ey came
to the place, Ayesha, not raising her head, spoke to them in her own
Eastern tongue. A wail was her answer. The armed men bounded forward,
and the bearers left the litter.

All gathered round the dead form with the face concealed under the black
veil; all knelt, and all wept. Far in the distance, at the foot of the
blue mountains, a crowd of the savage natives had risen up as if from
the earth; they stood motionless, leaning on their clubs and spears, and
looking towards the spot on which we were,--strangely thus brought into
the landscape, as if they too, the wild dwellers on the verge which
Humanity guards from the Brute, were among the mourners for the
mysterious Child of mysterious Nature! And still, in the herbage,
hummed the small insects, and still, from the cavern, laughed the great
kingfisher. I said to Ayesha, "Farewell! your love mourns the dead,
mine calls me to the living. You are now with your own people, they may
console you; say if I can assist."

"There is no consolation for me! What mourner can be consoled if the
dead die forever? Nothing for him is left but a grave; that grave shall
be in the land where the song of Ayesha first lulled him to sleep. Thou
assist Me,--thou, the wise man of Europe! From me ask assistance. What
road wilt thou take to thy home?"

"There is but one road known to me through the maze of the
solitude,--that which we took to this upland."

"On that road Death lurks, and awaits thee! Blind dupe, couldst thou
think that if the grand secret of life had been won, he whose head rests
on my lap would have yielded thee one petty drop of the essence which
had filched from his store of life but a moment? Me, who so loved and
so cherished him,--me he would have doomed to the pitiless cord of my
servant, the Strangler, if my death could have lengthened a hair-breadth
the span of his being. But what matters to me his crime or his madness?
I loved him! I loved him!"

She bowed her veiled head lower and lower; perhaps, under the veil, her
lips kissed the lips of the dead. Then she said whisperingly,--

"Juma the Strangler, whose word never failed to his master, whose prey
never slipped from his snare, waits thy step on the road to thy home!
But thy death cannot now profit the dead, the beloved. And thou hast had
pity for him who took but thine aid to design thy destruction. His life
is lost, thine is saved."

She spoke no more in the tongue that I could interpret. She spoke, i