e are told, the fair
Scheherazade resumed her history in the following words:

"Sinbad went on in this manner with his narrative to the caliph--'I
thanked the man-animal for its kindness, and soon found myself very much
at home on the beast, which swam at a prodigious rate through the ocean;
although the surface of the latter is, in that part of the world, by
no means flat, but round like a pomegranate, so that we went--so to
say--either up hill or down hill all the time.'

"That I think, was very singular," interrupted the king.

"Nevertheless, it is quite true," replied Scheherazade.

"I have my doubts," rejoined the king; "but, pray, be so good as to go
on with the story."

"I will," said the queen. "'The beast,' continued Sinbad to the caliph,
'swam, as I have related, up hill and down hill until, at length, we
arrived at an island, many hundreds of miles in circumference, but
which, nevertheless, had been built in the middle of the sea by a colony
of little things like caterpillars'" (*1)

"Hum!" said the king.

"'Leaving this island,' said Sinbad--(for Scheherazade, it must be
understood, took no notice of her husband's ill-mannered ejaculation)
'leaving this island, we came to another where the forests were of solid
stone, and so hard that they shivered to pieces the finest-tempered axes
with which we endeavoured to cut them down."' (*2)

"Hum!" said the king, again; but Scheherazade, paying him no attention,
continued in the language of Sinbad.

"'Passing beyond this last island, we reached a country where there
was a cave that ran to the distance of thirty or forty miles within the
bowels of the earth, and that contained a greater number of far more
spacious and more magnificent palaces than are to be found in all
Damascus and Bagdad. From the roofs of these palaces there hung myriads
of gems, liked diamonds, but larger than men; and in among the streets
of towers and pyramids and temples, there flowed immense rivers as black
as ebony, and swarming with fish that had no eyes.'" (*3)

"Hum!" said the king. "'We then swam into a region of the sea where
we found a lofty mountain, down whose sides there streamed torrents of
melted metal, some of which were twelve miles wide and sixty miles long
(*4); while from an abyss on the summit, issued so vast a quantity of
ashes that the sun was entirely blotted out from the heavens, and it
became darker than the darkest midnight; so that when we were even at
the