Theos has some quaint experiences. His great friend Sah-Lûma enchants the court with a poem—one that Theos faintly remembers he himself had written in days of old. The poet and his friend, after a court function, proceed to a reception at the Palace of Lysia. There they witness and take part in marvelous scenes; and the garden of the Palace gives the novelist an opportunity for those beautiful word-pictures that her pen evolves so brilliantly. The poets attend a midnight reception and there witness an extraordinary ballet which follows a banquet even more astounding in its incidents and in its revelations of the real character of this so-called Virgin Priestess. One, Nir-jalis, who had received favors from Lysia, and who, filled and flooded with wine, was indiscreet in his utterances, is given by her a cup of poison—the Chalice of Oblivion—which he drinks, and before a laughing, bacchanalian crowd dies a horrible death with the jeering words of Lysia in his ears, her contemptuous smile upon him. Nobody cares. In Al-Kyris, and certainly in Lysia’s Palace, they enjoy such scenes.
Theos, amazed, watches all. He, too, has another strange revelation before the night is through. In the midst of the revelry he hears a chime of bells, which reminds him of the village church of his earlier years, and of odd suggestions of fair women who were wont to pray for those they loved, and who believed their prayers would be answered. As he meditates thereon he is suddenly seized and borne swiftly along till in the moonlight he recognizes Lysia. Dramatic indeed is the scene that follows. Theos makes a passionate declaration of love to her, and has the promise from Lysia: “Thou shalt be honored above the noblest in the land ... riches, power, fame, all shall be thine—if thou wilt do my bidding.” The bidding is “Kill Sah-Lûma,” and it is Lysia who shows Theos his sleeping friend and places in his hand the dagger with which to strike. Horrified at the suggestion, Theos flings the weapon from him, escapes from the Palace, and reaches the home of Sah-Lûma, where, later, the Poet Laureate rejoins him.
The sands of Al-Kyris were fast running out, and events crowded one upon the other in rapid succession. Theos was terrorized when Sah-Lûma recited “the latest offspring of my fertile genius—my lyrical romance ‘Nourhàlma.’” Then the full title was proclaimed—“Nourhàlma: A Love-Legend of the Past”; and we are given the first line of this mysterious poem:
“A central sorrow dwells in perfect joy.”
It was the poem written by Theos after the vision of Edris! He had to hear Sah-Lûma proclaim it as his own; to praise it, too, as the work of the other. Assuredly the cup of self-abnegation for Theos Alwyn was very full. As they talked about the poem a great commotion was heard in the streets. Theos and Sah-Lûma found themselves in the midst of a turbulent crowd, who, for once, even disregarded the Poet Laureate. The Prophet Khosrûl was predicting in the midst of excited multitudes the early destruction of the city, and the coming of the Redeemer. Upon Theos was again forced the knowledge which was his in the world whence he had been transported to this pre-Christian age; and, suddenly roused to excitement, he declared to these talented barbarians—“He HAS come! He died for us, and rose again from the dead more than eighteen hundred years ago!”
From the astonishment caused by this declaration the people had scarcely been roused by words from Sah-Lûma, when King Zephorânim appeared. Khosrûl, having delivered his last dread warning, fell dead; and his decease was immediately followed by the collapse of the great obelisk of the city. The people’s final terrors had begun. The last words of the Prophet Khosrûl had been a reiteration of the old forgotten warning regarding the relations of the High Priestess and the King, and the fall of the city was foretold for that night.
Escaping the destruction caused by the fall of the obelisk, Sah-Lûma and Theos returned to the Palace of the former, and there the Poet Laureate for the first time showed real emotion on learning that his favorite slave, Niphrâta, had left him forever. Soon Sah-Lûma and Theos were summoned by Zèl, High Priest of the Sacrificial Altar, to take part in the Great Sacrifice; for the people were terrified by the many strange happenings and were about to join in solemn unison to implore the favor of Nagâya and the gods. The Temple of Nagâya was magnificently decorated for this New Year’s Festival. There Sah-Lûma found that the maiden to be sacrificed was Niphrâta, and he made an impassioned demand, then an appeal, for her life. Niphrâta was permitted her choice, but she repudiated Sah-Lûma, appearing to be in love with some ghostly representation of the Poet and to be unconscious of his material existence. She had, she plaintively cried, waited for happiness so long; and, the Sacrificial Priest calling for the victim, she rushed upon the knife the Priest held ready for her. One second and she was seen speeding towards the knife; the next—and the whole place was enveloped in darkness. Fire broke out in every part of the Temple. A terrible scene of destruction was enacted, and the terrified people rushed hither and thither in the effort to save their lives;—efforts vain, because the last day of the city had come,—Al-Kyris was doomed,—there was rescue neither for people nor priests.
Sah-Lûma, death being certain, desired to die with Lysia, but his claim was contested by the King. Sovereign and Poet then learned that they had been rivals in love. The prophecy of Khosrûl was being fulfilled. The barbarous Lysia, even in these last moments, was fierce in her hate, and demanded of the King that he should kill Sah-Lûma. Her last order was obeyed. She could secure the death of the Poet, but she could not save herself. Her own death was one of the most terrible and appalling scenes ever conceived or described. Nagâya, the huge snake that the people of Al-Kyris had worshiped, claimed its own. Frightened by the flames, in its fear it turned upon its mistress Lysia, and, with the King vainly striving to drag her from the coils of the python, the High Priestess, chief of the city of lies, atheism, and humbug, died a death which she had many times remorselessly and gleefully decreed for others.
Theos, gazing at the funeral pyre, as it vaguely seemed to him, of a wasted love and a dead passion, passed from the scene, taking with him the dead body of his friend the Poet. And as he kept his steadfast gaze on Sah-Lûma’s corpse, “the dead Poet’s eyes grew into semblance of his own eyes, the dead Sah-Lûma’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!’” Humbly he prayed to God to pardon his sins and to teach him what he should know; and again he heard soft, small voices singing Kyrie Eleison, and AWOKE to find himself on the Field of Ardath, the dawn just breaking, and the angel Edris near him. Then Edris told him that in the past he had been Sah-Lûma, that in those days he would neither hear Christ nor believe in Him, and that his talents had been misused; she also told Theos how his future years should be spent. She promised that afterwards he should meet her in the highest Heaven, but “not till then, unless the longing of thy love compels.”
It is in that portion of the work called “Poet and Angel” that the serious aim of Marie Corelli in writing this romance is clearly and emphatically brought out. Theos Alwyn is himself once again; but he is a very different self. Returning to London he is received warmly by his friend Villiers, and hears that “Nourhâlma” has brought him much of fame and profit. He had ceased to care for one or the other. He tells Villiers he has become a Christian, anxious, so far as he is able, to follow a faith so grand, and pure, and true. In his declarations on the subject we hear what our author again and again urges in many books—that Christianity and Religion are not determined by one sect or the other. In the words of Theos: