some dream that my mother had the night before I was born. Do _you_ tell
_me_ what it means, since you seem to know so much."

"I cannot, Prince. The secret is not one that has been shown to me. Yet
there was an aged man, a magician like myself from whom I learned much
in my youth--Bakenkhonsu knew him well--who made a study of this matter.
He told me he was sure, because it had been revealed to him, that men
do not live once only and then depart hence for ever. He said that they
live many times and in many shapes, though not always on this world, and
that between each life there is a wall of darkness."

"If so, of what use are lives which we do not remember after death has
shut the door of each of them?"

"The doors may open again at last, Prince, and show us all the chambers
through which our feet have wandered from the beginning."

"Our religion teaches us, Ki, that after death we live eternally
elsewhere in our own bodies, which we find again on the day of
resurrection. Now eternity, having no end, can have no beginning; it is
a circle. Therefore if the one be true, namely that we live on, it would
seem that the other must be true, namely that we have always lived."

"That is well reasoned, Prince. In the early days, before the priests
froze the thought of man into blocks of stone and built of them shrines
to a thousand gods, many held that this reasoning was true, as then they
held that there was but one god."

"As do these Israelites whom I go to visit. What say you of their god,
Ki?"