Slowly all the figures faded; it was as though the fire ate them up, for first they became thin and white as ashes; then vanished.  The Hesea, who had been leaning forward, sank backwards in her chair, as if weary with the toil of her own magic.

For a while confused pictures flitted rapidly to and fro across the vast mirror of the flame, such as might be reflected from an intelligence crowded with the memories of over two thousand years which it was too exhausted to separate and define.

Wild scenes, multitudes of people, great caves, and in them faces, amongst others our own, starting up distorted and enormous, to grow tiny in an instant and depart; stark imaginations of Forms towering and divine; of Things monstrous and inhuman; armies marching, illimitable battle-fields, and corpses rolled in blood, and hovering over them the spirits of the slain.

These pictures died as the others had died, and the fire was blank again.

Then the Hesea spoke in a voice very faint at first, that by slow degrees grew stronger.

“Is thy question answered, O Atene?”

“I have seen strange sights, Mother, mighty limnings worthy of thy magic, but how know I that they are more than vapours of thine own brain cast upon yonder fire to deceive and mock us?"[*]

[*] Considered in the light of subsequent revelations, vouchsafed to us by Ayesha herself, I am inclined to believe that Atene’s shrewd surmise was accurate, and that these fearful pictures, although founded on events that had happened in the past, were in the main “vapours” cast upon the crater fire; visions raised in our minds to “deceive and mock us.”—­L.  H. H.

“Listen then,” said the Hesea, in her weary voice, “to the interpretation of the writing, and cease to trouble me with thy doubts.  Many an age ago, but shortly after I began to live this last, long life of mine, Isis, the great goddess of Egypt, had her Holy House at Behbit, near the Nile.  It is a ruin now, and Isis has departed from Egypt, though still under the Power that fashioned it and her:  she rules the world, for she is Nature’s self.  Of that shrine a certain man, a Greek, Kallikrates by name, was chief priest, chosen for her service by the favour of the goddess, vowed to her eternally and to her alone, by the dreadful oath that might not be broken without punishment as eternal.

“In the flame thou sawest that priest, and here at thy side he stands, re-born, to fulfil his destiny and ours.

“There lived also a daughter of Pharaoh’s house, one Amenartas, who cast eyes of love upon this Kallikrates, and, wrapping him in her spells—­for then as now she practised witcheries—­caused him to break his oaths and fly with her, as thou sawest written in the flame.  Thou, Atene, wast that Amenartas.

“Lastly there lived a certain Arabian, named Ayesha, a wise and lovely woman, who, in the emptiness of her heart, and the sorrow of much knowledge, had sought refuge in the service of the universal Mother, thinking there to win the true wisdom which ever fled from her.  That Ayesha, as thou sawest also, the goddess visited in a dream, bidding her to follow those faithless ones, and work Heaven’s vengeance on them, and promising her in reward victory over death upon the earth and beauty such as had not been known in woman.