Michael kissed her rapturously. "Let's be big, big fools, beloved, let's enjoy this thing that's come to us." He paused. Again he looked troubled and serious.
"Why trouble?" Meg said. "I know just what's in your heart. You love me and I love you, and I trust you. You weren't ready for any engagement—you never thought of marriage. Well, let all that come in good time if it is meant to be. Let us be content with love for the present. It's surely big enough." She sighed. "It's tired me, Mike, it's so enormous."
"But, dearest, I meant to talk to you about very different things.
Love just caught me. . . . I was taken unawares . . . some look of
yours did it, or some trick of the stars. . . I can't tell which.
Anyhow, it's done."
"Tell me," she said. "All that you had meant to talk about. It's not too late. We must be friends as well as lovers now."
"It was about my visit to el-Azhar in Cairo."
"Yes?" Meg said. Her breath came more quickly.
"My old friend told me the most extraordinary things. He had seen visions."
Their eyes met. Meg's held a question; they asked: "Had they any connection with my vision?"
"Yes," Michael said to her unspoken question. "He saw me on a long desert journey. I was often surrounded by a wonderful light—a light which, he said, had come from one of God's messengers, who was never far from me. He said he saw the messenger of God always in the midst of a great light, like the light of the sun, that he resembled no mortal he had ever seen, or any king he had ever been shown in his dreams."
Meg drew in her breath nervously. "Had he ever heard of Akhnaton,
Mike?"