the air, and the deep, has ever been one of the
same peril which an invader must brave when
he crosses the bounds of his nation. By this
key alone, you unlock all the cells of the
alchemist's lore; by this alone, understand how a
labour, which a chemist's crudest apprentice
could perform, has baffled the giant fathers of
all your dwarfed children of science. Nature,
that stores this priceless boon, seems to shrink
from conceding it to man—the invisible tribes
that abhor him, oppose themselves to the gain
that might give them a master. The duller of
those, who were the life-seekers of old, would
have told you how some chance, trivial,
unlooked for, foiled their grand hope at the very
point of fruition; some doltish mistake, some
improvident oversight, a defect in the sulphur, a
wild overflow in the quicksilver, or a flaw in the
bellows, or a pupil, who had but to replenish the
fuel, fell asleep by the furnace. The invisible
foes seldom vouchsafe to make themselves visible
where they can frustrate the bungler, as they
mock at his toils from their ambush. But, the
mightier adventurers, equally foiled in despite of
their patience and skill, would have said, ' Not
with us rests the fault; we neglected no caution,
we failed from no oversight. But out from
the caldron dread faces arose, and the spectres
or demons dismayed and baffled us.' Such,
then, is the danger which seems so appalling
to a son of the East, as it seemed to a seer
in the dark age of Europe. But we can deride
all its threats, you and I. For myself, I own
frankly I take all the safety that the charms and
resources of magic bestow. You, for your safety,
have the cultured and disciplined reason which
reduces all phantasies to nervous impressions, and
I rely on the courage of one who has questioned,
unquailing, the Luminous Shadow, and wrested
from the hand of the magician himself the wand
which concentred the wonders of will!"

To this strange and long discourse I listened
without interruption, and now quietly answered,

"I do not merit the trust you affect in my
courage; but I am now on my guard against the
cheats of the fancy, and the fumes of a vapour can
scarcely bewilder the brain in the open air of this
mountain-land. I believe in no races like those
which you tell me lurk viewless in space, as do
gases. I believe not in magic; I ask not its aids,
and I dread not its terrors. For the rest, I am
confident of one mournful courage—the courage
that comes from, despair. I submit, to your
guidance, whatever it be, as a sufferer whom
colleges doom to the grave submits to the quack,
who says, ' Take my specific and live!' My life is
nought in itself; my life lives in another. You
and I are both brave from despair; you would
turn death from yourself, I would turn death
from one I love more than myself. Both know how
little aid we can win from the colleges, aud both,
therefore, turn to the promisers most audaciously
cheering: Dervish or magician, alchemist or
phantom, what care you and I? And if they fail
us, what then? They can not fail us more than
the colleges do!"

CHAPTER LXXXIII.

THE gold has been gained with an easy labour.
I knew where to seek for it, whether under the
turf or in the bed of the creek. But Margrave's
eyes, hungrily gazing round every spot from
which the ore was disburied, could not detect
the substance of which he alone knew the
outward appearance. I had begun to believe that
even in the description given to him of this
material he had been credulously duped, and
that no such material existed; when, coming
back from the bed of the watercourse, I saw a
faint yellow gleam amidst the roots of a giant
parasite plant, the leaves and blossoms of which
climbed up the sides of the cave with its
antediluvian relics. The gleam was the gleam of gold,
and on removing the loose earth round the roots
of the plant, we came on—No, I will not—I
dare not, describe it. The gold-digger would cast
it aside, the naturalist would pause not to heed it,
and did I describe it, and chemistry deign to
subject it to analysis, could chemistry alone
detach or discover its boasted virtues?

Its particles, indeed, are very minute, not
seeming readily to crystallise with each other,
each in itself of uniform shape and size, spherical
as the egg which contains the germ of life, and
small as the egg from which the life of an insect
may quicken.

But Margrave's keen eye caught sight of the
atoms upcast by the light of the moon. He
exclaimed to me, "Found! I shall live!" And
then, as he gathered up the grains with tremulous
hands, he called out to the Veiled Woman,
hitherto still seated motionless on the crag. At
his word she rose and went to the place hard-by,
where the fuel was piled, busying herself there.
I had no lesiure to heed her. I continued my
search in the soft and yielding soil that time and
the decay of vegetable life had accumulated over
the Pre- Adamite strata on which the arch of the
cave rested its mighty keystone.

When we had collected of these particles
about thrice as much as a man might hold in his
hand, we seemed to have exhausted their bed.
We continued still to find gold, but no more of
the delicate substance, to which, in our sight,
gold was as dross.

"Enough," then said Margrave, reluctantly
desisting. " What we have gained already will
suffice for a life thrice as long as legend
attributes to Haroun. I shall live—I shall live
through the centuries."

"Forget not that I claim my share."

"Your share—yours! True—your half of my
life!—it is true."  He paused, with a low,
ironical, malignant laugh, and then added, as he
rose and turned away, "But the work is yet to
be done."

CHAPTER LXXXIV.

WHILE we had thus laboured and found,
Ayesha had placed the fuel where the moonlight
fell fullest on the sward of the table-land—a part
of it already piled as for a fire, the rest of it
heaped confusedly close at hand—and by the pile