“What were those priests doing?” I said, more to break the silence than for any other reason.

“Why waste breath upon foolish questions?” she replied.  “Are no metals smelted in thy country, O Holly?  Now hadst thou sought to know what I am doing—­But that, without seeing, thou wouldst not believe, so, Doubter, thou shalt see.”

Then she pointed to and bade us don, two strange garments that hung upon the wall, made of a material which seemed to be half cloth and half wood and having headpieces not unlike a diver’s helmet.

So under her directions Leo helped me into mine, lacing it up behind, after which, or so I gathered from the sounds—­for no light came through the helmet—­she did the same service for him.

“I seem very much in the dark,” I said presently; for now there was silence again, and beneath this extinguisher I felt alarmed and wished to be sure that I was not left alone.

“Aye Holly,” I heard Ayesha’s mocking voice make answer, “in the dark, as thou wast ever, the thick dark of ignorance and unbelief.  Well, now, as ever also, I will give thee light.”  As she spoke I heard something roll back; I suppose that it must have been a stone door.

Then, indeed, there was light, yes, even through the thicknesses of that prepared garment, such light as seemed to blind me.  By it I saw that the wall opposite to us had opened and that we were all three of us, on the threshold of another chamber.  At the end of it stood something like a little altar of hard, black stone, and on this altar lay a mass of substance of the size of a child’s head, but fashioned, I suppose from fantasy, to the oblong shape of a human eye.

Out of this eye there poured that blistering and intolerable light.  It was shut round by thick, funnel-shaped screens of a material that looked like fire-brick, yet it pierced them as though they were but muslin.  More, the rays thus directed upwards struck full upon a lump of metal held in place above them by a massive frame-work.

And what rays they were!  If all the cut diamonds of the world were brought together and set beneath a mighty burning-glass, the light flashed from them would not have been a thousandth part so brilliant.  They scorched my eyes and caused the skin of my face and limbs to smart, yet Ayesha stood there unshielded from them.  Aye, she even went down the length of the room and, throwing back her veil, bent over them, as it seemed a woman of molten steel in whose body the bones were visible, and examined the mass that was supported by the hanging cradle.

“It is ready and somewhat sooner than I thought,” she said.  Then as though it were but a feather weight, she lifted the lump in her bare hands and glided back with it to where we stood, laughing and saying—­“Tell me now, O thou well-read Holly, if thou hast ever heard of a better alchemist than this poor priestess of a forgotten faith?” And she thrust the glowing substance up almost to the mask that hid my face.