EDITOR'S NOTE:

What was the greatest fault of Ayesha, /She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed/? Surely a vanity so colossal that, to take one out of many examples, it persuaded her that her mother died after looking upon her, fearing lest, should she live, she might give birth to another child who was less fair.

At least, as her story shows, it was vanity, rather than love of the beauteous Greek, Kallikrates, that stained the hands of She with his innocent blood and, amongst other ills, brought upon her the fearful curse of deathlessness while still inhabiting a sphere where Death is lord of all. Had not Amenartas taunted her with the waning of her imperial beauty, eaten of the tooth of Time, never would she have disobeyed the command of her master, the Prophet Noot, and entered that Fire of Immortality which she was set to guard.

Thus it seems that by denial she would have escaped the net of many woes in which, perchance, she is still entangled and of Ayesha, Daughter of Wisdom yet Folly's Slave, there would have been no tale to tell and, from her parable of the eternal war of flesh and spirit there would have been no lesson to be learned. But Vanity--or was it Fate?--led her down another road.

The Editor.

CONTENTS:

EDITOR'S NOTE
INTRODUCTORY


I: THE HALLS OF HEAVEN
II: NOOT THE PROPHET COMES TO OZAL
III: THE BATTLE AND THE FLIGHT
IV: THE KISS OF FATE
V: THE SUMMONS
VI: THE DIVINATION
VII: THE QUELLING OF THE STORM
VIII: THE KING OF SIDON
IX: DAGON TAKES HIS SACRIFICE
X: THE VENGEANCE OF BELTIS
XI: THE ESCAPE FROM SIDON
XII: THE SEA BATTLE
XIII: THE SHAME OF PHARAOH
XIV: THE BEGUILING OF BAGOAS
XV: THE PLOT AND THE VOICE
XVI: THE FEAST OF THE KING OF KINGS
XVII: THE FLIGHT AND THE SUMMONS
XVIII: THE TALE OF PHILO
XIX: THE HERMITAGE OF NOOT
XX: THE COMING OF KALLIKRATES
XXI: THE TRUTH AND THE TEMPTATION
XXII: BEWARE!
XXIII: THE DOOM OF THE FIRE
XXIV: THE COUNSEL OF PHILO
XXV: IN UNDYING LONELINESS

a selection from the INTRODUCTORY:

The manuscript of which the contents are printed here was discovered among the effects of the late L. Horace Holly, though not until some years after his death. It was in an envelope on which had been scribbled a direction that it should be forwarded to the present editor "at the appointed time," words that at first he did not understand. However, in due course it arrived without any accompanying note of explanation, so that to this hour he does not know by whom it was sent or where from, since the only postmark on the packet was London, W., and the address was typewritten.

When opened the package proved to contain two thick notebooks, bound in parchment, or rather scraped goat or sheepskin, and very roughly as though by an unskilled hand, perhaps in order to preserve them if exposed to hard usage or weather. The paper of these books is extremely thin and tough so that each of them contains a great number of sheets. It is not of European make, and its appearance suggests that it was manufactured in the East, perhaps in China.

There could be no doubt as to who had owned these notebooks, because on one of them, the first, written in red ink upon the parchment cover in block letters, appears the name of Mr. Holly himself. Also on its first pages are various memoranda of travel evidently made by him and no one else. After these follow sheet upon sheet of apparently indecipherable shorthand mixed up with tiny Arabic characters. This shorthand proved to belong to no known system, and though every effort was made to decipher it, for over two years it remained unread.