She paused awhile and then continued, “But stay, if thy heart is yet hardened against the mighty truth and thou dost require a further pledge of that which thou dost find too deep to understand, even now shall it be given to thee, and to thee also, oh my Holly.  Bear each one of you a lamp, and follow after me whither I shall lead you.”

Without stopping to think—­indeed, speaking for myself, I had almost abandoned the function in circumstances under which to think seemed to be absolutely useless, since thought fell hourly helpless against a black wall of wonder—­we took the lamps and followed her.  Going to the end of her “boudoir,” she raised a curtain and revealed a little stair of the sort that is so common in these dim caves of Kor.  As we hurried down the stair I observed that the steps were worn in the centre to such an extent that some of them had been reduced from seven and a half inches, at which I guessed their original height, to about three and a half.  Now, all the other steps that I had seen in the caves were practically unworn, as was to be expected, seeing that the only traffic which ever passed upon them was that of those who bore a fresh burden to the tomb.  Therefore this fact struck my notice with that curious force with which little things do strike us when our minds are absolutely overwhelmed by a sudden rush of powerful sensations; beaten flat, as it were, like a sea beneath the first burst of a hurricane, so that every little object on the surface starts into an unnatural prominence.

At the bottom of the staircase I stood and stared at the worn steps, and Ayesha, turning, saw me.

“Wonderest thou whose are the feet that have worn away the rock, my Holly?” she asked.  “They are mine—­even mine own light feet!  I can remember when those stairs were fresh and level, but for two thousand years and more have I gone down hither day by day, and see, my sandals have worn out the solid rock!”

I made no answer, but I do not think that anything that I had heard or seen brought home to my limited understanding so clear a sense of this being’s overwhelming antiquity as that hard rock hollowed out by her soft white feet.  How many hundreds of thousands of times must she have passed up and down that stair to bring about such a result?

The stair led to a tunnel, and a few paces down the tunnel was one of the usual curtain-hung doorways, a glance at which told me that it was the same where I had been a witness of that terrible scene by the leaping flame.  I recognised the pattern of the curtain, and the sight of it brought the whole event vividly before my eyes, and made me tremble even at its memory.  Ayesha entered the tomb (for it was a tomb), and we followed her—­I, for one, rejoicing that the mystery of the place was about to be cleared up, and yet afraid to face its solution.

XXI

THE DEAD AND LIVING MEET