“Believe!—I know. Long before this Communication came to me I had had those intimations,—that assurance that I was somebody else. Now I see clearly. I can remember days in Akkadia now just as clearly as I can remember days in Woodford Wells. I could almost doubt whether I have ever lived at Woodford Wells; it seems so far away now. It was when I was in bed the night after Mr. Fenton had gone that these memories began to come. I was in bed, and then suddenly I was not in bed—I was reclining on a couch under a canopy, a canopy of pure white wool very finely woven and embroidered with emblems and symbols and suchlike things in golden thread, and I was upon my state barge upon the Euphrates. Two King’s daughters, sisters, with slender necks, not unlike the two Miss Solbés except that they were fairer—and decidedly younger—much younger—and clad rather more in accordance with the requirements of a warm climate, chiefly in woven gold—sat and fanned me with fans of Eagles’ feathers dyed a royal purple. And at my feet sat my councillor Prewm, who was oddly enough extremely like Mr. Hockleby—just the same iron-grey whiskers and with the same little tufts of hair over his ears. He was wearing an extremely tall cap of some black woollen substance, and he was making memoranda with a wooden style on a tablet of wet clay. It was like writing on a mud pie. And beyond him were the officers of the boat on a kind of bridge—they were wearing leather helmets studded with brass—and then one saw the rowers below, chained to their oars, and then on either side spread the broad brown river just crinkled by the breeze. The little boats fled to make way for us. They had coarse, square sails, and they lowered them and turned them about all in precisely the same way at precisely the same time. It was very pretty to see. Along the banks were little villages of mud-brick houses and clumps and lines of palm trees; and everywhere there were primitive contrivances, great bent poles of wood like giant fishing-rods, for raising water out of the river for the cultivation of the land. And the people were all crowded along the water’s edge and bowing with their hands and foreheads in the water and crying, ‘Sargon the Conqueror, Sargon, King of Kings!’”
“But Daddy, this was a dream?”
“How could I dream of things I had never seen nor heard of before?”
“One does.”
“One does not,” he replied with a quiet, invincible obstinacy. “I remember I was coming back from the South where I had given peace to a multitude of warring tribes, Elamites and Perrizites and Jebusites and people of that sort, and I was returning to my capital. I remember distinctly many details of the campaign and I know that with an effort I could recall more in the proper order. In dreams absurd things happen, dreams when you think them over afterwards are all at sixes and sevens, but this is all sane and orderly. One might think, Christina Alberta, that I had never dreamt dreams and that all these memories of that previous existence which crowd upon me now were a deception of my imagination! But I can go right back as if it was yesterday, and I am surer by far that I am Sargon than that I am Albert Edward Preemby your father. The former is my true self, the latter is just a very simple, unpretending wrapping that for some purpose, at present inexplicable to me, has hidden me from the world.”
He waved his hand with a bolder gesture than was habitual to him. He sat with his eyes wide open, looking at unseen things.
The girl regarded him for some seconds in silence. She was trying to grasp the full import of this amazing speech.
“And this was your Communication?” she said at last.
“You have to know,” he said. “You have to serve and help me.”
(Help him! How could she help him or herself? How far was this thing going? What was she to do?)