phantoms have gone from the spaces in front; but what incantation or spell
can arrest the red march of the foe, speeding on in the rear! While we
gazed on the caldron of life, behind us, unheeded, behold the Destroyer!"

Ayesha looked, and made no reply; but, as by involuntary instinct, bowed
her majestic head, then rearing it erect, placed herself yet more
immediately before the wasted form of the young magician (he still bending
over the caldron, and hearing me not in the absorption and hope of his
watch),--placed herself before him, as the bird whose first care is her
fledgling.

As we two there stood, fronting the deluge of fire, we heard Margrave
behind us, murmuring low, "See the bubbles of light, how they sparkle and
dance! I shall live, I shall live!" And his words scarcely died in our
ears before, crash upon crash, came the fall of the age-long trees in the
forest; and nearer, all near us, through the blazing grasses, the hiss of
the serpents, the scream of-the birds, and the bellow and tramp of the
herds plunging wild through the billowy red of their pastures.

Ayesha now wound her arms around Margrave, and wrenched him, reluctant and
struggling, from his watch over the seething caldron. In rebuke; of his
angry exclamations, she pointed to the march of the fire, spoke in
sorrowful tones a few words in her own language, and then, appealing to me
in English, said,--

"I tell him that here the Spirits who oppose us have summoned a foe that
is deaf to my voice, and--"

"And," exclaimed Margrave, no longer with gasp and effort, but with the
swell of a voice which drowned all the discords of terror and of agony