is something about thy Isis," exclaimed Heru, as though amused at
my perspicuity. "Here, halfway down this chapter of earth-history,
it says," and putting one pink knee across the other to better prop the
book she read:

"And the priests of Thebes were gone; the sand stood untrampled on the
temple steps a thousand years; the wild bees sang the song of desolation
in the ears of Isis; the wild cats littered in the stony lap of Ammon;
ay, another thousand years went by, and earth was tilled of unseen hands
and sown with yellow grain from Paradise, and the thin veil that separates
the known from the unknown was rent, and men walked to and fro."

"Go on," I said.

"Nay," laughed the other, "the little mice in their eagerness have been
before you--see, all this corner is gnawed away."

"Read on again," I said, "where the page is whole; those sips of knowledge
you have given make me thirsty for more. There, begin where this blazonry
of initialed red and gold looks so like the carpet spread by the scribe
for the feet of a sovereign truth--what says he here?" And she, half
pouting to be set back once more to that task, half wondering as she
gazed on those magic letters, let her eyes run down the page, then began:

"And it was the Beginning, and in the centre void presently there came a
nucleus of light: and the light brightened in the grey primeval morning
and became definite and articulate. And from the midst of that natal
splendour, behind which was the Unknowable, the life came hitherward;
from the midst of that nucleus undescribed, undescribable, there issued
presently the primeval sigh that breathed the breath of life into