ually overwhelming. It
catches the imagination though not the mind. Yet out of her facts, as
she presented them, grew a strange likelihood. The force of this woman's
personality, and her calm and quiet way of believing all she talked
about, took her listener to some extent--further than ever before,
certainly--into the great dream after her. And the dream, to say the
least, was a picturesque one, laden with wonderful possibilities. For as
she talked the spirit of old Egypt moved up, staring down upon him out
of eyes lidded so curiously level. Hitherto all had prated to him of the
Arabs, their ancient faith and customs, and the splendour of the
Bedouins, those Princes of the Desert. But what he sought, barely
confessed in words even to himself, was something older far than this.
And this strange, dark woman brought it close. Deeps in his soul, long
slumbering, awoke. He heard forgotten questions.

Only in this brief way could he attempt to sum up the storm she roused
in him.

She carried him far beyond mere outline, however, though afterwards he
recalled the details with difficulty. So much more was suggested than
actually expressed. She contrived to make the general modern scepticism
an evidence of cheap mentality. It was so easy; the depth it affects to
conceal, mere emptiness. "We have tried all things, and found all
wanting"--the mind, as measuring instrument, merely confessed
inadequate. Various shrewd judgments of this kind increased his respect,
although her acceptance went so far beyond his own. And, while the label
of credulity refused to stick to her, her sense of imaginative wonder
enabled her to escape that dreadful compromise, a man's mind in a
woman's temperament. She fascinated him.

The spiritual worship of the ancient Egyptians, she held, was a
symbolical explanation of things generally alluded to as the secrets of
life and death; their knowledge was a remnant of the wisdom of Atlantis.
Material relics, equally misunderstood, still stood to-day at Karnac,
Stonehenge, and in the mysterious writings on buried Mexican temples and
cities, so significantly akin to the hieroglyphics upon the Egyptian
tombs.

"The one misinterpreted as literally as the other," she suggested, "yet
both fragments of an advanced knowledge that found its grave in the sea.
The Wisdom of that old spiritual system has vanished from the world,
only a degraded literalism left of its undecipherable language. The
jewel has been lost,