It was as though this Spirit were asking how my body had served its purposes and advanced its mighty ends, and in reply—­oh! what a miserable tale I had to tell.  Fault upon fault, weakness upon weakness, sin upon sin; never before did I understand how black was my record.  I tried to relieve the picture with some incidents of attempted good, but that Spirit would not hearken.  It seemed to say that it had gathered up the good and knew it all.  It was of the evil that it would learn, not of the good that had bettered it, but of the evil by which it had been harmed.

Hearing this there rose up in my consciousness some memory of what Ayesha had said; namely, that the body lived within the temple of the spirit which is oft defied, and not the spirit in the body.

The story was told and I hearkened for the judgment, my own judgment on myself, which I knew would be accepted without question and registered for good or ill.  But none came, since ere the balance sank this way or that, ere it could be uttered, I was swept afar.

Through Infinity I was swept, and as I fled faster than the light, the meaning of what I had seen came home to me.  I knew, or seemed to know for the first time, that at the last man must answer to himself, or perhaps to a divine principle within himself, that out of his own free-will, through long aeons and by a million steps, he climbs or sinks to the heights or depths dormant in his nature; that from what he was, springs what he is, and what he is, engenders what he shall be for ever and aye.

Now I envisaged Immortality and splendid and awful was its face.  It clasped me to its breast and in the vast circle of its arms I was up-borne, I who knew myself to be without beginning and without end, and yet of the past and of the future knew nothing, save that these were full of mysteries.

As I went I encountered others, or overtook them, making the same journey.  Robertson swept past me, and spoke, but in a tongue I could not understand.  I noted that the madness had left his eyes and that his fine-cut features were calm and spiritual.  The other wanderers I did not know.

I came to a region of blinding light; the thought rose in me that I must have reached the sun, or a sun, though I felt no heat.  I stood in a lovely, shining valley about which burned mountains of fire.  There were huge trees in that valley, but they glowed like gold and their flowers and fruit were as though they had been fashioned of many-coloured flames.

The place was glorious beyond compare, but very strange to me and not to be described.  I sat me down upon a boulder which burned like a ruby, whether with heat or colour I do not know, by the edge of a stream that flowed with what looked like fire and made a lovely music.  I stooped down and drank of this water of flames and the scent and the taste of it were as those of the costliest wine.

There, beneath the spreading limbs of a fire-tree I sat, and examined the strange flowers that grew around, coloured like rich jewels and perfumed above imagining.  There were birds also which might have been feathered with sapphires, rubies and amethysts, and their song was so sweet that I could have wept to hear it.  The scene was wonderful and filled me with exaltation, for I thought of the land where it is promised that there shall be no more night.