She quotes

The lighted match burnt away till it scorched my fingers, forcing me to drop it; but still I stood and stared at myself in the glass, and reflected.

“Well,” I said aloud, at last, “it is to be hoped that I shall be able to do something with the inside of my head, for I shall certainly never do anything by the help of the outside.”

This remark will doubtless strike anybody who reads it as being slightly obscure, but I was in reality alluding to my physical deficiencies.

such was my appearance nearly a quarter of a century ago, and such, with some modification, it is to this day.

Like Cain, I was branded⁠—branded by Nature with the stamp of abnormal ugliness, as I was gifted by Nature with iron and abnormal strength and considerable intellectual powers.

So ugly was I that the spruce young men of my College, though they were proud enough of my feats of endurance and physical prowess, did not even care to be seen walking with me. Was it wonderful that I was misanthropic and sullen?

and in the end by way of answer she took me to the glass, and stood side by side with me, and looked into it.

“Now,” she said, “if I am Beauty, who are you?”

That was when I was only twenty.

“Very well, remember that perhaps one day I shall ask for the account of your oath, for though I am dead and forgotten, yet I shall live.

There is no such thing as death, Holly, only a change, and, as you may perhaps learn in time to come, I believe that even that change could under certain circumstances be indefinitely postponed,

” and again he broke into one of his dreadful fits of coughing.

“Look here, Vincey,” I said, “if you are as ill as you think, you had better let me fetch a doctor.”

“No, no,” he said earnestly. “Promise me that you won’t. I am going to die, and, like a poisoned rat, I wish to die alone.”

“I don’t believe that you are going to do anything of the sort,” I answered. He smiled, and, with the word “Remember” on his lips, was gone. As for myself, I sat down and rubbed my eyes, wondering if I had been asleep.

This went on for some minutes, and then all of a sudden the lad stretched out both his little arms and ran to me.

“I like you,” he said: “you is ugly, but you is good.”

Ten minutes afterwards he was eating large slices of bread and butter, with every sign of satisfaction; Job wanted to put jam on to them, but I sternly reminded him of the excellent works that we had read, and forbade it.

But I have no space to dwell upon those delightful years, around which memory still fondly hovers. One by one they went by, and as they passed we two grew dearer and yet more dear to each other.

Few sons have been loved as I love Leo, and few fathers know the deep and continuous affection that Leo bears to me.

The child grew into the boy, and the boy into the young man, while one by one the remorseless years flew by, and as he grew and increased so did his beauty and the beauty of his mind grow with him.

“I do not believe that it is a fable; I believe that if it can only be rediscovered there is a spot where the vital forces of the world visibly exist.

Life exists; why therefore should not the means of preserving it indefinitely exist also?

But I have no wish to prejudice your mind about the matter. Read and judge for yourself. If you are inclined to undertake the search, I have so provided that you will not lack for means.

If, on the other hand, you are satisfied that the whole thing is a chimera, then, I adjure you, destroy the potsherd and the writings, and let a cause of troubling be removed from our race forever. Perhaps that will be wisest.

The unknown is generally taken to be terrible, not as the proverb would infer, from the inherent superstition of man, but because it so often is terrible.

He who would tamper with the vast and secret forces that animate the world may well fall a victim to them.

“What do you think of that, Job?” I asked of our retainer, who was sitting on the edge of the boat, trying to get as much sunshine as possible, and generally looking uncommonly wretched, and I pointed to the fiery and demonical head.

“Oh Lord, sir,” answered Job, who now perceived the object for the first time, “I think that the old geneleman must have been sitting for his portrait on them rocks.”

I laughed, and the laugh woke up Leo.

“Well!” said Leo, “it is a blessing to find anybody to carry us after having to carry ourselves so long.”

Leo always takes a cheerful view of things.

There being no help for it, after seeing the others into theirs I tumbled into my own litter, and very comfortable I found it.

I do not want to convey any disrespectful notion or slight when I call those good and learned men fossils, but my experience is that people are apt to fossilise even at a University if they follow the same paths too persistently.

I was getting fossilised myself, but of late my stock of ideas has been very much enlarged.

Well, I lay and reflected, and wondered what on earth would be the end of it all, till at last I ceased to wonder, and went to sleep.

… in favour of a rival, accepted the whole thing much as we accept the income-tax or our marriage laws, as something not to be disputed, and as tending to the good of the community, however disagreeable they may in particular instances prove to the individual.

It is very curious to observe how the customs of mankind on this matter vary in different countries, making morality an affair of latitude, and what is right and proper in one place wrong and improper in another.

It must, however, be understood that, since all civilised nations appear to accept it as an axiom that ceremony is the touchstone of morality, there is, even according to our canons, nothing immoral about this Amahagger custom, seeing that the interchange of the embrace answers …

Billali turned, and seeing that we were alone—for the young lady, Ustane, had withdrawn when he had begun to speak—said, with a curious little laugh—

“Are there none in your land who can see without eyes and hear without ears? Ask no questions; She knew.”

I shrugged my shoulders at this, and he proceeded to say that no further instructions had been received on the subject of our disposal, and this being so he was about to start to interview “She-who-must-be-obeyed,” generally spoken of, for the sake of brevity, as …

“when at night thou stretchest out thine hand and canst not find me, then shouldst thou think at times of me, for of a truth I love thee well, though I be not fit to wash thy feet.

And now let us love and take that which is given us, and be happy; for in the grave there is no love and no warmth, nor any touching of the lips.

Nothing perchance, or perchance but bitter memories of what might have been. Tonight the hours are our own, how know we to whom they shall belong tomorrow?”

And now let us love and take that which is given us, and be happy; for in the grave there is no love and no warmth, nor any touching of the lips. Nothing perchance, or perchance but bitter memories of what might have been.

Tonight the hours are our own, how know we to whom they shall belong tomorrow?

”

“Ah, so,” he answered. “Thou seest, my son, here there is a custom that if a stranger comes into this country he may be slain by ‘the pot,’ and eaten.”

“It is hospitality turned upside down,” I answered feebly. “In our country we entertain a stranger, and give him food to eat. Here ye eat him, and are entertained.”

“It is a custom,” he answered, with a shrug. “Myself I think it an evil one; but then,” he added by an afterthought, “I do not like the taste of strangers, especially after they have wandered through the swamps and lived on wildfowl.

… time to time, seemed to draw the coverings from its body, revealing now the perfect shape of a lovely blooming woman, and now again the white bones of a grinning skeleton, and which, as it veiled and unveiled, uttered the mysterious and apparently meaningless sentence:—

“That which is alive and hath known death, and that which is dead yet can never die, for in the Circle of the Spirit life is naught and death is naught. Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.”

The morning came at last, but when it came I found that I was too stiff and sore to rise.

… stone bench where it had lain for so many thousand years, and wondered whose was the beauty that it had upborne through the pomp and pageantry of a forgotten civilisation—first as a merry child’s, then as a blushing maid’s, and lastly as a perfect woman’s.

Through what halls of Life had its soft step echoed, and in the end, with what courage had it trodden down the dusty ways of Death!

To whose side had it stolen in the hush of night when the black slave slept upon the marble floor, and who had listened for its stealing? Shapely little foot!

“Ah,” I said, the matter never having struck me quite in that light before.

“We worship them,” he went on, “up to a point, till at last they get unbearable, which,” he added, “they do about every second generation.”

“And then what do you do?” I asked, with curiosity.

“And if She bade her leave him, and the girl refused? What then?”

“If,” he said, with a shrug, “the hurricane bids the tree to bend, and it will not; what happens?”

And then, without waiting for an answer, he turned and walked to his litter, and in ten minutes from that time we were all well under way.

Does any answer come out of it? Never any at all, nothing but echoes and fantastic visions! And yet we believe that there is an answer, and that upon a time a new Dawn will come blushing down the ways of our enduring night.

We believe it, for its reflected beauty even now shines up continually in our hearts from beneath the horizon of the grave, and we call it Hope.

Without Hope we should suffer moral death, and by the help of Hope we yet may climb to Heaven, or at the worst, if she also prove but a kindly mockery given to hold us from despair, be gently lowered into the abysses of eternal …

I sat up in my hammock and gazed out across the plain at this thrilling and majestic sight, and I suppose that Billali noticed it, for he brought his litter alongside.

“Behold the house of ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed!’ ” he said. “Had ever a queen such a throne before?”

“It is wonderful, my father,” I answered. “But how do we enter. Those cliffs look hard to climb.”

Job never got over the advances the former lady had made towards him, and suspected every girl who came near to him of similar designs.

“These young parties have a way of looking at one, sir,” he would say apologetically, “which I don’t call respectable.”

This chamber was twice the size of the sleeping caves, and I saw at once that it had originally served as a refectory, and also probably as an embalming room for the Priests of the Dead;

I could, however, clearly distinguish that the swathed mummy-like form before me was that of a tall and lovely woman, instinct with beauty in every part, and also with a certain snakelike grace which I had never seen anything to equal before.

When she moved a hand or foot her entire frame seemed to undulate, and the neck did not bend, it curved.

“Why art thou so frightened, stranger?” asked the sweet voice again—a voice which seemed to draw the heart out of me, like the strains of softest music. “Is there that about me that should affright a man?

“There,” said She, “he has gone, the white-bearded old fool!

Ah, how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathereth it up like water, but like water it runneth through his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, ‘See, he is a wise man!’

Is it not so? But how call they thee? ‘Baboon,’ he says,” and she laughed; “but that is the fashion of these savages who lack imagination, and fly to the beasts they resemble for a name.

“Oh man!” she said at last, speaking very slowly and deliberately, “it seems that there are still things upon the earth of which thou knowest naught. Dost thou still believe that all things die, even as those very Jews believed?

I tell thee that naught dies. There is no such thing as Death, though there be a thing called Change.

See,” and she pointed to some sculptures on the rocky wall. “Three times two thousand years have passed since the last of the great race that hewed those pictures fell before the breath of the pestilence which destroyed them, yet are they not dead.

“Nay, nay; oh Holly,” she answered, “it is no magic, that is a fiction of ignorance.

There is no such thing as magic, though there is such a thing as a knowledge of the secrets of Nature.

That water is my glass; in it I see what passes if I will to summon up the pictures, which is not often.

“So! what did I tell thee?

Beauty is like the lightning; it is lovely, but it destroys⁠—especially trees, oh Holly!

” and again she nodded and laughed.

Nonsense; it must be nonsense! She had warned me fairly, and I had refused to take the warning.

Curses on the fatal curiosity that is ever prompting man to draw the veil from woman, and curses on the natural impulse that begets it!

It is the cause of half—ay, and more than half—of our misfortunes. Why cannot man be content to live alone and be happy, and let the women live alone and be happy too?

Curses on the fatal curiosity that is ever prompting man to draw the veil from woman, and curses on the natural impulse that begets it! It is the cause of half—ay, and more than half—of our misfortunes.

Why cannot man be content to live alone and be happy, and let the women live alone and be happy too? But perhaps they would not be happy, and I am not sure that we should either.

Here is a nice state of affairs. I, at my age, to fall a victim to this modern Circe! But then she was not modern, at least she said not. She was almost as ancient as the original Circe.

Once in a generation mayhap I do as I have done but now, and slay a score by torture. Believe not that I would be cruel, or take vengeance on anything so low. What can it profit me to be avenged on such as these?

Those who live long, my Holly, have no passions, save where they have interests.

Though I may seem to slay in wrath, or because my mood is crossed, it is not so.

Thou hast seen how in the heavens the little clouds blow this way and that without a cause, yet behind them is the great wind sweeping on its path whither it listeth. So it is with me, oh Holly.

My moods and changes are the little clouds, and fitfully these seem to turn; but behind them ever blows the great wind of my purpose.

Nay, the men must die; and die as I have said.” Then, suddenly turning to the captain of the guard:—

Thou knowest them not. They are tigers to lap blood, and even now they hunger for your lives. How thinkest thou that I rule this people? I have but a regiment of guards to do my bidding, therefore it is not by force.

It is by terror. My empire is of the imagination.

Once in a generation mayhap I do as I have done but now, and slay a score by torture. Believe not that I would be cruel, or take vengeance on anything so low. What can it profit me to be avenged on such as these?

for Time eats up the works of man, unless, indeed, he digs in caves like the people of Kôr, and then mayhap the sea swallows them, or the earthquake shakes them in. Who knows what hath been on the earth, or what shall be?

There is no new thing under the sun, as the wise Hebrew wrote long ago.

Yet were not these people utterly destroyed, as I think. Some few remained in the other cities, for their cities were many.

But it came so home to me—I saw it all so clear in a moment, as it were; and, besides, who shall say what proportion of fact, past, present, or to come, may lie in the imagination?

What is imagination? Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the soul’s thought.

In an instant the whole thing had passed through my brain, and She was addressing me.

“I have seen enough, oh Queen,” I answered. “My heart is overwhelmed by the power of the present Death.

Mortality is weak, and easily broken down by a sense of the companionship that waits upon its end.

Take me hence, oh Ayesha!”

“Ah!” she said; “I see—two new religions! I have known so many, and doubtless there have been many more since I knew aught beyond these caves of Kôr. Mankind asks ever of the skies to vision out what lies behind them.

It is terror for the end, and but a subtler form of selfishness⁠—this it is that breeds religions.

Mark, my Holly, each religion claims the future for its followers; or, at least, the good thereof. The evil is for those benighted ones who will have none of it; seeing the light the true believers worship, as the fishes see the stars, but dimly.

Mark, my Holly, each religion claims the future for its followers; or, at least, the good thereof. The evil is for those benighted ones who will have none of it; seeing the light the true believers worship, as the fishes see the stars, but dimly.

The religions come and the religions pass, and the civilisations come and pass, and naught endures but the world and human nature.

Ah! if man would but see that hope is from within and not from without—that he himself must work out his own salvation!

How I cursed my selfishness and the folly that had kept me lingering by Ayesha’s side while my dear boy lay dying!

Alas and alas! how easily the best of us are lighted down to evil by the gleam of a woman’s eyes!

What a wicked wretch was I! Actually, for the last half-hour I had scarcely thought of Leo, and this, be it remembered, of the man who for twenty years had been my dearest companion, and the chief interest of my existence.

Her face grew dark as a thundercloud.

Old as she was, Ayesha had not outlived jealousy.

“Then there is an end,” she said; “she must die, even now!”

For man can be bought with woman’s beauty, if it be but beautiful enough; and woman’s beauty can be ever bought with gold, if only there be gold enough. So was it in my day, and so it will be to the end of time.

The world is a great mart, my Holly, where all things are for sale to him who bids the highest in the currency of our desires.

”

There was something very terrible, and yet very fascinating, about the employment of the remote dead to illumine the orgies of the living; in itself the thing was a satire, both on the living and the dead.

Caesar’s dust⁠—or is it Alexander’s?⁠—may stop a bunghole, but the functions of these dead Caesars of the past was to light up a savage fetish dance.

To such base uses may we come, of so little account may we be in the minds of the eager multitudes that we shall breed, many of whom, so far from revering our memory, will live to curse us for begetting them into such a …

“

Nay, why? It is not well to go so swift from the hot lips of love down to the cold mouth of the grave,

” and she made a motion to the mutes, who instantly stepped up and caught the girl by either arm.

“Hast thou aught to say, woman?

Thou silly straw, thou feather, who didst think to float towards thy passion’s petty ends, even against the great wind of my will!

Tell me, for I fain would understand. Why didst thou this thing?”

“How can I?” he said hoarsely. “Thou art a murderess; she loved me.”

Observe, he was already forgetting that he had loved her.

“It is naught,” she murmured, and her voice sounded sweet as the night-wind passing through the trees. “It is naught at all. If I have sinned, let my beauty answer for my sin. If I have sinned, it is for love of thee:

Nay, look not so—put away that pale cast of doubt, for oh be sure herein can error find no foothold!

Sooner shall the suns forget their course and the swallow miss her nest, than my soul shall swear a lie and be led astray from thee, Kallikrates.

Blind me, take away mine eyes, and let the darkness utterly fence me in, and still mine ears would catch the tone of thy unforgotten voice, striking more loud against the portals of my sense than can the call of brazen-throated clarions:—stop up mine hearing …

“

Dust to dust!⁠—the past to the past!⁠—the dead to the dead!⁠—Kallikrates is dead, and is born again!

”

… soon rejected the project as futile, and, to be perfectly honest, I do not believe that either of us would really have left Ayesha even if some superior power had suddenly offered to convey us from these gloomy caves and set us down in Cambridge.

We could no more have left her than a moth can leave the light that destroys it.

We were like confirmed opium-eaters: in our moments of reason we well knew the deadly nature of our pursuit, but we certainly were not prepared to abandon its terrible delights.

We could no more have left her than a moth can leave the light that destroys it.

We were like confirmed opium-eaters: in our moments of reason we well knew the deadly nature of our pursuit, but we certainly were not prepared to abandon its terrible delights.

No man who once had seen She unveiled, and heard the music of her voice, and drunk in the bitter wisdom of her words, would willingly give up the sight for a whole sea of placid joys.

My own opinion is that he would have been mad if he had done so. But then I confess that my statement on the matter must be accepted with qualifications.

I am in love with Ayesha myself to this day, and I would rather have been the object of her affection for one short week than that of any other woman in the world for a whole lifetime.

And let me add that, if anybody who doubts this statement, and thinks me foolish for making it, could have seen Ayesha draw her veil and flash out in beauty on his gaze, his view would exactly coincide with my own.

As we were returning Billali met us, and informed us that it was She’s pleasure that we should wait upon her, and accordingly we entered her presence, not without trepidation, for Ayesha was certainly an exception to the rule.

Familiarity with her might and did breed passion and wonder and horror, but it certainly did not breed contempt.

We were as usual shown in by the mutes, and after these had retired Ayesha unveiled, and once more bade Leo embrace her, which, notwithstanding his heart-searchings of the previous night, he did with more alacrity and fervour than in strictness courtesy required.

For me, oh Ayesha, the world has not proved so soft a nest that I would lie in it forever.

A stony-hearted mother is our earth, and stones are the bread she gives her children for their daily food.

Stones to eat and bitter water for their thirst, and stripes for tender nurture. Who would endure this for many lives?

“It may be so,” I answered; “but if the loved one prove a broken reed to pierce us, or if the love be loved in vain—what then?

Shall a man grave his sorrows upon a stone when he hath but need to write them on the water?

Nay, oh She, I will live my day, and grow old with my generation, and die my appointed death, and be forgotten.

But so it hath ever been; man can never be content with that which his hand can pluck. If a lamp be in his reach to light him through the darkness, he must needs cast it down because it is no star.

Happiness danceth ever apace before him, like the marsh-fires in the swamps, and he must catch the fire, and he must hold the star!

Beauty is naught to him, because there are lips more honey-sweet; and wealth is naught, because others can weigh him down with heavier shekels; and fame is naught, because there have been greater men than he.

Happiness danceth ever apace before him, like the marsh-fires in the swamps, and he must catch the fire, and he must hold the star!

Beauty is naught to him, because there are lips more honey-sweet; and wealth is naught, because others can weigh him down with heavier shekels; and fame is naught, because there have been greater men than he.

Thyself thou saidst it, and I turn thy words against thee. Well, thou dreamest that thou shalt pluck the star. I believe it not, and I think thee a fool, my Holly, to throw away the lamp.”

But so it hath ever been; man can never be content with that which his hand can pluck.

If a lamp be in his reach to light him through the darkness, he must needs cast it down because it is no star.

Happiness danceth ever apace before him, like the marsh-fires in the swamps, and he must catch the fire, and he must hold the star! Beauty is naught to him, because there are lips more honey-sweet;

“The law,” she laughed with scorn—“the law! Canst thou not understand, oh Holly, that I am above the law, and so shall my Kallikrates be also? All human law will be to us as the north wind to a mountain.

Does the wind bend the mountain, or the mountain the wind?

”

It was a wonderful sight to see the full moon looking down on the ruined fane of Kôr.

It was a wonderful thing to think for how many thousands of years the dead orb above and the dead city below had gazed thus upon each other, and in the utter solitude of space poured forth each to each the tale of their lost life and long-departed glory.

The white light fell, and minute by minute the quiet shadows crept across the grass-grown courts like the spirits of old priests haunting the habitations of their worship—the white light fell, and the long shadows grew till the beauty and grandeur of each scene and …

Court upon dim court, row upon row of mighty pillars—some of them (especially at the gateways) sculptured from pedestal to capital—space upon space of empty chambers that spoke more eloquently to the imagination than any crowded streets.

And over all, the dead silence of the dead, the sense of utter loneliness, and the brooding spirit of the Past!

How beautiful it was, and yet how drear! We did not dare to speak aloud. Ayesha herself was awed in the presence of an antiquity compared to which even her length of days was but a little thing;

“Canst thou not guess, oh Holly?” answered Ayesha. “Where then is thy imagination?

It is Truth standing on the World, and calling to its children to unveil her face.

See what is writ upon the pedestal.

“Thou seest,” said Ayesha, when she had finished translating, “

Truth was the Goddess of the people of old Kôr, and to her they built their shrines, and her they sought; knowing that they should never find, still sought they.

”

“Surely thou art not afraid,” this strange creature called in a lull of the gale, from where she stood poised like a bird on the highest point of the rocking-stone. “Make way then for Kallikrates.”

This settled me; it is better to fall down a precipice and die than be laughed at by such a woman;

so I clenched my teeth, and in another instant I was on that horrible, narrow, bending plank, with bottomless space beneath and around me.

For all I knew she might be in the very act of consigning me to a horrible doom.

But in life we sometimes have to lay our faith upon strange altars, and so it was now.

“Let thyself go!” she cried, and, having no choice, I did.

Thy love, Kallikrates, shall be the gate of my redemption, even as aforetime my passion was the path down which I ran to evil.

For deep love unsatisfied is the hell of noble hearts and a portion of the accursed, but love that is mirrored back more perfect from the soul of our desired doth fashion wings to lift us above ourselves, and makes us what we might be.

Therefore, Kallikrates, take me by the hand, and lift my veil with no more fear than though I were some peasant girl, and not the wisest and most beauteous woman in this wide world, and look me in the eyes, and tell me that thou …

Thou shalt read the hearts of men as an open writing, and hither and thither shalt thou lead them as thy pleasure listeth.

Like that old Sphinx of Egypt shalt thou sit aloft from age to age, and ever shall they cry to thee to solve the riddle of thy greatness that doth not pass away, and ever shalt thou mock them with thy silence!

“Behold! once more I kiss thee, and by that kiss I give to thee dominion over sea and earth, over the peasant in his hovel, over the monarch in his palace halls, and cities crowned with towers, and those who breathe therein.

“And now it is done; now for thee I loose my virgin zone; and come storm, come shine, come good, come evil, come life, come death, it never, never can be undone.

For, of a truth, that which is, is, and, being done, is done for aye, and cannot be altered.

I have said—Let us hence, that all things may be accomplished in their order;” and, taking one of the lamps, she advanced towards the end of the chamber that was roofed in by the swaying stone, where she halted.

And, mind you, this was from no heartlessness, for he and Job were much attached to each other; and he often talks of him now with the deepest regret and affection. It was only that his nerves would bear no more.

A harp can give out but a certain quantity of sound, however heavily it is smitten.

Well, I set myself to recovering Leo, who, to my infinite relief, I found was not dead, but only fainting, and in the end I succeeded, as I have said, and he sat up; and then I saw another dreadful thing.

… fall from my mistress’s table, the memory of a few kind words, the hope one day in the far undreamed future of a sweet smile or two of recognition, a little gentle friendship, and a little show of thanks for my devotion to her—and Leo.

If that does not constitute true love, I do not know what does, and all I have to say is that it is a very bad state of affairs for a man on the wrong side of middle age to fall into.