“He speaks well,” she answered with a note of admiration in her voice.  “By Isis, were he but white I would set him to rule these Amahagger under me.  Tell him, Allan, that if he lays Rezu low he shall have a great reward.”

“And tell the White Witch, Macumazahn,” Umslopogaas replied when I had translated, “that I seek no reward, save glory only, and with it the sight of one who is lost to me but with whom my heart still dwells, if indeed this Witch has strength to break the wall of blackness that is built between me and her who is ‘gone down.’”

“Strange,” reflected Ayesha when she understood, “that this grim Destroyer should yet be bound by the silken bonds of love and yearn for one whom the grave has taken.  Learn from it, Allan, that all humanity is cast in the same mould, since my longings and your longings are his also, though the three of us be far apart as are the sun and the moon and the earth, and as different in every other quality.  Yet it is true that sun and moon and earth are born of the same black womb of chaos.  Therefore in the beginning they were identical, as doubtless they will be in the end when, their journeyings done, they rush together to light space with a flame at which the mocking gods that made them may warm their hands.  Well, so it is with men, Allan, whose soul-stuff is drawn from the gulf of Spirit by Nature’s hand, and, cast upon the cold air of this death-driven world, freezes into a million shapes each different to the other and yet, be sure, the same.  Now talk no more, but follow me.  Slave” (this was addressed to Billali), “bid the guards lead on to the camp of the servants of Lulala.”

So we went through the silent ruins.  Ayesha walked, or rather glided a pace or two ahead, then came Umslopogaas and I side by side, while at our heels followed Hans, very close at our heels since he did not wish to be out of reach of the virtue of the Great Medicine and incidentally of the protection of axe and rifle.

Thus we marched surrounded by the solemn guard for something between a quarter and half a mile, till at length we climbed the debris of a mighty wall that once had encompassed the city, and by the moonlight saw beneath us a vast hollow which clearly at some unknown time had been the bed of an enormous moat and filled with water.

Now, however, it was dry and all about its surface were dotted numerous camp-fires round which men were moving, also some women who appeared to be engaged in cooking food.  At a little distance too, upon the further edge of the moat-like depression were a number of white-robed individuals gathered in a circle about a large stone upon which something was stretched that resembled the carcase of a sheep or goat, and round these a great number of spectators.

“The priests of Lulala who make sacrifice to the moon, as they do night by night, save when she is dead,” said Ayesha, turning back towards me as though in answer to the query which I had conceived but left unuttered.