“Still I gazed, fascinated. Those thick, wreathing masses of smoke were shaping themselves--shaping themselves into something--something columnar. I watched like one in a dream, and as I watched a part of me attained to consciousness of Captain Strong sitting in frozen immobility by the side of me. The wreathing smoke coalesced, formed itself into something whose outlines were not yet clear. A brighter, yellower light emanated from below it, lit it up. A body--a vague female body--collected itself, and then a girl’s head, strangely beautiful for all its almond eyes and scanty brows, smiled upon us, suddenly vivid and real. I recognized it with a shock--the girl of the garden! She and her body were now one complete living organism that moved sinuously from the hips. I held my breath in awe. Whereas the visions I had been watching were like pictures at a distance, this was an actual living woman a few feet from us. The smoke disappeared. I was staring at a beautiful native woman, as real as you or I, mysteriously illumined in yellow light against a background of obscurity, who stood where the fumes had writhed upward from the bowl.
“Conscious as I now was of Captain Strong’s close neighbourhood, I craved to turn to him for astonished comment. But still my body was deprived of function; I could not move a muscle. He made neither move nor sound. Then I almost forgot him in the fascinated interest which this apparition compelled.
“Swaying slightly, with a free, graceful motion of the hips, she moved from her place. Her mouth parted in a pathetic little smile of melancholy, her dark eyes gazing not at me but at something at my side, in soulful yearning appeal, she glided toward us through a hushed silence where I could hear my own heart beat. Slowly she detached her arms from the simple robe which swathed her, stretched them out imploringly, with a wistful smile that seemed to beseech a difficult confidence, to the companion at my side, to Captain Strong. Once more I heard the gasp of his laboured breathing.
“She approached, and it seemed to me that she and I and the panting figure at my side whom I could not turn my head to see were the only things existing in a world that was otherwise dark. She was illumined from head to foot, clearly and definitely detached from her surroundings. I marked the soft, lithe roundness of her form. Did she speak? Her lips moved, but I heard nothing, although it seemed to me that a gently uttered name echoed far away in illimitable space, echoed endlessly as though ringing through the vast, incommensurable soul of things past, present, and to be.