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"When I opened my eyes, I saw a blazing torch on the wall beyond him, and his dark outline looming before me, and his eyes animate, and looking at me without question, the black pupils swimming in a dull gray light. He was otherwise lifeless, hands limp at his sides. He was ornamented as she had been, and he wore the glorified dress of the pharaoh and his hair too was plaited with gold. His skin was bronze all over, as hers had been, enhanced, as the Elder had said. And he was the incarnation of menace in his stillness as he stood staring at me.

"In the barren chamber behind him, she sat on a stone shelf, with her head at an angle, her arms dangling, as if she were a lifeles

s body flung there. Her linen was smeared with sand, her sandaled feet caked with it, and her eyes were vacant and staring. Perfect attitude of death.

"And he like a stone sentinel in a royal tomb blocked my path.

"I could hear no more from either of them than you heard from them when I took you down to the chamber here on the island. And I thought I might expire on the spot from fear.

" Yet there was the sand on her feet and on her linen. She'd come to me! She had!

"But someone had come into the corridor behind me. Someone was shuffling along the passage, and when I turned, I saw one of the burnt ones -- a mere skeleton, this one, with black gums showing and the fangs cutting into the shiny black raisin skin of his lower lip.

"I swallowed a gasp at the sight of him, his bony limbs, feet splayed, arms jiggling with every step. He was plowing towards us, but he did not seem to see me. He put his hands up and shoved at Enkil.

"'No, no, back into the chamber!' he whispered in a low, crackling voice. 'No, no!' and each syllable seemed to take all he had. His withered arms shoved at the figure. He couldn't budge it.

"'Help me!' he said to me. 'They have moved. Why did they move? Make them go back. The further they move, the harder it is to get them back. '

"I stared at Enkil and I felt the horror that you felt to see this statue with life in it, seemingly unable or unwilling to move. And as I watched the spectacle grew even more horrible, because the blackened wraith was now screaming and scratching at Enkil, unable to do anything with him. And the sight of this thing that should have been dead wearing itself out like this, and this other thing that looked so perfectly godlike and magnificent just standing there, was more than I could bear.

" 'Help me!' the thing said. 'Get him back into the chamber. Get them back where they must remain. '

"How could I do this? How could I lay hands on this being? How could I presume to push him where he did not wish to go?

"'They will be all right, if you help me,' the thing said. 'They will be together and they will be at peace. Push on him. Do it. Push! Oh, look at her, what's happened to her. Look. '

" 'All right, damn it!' I whispered, and overcome with shame, I tried. I laid my hands again on Enkil and I pushed at him, but it was impossible. My strength meant nothing here, and the burnt one became all the more irritating with his useless ranting and shoving.

"But then he gasped and cackled and threw his skeletal arms up in the air and backed up.

"'What's the matter with you!' I said, trying not to scream and run. But I saw soon enough.

"Akasha had appeared behind Enkil. She was standing directly behind him and looking at me over his shoulder, and I saw her fingertips come round his muscular arms. Her eyes were as empty in their glazed beauty as they had been before. But she was making him move, and now came the spectacle of these two things walking of their own volition, he backing up slowly, feet barely leaving the ground, and she shielded by him so that I saw only her hands and the top of her head and her eyes.

"I blinked, trying to clear my head.

"They were sitting on the shelf again, together, and they had lapsed into the same posture in which you saw them downstairs on this island tonight.

"The burnt creature was near to collapse. He had gone down on his knees, and he didn't have to explain to me why. He had found them many a time in different positions, but he had never witnessed their movement. And he had never seen her as she had been before.

"I was bursting with the knowledge of why she had been as she was before. She had come to me. But there was a point at which my pride and exhilaration gave way to what it should have been: overwhelming awe, and finally grief.

"I started to cry. I started to cry uncontrollably as I had not cried since I had been with the old god in the grove and my death had occurred, and this curse, this great luminous and powerful curse, had descended on me. I cried as you cried when you first saw them. I cried for their stillness and their isolation, and this horrible little place in which they stared forward at nothing or sat in darkness while Egypt died above.

"The goddess, the mother, the thing, whatever she was, the mindless and silent or helpless progenitor was looking at me. Surely it wasn't an illusion. Her great glossy eyes, with their black fringe of lashes, were fixed upon me. And there came her voice again, but it had nothing of its old power, it was merely the thought, quite beyond language, inside my head.

"Take us out of Egypt, Marius. The Elder means to destroy us. Guard us, Marius. Or we perish here.

" 'Do they want blood?' the burnt one cried. 'Did they move because they would have sacrifice?' the dried one begged.

" 'Go get them a sacrifice,' I said.

" "I cannot now. I haven't the strength. And they won't give their healing blood to me. Would they but allow me a few drops, my burnt flesh might restore itself, the blood in me would be replenished, and I should bring them glorious sacrifices. . . "

"But there was an element of dishonesty in this little speech, because they didn't desire glorious sacrifices anymore.

" 'Try again to drink their blood,' I said and this was horribly selfish of me. I just wanted to see what would happen.