if Abarak be with him, and a
single of the three slaves of the Sword that I released from the tail of
Garraveen, Ravejoura, Karavejis, and Veejravoosh, he will yet come
through, and I may revive him in my bosom for the task.' So, thinking
upon that, the sweet crimson surprised her cheeks, and she arose and drew
Koorookh with her along the beach till they came to some rocks piled
ruggedly and the waves breaking over them. She mounted these, and stepped
across them to the entrance of a cavern, where flowed a full water
swiftly to the sea, rolling smooth bulks over and over, and with a
translucent light in each, showing precious pebbles in the bed of the
water below; agates of size, limpid cornelians, plates of polished jet,
rubies, diamonds innumerable that were smitten into sheen by slant rays
of the level sun, the sun just losing its circle behind lustrous billows
of that Enchanted Sea. She turned to Koorookh a moment, saying, with a
coax of smiles, 'Will my bird wait here for me, even at this point?'
Koorookh clapped both his wings, and she said again, petting him, 'He
will keep watch to pluck me from the force of water as I roll past, that
I be not carried to the sea, and lost?'

Koorookh still clapped his wings, and she entered under the arch of the
cavern. It was roofed with crystals, a sight of glory, with golden lamps
at intervals, still centres of a thousand beams. Taking the sandal from
her left foot and tucking up the folds of her trousers to the bend of her
clear white knee, she advanced, half wading, up the winds of the cavern,
and holding by the juts of granite here and there, till she came to a
long straight lane in the cavern, and at the end of it, far down, a solid
pillar of many-coloured water that fell into the current, as it had been
one block of gleaming marble from the roof, without ceasing. Now, she
made toward it, and fixed her eye warily wide on it, and it was bright,
flawless in brilliancy; but while she gazed a sudden blot was visible,
and she observed in the body of the fall two dark objects plumping
downward one after the other, like bolts, and they splashed in the
current and were carried off by the violence of its full sweep, shooting
by her where she stood, rapidly; but she, knotting her garments round the
waist to give her limbs freedom and swiftness, ran a space, and then bent
and plunged, catching, as she rose, the foremost to her bosom, and
whirled away under the flashing crystals like