“I pierced the impenetrable veil of futurity.”
“And what manner of things were revealed?”
“I beheld many marvels,” she answered, in a slow, impressive voice. “Marvels that thou, too, canst behold if thou darest brave the wrath.”
She spoke so earnestly, fixing her searching eyes upon me, that I felt my courage failing. The constant flashing of brilliant colours in my eyes seemed to unnerve me, throwing me into a kind of helpless stupor, in which my senses became frozen by the ghastly mysteries practised before me. It was this feeling of helplessness that caused my heart to sink.
“Didst thou not declare thou wouldst engage Malec in single combat in thine endeavour to fathom the Secret of the Asps?” she observed, half reproachfully. “Yet thine hand quivereth like the aspen, and thou carest not to seek the displeasure consequent upon such an action.”
Erect, almost statuesque, she stood before me, pale and of incomparable beauty, holding my sun-browned hand in hers.
“Hearken, O Azala,” I cried, struggling with difficulty to my feet, and passing my hand across my aching brow to steady the balance of my brain. “No man hath yet accused Zafar-Ben-A’Ziz of cowardice. If, in order to seek the key to the mystery of the strange marks we both bear, it is imperative that I should gaze into yonder crystal, then I fear nought.”
“It is imperative,” she stammered. “If it were not, I, of all persons, would not endeavour to induce thee to invoke the curse upon thyself.”
“Then let me gaze,” I said, and with uneven steps went forward, my hand in hers, to where the great prism had so miraculously appeared. It was moving very slowly, the only light in the chamber being that emitted from its triangular surfaces, and as I halted before it my head reeled with a strange sensation of dizziness I had never before experienced.
Aloud the prostrate slaves cried,—