d white as ashes; then vanished. The Hesea, who
had been leaning forward, sank backwards in her chair, as if weary with
the toil of her own magic.

For a while confused pictures flitted rapidly to and fro across the vast
mirror of the flame, such as might be reflected from an intelligence
crowded with the memories of over two thousand years which it was too
exhausted to separate and define.

Wild scenes, multitudes of people, great caves, and in them faces,
amongst others our own, starting up distorted and enormous, to grow
tiny in an instant and depart; stark imaginations of Forms towering and
divine; of Things monstrous and inhuman; armies marching, illimitable
battle-fields, and corpses rolled in blood, and hovering over them the
spirits of the slain.

These pictures died as the others had died, and the fire was blank
again.

Then the Hesea spoke in a voice very faint at first, that by slow
degrees grew stronger.

"Is thy question answered, O Atene?"

"I have seen strange sights, Mother, mighty limnings worthy of thy
magic, but how know I that they are more than vapours of thine own brain
cast upon yonder fire to deceive and mock us?"[*]

[*] Considered in the light of subsequent revelations,
vouchsafed to us by Ayesha herself, I am inclined to believe
that Atene's shrewd surmise was accurate, and that these
fearful pictures, although founded on events that had
happened in the past, were in the main "vapours" cast upon
the crater fire; visions raised in our minds to "deceive and
mock us."--L. H. H.

"Listen then," said the Hesea, in her weary voice, "to the
interpretation of the writing, and cease to trouble me with thy doubts.
Many an age ago, but shortly after I began to live this last, long life
of mine, Isis, the great goddess of Egypt, had her Holy House at Behbit,
near the Nile. It is a ruin now, and Isis has departed from Egypt,
though still under the Power that fashioned it and her: she rules the
world, for she is Nature's self. Of that shrine a certain man, a Greek,
Kallikrates by name, was chief priest, chosen for her service by the
favour of the goddess, vowed to her eternally and to her alone, by the
dreadful oath that might not be broken without punishment as eternal.

"In the flame thou sawest that priest, and here at thy side he stands,
re-born, to fulfil his destiny and ours.

"There lived also a daughter of Pharaoh's house, one Amenartas, who cast
eyes