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 rubylike 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.  Toward that spot were attracted myriads