Again I translated.  Umslopogaas received her prophecies in stoical silence, and as I thought with indifference, and only said in reply,

“The glory that I have won is my reward and the only boon I seek at this queen’s hands is that if she can she should give me sight of a woman for whom my heart is hungry, and with it knowledge that this woman lives in that land whither I travel like all men.”

When she heard these words Ayesha said,

“True, I had forgotten.  Your heart also is hungry, I think, Allan, for the vision of sundry faces that you see no more.  Well, I will do my best, but since only faith fulfils itself, how can I who must strive to pierce the gates of darkness for one so unbelieving, know that they will open at my word?  Come to me, both of you, at the sunset to-morrow.”

Then as though to change the subject, she talked to me for a long while about Kor, of which she told me a most interesting history, true or false, that I omit here.

At length, as though suddenly she had grown tired, waving her hand to show that the conversation was ended, Ayesha went to the wounded men and touched them each in turn.

“Now they will recover swiftly,” she said, and leaving the place was gone into the darkness.

CHAPTER XX

THE GATE OF DEATH

Before turning in I examined these wounded men for myself.  The truth is that I was anxious to learn their exact condition in order that I might make an estimate as to when it would be possible for us to leave this valley or crater bottom of Kor, of which I was heartily tired.  Who could desire to stay in a place where he had not only been involved in a deal of hard, doubtful, and very dangerous fighting from which all personal interest was absent, but where also he was meshed in a perfect spider’s web of bewilderment, and exposed to continual insult into the bargain?

For that is what it came to; this Ayesha took every opportunity to jeer at and affront me.  And why?  Just because I had conceived doubts, which somehow she discovered, of the amazing tales with which it had amused her to stuff me, as a farmer’s wife does a turkey poult with meal pellets.  How could she expect me, a man, after all, of some experience, to believe such lies, which, not half an hour before, in the coolest possible fashion she had herself admitted to be lies and nothing else, told for the mere pleasure of romancing?

The immortal Rezu, for instance, who had drunk of the Cup of Life or some such rubbish, now turned out to be nothing but a brawny savage descended from generations of chiefs also called Rezu.  Moreover the immemorial Ayesha, who also had drunk of Cups of Life, and according to her first story, had lived in this place for thousands of years, had come here with a mother, who filled the same mystic role before her for the benefit of an extremely gloomy and disagreeable tribe of Semitic savages.  Yet she was cross with me because I had not swallowed her crude and indigestible mixture of fable and philosophy without a moment’s question.