The Jewel of Seven Stars

Contents

I A Summons in the Night
II Strange Instructions
III The Watchers
IV The Second Attempt
V More Strange Instructions
VI Suspicions
VII The Traveller's Loss
VIII The Finding of the Lamps
IX The Need of Knowledge
X The Valley of the Sorcerer
XI A Queen's Tomb
XII The Magic Coffer
XIII Awaking From the Trance
XIV The Birth-Mark
XV The Purpose of Queen Tera
XVI The Cavern
XVII Doubts and Fears
XVIII The Lesson of the "Ka"
XIX The Great Experiment




Chapter I

A Summons in the Night


It all seemed so real that I could hardly imagine that it had ever
occurred before; and yet each episode came, not as a fresh step in the
logic of things, but as something expected. It is in such a wise that
memory plays its pranks for good or ill; for pleasure or pain; for weal
or woe. It is thus that life is bittersweet, and that which has been
done becomes eternal.

Again, the light skiff, ceasing to shoot through the lazy water as when
the oars flashed and dripped, glided out of the fierce July sunlight
into the cool shade of the great drooping willow branches--I standing
up in the swaying boat, she sitting still and with deft fingers
guarding herself from stray twigs or the freedom of the resilience of
moving boughs. Again, the water looked golden-brown under the canopy
of translucent green; and the grassy bank was of emerald hue. Again,
we sat in the cool shade, with the myriad noises of nature both without
and within our bower merging into that drowsy hum in whose sufficing
environment the great world with its disturbing trouble, and its more
disturbing joys, can be effectually forgotten. Again, in that blissful
solitude the young girl lost the convention of her prim, narrow
upbringing, and told me in a natural, dreamy way of the loneliness of
her new life. With an undertone of sadness she made me feel how in that
spacious home each one of the household was isolated by the personal
magnificence of her father and herself; that there confidence had no
altar, and sympathy no shrine; and that there even her father's face
was as distant as the old country life seemed now. Once more, the
wisdom of my manhood and the experience of my years laid themselves at
the girl's feet. It was seemingly their own doing; for the individual
"I" had no say in the matter, but only just obeyed imperative orders.
And once again the flying seconds multiplied themselves endlessly. For
it is in the arcana of dreams that existences merge and renew
themselves, change and yet keep the same--like the soul of a musician
in a fugue. And so memory swooned, again and again, in sleep.

It seems that there is never to be any perfect rest. Even in Eden the
snake rears its head among the laden boughs of the Tree of Knowledge.
The silence of the dreamless night is broken by the roar of the
avalanche; the hissing of sudden floods; the clanging of the engine
bell marking its sweep through a sleeping American town; the clanking
of distant paddles over the sea.... Whatever it is, it is breaking the
charm of my Eden. The canopy of greenery above us, starred with
diamond-points of light, seems to quiver in the ceaseless beat of
paddles; and the restless bell seems as though it would never cease....

All at once the gates of Sleep were thrown wide open, and my waking
ears took in the cause of the disturbing sounds. Waking existence is
prosaic enough--there was somebody knocking and ringing at someone's
street door.