ater, Noorna said, 'The end of
this fair sea is Aklis, and beyond it is the Koosh. So while the wind is
our helmsman, and we go circled by the quiet of this sea, I'll tell thee
of myself, if thou carest to hear.'

And he cried with the ardour of love, 'Surely, I would hear of nought
save thyself, Noorna, and the music of the happy garden compareth not in
sweetness with it. I long for the freshness of thy voice, as the desert
camel for the green spring, O my betrothed!'

So she said, 'And now give ear to the following':--

AND THIS IS THE STORY OF NOORNA BIN NOORKA, THE GENIE KARAZ, AND THE
PRINCESS OF OOLB

Know, that when I was a babe, I lay on my mother's bosom in the
wilderness, and it was the bosom of death. Surely, I slept and smiled,
and dreamed the infant's dream, and knew not the coldness of the thing I
touched. So were we even as two dead creatures lying there; but life was
in me, and I awoke with hunger at the time of feeding, and turned to my
mother, and put up my little mouth to her for nourishment, and sucked
her, but nothing came. I cried, and commenced chiding her, and after a
while it was as decreed, that certain horsemen of a troop passing through
the wilderness beheld me, and seeing my distress and the helpless being I
was, their hearts were stirred, and they were mindful of what the poet
says concerning succour given to the poor, helpless, and innocent of this
world, and took me up, and mixed for me camel's milk and water from the
bags, and comforted me, and bore me with them, after they had paid
funeral rites to the body of my mother.

Now, the rose-bud showeth if the rose-tree be of the wilds or of the
garden, and the chief of that troop seeing me born to the uses of
gentleness, carried me in his arms with him to his wife, and persuaded
her that was childless to make me the child of their adoption. So I abode
with them during the period of infancy and childhood, caressed and cared
for, as is said:

The flower a stranger's hand may gather,
Strikes root into the stranger's breast;
Affection is our mother, father,
Friend, and of cherishers the best.

And I loved them as their own child, witting not but that I was their
child, till on a day while I played among some children of my years, the
daughter of the King of Oolb passed by us on a mule, with her slaves and
drawn swords, and called to me, 'Thou little castaway!' and had me
brought to her, and peered upon my fac