This journey was the first of many.  Every day the litters were waiting and they visited some new place, although into the town itself they never went.  Moreover, if they passed through outlying villages, though Alan was forced to wear his mask, their inhabitants had been warned to absent themselves, so that they saw no one.  The crops were left untended and the cattle and sheep lowed hungrily in their kraals.  On certain days, at Alan’s request, they were taken to the spots where the gold was found in the gravel bed of an almost dry stream that during the rains was a torrent.

He descended from the litter and with the help of the Asika and Jeekie, dug a little in this gravel, not without reward, for in it they found several nuggets.  Above, too, where they went afterwards, was a huge quartz reef denuded by water, which evidently had been worked in past ages and was still so rich that in it they saw plenty of visible gold.  Looking at it Alan bethought him of his City days and of the hundreds of thousands of pounds capital with which this unique proposition might have been floated.  Afterwards they were carried to the places where the gems were found, stuck about in the clay, like plums in a pudding, though none ever sought them now.  But all these things interested the Asika not at all.

“What is the good of gold,” she asked of Alan, “except to make things of, or the bright stones except to play with?  What is the good of anything except food to eat and power and wisdom that can open the secret doors of knowledge, of things seen and things unseen, and love that brings the lover joy and forgetfulness of self and takes away the awful loneliness of the soul, if only for a little while?”

Not wishing to drift into discussion on the matter of love, Alan asked the priestess to define her “soul,” whence it came and whither she believed it to be going.

“My soul is I, Vernoon,” she answered, “and already very, very old.  Thus it has ruled amongst this people for thousands of years.”

“How is that?” he asked, “seeing that the Asika dies?”

“Oh! no, Vernoon, she does not die; she only changes.  The old body dies, the spirit enters into another body which is waiting.  Thus until I was fourteen I was but a common girl, the daughter of a headman of that village yonder, at least so they tell me, for of this time I have no memory.  Then the Asika died and as I had the secret marks and the beauty that is hers the priests burnt her body before Big Bonsa and suffocated me, the child, in the smoke of the burning.  But I awoke again and when I awoke the past was gone and the soul of the Asika filled me, bringing with it its awful memories, its gathered wisdom, its passion of love and hate, and its power to look backward and before.”

“Do you ever do these things?” asked Alan.