an, a woman who half an hour ago had been
a stranger to him. He followed these faded mental pictures, though he
never caught them up.... It was like his dream in London.

Lady Statham was talking--he had not noticed the means by which she
effected the abrupt transition--of familiar beliefs of old Egypt; of the
Ka, or Double, by whose existence the survival of the soul was possible,
even its return into manifested, physical life; of the astrology, or
influence of the heavenly bodies upon all sublunar activities; of
terrific forms of other life, known to the ancient worship of Atlantis,
great Potencies that might be invoked by ritual and ceremonial, and of
their lesser influence as recognised in certain lower forms, hence
treated with veneration as the "Sacred Animal" branch of this dim
religion. And she spoke lightly of the modern learning which so glibly
imagined it was the animals themselves that were looked upon as
"gods"--the bull, the bird, the crocodile, the cat. "It's there they all
go so absurdly wrong," she said, "taking the symbol for the power
symbolised. Yet natural enough. The mind to-day wears blinkers, studies
only the details seen directly before it. Had none of us experienced
love, we should think the first lover mad. Few to-day know the Powers
_they_ knew, hence deny them. If the world were deaf it would stand with
mockery before a hearing group swayed by an orchestra, pitying both
listeners and performers. It would deem our admiration of a great
swinging bell mere foolish worship of form and movement. Similarly, with
high Powers that once expressed themselves in common forms--where best
they could--being themselves bodiless. The learned men classify the
forms with painstaking detail. But deity has gone out of life. The
Powers symbolised are no longer experienced."

"These Powers, you suggest, then--their Kas, as it were--may still--"

But she waved aside the interruption. "They are satisfied, as the common
people were, with a degraded literalism," she went on. "Nut was the
Heavens, who spread herself across the earth in the form of a woman;
Shu, the vastness of space; the ibis typified Thoth, and Hathor was the
Patron of the Western Hills; Khonsu, the moon, was personified, as was
the deity of the Nile. But the high priest of Ra, the sun, you notice,
remained ever the Great One of Visions."

The High Priest, the Great One of Visions!--How wonderfully again she
made the sentence sing. She put splendo