It drew nearer and nearer, seeming to move from the ground at the height of some lofty giant.Its gaze riveted mine; my blood curdled in the blaze from its angry ball; and now as it advanced larger and larger, other Eyes, as if of giants in its train, grew out from the space in its rear--numbers on numbers, like the spearheads of some Eastern army, seen afar by pale warders of battlements doomed to the dust.My voice long refused an utterance to my awe; at length it burst forth shrill and loud:
"Look, look! Those terrible Eyes! Legions on legions.And hark!
that tramp of numberless feet; THEY are not seen, but the hollows of earth echo the sound of their march!"Margrave, more than ever intent on the caldron, in which, from time to time, he kept dropping powders or essences drawn forth from his coffer, looked up, defyingly, fiercely:
"Ye come," he said in a low mutter, his once mighty voice sounding hollow and laboring, but fearless and firm--"ye come--not to conquer, vain rebels!--ye whose dark chief I struck down at my feet in the tomb where my spell had raised up the ghost of your first human master, the Chaldee! Earth and air have their armies still faithful to me, and still I remember the war song that summons them up to confront you! Ayesha, Ayesha! recall the wild troth that we pledged among the roses; recall the dread bond by which we united our sway over hosts that yet own thee as queen, though my scepter is broken, my diadem reft from my brows!"The Veiled Woman rose at this adjuration.Her veil now was withdrawn, and the blaze of the fire between Margrave and herself flushed, as with the rosy bloom of youth, the grand beauty of her softened face.It was seen, detached, as it were, from her dark-mantled form; seen through the mist of the vapors which rose from the caldron, framing it round like the clouds that are yieldingly pierced by the light of the evening star.
Through the haze of the vapor came her voice, more musical, more plaintive than I had heard it before, but far softer, more tender:
still in her foreign tongue; the words unknown to me, and yet their sense, perhaps, made intelligible by the love, which has one common language and one common look to all who have loved--the love unmistakably heard in the loving tone, unmistakably seen in the loving face.
A moment or so more and she had come round from the opposite side of the fire pile, and bending over Margrave's upturned brow, kissed it quietly, solemnly; and then her countenance grew fierce, her crest rose erect: it was the lioness protecting her young.She stretched forth her arm from the black mantle, athwart the pale front that now again bent over the caldron--stretched it toward the haunted and hollow-sounding space beyond, in the gesture of one whose right hand has the sway of the scepter.And then her voice stole on the air in the music of a chant, not loud yet far-reaching; so thrilling, so sweet and yet so solemn that I could at once comprehend how legend united of old the spell of enchantment with the power of song.All that I recalled of the effects which, in the former time, Margrave's strange chants had produced on the ear that they ravished and the thoughts they confused, was but as the wild bird's imitative carol, compared to the depth and the art and the soul of the singer, whose voice seemed endowed with a charm to inthrall all the tribes of creation, though the language it used for that charm might to them, as to me, be unknown.As the song ceased, I heard from behind sounds like those I had heard in the spaces before me--the tramp of invisible feet, the whir of invisible wings, as if armies were marching to aid against armies in march to destroy.
"Look not in front nor around," said Ayesha."Look, like him, on the caldron below.The circle and the lamps are yet bright; I will tell you when the light again fails."I dropped my eyes on the caldron.
"See," whispered Margrave, "the sparkles at last begin to arise, and the rose hues to deepen--signs that we near the last process."
