She
For the rest, it is of no public interest, resembling as it does
the experience of more than one Central African traveller.
Suffice it to say, that we did, after incredible hardships and
privations, reach the Zambesi, which proved to be about a hundred
and seventy miles south of where Billali left us. There we were
for six months imprisoned by a savage tribe, who believed us to
be supernatural beings, chiefly on account of Leo’s youthful face
and snow-white hair. From these people we ultimately escaped,
and, crossing the Zambesi, wandered off southwards, where, when
on the point of starvation, we were sufficiently fortunate to
fall in with a half-caste Portuguese elephant-hunter who had
followed a troop of elephants farther inland than he had ever
been before. This man treated us most hospitably, and ultimately
through his assistance we, after innumerable sufferings and
adventures, reached Delagoa Bay, more than eighteen months from
the time when we emerged from the marshes of Kôr, and the very
next day managed to catch one of the steamboats that run round
the Cape to England. Our journey home was a prosperous one, and
we set our foot on the quay at Southampton exactly two years from
the date of our departure upon our wild and seemingly ridiculous
quest, and I now write these last words with Leo leaning over my
shoulder in my old room in my college, the very same into which
some two-and-twenty years ago my poor friend Vincey came
stumbling on the memorable night of his death, bearing the iron
chest with him.
And that is the end of this history so far as it concerns science
and the outside world. What its end will be as regards Leo and
myself is more than I can guess at. But we feel that is not
reached yet. A story that began more than two thousand years ago
may stretch a long way into the dim and distant future.
Is Leo really a reincarnation of the ancient Kallikrates of whom
the inscription tells? Or was Ayesha deceived by some strange
hereditary resemblance? The reader must form his own opinion on
this as on many other matters. I have mine, which is that she
made no such mistake.
Often I sit alone at night, staring with the eyes of the mind
into the blackness of unborn time, and wondering in what shape
and form the great drama will be finally developed, and where the
scene of its next act will be laid. And when that _final_
development ultimately occurs, as I have no doubt it must and
will occur, in obedience to a fate that never swerves and a
purpose that cannot be altered, what will be the part played
therein by that beautiful Egyptian Amenartas, the Princess of the
royal race of the Pharaohs, for the love of whom the Priest
Kallikrates broke his vows to Isis, and, pursued by the
inexorable vengeance of the outraged Goddess, fled down the coast
of Libya to meet his doom at Kôr?