of Louis Grayle,--for the sake of the elixir of life,--murdered by
Juma the Strangler; and that Grayle himself had been aided in his
flight from Aleppo, and tended, through the effects of the
life-giving drug thus murderously obtained, by the womanly love of the
Arab woman Ayesha. These convictions (since I could not, without
being ridiculed as the wildest of dupes, even hint at the vital
elixir) I failed to impress on the Eastern officials, or even on a
countryman of my own whom I chanced to find at Aleppo. They only
arrived at what seemed the common-sense verdict,--namely, that Haroun
might have been strangled, or might have died in a fit (the body,
little examined, was buried long before I came to Aleppo); and that
Louis Grayle was murdered by his own treacherous dependents. But all
trace of the fugitives was lost.

"And now," wrote Sir Philip, "I will state by what means I discovered
that Louis Grayle still lived,--changed from age into youth; a new
form, a new being; realizing, I verily believe, the image which
Haroun's words had raised up, in what then seemed to me the
metaphysics of fantasy,---criminal, without consciousness of crime;
the dreadest of the mere animal race; an incarnation of the blind
powers of Nature,--beautiful and joyous, wanton and terrible and
destroying! Such as ancient myths have personified in the idols of
Oriental creeds; such as Nature, of herself, might form man in her
moments of favour, if man were wholly the animal, and spirit were no
longer the essential distinction between himself and the races to
which by superior formation and subtler perceptions he would still be
the king.

"But this being is yet more dire and portentous than the mere animal
man, for in him are not only the fragmentary memories of a pristine
intelligence which no mind, unaided by the presence of soul, could
have originally compassed, but amidst that intelligence are the
secrets of the magic which is learned through the agencies of spirits
the most hostile to our race. And who shall say whether the fiends do
not enter at their will this void and deserted temple whence the soul
has departed, and use as their tools, passive and unconscious, all the
faculties which, skilful in sorcery, still place a mind at the
control of their malice?

"It, was in the interest excited i