“I know them, too! I know them as nobody else does! They are neither Hindu, nor Muhammadan, but are older by a thousand ages than either foolishness! I love them, and they love me--as you shall love me, too! If they did not love both of us, we would not both be here! We must obey them!”
None of the East's amazing ways of courtship are ever tedious. Love springs into being on an instant and lives a thousand years inside an hour. She left no doubt as to her meaning. She and King were to love, as the East knows love, and then the world might have just what they two did not care to take from it.
His only possible course as yet was the defensive, and there is no defense like silence. He was still.
“The sirkar,” she went on, “the silly sirkar fears that perhaps Turkey may enter the war. Perhaps a jihad may be proclaimed. So much for fear! I know! I have known for a very long time! And I have not let fear trouble me at all!”
Her eyes were on his steadily, and she read no fear in his, either, for none was there. In hers he saw ambition--triumph already--excitement--the gambler's love of all the hugest risks. Behind them burned genius and the devilry that would stop at nothing. As the general had told him in Peshawur, she would dare open Hell's gate and ride the devil down the Khyber for the fun of it.
“Au diable, diable et demie!” the French say; and like most French proverbs it is a wise one. But whence the devil and a half should come to thwart her was not obvious.
“I must be a devil and a half,” he told himself, and very nearly laughed aloud at the idea. She mistook the sudden humor in his eyes for admiration of herself, being used to that from men.
“Listen, while I tell you all from the beginning! The sirkar sent me to discover what may be this 'Heart of the Hills' men talk about. I found these caves--and this! I told the sirkar a little about the Caves, and nothing at all about the Sleepers. But even at that they only believed the third of what I said. And I--back in Delhi I bought books--borrowed books--sent to Europe for more books--and hired babu Sita Ram to read them to me, until his tongue grew dry and swollen and he used to fall asleep in a corner. I know all about Rome! Days I spent--weeks!--months!--listening to the history of their great Caesar, and their little Caesars--of their conquests and their games! It was good, and I understood it all! Rome should have been true to the old gods, and they would have been true to her! She fell when she fooled with Christianity!”
She was speaking dreamily now, with her chin resting on a hand and an elbow on the ivory arm of the throne, remembering as she told her story. And it meant so much to her, she was so in earnest, that her voice conjured up pictures for King to see.
“When I had read enough I came back here to think. I knew enough now to be sure that the Sleeper is a Roman, and the 'Heart of the Hills' a Grecian maid. She is like me. That is why I know she drove him to make an empire, choosing for a beginning these 'Hills' where Rome had never penetrated. He found her in Greece. He plunged through Persia to build a throne for her! I have seen it all in dreams, and again in the crystal! And because I was all alone, I saw that I would need all the skill I could learn, and much patience. So I began to learn to dance as she danced, using those pictures of her as a model. I have surpassed her! I can dance better than she ever did!