and still she beheld the visage of a hag; nothing of beauty there
save the hair and the brilliant eyes. Then summoned she the serpents in a
circle, and the number of them was that of the days in the year: and she
bared her wrist and seized one, a gray-silver with sapphire spots, and
hissed at him till he hissed, and foam whitened the lips of each.
Thereupon she cried:

Treble-tongue and throat of hell,
What is come upon me, tell!

And the Serpent replied,

Jewel Queen! beauty's price!
'Tis the time for sacrifice!

She grasped another, one of leaden colour, with yellow bars and silver
crescents, and cried:

Treble-tongue and throat of fire,
Name the creature ye require!

And the Serpent replied:

Ruby lip! poison tooth!
We are hungry for a youth.

She grasped another that writhed in her fingers like liquid emerald, and
cried:

Treble-tongue and throat of glue!
How to know the one that's due?

And the Serpent replied:

Breast of snow! baleful bliss!
He that wooing wins a kiss.

She clutched one at her elbow, a hairy serpent with yellow languid eyes
in flame-sockets and livid-lustrous length--a disease to look on, and
cried:

Treble-tongue and throat of gall!
There's a youth beneath the pall.

And the Serpent replied:

Brilliant eye! bloody tear!
He has fed us for a year.

She squeezed that hairy serpent till her finger-points whitened in his
neck, and he dropped lifelessly, crying:

Treble-tongues and things of mud!
Sprang my beauty from his blood?

And the Serpents rose erect, replying:

Yearly one of us must die;
Yearly for us dieth one;
Else the Queen an ugly lie
Lives till all our lives be done!

Bhanavar stood up, and hurried them to Karatis. When she was alone she
fell toward the floor, repeating, ''Tis the Curse!' Suddenly she thought,
'Yet another year my beauty shall be nourished by my vengeance, yet
another! And, O Vizier, the kiss shall be thine, the kiss of doom; for I
have doomed thee ere now. Thou, thou shalt restore me to my beauty: that
only love I now my Prince is lost.'

So she veiled her face in the close veil of the virtuous, and despatched
Ukleet, whom she exalted in the palace of the King, to the Vizier; and
Ukleet stood before Aswarak, and said, 'O Vizier, my mistress truly is
longing for y