whom we lived was venerated and
beloved by all right-thinking people in her vast realms. Also, we
told her that real power in our country rested in the hands of
the people, and that we were in fact ruled by the votes of the
lower and least educated classes of the community.
“Ah,” she said, “a democracy—then surely there is a tyrant, for I
have long since seen that democracies, having no clear will of
their own, in the end set up a tyrant, and worship him.”
“Yes,” I said, “we have our tyrants.”
“Well,” she answered resignedly, “we can at any rate destroy
these tyrants, and Kallikrates shall rule the land.”
I instantly informed Ayesha that in England “blasting” was not an
amusement that could be indulged in with impunity, and that any
such attempt would meet with the consideration of the law and
probably end upon a scaffold.
“The law,” she laughed with scorn—“the law! Canst thou not
understand, oh Holly, that I am above the law, and so shall my
Kallikrates be also? All human law will be to us as the north
wind to a mountain. Does the wind bend the mountain, or the
mountain the wind?”
“And now leave me, I pray thee, and thou too, my own Kallikrates,
for I would get me ready against our journey, and so must ye
both, and your servant also. But bring no great quantity of
things with thee, for I trust that we shall be but three days
gone. Then shall we return hither, and I will make a plan whereby
we can bid farewell for ever to these sepulchres of Kôr. Yea,
surely thou mayst kiss my hand!”
So we went, I, for one, meditating deeply on the awful nature of the
problem that now opened out before us. The terrible _She_ had evidently
made up her mind to go to England, and it made me absolutely shudder to
think what would be the result of her arrival there. What her powers
were I knew, and I could not doubt but that she would exercise them to
the full. It might be possible to control her for a while, but her
proud, ambitious spirit would be certain to break loose and avenge
itself for the long centuries of its solitude. She would, if necessary,
and if the power of her beauty did not unaided prove equal to the
occasion, blast her way to any end she set before her, and, as she
could not die, and for aught I knew could not even be killed,[1] what
was there to stop her? In the end she would, I had little doubt, assume
absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole
earth, and, though I was sure that she would speedily make ours the
most glorious and prosperous empire that the world has ever seen, it
would be at the cost of a terrible sacrifice of life.
[1] I regret to say that I was never able to ascertain if _She_ was
invulnerable against the ordinary accidents of life. Presumably this
was so, else some misadventure would have been sure to put an end to
her in the course of so many centuries. True, she offered to let Leo
slay her, but very probably this was only an experiment to try his
temper and mental attitude towards her. Ayesha never gave way to
impulse without some valid object.—L. H. H.
The whole thing sounded like a dream or some extraordinary
invention of a speculative brain, and yet it was a fact—a
wonderful fact—of which the whole world would soon be called on
to take notice. What was the meaning of it all? After much
thinking I could only conclude that this marvellous creature,
whose passion had kept her for so many centuries chained as it
were, and comparatively harmless, was now about to be used by
Providence as a means to change the order of the world, and
possibly, by the building up of a power that could no more be
rebelled against or questioned than the decrees of Fate, to
change it materially for the better.
XXIII.
THE TEMPLE OF TRUTH
Our preparations did not take us very long. We put a change of
clothing apiece and some spare boots into my Gladstone bag, also
we took our revolvers and an express rifle each, together with a
good supply of ammunition, a precaution to which, under
Providence, we subsequently owed our lives over and over again.
The rest of our gear, together with our heavy rifles, we left
behind us.
A few minutes before the appointed time we once more attended in
Ayesha’s boudoir, and found her also ready, her dark cloak thrown
over her winding-sheetlike wrappings.
“Are ye prepared for the great venture?” she said.
“We are,” I answered, “though for my part, Ayesha, I have no
faith in it.”
“Ah, my Holly,” she said, “thou art of a truth like those old
Jews—of whom the memory vexes me so sorely—unbelieving, and hard
to accept that which they have not known. But thou shalt see; for
unless my mirror beyond lies,” and she pointed to the font of
crystal water, “the path is yet open as it was of old time. And
now let us start upon the new life which shall end—who knoweth
where?”
“Ah,” I echoed, “who knoweth where?” and we passed down into the
great central cave, and out into the light of day. At the mouth
of the cave we found a single litter with six bearers, all of
them mutes, waiting, and with them I was relieved to see our old
friend Billali, for whom I had conceived a sort of affection. It
appeared that, for reasons not necessary to explain at length,
Ayesha had thought it best that, with the exception of herself,
we should proceed on foot, and this we were nothing loth to do,
after our long confinement in these caves, which, however
suitable they might be for sarcophagi—a singularly inappropriate
word, by the way, for these particular tombs, which certainly did
not consume the bodies given to their keeping—were depressing
habitations for breathing mortals like ourselves. Either by
accident or by the orders of _She_, the space in front of the
cave where we had beheld that awful dance was perfectly clear of
spectators. Not a soul was to be seen, and consequently I do not
believe that our departure was known to anybody, except perhaps
the mutes who waited on _She_, and they were, of course, in the
habit of keeping what they saw to themselves.
In a few minutes’ time we were stepping out sharply across the
great cultivated plain or lake bed, framed like a vast emerald in
its setting of frowning cliff, and had another opportunity of
wondering at the extraordinary nature of the site chosen by these
old people of Kôr for their capital, and at the marvellous amount
of labour, ingenuity, and engineering skill that must have been
brought into requisition by the founders of the city to drain so
huge a sheet of water, and to keep it clear of subsequent
accumulations. It is, indeed, so far as my experience goes, an
unequalled instance of what man can do in the face of nature, for
in my opinion such achievements as the Suez Canal or even the
Mont Cenis Tunnel do not approach this ancient undertaking in
magnitude and grandeur of conception.
When we had been walking for about half an hour, enjoying ourselves
exceedingly in the delightful cool which about this time of the day
always appeared to descend upon the great plain of Kôr, and which in
some degree atoned for the want of any land or sea breeze—for all wind
was kept off by the rocky mountain wall—we began to get a clear view of
what Billali had informed us were the ruins of the great city. And even
from that distance we could see how wonderful those ruins were, a fact
which with every step we took became more evident. The town was not
very large if compared to Babylon or Thebes, or other cities of remote
antiquity; perhaps its outer wall contained some twelve square miles of
ground, or a little more. Nor had the walls, so far as we could judge
when we reached them, been very high, probably not more than forty
feet, which was about their present height where they had not through
the sinking of the ground, or some such cause, fallen into ruin. The
reason of this, no doubt, was that the people of Kôr, being protected
from any outside attack by far more tremendous ramparts than any that
the hand of man could rear, only required them for show and to guard
against civil discord. But on the other hand they were as broad as they
were high, built entirely of dressed stone, hewn, no doubt, from the
vast caves, and surrounded by a great moat about sixty feet in width,
some reaches of which were still filled with water. About ten minutes
before the sun finally sank we reached this moat, and passed down and
through it, clambering across what evidently were the piled-up
fragments of a great bridge in order to do so, and then with some
little difficulty over the slope of the wall to its summit. I wish that
it lay within the power of my pen to give some idea of the grandeur of
the sight that then met our view. There, all bathed in the red glow of
the sinking sun, were miles upon miles of ruins—columns, temples,
shrines, and the palaces of kings, varied with patches of green bush.