ns and broke, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, against
the ships and masts in the calm water of the harbour.

The King had little time to lose. Even festal joy must move swiftly.
There were many and varied things to be seen and done; but in the course
of an hour--so ran the order--this portion of the festivities must be
over, and it was fully obeyed.

The hands and feet of the woolly-headed blacks who, amid loud
acclamations, carried on shore the cages in which lions, panthers, and
leopards shook the bars with savage fury, moved as if they were winged.
The slender, dark-brown Ethiopians who led giraffes, apes, gazelles, and
greyhounds past the royal pair rushed along as if they were under the
lash; and the sixty elephants which Eumedes and his men had caught in the
land of Chatyth moved at a rapid pace past the royal state galley.

At the sight of them the King joined in the cheers of thousands of voices
on the shore; these giant animals were to him auxiliaries who could put
to flight a whole corps of hostile cavalry, and Arsinoe-Philadelphus, the
Queen, sympathized with his pleasure.

She raised her voice with her royal husband, and it seemed to the
spectators on the shore as if they had a share in the narrative when she
listened to Eumedes's first brief report.

Only specimens of the gold and ivory, spices and rare woods, juniper
trees and skins of animals which the ships brought home could be borne
past their Majesties, and the black and brown men who carried them moved
at a breathless rate.

The sun was still far from the meridian when the royal couple and their
train withdrew from the scene of the reception ceremonial, and drove, in
a magnificent chariot drawn by four horses, to the neighbouring city of
Pithoin, where new entertainments and a long period of rest awaited them.
Hermon had seen, as if through a veil of white mists, the objects that
aroused the enthusiasm of the throng, and so, he said to himself, it had
been during the whole course of his life. Only the surface of the
phenomena on which he fixed his eyes had been visible to him; he had not
learned to penetrate further into their nature, fathom them to their
depths, until he became blind.

If the gods fulfilled his hope, if he regained his vision entirely, and
even the last mists had vanished, he would hold firmly to the capacity he
had gained, and use it in life as well as in art.

CHAPTER XIV.

The messenger from Philippus appeare