But from that spell, I burst again, as all the Past smote all the
Present in me.

"Oh Hautia! thou knowest the mystery I die to fathom. I see it
crouching in thine eye:--Reveal!"

"Weal or woe?"

"Life or death!"

"See, see!" and Yillah's rose-pearl danced before me.

I snatched it from her hand:--"Yillah! Yillah!"

"Rave on: she lies too deep to answer; stranger voices than thine she
hears:--bubbles are bursting round her."

"Drowned! drowned then, even as she dreamed:--I come, I come!--Ha,
what form is this?--hast mosses? sea-thyme? pearls?--Help, help! I
sink!--Back, shining monster!---What, Hautia,--is it thou?--Oh
vipress, I could slay thee!"

"Go, go,--and slay thyself: I may not make thee mine;--go,--dead to
dead!--There is another cavern in the hill." Swift I fled along the
valley-side; passed Hautia's cave of pearls; and gained a twilight
arch; within, a lake transparent shone. Conflicting currents met, and
wrestled; and one dark arch led to channels, seaward tending.

Round and round, a gleaming form slow circled in the deepest eddies:--
white, and vaguely Yillah.

Straight I plunged; but the currents were as fierce headwinds off
capes, that beat back ships.

Then, as I frenzied gazed; gaining the one dark arch, the revolving
shade darted out of sight, and the eddies whirled as before.

"Stay, stay! let me go with thee, though thou glidest to gulfs of
blackness;--naught can exceed the hell of this despair!--Why beat
longer in this corpse oh, my heart!"

As somnambulists fast-frozen in some horrid dream, ghost-like glide
abroad, and fright the wakeful world; so that night, with death-glazed
eyes, to and fro I flitted on the damp and weedy beach.

"Is this specter, Taji?"--and Mohi and the minstrel stood before me.

"Taji lives no more. So dead, he has no ghost. I am his spirit's
phantom's phantom."

"Nay, then, phantom! the time has come to flee."

They dragged me to the water's brink, where a prow was beached. Soon--
Mohi at the helm--we shot beneath the far-flung shadow of a cliff;
when, as in a dream, I hearkened to a voice.

Arrived at Odo, Media had been met with yells. Sedition was in arms,
and to his beard defied him. Vain all concessions then. Foremost stood
the three pale sons of him, whom I had slain, to gain the maiden lost.
Avengers, from the first hour we had parted on the sea, they had
drifted on my track survived starvation; and lived to hunt me round
all Mardi's reef; a