When my sense had recovered its shock, and my eyes looked dizzily round,
the charge of the beasts had swept by; and of all the wild tribes
which had invaded the magical circle, the only lingerer was the brown
Death-adder, coiled close by the spot where my head had rested. Beside
the extinguished lamps which the hoofs had confusedly scattered, the
fire, arrested by the watercourse, had consumed the grasses that fed it,
and there the plains stretched, black and desert as the Phlegroean
Field of the Poet’s Hell. But the fire still raged in the forest
beyond,--white flames, soaring up from the trunks of the tallest trees,
and forming, through the sullen dark of the smoke-reek, innumerable
pillars of fire, like the halls in the City of fiends.
Gathering myself up, I turned my eyes from the terrible pomp of the
lurid forest, and looked fearfully down on the hoof-trampled sward for
my two companions.
I saw the dark image of Ayesha still seated, still bending, as I had
seen it last. I saw a pale hand feebly grasping the rim of the magical
caldron, which lay, hurled down from its tripod by the rush of
the beasts, yards away from the dim fading embers of the scattered
wood-pyre. I saw the faint writhings of a frail wasted frame, over which
the Veiled Woman was bending. I saw, as I moved with bruised limbs to
the place, close by the lips of the dying magician, the flash of the
ruby-like essence spilled on the sward, and, meteor-like, sparkling up
from the torn tufts of herbage.
I now reached Margrave’s side. Bending over him as the Veiled Woman
bent, and as I sought gently to raise him, he turned his face, fiercely
faltering out, “Touch me not, rob me not! You share with me! Never!
never! These glorious drops are all mine! Die all else! I will live! I
will live!” Writhing himself from my pitying arms, he plunged his face
amidst the beautiful, playful flame of the essence, as if to lap the
elixir with lips scorched away from its intolerable burning. Suddenly,
with a low shriek, he fell back, his face upturned to mine, and on that
face unmistakably reigned Death!
Then Ayesha tenderly, silently, drew the young head to her lap, and it
vanished from my sight behind her black veil.
I knelt beside her, murmuring some trite words of comfort; but she
heeded me not, rocking herself to and fro as the mother who cradles a
child to sleep. Soon the fast-flickering sparkles of the lost elixir
died out on the grass; and with their last sportive diamond-like tremble
of light, up, in all the suddenness of Australian day, rose the sun,
lifting himself royally above the mountain-tops, and fronting the meaner
blaze of the forest as a young king fronts his rebels. And as there,
where the bush-fires had ravaged, all was a desert, so there, where
their fury had not spread, all was a garden. Afar, at the foot of the
mountains, the fugitive herds were grazing; the cranes, flocking back
to the pools, renewed the strange grace of their gambols; and the great
kingfisher, whose laugh, half in mirth, half in mockery, leads the choir
that welcome the morn,--which in Europe is night,--alighted bold on
the roof of the cavern, whose floors were still white with the bones of
races, extinct before--so helpless through instincts, so royal through
Soul--rose Man!
But there, on the ground where the dazzling elixir had wasted its
virtues,--there the herbage already had a freshness of verdure which,
amid the duller sward round it, was like an oasis of green in a desert.
And there wild-flowers, whose chill hues the eye would have scarcely
distinguished the day before, now glittered forth in blooms of
unfamiliar beauty. Towards that spot were attracted myriads of happy
insects, whose hum of intense joy was musically loud. But the form of
the life-seeking sorcerer lay rigid and stark; blind to the bloom of the
wild-flowers, deaf to the glee of the insects,--one hand still resting
heavily on the rim of the emptied caldron, and the face still hid behind
the Black Veil. What! the wondrous elixir, sought with such hope and
well-nigh achieved through such dread, fleeting back to the earth from
which its material was drawn, to give bloom, indeed,--but to herbs: joy
indeed,--but to insects!
And now, in the flash of the sun, slowly wound up the slopes that led to
the circle the same barbaric procession which had sunk into the valley
under the ray of the moon. The armed men came first, stalwart and tall,
their vests brave with crimson and golden lace, their weapons gayly
gleaming with holiday silver. After them, the Black Litter. As they came
to the place, Ayesha, not raising her head, spoke to them in her own
Eastern tongue. A wail was her answer. The armed men bounded forward,
and the bearers left the litter.
All gathered round the dead form with the face concealed under the black
veil; all knelt, and all wept. Far in the distance, at the foot of the
blue mountains, a crowd of the savage natives had risen up as if from
the earth; they stood motionless, leaning on their clubs and spears, and
looking towards the spot on which we were,--strangely thus brought into
the landscape, as if they too, the wild dwellers on the verge which
Humanity guards from the Brute, were among the mourners for the
mysterious Child of mysterious Nature! And still, in the herbage,
hummed the small insects, and still, from the cavern, laughed the great
kingfisher. I said to Ayesha, “Farewell! your love mourns the dead,
mine calls me to the living. You are now with your own people, they may
console you; say if I can assist.”
“There is no consolation for me! What mourner can be consoled if the
dead die forever? Nothing for him is left but a grave; that grave shall
be in the land where the song of Ayesha first lulled him to sleep. Thou
assist Me,--thou, the wise man of Europe! From me ask assistance. What
road wilt thou take to thy home?”
“There is but one road known to me through the maze of the
solitude,--that which we took to this upland.”
“On that road Death lurks, and awaits thee! Blind dupe, couldst thou
think that if the grand secret of life had been won, he whose head rests
on my lap would have yielded thee one petty drop of the essence which
had filched from his store of life but a moment? Me, who so loved and
so cherished him,--me he would have doomed to the pitiless cord of my
servant, the Strangler, if my death could have lengthened a hair-breadth
the span of his being. But what matters to me his crime or his madness?
I loved him! I loved him!”
She bowed her veiled head lower and lower; perhaps, under the veil, her
lips kissed the lips of the dead. Then she said whisperingly,--
“Juma the Strangler, whose word never failed to his master, whose prey
never slipped from his snare, waits thy step on the road to thy home!
But thy death cannot now profit the dead, the beloved. And thou hast had
pity for him who took but thine aid to design thy destruction. His life
is lost, thine is saved.”
She spoke no more in the tongue that I could interpret. She spoke, in
the language unknown, a few murmured words to her swarthy attendants;
then the armed men, still weeping, rose, and made a dumb sign to me
to go with them. I understood by the sign that Ayesha had told them to
guard me on my way; but she gave no reply to my parting thanks.