"Evidently your adventure to the Ruins of Babylon was not altogether without results!" said Heliobas softly--"Your appearance indicates happiness,--is your life at last complete?"
"Complete?--No!"--and Alwyn sighed somewhat impatiently--"It cannot be complete, so long as its best and purest half is elsewhere! My fame is, as you can guess, a mere ephemera,--a small vanishing point, in comparison with the higher ambition I have now in view. Listen,--you know nothing of what happened to me on the Field of Ardath,--I should have written to you perhaps, but it is better to speak--I will tell you all as briefly as I can."
And talking in an undertone, with his arm linked through that of his companion, he related the whole strange story of the visitation of Edris, the Dream of Al-Kyris, his awakening on the Prophet's Field at sunrise, and his final renunciation of Self at the Cross of Christ. Heliobas listened to him in perfect silence, his eyes alone expressing with what eager interest and attention he followed every incident of the narrative.
"And now," said Alwyn in conclusion,--"I always try to remember for my own comfort that I LEFT my dead Self in the burning ruin of that dream built city of the past,--or SEEMED to leave it, . . and yet I feel sometimes as if its shadow presence clung to me still! I look in the mirror and see strange, faint reflections of the actual personal attributes of the slain Sah-luma,--occasionally these are so strong and distinctly marked that I turn away in anger from my own image! Why, I loved that Phantasm of a Poet in my dream as I must for ages have loved myself to my own utter undoing!--I admired his work with such extravagant fondness, that, thinking of it, I blush for shame at my own thus manifest conceit!--In truth there is only one thing in that pictured character of his, I can for the present judge myself free from,-- namely, the careless rejection of true love for false,--the wanton misprisal of a faithful heart, such as Niphrata's, whose fair child-face even now often flits before my remorseful memory,--and the evil, sensual passion for a woman whose wickedness was as evident as her beauty was paramount! I could never understand or explain this wilful, headstrong weakness in my Shadow-Self--it was the one circumstance in my vision that seemed to have little to do with the positive Me in its application,--but now I thoroughly grasp the meaning of the lesson conveyed, which is that NO MAN EVER REALLY KNOWS HIMSELF, OR FATHOMS THE DEPTHS OF HIS OWN POSSIBLE INCONSISTENCIES. And as matters stand with me at the present time, I am hemmed in on all sides by difficulties,--for since the modern success of that very anciently composed poem, 'Nourhalma'"--and he smiled--"my friends and acquaintances are doing their best to make me think as much of myself as if I were, --well! all that I am NOT. Do what I will, I believe am still an egoist,--nay, I am sure of it,--for even as regards my heavenly saint, Edris, I am selfish!"