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 gates and the streets of the city, heavily veiled, to the prison
where Ruark awaited her within the walls and Ukleet without. The Governor
of the prison had been warned by Ukleet of her coming, and the doors and
bars opened before her unchallenged, till she stood in the cell of Ruark;
her eyes, that were alone unveiled, scanned the countenance of the Chief,
the fevered lustre-jet of his looks, and by the little moonlight in the
cell she saw with a glance the straw-heap and the fetters, and the
black-bread and water untasted on the bench--signs of his misery and
desire for her coming. So she greeted him with the word of peace, and he
replied with the name of the All-Merciful. Then said she, 'O Ruark, of
Rukrooth thy mother tell me somewhat.'

He answered, 'I know nought of her since that day. Allah have her in his
keeping!'

So she cried, 'How? What say'st thou, Ruark? 'tis a riddle.'

Then he, 'The oath of Ruark is no rope of sand! He swore to see her not
till he had set eyes on Bhanavar.'

She knelt by the Chief, saying in a soft voice, 'Very greatly the Chief
of the Beni-Asser loved Bhanavar.' And she thought, 'Yea! greatly and
verily love I him; and he shall be no victim of the Serpents, for I defy
them and give them other prey.' So she said in de