ssing.' And he came in the darkness
to a tree, and a bejewelled bank, and other urns, and swinging lamps
without light, and a running water, and a grassy bank, and flowers, and a
silver seat, sprinkling each; and they said all in answer to his question
of the Lily, 'I caught a light from it in passing.' At the last he
stumbled upon the steps of a palace, and ascended them, endowing the
steps with speech as he went, and they said, 'The light of it went over
us.' He groped at the porch of the palace, and gave the door a voice, and
it opened on jasper hinges, shrieking, 'The light of it went through me.'
Then he entered a spacious hall, scattering drops, and voices exclaimed,
'We glow with the light of it.' He passed, groping his way through other
halls and dusk chambers, scattering drops, and as he advanced the voices
increased in the fervour of their replies, saying sequently: 'We blush
with the light of it; We beam with the light of it; We burn with the
light of it.' So, presently he found himself in a long low room, sombrely
lit, roofed with crystals; and in a corner of the room, lo! a damsel on a
couch of purple, she white as silver, spreading radiance. Of such
lustrous beauty was she that beside her, the Princess Goorelka as Shibli
Bagarag first beheld her, would have paled like a morning moon; even
Noorna had waned as Both a flower in fierce heat; and the Queen of
Enchantments was but the sun behind a sand-storm, in comparison with that
effulgent damsel on the length of the purple couch. Well for him he wilt
of the magic which floated through that palace; as is said,

Tempted by extremes,
The soul is most secure;
Too vivid loveliness blinds with its beams,
And eyes turned inward perceive the lure.

Pulling down his turban hastily, he stepped on tiptoe to within arm's
reach of her, and, looking another way, inclined over her soft vermeil
mouth the phial slowly till it brimmed the neck, and dropped a drop of
Paravid between the bow of those sweet lips. Still not daring to gaze on
her, he said then, 'My question is of the Lily, the Lily of the Sea, and
where is it, O marvel?'

And he heard a voice answer in the tones of a silver bell, clear as a
wind in strung wires, 'Where I lie, lies the Lily, the Lily of the Sea; I
with it, it with me.'

Said he, 'O breather of music, tell me how I may lay hand on the flower
of beauty to bear it forth.'

And he heard the voice, 'An equal space betwixt my right