“See now the place where I have slept for these two thousand years,” said Ayesha, taking the lamp from Leo’s hand and holding it above her head.  Its rays fell upon a little hollow in the floor, where I had seen the leaping flame, but the fire was out now.  They fell upon the white form stretched there beneath its wrappings upon its bed of stone, upon the fretted carving of the tomb, and upon another shelf of stone opposite the one on which the body lay, and separated from it by the breadth of the cave.

“Here,” went on Ayesha, laying her hand upon the rock—­“here have I slept night by night for all these generations, with but a cloak to cover me.  It did not become me that I should lie soft when my spouse yonder,” and she pointed to the rigid form, “lay stiff in death.  Here night by night have I slept in his cold company—­till, thou seest, this thick slab, like the stairs down which we passed, has worn thin with the tossing of my form—­so faithful have I been to thee even in thy space of sleep, Kallikrates.  And now, mine own, thou shalt see a wonderful thing—­living, thou shalt behold thyself dead—­for well have I tended thee during all these years, Kallikrates.  Art thou prepared?”

We made no answer, but gazed at each other with frightened eyes, the whole scene was so dreadful and so solemn.  Ayesha advanced, and laid her hand upon the corner of the shroud, and once more spoke.

“Be not affrighted,” she said; “though the thing seem wonderful to thee—­all we who live have thus lived before; nor is the very shape that holds us a stranger to the sun!  Only we know it not, because memory writes no record, and earth hath gathered in the earth she lent us, for none have saved our glory from the grave.  But I, by my arts and by the arts of those dead men of Kor which I have learned, have held thee back, oh Kallikrates, from the dust, that the waxen stamp of beauty on thy face should ever rest before mine eye.  ’Twas a mask that memory might fill, serving to fashion out thy presence from the past, and give it strength to wander in the habitations of my thought, clad in a mummery of life that stayed my appetite with visions of dead days.

“Behold now, let the Dead and Living meet!  Across the gulf of Time they still are one.  Time hath no power against Identity, though sleep the merciful hath blotted out the tablets of our mind, and with oblivion sealed the sorrows that else would hound us from life to life, stuffing the brain with gathered griefs till it burst in the madness of uttermost despair.  Still are they one, for the wrappings of our sleep shall roll away as thunder-clouds before the wind; the frozen voice of the past shall melt in music like mountain snows beneath the sun; and the weeping and the laughter of the lost hours shall be heard once more most sweetly echoing up the cliffs of immeasurable time.

“Ay, the sleep shall roll away, and the voices shall be heard, when down the completed chain, whereof our each existence is a link, the lightning of the Spirit hath passed to work out the purpose of our being; quickening and fusing those separated days of life, and shaping them to a staff whereon we may safely lean as we wend to our appointed fate.