accident, turned towards me as it passed and perhaps by the chance of
light, seemed to frown upon me.

Thus I thought as Shabaka hundreds of years before the Christian era,
but as Allan Quatermain the modern man, to whom it was given so
marvellously to behold all these things and who in beholding them, yet
never quite lost the sense of his own identity of to-day, I was
amazed. For I knew that this lady Amada was the same being though clad
in different flesh, as that other lady with whom I had breathed the
magical /Taduki/ fumes which had power to rend the curtain of the
past, or, perhaps, only to breed dreams of what it might have been.

To the outward eye, indeed she was different, as I was different,
taller, more slender, larger-eyed, with longer and slimmer hands than
those of any Western woman, and on the whole even more beautiful and
alluring. Moreover that mysterious look which from time to time I had
seen on Lady Ragnall's face, was more constant on that of the lady
Amada. It brooded in the deep eyes and settled in a curious smile
about the curves of the lips, a smile that was not altogether human,
such a smile as one might wear who had looked on hidden things and
heard voices that spoke beyond the limits of the world.

Somehow neither then nor at any other time during all my dream, could
I imagine this Amada, this daughter of a hundred kings, whose blood
might be traced back through dynasty on dynasty, as nothing but a
woman who nurses children upon her breast. It was as though something
of our common nature had been bred out of her and something of another
nature whereof we have no ken, had entered to fill its place. And yet
these two women were the same, that I /knew/, or at any rate, much of
them was the same, for who can say what part of us we leave behind as