Within the Temple of Isis | Page 6

a Vestal of the Temple, but in her mind
and soul as imperious as a Queen of the realm of Heaven. Passionately
devoted to the pursuit of Wisdom and the possibilities of obtaining
knowledge, even Magic was open to her, in the Temple Service. Could
she leave her Temple home, her opportunities for growth, her idolized
Priestess, to go into the environments of Nu-nah?
The thought seemed to her worse than death itself. "Every one has to
die," she mused, "and I may as well die one time as another."
Then another thought came into her mind--Hermo. He had begun to
teach her the mysteries of his science of Astrology. Hermo, for whom
she had a pure sisterly regard and who was so proud of her swift
proficiency in his favorite study. And then she recalled the vision of the
previous night when Hermo had shown to her clairvoyant eye his
agitation at her impending doom.
"But if I become Nu-nah and Nu-nah becomes Sarthia, Hermo will
never know the difference and thus be spared the pain of loving his
young sister. And furthermore, Nu-nah has a lover to whom she is
betrothed and would have married, ere this, but for her lingering
malady, the superb young Prince Rathunor, whom I have never seen."
Ah! here was indeed a most dire complication. Love was a most
mysterious and unknown emotion to her. She might hate Prince
Rathunor and "then we would both wish I had died," and she half
laughed to herself at the domestic comedy thus presented to her mind.
At this period, either as a reaction from the light thrown, or lighter
thought upon her overwrought nature, or possibly from some subtle,
potent influence emanating from the censer burning near her, Sarthia
lapsed into sudden and most profound unconsciousness.

A few moments later--it seemed to Sarthia as if ages had
intervened--she began a fierce struggle to awake. "Why, how is this?"
she thought. She seemed enveloped in a dead wall of some kind. The
brain, the heart, the infinite ramification of nerves in no way responded
to her will and her utmost effort. Almost worn out with the unequal
battle it began to dawn upon her that she was really endeavoring to
animate the other body. "Am I becoming Nu-nah?" Yes, in the
excitement of the moment she raised herself upon her couch and,
resting upon her elbow, gazed upon the rigid form of what a moment
before had been herself.
But her movement had startled a form beside the couch, some one who
had approached, unobserved by Sarthia, during the interval of
unconsciousness.
A young man who seemed to her the most God-like being she had ever
beheld and perceiving her glance, with a low exclamation of joy,
sprang toward her, clasped her hand in his, and turning her face upward,
gazed with most passionate tenderness into her eyes.
"My Nu-nah, you will live," he murmured. "Do you know your
Rathunor?"
Thrilled to suffocation by the love in his eyes, every atom of her soul
vibrating to a new-born and overwhelming emotion, she felt herself
slowly but surely losing control of her new body. With, however, one
supreme effort she pressed the hand holding hers and returning the look
in his eyes she gave one deep, quivering sigh and was gone.
When again she regained consciousness she was within her own body.
Rathunor had vanished and the first slanting rays of the Moon were
descending the last aperture.
It was midnight, and she found herself in communication with the
Hierophant, who, from a different portion of the Sanctuary, was
seriously regarding her and again reading her inmost thoughts.
A few moments before she had all but decided that she could not be

Nu-nah, that death now, here in this Holy Sanctuary were better far
than hundreds of years as a Princess of the realm of materiality. But, a
new factor had now entered her being. A force, more subtle than all
Wisdom,--more potent than life or eternity itself,--had transfused her
soul--Love! Love, the first, the highest, the all-embracing force of the
mighty Universe, and with this new love had been ushered also into
being, Jealousy.
"Rathunor loved Nu-nah! Am I not a strange interloper? Was it not
worse by my decision to rob Nu-nah of her lover than to deprive her of
continued physical life?"
For, it seemed to her now, that life without love would be more than the
agonies of the lowest hells. Then again, to live with Rathunor as his
wife, while he all the time thought her to be Nu-nah, would be an
incessant torture, keener and more intense than if she were chained by,
as a third person, to behold him loving the actual Nu-nah in her own
body.
"Holy Father and revered Hierophant,"