“Shall I raise thee,” she said, apparently addressing the corpse, “so that thou standest there before me, as of old?  I can do it,” and she held out her hands over the sheeted dead, while her whole frame became rigid and terrible to see, and her eyes grew fixed and dull.  I shrank in horror behind the curtain, my hair stood up upon my head, and, whether it was my imagination or a fact I am unable to say, but I thought that the quiet form beneath the covering began to quiver, and the winding sheet to lift as though it lay on the breast of one who slept.  Suddenly she withdrew her hands, and the motion of the corpse seemed to me to cease.

“To what purpose?” she said gloomily.  “Of what good is it to recall the semblance of life when I cannot recall the spirit?  Even if thou stoodest before me thou wouldst not know me, and couldst but do what I bid thee.  The life in thee would be my life, and not thy life, Kallikrates.”

For a moment she stood there brooding, and then cast herself down on her knees beside the form, and began to press her lips against the sheet, and weep.  There was something so horrible about the sight of this awe-inspiring woman letting loose her passion on the dead—­so much more horrible even than anything that had gone before—­that I could no longer bear to look at it, and, turning, began to creep, shaking as I was in every limb, slowly along the pitch-dark passage, feeling in my trembling heart that I had seen a vision of a Soul in Hell.

On I stumbled, I scarcely know how.  Twice I fell, once I turned up the bisecting passage, but fortunately found out my mistake in time.  For twenty minutes or more I crept along, till at last it occurred to me that I must have passed the little stair by which I had descended.  So, utterly exhausted, and nearly frightened to death, I sank down at length there on the stone flooring, and sank into oblivion.

When I came to I noticed a faint ray of light in the passage just behind me.  I crept to it, and found it was the little stair down which the weak dawn was stealing.  Passing up it, I gained my chamber in safety, and, flinging myself on the couch, was soon lost in slumber or rather stupor.

XV

AYESHA GIVES JUDGMENT

The next thing that I remember was opening my eyes and perceiving the form of Job, who had now practically recovered from his attack of fever.  He was standing in the ray of light that pierced into the cave from the outer air, shaking out my clothes as a makeshift for brushing them, which he could not do because there was no brush, and then folding them up neatly and laying them on the foot of the stone couch.  This done, he got my travelling dressing-case out of the Gladstone bag, and opened it ready for my use.  First he stood it on the foot of the couch also, then, being afraid, I suppose, that I should kick it off, he placed it on a leopard skin on the floor, and stood