e Baba Mustapha with them to the great palace of
the King, which was in the centre of that City. Now, when the King heard
of the attempt on Shagpat, and the affair of the Pomegranate Grain, he
gave orders for the admission of the people, as many of them as could be
contained in the Hall of Justice: and he set a guard over Baba Mustapha,
and commanded that Shagpat should be brought to the palace even as he
then was, and with the lather on him. So the regal mandate went forth,
and Shagpat was brought in state on cushions, and the potency of the drug
preserved his sedateness through all this, and he remained motionless in
sleep, folded in the centre of calm and satisfaction, while this tumult
was rageing and the City shook with uproar. But the people, when they saw
him whitened behind a lather, wrath at Baba Mustapha's polluting touch
and the audacity of barbercraft wrestled in them with the outpouring of
reverence for Shagpat, and a clamour arose for the instant sacrifice of
Baba Mustapha at the foot of their idol Shagpat. And the whole of the
City of Shagpat, men, women, and children, and the sheikhs and the
dervishes and crafts of the City besieged the King's palace in that
middle hour of the noon, clamouring for the sacrifice of Baba Mustapha at
the feet of their idol Shagpat.

THE BURNING OF THE IDENTICAL

Now, the Great Hall for the dispensing of justice in the palace of the
King was one on which the architect and the artificers had lavished all
their arts and subtleties of design and taste and their conceptions of
uniformity and grandeur, so that none entered it without a sense of
abasement, and the soul acknowledged awfulness and power in him that
ruled and sat eminent on the throne of that Hall. For, lo! the throne was
of solid weighty gold, overhung with rich silks and purples; and the hall
was lofty, with massive pillars, fifty on either side, ranging in
stateliness down toward the blaze of the throne; and the pillars were
pillars of porphyry and of jasper and precious marble, carven over all of
them with sentences of the cunningest wisdom, distichs of excellence,
odes of the poet, stanzas sharp with the incisiveness of wit, and that
solve knotty points with but one stroke; and these pillars were each the
gift of a mighty potentate of earth or of a Genie.

In the centre of the Hall a fountain set up a glittering jet, and spread
abroad the breath of freshness, leaping a height of sixty feet, and
shimmerin