above me a moment, and won
The bliss of my breast as a beam of the sun,
Untouch'd and untasted till then--

The voice in her throat was like a drowning creature, and she rose up,
and chanted wildly:

I weep again?

What play is this? for the thing is dead in me long since:
Will all the reviving rain
Of heaven bring me back my Prince?
But I, when I weep, when I weep,
Blood will I weep!
And when I weep,
Sons for fathers shall weep;
Mothers for sons shall weep;
Wives for husbands shall weep!
Earth shall complain of floods red and deep,
When I weep!

Upon that she ran up a secret passage to her chamber and rubbed the
Jewel, and called the serpents, to delight her soul with the sight of her
power, and rolled and sported madly among them, clutching them by the
necks till their thin little red tongues hung out, and their eyes were as
discoloured blisters of venom. Then she arose, and her arms and neck and
lips were glazed with the slime of the serpents, and she flung off her
robes to the close-fitting silken inner vest looped across her bosom with
pearls, and whirled in a mazy dance-measure among them, and sang
melancholy melodies, making them delirious, fascinating them; and they
followed her round and round, in twines and twists and curves, with
arched heads and stiffened tails; and the chamber swam like an undulating
sea of shifting sapphire lit by the moon of midnight. Not before the moon
of midnight was in the sky ceased Bhanavar sporting with the serpents,
and she sank to sleep exhausted in their midst.

Such was the occupation of the Queen of Mashalleed when he came not to
her. The women and slaves of the palace dreaded her, and the King himself
was her very slave.

Meanwhile the plot of her unforgivingness against Aswarak ripened: and
the Vizier beholding the bride he had lost Queen of Mashalleed his
master, it was as she conceived, that his heart was eaten with jealousy
and fierce rage. Bhanavar as she came across him spake mildly, and gave
him gentle looks, sad glances, suffering not his fires to abate, the
torment of his love to cool. Each night he awoke with a serpent in his
bed; the beam of her beauty was as the constant bite of a serpent,
poisoning his blood, and he deluded his soul with the belief that
Bhanavar loved him notwithstanding, and that she was seized forcibly from
him by the King. 'Otherwise,' thought he, 'why loo