“Then you would be sorry for me also, Lady Yva?”
“Why?” she asked with a dazzling smile, “when your heart is athirst for knowledge, gaping for it like a fledgling’s mouth for food, and, as it chances, though I am not very wise, I can satisfy something of your soul-hunger.”
“Not very wise!” I repeated.
“No, Humphrey. I think that Bastin, who in many ways is so stupid, has more true wisdom than I have, because he can believe and accept without question. After all, the wisdom of my people is all of the universe and its wonders. What you think magic is not magic; it is only gathered knowledge and the finding out of secrets. Bickley will tell you the same, although as yet he does not believe that the mind of man can stretch so far.”
“You mean that your wisdom has in it nothing of the spirit?”
“Yes, Humphrey, that is what I mean. I do not even know if there is such a thing as spirit. Our god was Fate; Bastin’s god is a spirit, and I think yours also.”
“Yes.”
“Therefore, I wish you and Bastin to teach me of your god, as does Oro, my father. I want—oh! so much, Humphrey, to learn whether we live after death.”
“You!” I exclaimed. “You who, according to the story, have slept for two hundred and fifty thousand years! You, who have, unless I mistake, hinted that during that sleep you may have lived in other shapes! Do you doubt whether we can live after death?”
“Yes. Sleep induced by secret arts is not death, and during that sleep the I within might wander and inhabit other shapes, because it is forbidden to be idle. Moreover, what seems to be death may not be death, only another form of sleep from which the I awakes again upon the world. But at last comes the real death, when the I is extinguished to the world. That much I know, because my people learned it.”