Eastern tongue. A wail was her answer. The armed men bounded forward,
and the bearers left the litter.

All gathered round the dead form with the face concealed under the black
veil; all knelt, and all wept. Far in the distance, at the foot of the
blue mountains, a crowd of the savage natives had risen up as if from the
earth; they stood motionless, leaning on their clubs and spears, and
looking towards the spot on which we were,--strangely thus brought into
the landscape, as if they too, the wild dwellers on the verge which
Humanity guards from the Brute, were among the mourners for the mysterious
Child of mysterious Nature! And still, in the herbage, hummed the small
insects, and still, from the cavern, laughed the great kingfisher. I said
to Ayesha, "Farewell! your love mourns the dead, mine calls me to the
living. You are now with your own people, they may console you; say if I
can assist."

"There is no consolation for me! What mourner can be consoled if the dead
die forever? Nothing for him is left but a grave; that grave shall be in
the land where the song of Ayesha first lulled him to sleep. Thou assist
Me,--thou, the wise man of Europe! From me ask assistance. What road
wilt thou take to thy home?"

"There is but one road known to me through the maze of the solitude,--that
which we took to this upland."

"On that road Death lurks, and awaits thee! Blind dupe, couldst thou
think that if the grand secret of life had been won, he whose head rests
on my lap would have yielded thee one petty drop of the essence which had
filched from his store of life but a moment? Me, who so loved and so
cherished him,--me he would have doomed to the pitiless cord of my