When we had collected of these particles about thrice as much as a man might hold in his hand, we seemed to have exhausted their bed.  We continued still to find gold, but no more of the delicate substance to which, in our sight, gold was as dross.

“Enough,” then said Margrave, reluctantly desisting.  “What we have gained already will suffice for a life thrice as long as legend attributes to Haroun.  I shall live—­I shall live through the centuries.”

“Forget not that I claim my share.”

“Your share—­yours!  True—­your half of my life!  It is true.”  He paused with a low, ironical, malignant laugh, and then added, as he rose and turned away, “But the work is yet to be done.”

VI

While we had thus labored and found, Ayesha had placed the fuel where the moonlight fell fullest on the sward of the tableland—­a part of it already piled as for a fire, the rest of it heaped confusedly close at hand; and by the pile she had placed the coffer.  And, there she stood, her arms folded under her mantle, her dark image seeming darker still as the moonlight whitened all the ground from which the image rose motionless.  Margrave opened his coffer, the Veiled Woman did not aid him, and I watched in silence, while he as silently made his weird and wizard-like preparations.

VII

On the ground a wide circle was traced by a small rod, tipped apparently with sponge saturated with some combustible naphtha-like fluid, so that a pale, lambent flame followed the course of the rod as Margrave guided it, burning up the herbage over which it played, and leaving a distinct ring, like that which, in our lovely native fable talk, we call the “Fairy’s ring,” but yet more visible because marked in phosphorescent light.  On the ring thus formed were placed twelve small lamps, fed with the fluid from the same vessel, and lighted by the same rod.  The light emitted by the lamps was more vivid and brilliant than that which circled round the ring.

Within the circumference, and immediately round the woodpile, Margrave traced certain geometrical figures, in which—­not without a shudder, that I overcame at once by a strong effort of will in murmuring to myself the name of “Lilian”—­I recognized the interlaced triangles which my own hand, in the spell enforced on a sleepwalker, had described on the floor of the wizard’s pavilion.  The figures were traced like the circle, in flame, and at the point of each triangle (four in number) was placed a lamp, brilliant as those on the ring.  This task performed, the caldron, based on an iron tripod, was placed on the woodpile.  And then the woman, before inactive and unheeding, slowly advanced, knelt by the pile and lighted it.  The dry wood crackled and the flame burst forth, licking the rims of the caldron with tongues of fire.

Margrave flung into the caldron the particles we had collected, poured over them first a liquid, colorless as water, from the largest of the vessels drawn from his coffer, and then, more sparingly, drops from small crystal phials, like the phials I had seen in the hand of Philip Derval.