"A novel in which a mystic named El Rami, a practitioner of the arts of healing drawn from the occult science of the ancient Egyptians, attempts to control and dominate the soul of a dead girl. El Rami travels from London to Syria where he meets a caravan in the desert with two ailing women in need of care and attention. He agrees to help, and he restores one, an old woman, to health. The other, a young orphan girl called Lilith, succumbs to her illness and dies. El Rami practices his mysterious arts on Lilith in an attempt to demonstrate the existence of life after death. He administers an elixir that brings her body back to life and returns to London with the breathing corpse of Lilith. He hides her in a room in his mansion for six years, and summoning all his powers succeeds in being able to summon her soul back to her body at will. The head of the Brotherhood of the Holy Cross of which El Rami was a member, Heliobas, arrives. Readers know him from The Romance of Two Worlds and Ardath. Heliobas is alarmed by El Rami's experiments and tells him that he must release the girl and allow her to die. But El Rami is obsessed with the beautiful Lilith and intends on making her his soulmate. Despite Lilith's pleas and warnings, as El Rami kisses her she crumbles to ashes in from of him. When El Rami recovers himself, he is taken to the Brotherhood's monastery in Cyprus, a mental wreck."