n
the language unknown, a few murmured words to her swarthy attendants;
then the armed men, still weeping, rose, and made a dumb sign to me
to go with them. I understood by the sign that Ayesha had told them to
guard me on my way; but she gave no reply to my parting thanks.

CHAPTER LXXXIX.

I descended into the valley; the armed men followed. The path, on that
side of the watercourse not reached by the flames, wound through meadows
still green, or amidst groves still unscathed. As a turning in the way
brought in front of my sight the place I had left behind, I beheld the
black litter creeping down the descent, with its curtains closed, and
the Veiled Woman walking by its side. But soon the funeral procession
was lost to my eyes, and the thoughts that it roused were erased. The
waves in man's brain are like those of the sea, rushing on, rushing over
the wrecks of the vessels that rode on their surface, to sink, after
storm, in their deeps. One thought cast forth into the future now
mastered all in the past: "Was Lilian living still?" Absorbed in the
gloom of that thought, hurried on by the goad that my heart, in its
tortured impatience, gave to my footstep, I outstripped the slow stride
of the armed men, and, midway between the place I had left and the home
which I sped to, came, far in advance of my guards, into the thicket in
which the bushmen had started up in my path on the night that Lilian
had watched for my coming. The earth at my feet was rife with creeping
plants and many-coloured flowers, the sky overhead was half-hid by
motionless pines. Suddenly, whether crawling out from the herbage,
or dropping down from the trees, by my side stood the white-robed and
skeleton form,--Ayesha's attendant, the Strangler.

I sprang from him shuddering, then halted and faced him. The hideous
creature crept towards me, cringing and fawning, making signs of
humble good-will and servile obeisance. Again I recoiled,--wrathfully,
loathingly; turned my face homeward, and fled on. I thought I had
baffled his chase, when, just at the mouth of the thicket, he dropped
from a bough in my path close behind me. Before I could turn, some
dark muffling substance fell between my sight and the sun, and I felt a
fierce strain at my throat. But the words of Ayesha had warned me; with
one rapid hand I seized the noose before it could tighten too closely,
with the other I tore the bandage away from my eyes, and, wheeling round
on the dasta