Add To collaction

She and allan__H.Rider Heggard


Ch__15

I interpreted her wish to Umslopogaas who held it out to her but refused to loose it from his wrist to which it was attached by the leathern thong.

“Does the Black One think that I shall cut him down with his own weapon, I who am so weak and gentle?” she asked, laughing.

“Nay, Ayesha, but it is his law not to part with this Drinker of Lives, which he names ‘Chieftainess and Groan-maker,’ and clings to closer by day and night than a man does to his wife.”

“There he is wise, Allan, since a savage captain may get more wives but never such another axe. The thing is ancient,” she added musingly after examining its every detail, “and who knows? It may be that whereof the legend tells which is fated to bring Rezu to the dust. Now ask this fierce-eyed Slayer whether, armed with his axe he can find courage to face the most terrible of all men and the strongest, one who is a wizard also, of whom it is prophesied that only by such an axe as this can he be made to bite the dust.”

I obeyed. Umslopogaas laughed grimly and answered,

“Say to the White Witch that there is no man living upon the earth whom I would not face in war, I who have never been conquered in fair fight, though once a chance blow brought me to the doors of death,” and he touched the great hole in his forehead. “Say to her also that I have no fear of defeat, I from whom doom is, as I think, still far away, though the Opener-of-Roads has told me that among a strange people I shall die in war at last, as I desire to do, who from my boyhood have lived in war.”

“He speaks well,” she answered with a note of admiration in her voice. “By Isis, were he but white I would set him to rule these Amahagger under me. Tell him, Allan, that if he lays Rezu low he shall have a great reward.”

“And tell the White Witch, Macumazahn,” Umslopogaas replied when I had translated, “that I seek no reward, save glory only, and with it the sight of one who is lost to me but with whom my heart still dwells, if indeed this Witch has strength to break the wall of blackness that is built between me and her who is ‘gone down.’”

“Strange,” reflected Ayesha when she understood, “that this grim Destroyer should yet be bound by the silken bonds of love and yearn for one whom the grave has taken. Learn from it, Allan, that all humanity is cast in the same mould, since my longings and your longings are his also, though the three of us be far apart as are the sun and the moon and the earth, and as different in every other quality. Yet it is true that sun and moon and earth are born of the same black womb of chaos. Therefore in the beginning they were identical, as doubtless they will be in the end when, their journeyings done, they rush together to light space with a flame at which the mocking gods that made them may warm their hands. Well, so it is with men, Allan, whose soul-stuff is drawn from the gulf of Spirit by Nature’s hand, and, cast upon the cold air of this death-driven world, freezes into a million shapes each different to the other and yet, be sure, the same. Now talk no more, but follow me. Slave” (this was addressed to Billali), “bid the guards lead on to the camp of the servants of Lulala.”

   1
0 Comments