Away over wood and heath, stream and pool, they flew to the moor, and floated over that in great circles. The Christian priest raised the cross on high; it shone like gold, and from his lips came the eucharistic chant. Little Helga sang with him, as a child joins in the song of its mother. She swung the censer, and there came a fragrance as if from an altar, so powerful, so subtly operating, that the rushes and reeds of the moor put forth their flowers. All the germs sprang up from the deep soil; everything that had life arose. A veil of water-lilies spread itself like an embroidered carpet of flowers, and on it lay a sleeping woman, young and beautiful. Little Helga thought she saw herself mirrored in the still water; but it was her mother that she saw, the Marsh King’s wife, the princess from the waters of the Nile. The dead Christian priest bade the sleeper be lifted on to the horse; but that sank under the burden as if its body was only a winding-sheet flying in the breeze; but the sign of the cross made the airy phantom strong, and all three rode to the firm ground. A cock crowed in the Viking’s stronghold. The phantoms rose up in the mist, and were dispersed in the wind, but mother and daughter stood there together. ‘Is that myself that I see in the deep water?’ said the mother. ‘Is that myself that I see in the bright shield?’ exclaimed the daughter; and they came close together, breast to breast in each other’s arms. The mother’s heart beat strongest, and she understood it all. ‘My child! My own heart’s flower! My lotus from the deep waters!’ And she embraced her child, and wept over her; and the tears were as a baptism of new life and affection for little Helga. ‘I came hither in a swan’s skin, and I took it off,’ said the mother. ‘I sank through the quivering swamp, deep into the mire of the bog, that enclosed me as with a wall. But soon I found a fresher current about me; a power seemed to draw me ever deeper and deeper. I felt a pressure of sleep on my eyelids; I slept, I dreamt--I seemed to lie again in the pyramids of Egypt; but there still stood before me the moving elder-stump, which had frightened me on the surface of the moor. I looked at the crevices in the bark, and they shone forth in colours and became hieroglyphics--it was the case of a mummy which I was looking at. That burst, and out of it stepped a lord a thousand years old, a mummy form, black as pitch, shining black like a wood-snail or the slimy black mud--the Marsh King, or the mummy of the pyramid, I did not know which. He flung his arms about me, and I felt that I should die. When I first returned to life again, and my [Illustration: PLACED THE GOLDEN CIRCUIT ABOUT HIS NECK]