mpanions, when a slap from the hand of
Bhanavar spun her twice round, and she dropped to the marble insensible.
The King bellowed in wrath, and ran to Nashta, crying to the Queen,
'Surrender that crown to her, foul hag!' But Bhanavar had bent over the
basin of the fountain, and beheld the image of her change therein, and
was hurrying from the hall and down the corridors of the palace to the
private chamber. So he made bare the steel by his side, and followed her
with a number of the harem guard, menacing her, and commanding her to
surrender the crown with the Jewel. Ere she could lay hand on a veil, he
was beside her, and she was encompassed. In that extremity Bhanavar
plucked the Jewel from her crown, and rubbed it, calling the Serpents to
her. One came, one only, and that one would not move from her to sling
himself about the neck of Mashalleed, but whirled round her, hissing:

Every hour a serpent dies,
Till we have the sacrifice:
Sweeten, sweeten, with thy kiss,
Quick! a soul for Karatis.

Surely the King bit his breath, marvelling, and his fury became an awful
fear, and he fell back from her, molesting her no further. Then she
squeezed the serpent till his body writhed in knots, and veiled herself,
and sprang down a secret passage to the garden, and it was the time of
the rising of the moon. Coolness and soothingness dropped on her as a
balm from the great light, and she gazed on it murmuring, as in a memory:

Shall I counsel the moon in her ascending?
Stay under that dark palm-tree through the night,
Rest on the mountain slope,
By the couching antelope,
O thou enthroned supremacy of light!
And for ever the lustre thou art lending
Lean on the fair long brook that leaps and leaps,
Silvery leaps and falls:
Hang by the mountain-walls,
Moon! and arise no more to crown the steeps,
For a danger and dolour is thy wending!

And she panted and sighed, and wept, crying, 'Who, who will kiss me or
have my kiss now, that I may indeed be as yonder beam? Who, that I may be
avenged on this King? And who sang that song of the ascending of the
moon, that comes to me as a part of me from old times?' As she gazed on
the circled radiance swimming under a plume of palm leaves, she
exclaimed, 'Ruark! Ruark the Chief!' So she clasped her hands to her
bosom, and crouched under the shadows of the garden, and fled through the
garden g