CHAPTER LXXXVII.

The fifth hour had passed away, when Ayesha said to me, "Lo! the circle is
fading; the lamps grow dim. Look now without fear on the space beyond;
the eyes that appalled thee are again lost in air, as lightnings that
fleet back into cloud."

I looked up, and the spectres had vanished. The sky was tinged with
sulphurous hues, the red and the black intermixed. I replenished the
lamps and the ring in front, thriftily, heedfully; but when I came to the
sixth lamp, not a drop in the vessel that fed them was left. In a vague
dismay, I now looked round the half of the wide circle in rear of the two
bended figures intent on the caldron. All along that disk the light was
already broken, here and there flickering up, here and there dying down;
the six lamps in that half of the circle still twinkled, but faintly, as
stars shrinking fast from the dawn of day. But it was not the fading
shine in that half of the magical ring which daunted my eye and quickened
with terror the pulse of my heart; the Bushland beyond was on fire. From
the background of the forest rose the flame and the smoke,--the smoke,
there, still half smothering the flame. But along the width of the
grasses and herbage, between the verge of the forest and the bed of the
water-creek just below the raised platform from which I beheld the dread
conflagration, the fire was advancing,--wave upon wave, clear and red
against the columns of rock behind,--as the rush of a flood through the
mists of some Alp crowned with lightnings.

Roused from my stun at the first sight of a danger not foreseen by the
mind I had steeled against far rarer portents of Nature, I cared no more
for the lamps and the circle. Hurrying back to Ayesha, I exclaimed: "The