Chapter XXI: The Dead and Living Meet

“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,[1] 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.

[1] 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.