I instantly informed Ayesha that in England “blasting” was not an amusement that could be indulged in with impunity, and that any such attempt would meet with the consideration of the law and probably end upon a scaffold.

“The law,” she laughed with scorn—­“the law!  Canst thou not understand, oh Holly, that I am above the law, and so shall my Kallikrates be also?  All human law will be to us as the north wind to a mountain.  Does the wind bend the mountain, or the mountain the wind?”

“And now leave me, I pray thee, and thou too, my own Kallikrates, for I would get me ready against our journey, and so must ye both, and your servant also.  But bring no great quantity of things with thee, for I trust that we shall be but three days gone.  Then shall we return hither, and I will make a plan whereby we can bid farewell for ever to these sepulchres of Kor.  Yea, surely thou mayst kiss my hand!”

So we went, I, for one, meditating deeply on the awful nature of the problem that now opened out before us.  The terrible She had evidently made up her mind to go to England, and it made me absolutely shudder to think what would be the result of her arrival there.  What her powers were I knew, and I could not doubt but that she would exercise them to the full.  It might be possible to control her for a while, but her proud, ambitious spirit would be certain to break loose and avenge itself for the long centuries of its solitude.  She would, if necessary, and if the power of her beauty did not unaided prove equal to the occasion, blast her way to any end she set before her, and, as she could not die, and for aught I knew could not even be killed,[*] what was there to stop her?  In the end she would, I had little doubt, assume absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth, and, though I was sure that she would speedily make ours the most glorious and prosperous empire that the world has ever seen, it would be at the cost of a terrible sacrifice of life.

[*] I regret to say that I was never able to ascertain if She was invulnerable against the ordinary accidents of life.  Presumably this was so, else some misadventure would have been sure to put an end to her in the course of so many centuries.  True, she offered to let Leo slay her, but very probably this was only an experiment to try his temper and mental attitude towards her.  Ayesha never gave way to impulse without some valid object.—­L.  H. H.

The whole thing sounded like a dream or some extraordinary invention of a speculative brain, and yet it was a fact—­a wonderful fact—­of which the whole world would soon be called on to take notice.  What was the meaning of it all?  After much thinking I could only conclude that this marvellous creature, whose passion had kept her for so many centuries chained as it were, and comparatively harmless, was now about to be used by Providence as a means to change the order of the world, and possibly, by the building up of a power that could no more be rebelled against or questioned than the decrees of Fate, to change it materially for the better.