light of the moon, and through the gauze-like fabric, he perceived the
outlines of a perfect shape. His vague wonderment, concerned itself
now with the ivory, jewel-laden hands. His condition differed from the
normal dream state, in that he was not entirely resigned to the
anomalous.

Misty doubts were forming, when his dream guide paused before a heavy
door of a typical native house which once had been of some
consequence, and which faced the entrance to a mosque, indeed lay in
the shadow of the minaret. It was opened from within, although she
gave no perceptible signal, and its darkness, to Dr. Cairn's dulled
perceptions, seemed to swallow them both up. He had an impression of a
trap raised, of stone steps descended, of a new darkness almost
palpable.

The gloom of the place effected him as a mental blank, and, when a
bright light shone out, it seemed to mark the opening of a second dream
phase. From where the light came, he knew not, cared not, but it
illuminated a perfectly bare room, with a floor of native mud bricks, a
plastered wall, and wood-beamed ceiling. A tall sarcophagus stood
upright against the wall before him; its lid leant close beside it ...
and his black robed guide, her luminous eyes looking straightly over the
yashmak, stood rigidly upright-within it!

She raised the jewelled hands, and with a swift movement discarded
robe and _yashmak_, and stood before him, in the clinging draperies of
an ancient queen, wearing the leopard skin and the _uraeus_, and
carrying the flail of royal Egypt!

Her pale face formed a perfect oval; the long almond eyes had an evil
beauty which seemed to chill; and the brilliantly red mouth was curved
in a smile which must have made any man forget the evil in the eyes.
But when we move in a dream world, our emotions become dreamlike too.
She placed a sandalled foot upon the mud floor and stepped out of the
sarcophagus, advancing towards Dr. Cairn, a vision of such sinful
loveliness as he could never have conceived in his waking moments. In
that strange dream language, in a tongue not of East nor West, she
spoke; and her silvern voice had something of the tone of those
Egyptian pipes whose dree fills the nights upon the Upper Nile--the
seductive music of remote and splendid wickedness.

"You know me, _now_?" she whispered.

And in his dream she seemed to be a familiar figure, at once dreadful
and worshipful.

A fitful light played through the darkness, and seemed to