here amongst all this
lordly litter, I can think of nothing else." Again I bid her turn the
pages, noting as she did so how each chapter was headed by the coloured
configuration of a world. Page by page we turned of crackling
parchment, until by chance, at the top of one, my eye caught a coloured
round I could not fail to recognise--'twas the spinning button on the
blue breast of the immeasurable that yesterday I inhabited. "Read
here," I cried, clapping my finger upon the page midway down, where
there were some signs looking like Egyptian writing. "Says this quaint
dabbler in all knowledge anything of Isis, anything of Phra, of Ammon,
of Ammon Top?"

"And who was Isis? who Ammon Top?" asked the lady.

"Nay, read," I answered, and down the page her slender fingers went
awandering till at a spot of knotted signs they stopped. "Why, here is
something about thy Isis," exclaimed Heru, as though amused at my
perspicuity. "Here, halfway down this chapter of earth-history, it
says," and putting one pink knee across the other to better prop the
book she read:

"And the priests of Thebes were gone; the sand stood untrampled on the
temple steps a thousand years; the wild bees sang the song of
desolation in the ears of Isis; the wild cats littered in the stony lap
of Ammon; ay, another thousand years went by, and earth was tilled of
unseen hands and sown with yellow grain from Paradise, and the thin
veil that separates the known from the unknown was rent, and men walked
to and fro."

"Go on," I said.

"Nay," laughed the other, "the little mice in their eagerness have been
before you--see, all this corner is gnawed away."

"Read on again," I said, "where the page is whole; those sips of
knowledge you have given make me thirsty for more. There, begin where
this blazonry of initialed red and gold looks so like the carpet spread
by the scribe for the feet of a sovereign truth--what says he here?"
And she, half pouting to be set back once more to that task, half
wondering as she gazed on those magic letters, let her eyes run down
the page, then began:

"And it was the Beginning, and in the centre void presently there came
a nucleus of light: and the light brightened in the grey primeval
morning and became definite and articulate. And from the midst of that
natal splendour, behind which was the Unknowable, the life came
hitherward; from the midst of that nucleus undescribed, undescribable,
there issued presently the p