"I started to run towards the old section where I had found the door. I spent the next few nights feasting on blood until my miserable thoughts were drowned in it, and then in the early hours I roamed the great library of Alexandria, reading as I had always done. "But I didn't return to the underground temple. An immense force emanated from her, an invisible and commanding sense of her presence, her occupation of this small and insignificant room. And not merely a woman, but a magnificent bronze-skinned Egyptian woman as artfully bejeweled and dressed as the old queens, in fine pleated linen, with her black hair down to her shoulders and braided with strands of gold. "And slowly I turned my eyes in the direction of the door, and it was a woman I saw standing there. She was still there, the remaining light defining her expressionless face, sparkling on the jewels around her neck and in her large almond-shaped eyes. I saw the smoke rising from them in the dark, gray wisps like snakes coiling towards the ceiling and then gone. "I sat up and moved back the curtains, and the lamps in the room went out. And I thought I might expire on the spot from fear. "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. It would have taken a band of mortals several hours to discover the trapdoor, but I found it quickly, and I was able to lift it, which mortals couldn't have done. I went out from the city to where the stars provided the only light, and I walked until I came to a ruined temple, and there I began to dig in the sand. "In the hour that followed I was to remember the strength and the speed I'd known in the forests of Gaul, and had not used since.
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