“A vision then if you will, but there are visions true and false, and how can we know that this is true?  Listen, Leo.  What is there in all that wonderful tale which could not have been fashioned in your own brain, distraught as it is almost to madness with your sorrow and your longings?  You dreamed that you were alone in the vast universe.  Well, is not every living creature thus alone?  You dreamed that the shadowy shape of Ayesha came to you.  Has it ever left your side?  You dreamed that she led you over sea and land, past places haunted by your memory, above the mysterious mountains of the Unknown to an undiscovered peak.  Does she not thus lead you through life to that peak which lies beyond the Gates of Death?  You dreamed——­”

“Oh! no more of it,” he exclaimed.  “What I saw, I saw, and that I shall follow.  Think as you will, Horace, and do what you will.  To-morrow I start for India, with you if you choose to come; if not, without you.”

“You speak roughly, Leo,” I said.  “You forget that I have had no sign, and that the nightmare of a man so near to insanity that but a few hours ago he was determined upon suicide, will be a poor staff to lean on when we are perishing in the snows of Central Asia.  A mixed vision, this of yours, Leo, with its mountain peak shaped like a crux-ansata and the rest.  Do you suggest that Ayesha is re-incarnated in Central Asia—­as a female Grand Lama or something of that sort?”

“I never thought of it, but why not?” asked Leo quietly.  “Do you remember a certain scene in the Caves of Kor yonder, when the living looked upon the dead, and dead and living were the same?  And do you remember what Ayesha swore, that she would come again—­yes, to this world; and how could that be except by re-birth, or, what is the same thing, by the transmigration of the spirit?”

I did not answer this argument.  I was struggling with myself.

“No sign has come to me,” I said, “and yet I have had a part in the play, humble enough, I admit, and I believe that I have still a part.”

“No,” he said, “no sign has come to you.  I wish that it had.  Oh! how I wish you could be convinced as I am, Horace!”

Then we were silent for a long while, silent, with our eyes fixed upon the sky.

It was a stormy dawn.  Clouds in fantastic masses hung upon the ocean.  One of them was like a great mountain, and we watched it idly.  It changed its shape, the crest of it grew hollow like a crater.  From this crater sprang a projecting cloud, a rough pillar with a knob or lump resting on its top.  Suddenly the rays of the risen sun struck upon this mountain and the column and they turned white like snow.  Then as though melted by those fiery arrows, the centre of the excrescence above the pillar thinned out and vanished, leaving an enormous loop of inky cloud.

“Look,” said Leo in a low, frightened voice, “that is the shape of the mountain which I saw in my vision.  There upon it is the black loop, and there through it shines the fire. It would seem that the sign is for both of us, Horace.”