But that pistol-shot, as it pierced the hot, sultry air in the vaulted archways, was caught by a sudden blast of warm wind, sweeping God knows whence, to God knows where! and was blown out riverwards, citywards. Blown by that sudden blast, like the hot breath of someone's anger, which always heralds an electrical dust-storm. One moment there is the stillness of the uttermost void brooding over the deep; the next, causelessly, God knows why! the spirit moving palpably. And so it is always when the ever-recurring struggle for the right road to that lost Paradise, for the right method of regaining that bartered birthright, begins afresh among the sons of Adam. When the Hosts of the Lord,--fighting, as men always fight, under the banner of Right, for what they think good and true, for what seems to them to bring them nearer to the golden gates--change armed peace for war. It was so now; and Lance Carlyon, waking to the familiar, yet unfamiliar sound of that pistol-shot, woke also to the knowledge that someone had already resorted to that last argument between man and his fellow. Who was it? And why? As he stood, still half dazed by sleep, listening, as one does instinctively, for another shot to follow the first, a new sound distracted his attention. Was he still asleep and dreaming? or was that really Erda Shepherd's voice, rising towards him from the sliding, unseen river? "I will come back to you directly," it said in Urdu. The half-heard promise of the words took him by storm, making him forget the strangeness of the language. Yet even that made his bewilderment more utter. And all around him, about him, a mist--or was it a cloud, or what was it?--had sprung into being. A wreath as of smoke drifted past the wide arches of the balcony, blotting out the pale shimmer of the young moon. The swinging lamp above his head darkened, reddened, as the dust-atoms leapt from the earth into the air, obedient to the call of that mightiest force in nature which holds the world together, and guides it on its way among the stars. Pidar Narâyan had been right! The electrical storm had come! But Erda had come with it. He could see her now, standing at the top of the river steps, dimmed by the dust-atoms that glittered faintly in the clouded ray of the lamp; could see her--tall, slim, white--with a red-gold ball in her hand. So it was only a dream; he was asleep still! The certainty of this, the knowledge that he would wake soon, made him yield to impulse, to emotion, as he would never have done otherwise. He held out his arms to the gracious vision, his voice rang with passion. "Erda! Erda! You have come back to me!--the world's desire--my heart's desire!"