“I never saw you before, and you never saw me, Lady, yet you talk as though we had been friends,” broke in Alan in his halting Asiki.

“So we were in the spirit, Vernoon.  It was she who went before me who loved that white man whose face was as your face is, but her ghost lives on in me and tells me the tale.  There have been many Asikas, for thousands of years they have ruled in this land, yet but one spirit belongs to them all; it is the string upon which the beads of their lives are threaded.  White man, I, whom you think young, know everything back to the beginning of the world, back to the time when I was a monkey woman sitting in those cedar trees, and if you wish, I can tell it you.”

“I should like to hear it very much indeed,” answered Alan, when he had mastered her meaning, “though it is strange that none of the rest of us remember such things.  Meanwhile, O Asika, I will tell you that I desire to return to my own land, taking with me that gift of gold that you have given me.  When will it please you to allow me to return?”

“Not yet a while, I think,” she said, smiling at him weirdly, for no other word will describe that smile.  “My spirit remembers that it was always thus.  Those wanderers who came hither always wished to return again to their own country, like the birds in spring.  Once there was a white man among them, that was more than twenty hundred years ago; he was a native of a country called Roma, and wore a helmet.  He wished to return, but my mother of that day, she kept him and by and by I will show him to you if you like.  Before that there was a brown man who came from a land where a great river overflows its banks every year.  He was a prince of his own country, who had fled from his king and the desert folk made a slave of him, and so he drifted hither.  He wished to return also, for my mother of that day, or my spirit that dwelt in her, showed to him that if he could but be there they would make him king in his own land.  But my mother of that day, she would not let him go, and by and by I will show him to you, if you wish.”

Bewildered, amazed, Alan listened to her.  Evidently the woman was mad, or else she played some mystical part for reasons of her own.

“When will you let me go, O Asika?” he repeated.

“Not yet a while, I think,” she said again.  “You are too comely and I like you,” and she smiled at him.  There was nothing coarse in the smile, indeed it had a certain spiritual quality which thrilled him.  “I like you,” she went on in her dreamy voice, “I would keep you with me until your spirit is drawn up into my spirit, making it strong and rich as all the spirits that went before have done, those spirits that my mothers loved from the beginning, which dwell in me to-day.”

Now Alan grew alarmed, desperate even.

“Queen,” he said, “but just now your husband sat here, is it right then that you should talk to me thus?”