more?  As I thus stood, right into the gap between the two dead lamps strode a gigantic Foot.  All the rest of the form was unseen; only, as volume after volume of smoke poured on from the burning land behind, it seemed as if one great column of vapor, eddying round, settled itself aloft from the circle, and that out from that column strode the giant Foot.  And, as strode the Foot, so with it came, like the sound of its tread, a roll of muttered thunder.

I recoiled, with a cry that rang loud through the lurid air.

“Courage!” said the voice of Ayesha.  “Trembling soul, yield not an inch to the demon!”

At the charm, the wonderful charm, in the tone of the Veiled Woman’s voice, my will seemed to take a force more sublime than its own.  I folded my arms on my breast, and stood as if rooted to the spot, confronting the column of smoke and the stride of the giant Foot.  And the Foot halted, mute.

Again, in the momentary hush of that suspense, I heard a voice—­it was Margrave’s.

“The last hour expires—­the work is accomplished!  Come! come!  Aid me to take the caldron from the fire; and, quick!—­or a drop may be wasted in vapor—­the Elixir of Life from the caldron!”

At that cry I receded, and the Foot advanced.

And at that moment, suddenly, unawares, from behind, I was stricken down.  Over me, as I lay, swept a whirlwind of trampling hoofs and glancing horns.  The herds, in their flight from the burning pastures, had rushed over the bed of the water course, scaled the slopes of the banks.  Snorting and bellowing, they plunged their blind way to the mountains.  One cry alone, more wild than their own savage blare, pierced the reek through which the Brute Hurricane swept.  At that cry of wrath and despair I struggled to rise, again dashed to earth by the hoofs and the horns.  But was it the dreamlike deceit of my reeling senses, or did I see that giant Foot stride past through the close-serried ranks of the maddening herds?  Did I hear, distinct through all the huge uproar of animal terror, the roll of low thunder which followed the stride of that Foot?

X

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 water course, had consumed the grasses that fed it, and there the plains stretched black and desert as the Phlegraean 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 reck, innumerable pillars of fire, like the halls in the city of fiends.