Calming the frenzy of his thoughts by a strong effort, he began to vaguely wonder why and how it happened that the place where he now was, . . this small and insignificant court,—had so far escaped the fire, and was as cool and sombre as a sacred tomb set apart for some hero, … or Poet? Poet!—The word acted as a stimulant to his tired struggling brain, and he all at once remembered what Sah-luma had said to him at their first meeting: "There is but one Poet in Al-Kyris, and I am he!"
O true, true! Only one Poet! … Only one glory of the great city, that now served him as funeral pyre!—only one name worth remembering in all its perishing history.. the name of SAH-LUMA! Sah-luma, the beautiful, the gifted, the famous, the beloved, . . he was dead! This thought, in its absorbing painfulness, straightway drove out all others,—and Theos, who had carried his comrade's corpse bravely and unshrinkingly through a fiery vortex of imminent peril, now sank on his knees all desolate and unnerved, his hot tears dropping fast on that fair, still, white face that he knew would never flush to the warmth of life again!
"Sah-luma! Sah-luma!" he whispered, "My friend … My more than brother! Would I could have died for thee! … Would thou couldst have lived to fulfil the nobler promise of thy genius! … Better far thou hadst been spared to the world than I! … for I am Nothing, . . but thou wert Everything!"
And taking the clay-cold hands in his own, he kissed them reverently, and, with an unconscious memory not born of his recent adventures, folded them on the dead Laureate's breast in the fashion of a Cross.
As he did this an icy spasm seemed to contract his heart, . . seized by a sudden insufferable anxiety, he stared like one spell-bound into Sah-luma's wide-open, fixed, and glassy eyes. Dead eyes! … yet how full of mysterious significance! … What—WHAT was their weird secret, their imminent meaning! … Why did their dark and frozen depths appear to retain a strange, living undergleam of melting, sorrowful, beseeching sweetness? … like the eyes of one who prays to be remembered, though changed after long absence! What hot and terrible delirium was this that snatched at his whirling brain as he bent closer and closer over the marble quiet countenance, and studied with a sort of fierce intentness every line of those delicate, classic features, on which high thought had left so marked an impress of dignity and power! What a marvellous, half-reproachful, half-appealing smile lingered on the finely-curved set lips! … How wonderful, how beautiful, how beloved beyond all words was this fair dead god of poesy on whom he gazed with such a passion of yearning!
Stooping more and more, he threw his arms round the senseless form, and partly lifting it from the ground, brought the wax-pallid face nearer to his own.. so near that the cold mouth almost touched his, . . then filled with an awful, unnamable misgiving, he scanned his murdered comrade's perished beauty in puzzled, vague bewilderment, much as an ignorant dullard might perplexedly scan the incomprehensible characters of some hieroglyphic scroll. And, as he looked, a sharp pang shot through him like a whizzing ball of fire, . . a convulsion of mental agony shook his limbs,—he could have shrieked aloud in the extremity of his torture, but the struggling cry died gasping in his throat. Still as stone he kept his strained, steadfast gaze fixed on Sah-luma's corpse, slowly absorbing the full horror of a tremendous Suggestion, that like a scorching lava-flood swept into every subtle channel of his brain. For the dead Sah-luma's eyes grew into the semblance of his own eyes! … the dead Sah-luma's face smiled spectrally back at him in the image of his own face! … it was as though he beheld the Picture of himself, slain and reflected in a magician's mirror! Round him the very heavens seemed given up to fire,—but he heeded it not,—the world might be at an end and the day of Judgment, proclaimed,—nothing would have stirred him from where he knelt, in that dreadful stillness of mystic martyrdom, drinking in the gradual, glimmering consciousness of a terrific Truth, . . the amazing, yet scarcely graspable solution of a supernatural Enigma, … an enigma through which, like a man lost in the depths of a dark forest, he had wandered up and down, seeking light, yet finding none!
"O God!" he dumbly prayed. "Thou, with whom all things are possible, give eyes to this blind trouble of my heart! I am but as a grain of dust before thee, . . a poor perishable atom, devoid of simplest comprehension! … Do Thou of Thy supernal pity teach me what I must know!"
As he thought out this unuttered petition, a tense cord seemed to snap suddenly in his brain, . . a rush of tears came to his relief, and through their salt and bitter haze the face of Sah-luma appeared to melt into a thin and spiritual brightness,—a mere aerial outline of what it had once been, . . the glazed dark eyes seemed to flash living lightning into his, . . the whole lost Personality of the dead Poet seemed to environ him with a mysterious, potent, incorporeal influence.. an influence that he felt he must now or never repel, reject, and utterly RESIST! … With a shuddering cry, he tore his reluctant arms away from the beloved corpse, . . with trembling, tender fingers he closed and pressed down the white eyelids of those love-expressive eyes, and kissed the broad poetic brow!
"Whatever thou WERT or ART to me, Sah-luma," he murmured in sobbing haste,—"thou knowest that I loved thee, though now I leave thee! Farewell!"—and his voice broke in its strong agony—"O how much easier to divide body from soul than part myself from thee! Sah-luma, beloved Sah-luma! God give thee rest! … God pardon thy sins,—and mine!"
And he pressed his lips once more on the folded rigid hands; . . as he did so, he inadvertently touched the writing-tablet that hung from the dead Laureate's girdle. The red glow of the fire around him enabled him to see distinctly what was written on it, . . there were about twenty lines of verse, in exquisitely clear and fine caligraphy, … and, as he read, he knew them well, . . they were the last lines of the poem "Nourhalma"!