THE PROPHECY OF ATENE
On the day following this strange experience of the
iron that was turned to gold some great service was
held in the Sanctuary, as we understood, “to
consecrate the war.” We did not attend it,
but that night we ate together as usual. Ayesha
was moody at the meal, that is, she varied from sullenness
to laughter.
“Know you,” she said, “that to-day
I was an Oracle, and those fools of the Mountain sent
their medicine-men to ask of the Hesea how the battle
would go and which of them would be slain, and which
gain honour. And I—I could not tell
them, but juggled with my words, so that they might
take them as they would. How the battle will go
I know well, for I shall direct it, but the future—ah!
that I cannot read better than thou canst, my Holly,
and that is ill indeed. For me the past and all
the present lie bathed in light reflected from that
black wall—the future.”
Then she fell to brooding, and looking up at length
with an air of entreaty, said to Leo—“Wilt
thou not hear my prayer and bide where thou art for
some few days, or even go a-hunting? Do so, and
I will stay with thee, and send Holly and Oros to
command the Tribes in this petty fray.”
“I will not,” answered Leo, trembling
with indignation, for this plan of hers that I should
be sent out to war, while he bided in safety in a
temple, moved him, a man brave to rashness, who, although
he disapproved of it in theory, loved fighting for
its own sake also, to absolute rage.
“I say, Ayesha, that I will not,” he repeated;
“moreover, that if thou leavest me here I will
find my way down the mountain alone, and join the
battle.”
“Then come,” she answered, “and
on thine own head be it. Nay, not on thine beloved,
on mine, on mine.”
After this, by some strange reaction, she became like
a merry girl, laughing more than I have ever seen
her do, and telling us many tales of the far, far
past, but none that were sad or tragic. It was
very strange to sit and listen to her while she spoke
of people, one or two of them known as names in history
and many others who never have been heard of, that
had trod this earth and with whom she was familiar
over two thousand years ago. Yet she told us
anecdotes of their loves and hates, their strength
or weaknesses, all of them touched with some tinge
of humorous satire, or illustrating the comic vanity
of human aims and aspirations.
At length her talk took a deeper and more personal
note. She spoke of her searchings after truth;
of how, aching for wisdom, she had explored the religions
of her day and refused them one by one; of how she
had preached in Jerusalem and been stoned by the Doctors
of the Law. Of how also she had wandered back
to Arabia and, being rejected by her own people as
a reformer, had travelled on to Egypt, and at the court
of the Pharaoh of that time met a famous magician,
half charlatan and half seer who, because she was
far-seeing, ‘clairvoyante’ we should call
it, instructed her in his art so well that soon she
became his master and forced him to obey her.
