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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 face in a manner that frightened me,
for I was young. Then she put me down from the neck of her mule where she
had seated me, saying, 'Child of a dead mother and a runaway father, what
need I fear from thy like, and the dreams of a love-sick Genie?' So she
departed, but I forgot not her words, and dwelt upon them, and grew
fevered with them, and drooped. Now, when he saw my bloom of health gone,
heaviness on my feet, the light hollowed from my eyes, my benefactor,
Ravaloke--he that I had thought my father--took me between his knees, and
asked me what it was and the cause of my ailing; and I told him.

Then said he, 'This is so: thou art not my child; but I love thee as
mine, O my little Desert-flower; and why the Princess should fancy fear
of thee I like not to think; but fear thou her, for she is a mask of
wiles and a vine trailing over pitfalls; such a sorceress the world
knoweth not as Goorelka of Oolb.'

Now, I was penetrated by what he said, and ceased to be a companion to
them that loved childish games and romps, and meditated by myself in
gardens and closets, feigning sleep when the elder ones discoursed, that
I might learn something of this mystery, and all that was