Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/114

 moments, was fierce in her hate, and demanded of the King that he should kill Sah-Lûma. Her last order was obeyed. She could secure the death of the Poet, but she could not save herself. Her own death was one of the most terrible and appalling scenes ever conceived or described. Nagâya, the huge snake that the people of Al-Kyris had worshiped, claimed its own. Frightened by the flames, in its fear it turned upon its mistress Lysia, and, with the King vainly striving to drag her from the coils of the python, the High Priestess, chief of the city of lies, atheism, and humbug, died a death which she had many times remorselessly and gleefully decreed for others.

Theos, gazing at the funeral pyre, as it vaguely seemed to him, of a wasted love and a dead passion, passed from the scene, taking with him the dead body of his friend the Poet. And as he kept his steadfast gaze on Sah-Lûma's corpse, "the dead Poet's eyes grew into semblance of his own eyes, the dead Sah-Lûma's face smiled spectrally back at him in the image of his own face!—it was as though he beheld the Picture of Himself, slain and 'reflected in a magician's mirror!'" Humbly he prayed to God to pardon his sins and to teach him what he should know; and again he heard soft, small voices singing Kyrie Eleison, and to find himself