I sprang from my horse and ran towards her.  She looked up and saw me.  At first she frowned, then her face grew wondering, then tender, and I thought that her red lips shaped my name.  Moreover in her confusion she let the sistrum fall.

I muttered “Amada!” and stepped forward, but priests ran between us and thrust me away.  Next moment she had recovered the sistrum and passed on with her head bowed.  Nor did she lift her eyes to look back.

“Begone, man!” cried a priest, “Begone, whoever you may be.  Because you wear Eastern armour do you think that you can dare the curse of Isis?”

Then I fell back, the holy image of the goddess passed and the procession vanished through the pylon gate.  I, Shabaka the Egyptian, stood by my horse and watched it depart.  I was happy because the lady Amada was alive, well, and more beautiful than ever; also because she had shown signs of joy and confusion at seeing me again.  Yet I was unhappy because I met her still filling a holy office which built a wall between us, also because it seemed to me an evil omen that I should have been repelled from her by a priest of Isis who talked of the curse of the goddess.  Moreover the sacred statue, I suppose by accident, turned towards me as it passed and perhaps by the chance of light, seemed to frown upon me.

Thus I thought as Shabaka hundreds of years before the Christian era, but as Allan Quatermain the modern man, to whom it was given so marvellously to behold all these things and who in beholding them, yet never quite lost the sense of his own identity of to-day, I was amazed.  For I knew that this lady Amada was the same being though clad in different flesh, as that other lady with whom I had breathed the magical Taduki fumes which had power to rend the curtain of the past, or, perhaps, only to breed dreams of what it might have been.

To the outward eye, indeed she was different, as I was different, taller, more slender, larger-eyed, with longer and slimmer hands than those of any Western woman, and on the whole even more beautiful and alluring.  Moreover that mysterious look which from time to time I had seen on Lady Ragnall’s face, was more constant on that of the lady Amada.  It brooded in the deep eyes and settled in a curious smile about the curves of the lips, a smile that was not altogether human, such a smile as one might wear who had looked on hidden things and heard voices that spoke beyond the limits of the world.

Somehow neither then nor at any other time during all my dream, could I imagine this Amada, this daughter of a hundred kings, whose blood might be traced back through dynasty on dynasty, as nothing but a woman who nurses children upon her breast.  It was as though something of our common nature had been bred out of her and something of another nature whereof we have no ken, had entered to fill its place.  And yet these two women were the same, that I knew, or at any rate, much of them was the same, for who can say what part of us we leave behind as we flit from life to life, to find it again elsewhere in the abysms of Time and Change?  One thing too was quite identical—­the birthmark of the new moon above the breast which the priests of the Kendah had declared was always the seal that marked their prophetess, the guardian of the Holy Child.