ked on hidden things and heard voices
that spoke beyond the limits of the world.

Somehow neither then nor at any other time during all my dream, could I
imagine this Amada, this daughter of a hundred kings, whose blood might
be traced back through dynasty on dynasty, as nothing but a woman who
nurses children upon her breast. It was as though something of our
common nature had been bred out of her and something of another nature
whereof we have no ken, had entered to fill its place. And yet these two
women were the same, that I _knew_, or at any rate, much of them was the
same, for who can say what part of us we leave behind as we flit from
life to life, to find it again elsewhere in the abysms of Time and
Change? One thing too was quite identical--the birthmark of the new moon
above the breast which the priests of the Kendah had declared was always
the seal that marked their prophetess, the guardian of the Holy Child.

When the procession had quite departed and I could no longer hear the
sound of singing, I remounted and rode on to my house, or rather to that
of my mother, the great lady Tiu, which was situated beneath the wall of
the old palace facing towards the Nile. Indeed my heart was full of this
mother of mine whom I loved and who loved me, for I was her only child,
and my father had been long dead; so long that I could not remember him.
Eight months had gone by since I saw her face and in eight months who
knew what might have happened? The thought made me cold for she, who
was aged and not too strong, perhaps had been gathered to Osiris. Oh! if
that were so!

I shook my tired horse to a canter, Bes riding ahead of me to clear a
road through the crowded street in which, at this hour of sundown, all
the idlers of Memphis seemed to have gathered. They stared at me because
it was not common to see men riding in Memphis, and with little love,
since from my dress and escort they took me to be some envoy from their
hated master, the Great King of the East. Some even threatened to bar
the way; but we thrust through and presently turned into a thoroughfare
of private houses standing in their own gardens. Ours was the third of
these. At its gate I leapt from my horse, pushed open the closed door
and hastened in to seek and learn.

I had not far to go for, there in the courtyard, standing at the head of
our modest household and dressed in her festal robes, was my mother, the
stately and white-haired lady Tiu, as o