The Ancient Allan | Page 2

deviations from their laws and we half believe in
something, whereas often the savage, not being troubled with religion,
fears less, because he half believes in nothing. For very few inhabitants
of this earth can attain either to complete belief or to its absolute
opposite. They can seldom lay their hands upon their hearts, and say
they /know/ that they will live for ever, or sleep for ever; there remains
in the case of most honest men an element of doubt in either
hypothesis.
That is what makes this story of mine so interesting, at any rate to me,
since it does seem to suggest that whether or no I have a future, as
personally I hold to be the case and not altogether without evidence,
certainly I have had a past, though, so far as I know, in this world only;
a fact, if it be a fact, from which can be deduced all kinds of arguments
according to the taste of the reasoner.
And now for my experience, which it is only fair to add, may after all
have been no more than a long and connected dream. Yet how was I to
dream of lands, events and people where of I have only the vaguest
knowledge, or none at all, unless indeed, as some say, being a part of
this world, we have hidden away somewhere in ourselves an
acquaintance with everything that has ever happened in the world.
However, it does not much matter and it is useless to discuss that which
we cannot prove.
Here at any rate is the story.

In a book or a record which I have written down and put away with
others under the title of "The Ivory Child," I have told the tale of a
certain expedition I made in company with Lord Ragnall. Its object was
to search for his wife who was stolen away while travelling in Egypt in
a state of mental incapacity resulting from shock caused by the loss of
her child under tragic and terrible circumstances. The thieves were the
priests of a certain bastard Arab tribe who, on account of a birthmark
shaped like the young moon which was visible above her breast,

believed her to be the priestess or oracle of their worship. This worship
evidently had its origin in Ancient Egypt since, although they did not
seem to know it, the priestess was nothing less than a personification of
the great goddess Isis, and the Ivory Child, their fetish, was a statue of
the infant Horus, the fabled son of Isis and Osiris whom the Egyptians
looked upon as the overcomer of Set or the Devil, the murderer of
Osiris before his resurrection and ascent to Heaven to be the god of the
dead.
I need not set down afresh all that happened to us on this remarkable
adventure. Suffice it to say that in the end we recovered the lady and
that her mind was restored to her. Before she left the Kendah country,
however, the priesthood presented her with two ancient rolls of papyrus,
also with a quantity of a certain herb, not unlike tobacco in appearance,
which by the Kendah was called /Taduki/. Once, before we took our
great homeward journey across the desert, Lady Ragnall and I had a
curious conversation about this herb whereof the property is to cause
the person who inhales its fumes to become clairvoyant, or to dream
dreams, whichever the truth may be. It was used for this purpose in the
mystical ceremonies of the Kendah religion when under its influence
the priestess or oracle of the Ivory Child was wont to announce divine
revelations. During her tenure of this office Lady Ragnall was
frequently subjected to the spell of the /Taduki/ vapour, and said
strange things, some of which I heard with my own ears. Also myself
once I experienced its effects and saw a curious vision, whereof many
of the particulars were afterwards translated into facts.
Now the conversation which I have mentioned was shortly to the effect,
that she, Lady Ragnall, believed a time would come when she or I or
both of us, were destined to imbibe these /Taduki/ fumes and see
wonderful pictures of some past or future existence in which we were
both concerned. This knowledge, she declared, had come to her while
she was officiating in an apparently mindless condition as the priestess
of the Kendah god called the Ivory Child.
At the time I did not think it wise to pursue so exciting a subject with a
woman whose mind had been recently unbalanced, and afterwards in
the stress of new experiences, I forgot all about the matter, or at any
rate only thought of it very rarely.
Once, however, it did recur to