“Sah-luma!  Sah-luma!” he whispered, “My friend ...  My more than brother!  Would I could have died for thee! ...  Would thou couldst have lived to fulfil the nobler promise of thy genius! ...  Better far thou hadst been spared to the world than I! ... for I am Nothing, . . but thou wert Everything!”

And taking the clay-cold hands in his own, he kissed them reverently, and, with an unconscious memory not born of his recent adventures, folded them on the dead Laureate’s breast in the fashion of a Cross.

As he did this an icy spasm seemed to contract his heart, . . seized by a sudden insufferable anxiety, he stared like one spell-bound into Sah-luma’s wide-open, fixed, and glassy eyes.  Dead eyes! ... yet how full of mysterious significance! ...  What—­what was their weird secret, their imminent meaning! ...  Why did their dark and frozen depths appear to retain a strange, living undergleam of melting, sorrowful, beseeching sweetness? ... like the eyes of one who prays to be remembered, though changed after long absence!  What hot and terrible delirium was this that snatched at his whirling brain as he bent closer and closer over the marble quiet countenance, and studied with a sort of fierce intentness every line of those delicate, classic features, on which high thought had left so marked an impress of dignity and power!  What a, marvellous, half-reproachful, half-appealing smile lingered on the finely-curved set lips! ...  How wonderful, how beautiful, how beloved beyond all words was this fair dead god of poesy on whom he gazed with such a passion of yearning!

Stooping more and more, he threw his arms round the senseless form, and partly lifting it from the ground, brought the wax-pallid face nearer to his own.. so near that the cold mouth almost touched his, . . then filled with an awful, unnamable misgiving, he scanned his murdered comrade’s perished beauty in puzzled, vague bewilderment, much as an ignorant dullard might perplexedly scan the incomprehensible characters of some hieroglyphic scroll.  And, as he looked, a sharp pang shot through him like a whizzing ball of fire, . . a convulsion of mental agony shook his limbs,—­he could have shrieked aloud in the extremity of his torture, but the struggling cry died gasping in his throat.  Still as stone he kept his strained, steadfast gaze fixed on Sah-luma’s corpse, slowly absorbing the full horror of a tremendous Suggestion, that like a scorching lava-flood swept into every subtle channel of his brain.  For the dead Sah-luma’s eyes grew into the semblance of his own eyes! ... the dead Sah-luma’s face smiled spectrally back at him in the image of his own face! ... it was as though he beheld the Picture of himself, slain and reflected in a magician’s mirror!  Round him the very heavens seemed given up to fire,—­but he heeded it not,—­the world might be at an end and the day of Judgment, proclaimed,—­nothing would have stirred him from where he knelt, in that dreadful stillness of mystic martyrdom, drinking in the gradual, glimmering consciousness of a terrific Truth, . . the amazing, yet scarcely graspable solution of a supernatural Enigma, ... an enigma through which, like a man lost in the depths of a dark forest, he had wandered up and down, seeking light, yet finding none!