In their midst burned a lamp; as the light burns night and day in the tombs of the kings of the East.
Her color paled, her breath came and went, her body trembled like a leaf; yet she was not afraid.
A divine ecstasy of surprise and faith smote the dull misery of her life. She saw at last another world than the world of toil in which she had labored without sight and without hope, as the blinded ox labored in the brick-field, treading his endless circles in the endless dark, and only told that it was day by blows.
She had no fear of them—these, whom she deemed the dwellers of the lands beyond the sun, could not be more cruel to her than had been the sons of men. She yearned to them, longed for them; wondered with rapture and with awe if these were the messengers of her father's kingdom; if these would have mercy on her, and take her with them to their immortal homes—whether of heaven or of hell, what mattered it?
It was enough to her that it would not be of earth.
She raised herself upon the ledge above the rushes, poised herself lightly as a bird, and with deft soundless feet dropped safely on the floor within, and stood in the midst of that enchanted world—stood motionless, gazing upwards with rapt eyes, and daring barely to draw breath with any audible sigh, lest she should rouse them, and be driven from their presence. The flame of the lamp, and the moonlight, reflected back from the foam of the risen waters, shed a strange, pallid, shadowy light on all the forms around her.
"They are the dead, surely," she thought, as she stood among them; and she stayed there, with her arms folded on her breast to still its beating, lest any sound should anger them and betray her; a thing lower than the dust—a mortal amidst this great immortal host.
The mists and the shadows between her eyes and them parted them as with a sea of dim and subtle vapor, through which they looked white and impalpable as a summer cloud, when it seems to lean and touch the edge of the world in a gray, quiet dawn.
They were but the creations of an artist's classic dreams, but to her they seemed to thrill, to move, to sigh, to gaze on her; to her, they seemed to live with that life of the air, of the winds, of the stars, of silence and solitude, and all the nameless liberties of death, of which she dreamed when, shunned, and cursed, and hungered, she looked up to the skies at night from a sleepless bed.
They were indeed the dead: the dead of that fair time when all the earth was young, and men communed with their deities, and loved them, and were not afraid. When their gods were with them in their daily lives, when in every breeze that curled the sea, in every cloud that darkened in the west, in every water-course that leaped and sparkled in the sacred cedar groves, in every bee-sucked blossom of wild thyme that grew purple by the marble temple steps, the breath and the glance of the gods were felt, the footfall and the voice of the gods were heard.