Few men have been nearer their end and yet escaped it than we
were on that dreadful day.
I am a bad sleeper at the best of times, and my dreams that night when
at last I got to rest were not of the pleasantest. The awful vision of
poor Mahomed struggling to escape the red-hot pot would haunt them, and
then in the background, as it were, a veiled form was always hovering,
which, from time to time, seemed to draw the coverings from its body,
revealing now the perfect shape of a lovely blooming woman, and now
again the white bones of a grinning skeleton, and which, as it veiled
and unveiled, uttered the mysterious and apparently meaningless
sentence:--
"That which is alive and hath known death, and that which is dead yet
can never die, for in the Circle of the Spirit life is naught and death
is naught. Yea, all things live for ever, though at times they sleep and
are forgotten."
The morning came at last, but when it came I found that I was too stiff
and sore to rise. About seven Job arrived, limping terribly, and with
his face the colour of a rotten apple, and told me that Leo had slept
fairly, but was very weak.
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