Ayesha | Page 9

mixed vision,
this of yours, Leo, with its mountain peak shaped like a /crux-ansata/

and the rest. Do you suggest that Ayesha is re- incarnated in Central
Asia--as a female Grand Lama or something of that sort?"
"I never thought of it, but why not?" asked Leo quietly. "Do you
remember a certain scene in the Caves of Kor yonder, when the living
looked upon the dead, and dead and living were the same? And do you
remember what Ayesha swore, that she would come again--yes, to this
world; and how could that be except by re-birth, or, what is the same
thing, by the transmigration of the spirit?"
I did not answer this argument. I was struggling with myself.
"No sign has come to me," I said, "and yet I have had a part in the play,
humble enough, I admit, and I believe that I have still a part."
"No," he said, "no sign has come to you. I wish that it had. Oh! how I
wish you could be convinced as I am, Horace!"
Then we were silent for a long while, silent, with our eyes fixed upon
the sky.
It was a stormy dawn. Clouds in fantastic masses hung upon the ocean.
One of them was like a great mountain, and we watched it idly. It
changed its shape, the crest of it grew hollow like a crater. From this
crater sprang a projecting cloud, a rough pillar with a knob or lump
resting on its top. Suddenly the rays of the risen sun struck upon this
mountain and the column and they turned white like snow. Then as
though melted by those fiery arrows, the centre of the excrescence
above the pillar thinned out and vanished, leaving an enormous loop of
inky cloud.
"Look," said Leo in a low, frightened voice, "that is the shape of the
mountain which I saw in my vision. There upon it is the black loop, and
there through it shines the fire. /It would seem that the sign is for both
of us, Horace./"
I looked and looked again till presently the vast loop vanished into the
blue of heaven. Then I turned and said--"I will come with you to

Central Asia, Leo."










CHAPTER II
THE LAMASERY
Sixteen years had passed since that night vigil in the old Cumberland
house, and, behold! we two, Leo and I, were still travelling, still
searching for that mountain peak shaped like the Symbol of Life which
never, never could be found.
Our adventures would fill volumes, but of what use is it to record them.
Many of a similar nature are already written of in books; those that we
endured were more prolonged, that is all. Five years we spent in Thibet,
for the most part as guests of various monasteries, where we studied the
law and traditions of the Lamas. Here we were once sentenced to death
in punishment for having visited a forbidden city, but escaped through
the kindness of a Chinese official.

Leaving Thibet, we wandered east and west and north, thousands and
thousands of miles, sojourning amongst many tribes in Chinese
territory and elsewhere, learning many tongues, enduring much
hardship. Thus we would hear a legend of a place, say nine hundred
miles away, and spend two years in reaching it, to find when we came
there, nothing.
And so the time went on. Yet never once did we think of giving up the
quest and returning, since, before we started, we had sworn an oath that
we would achieve or die. Indeed we ought to have died a score of times,
yet always were preserved, most mysteriously preserved.
Now we were in country where, so far as I could learn, no European
had ever set a foot. In a part of the vast land called Turkestan there is a
great lake named Balhkash, of which we visited the shores. Two
hundred miles or so to the westward is a range of mighty mountains
marked on the maps as Arkarty-Tau, on which we spent a year, and five
hundred or so to the eastward are other mountains called Cherga,
whither we journeyed at last, having explored the triple ranges of the
Tau.
Here it was that at last our true adventures began. On one of the spurs
of these awful Cherga mountains--it is unmarked on any map--we
well-nigh perished of starvation. The winter was coming on and we
could find no game. The last traveller we had met, hundreds of miles
south, told us that on that range was a monastery inhabited by Lamas of
surpassing holiness. He said that they dwelt in this wild land, over
which no power claimed dominion and where no tribes lived, to acquire
"merit," with