o join the
rebels, and pressed forward in his eagerness to inflict a chastisement
signal in swiftness upon them and that traitor; so eagerly Mashalleed
journeyed to his army in advance, that the main body, with Bhanavar, was
left by him long behind. She had encouraged him, saying, 'I shall love
thee much if thou art speedy in winning success.' The Queen was housed on
an elephant, harnessed with gold, and with silken purple trappings; from
the rose-hued curtains of her palanquin she looked on a mighty march of
warriors, filling the extent of the plains; all day she fed her sight on
them. Surely the story of her beauty became noised among the guards of
her person that rode and ran beneath the royal elephant, till the
soldiers of Mashalleed spake but of the beauty of the Queen, and Bhanavar
was as a moon shining over that sea of men.

Now, they had passed the cultivated fields, and were halting by the ford
of a river bordering the Desert, when lo! a warrior on the yonside,
riding in a cloud of dust, and his shout was, 'The King Mashalleed is
defeated, and flying.' Then the Captains of the host witnessed to the
greatness of Allah, and were troubled with a dread, fearing to advance;
but Bhanavar commanded a horse to be saddled for her, and mounted it, and
plunged through the ford singly; so they followed her, and all day she
rode forward on horseback, touching neither food nor drink. By night she
was a league beyond the foremost of them, and fell upon the King encamped
in the Desert, with the loose remnant of his forces. Mashalleed, when he
had looked on her, forgot his affliction, and stood up to embrace her,
but Bhanavar spurned him, crying, 'A time for this in the time of
disgrace?' Then she said, 'How came it?'

He answered, 'There was a Chief among the enemy, an Arab, before the
terror of whom my people fled.'

Cried she, 'Conquer him on the morrow, and till then I eat not, drink
not, sleep not.'

On the morrow Mashalleed again encountered the rebels, and Bhanavar,
seated on her elephant, from a sand-hillock under a palm, beheld the
prowess of the Arab Chief and the tempest of battle that he was. She
thought, 'I have seen but one mighty in combat like that one, Ruark, the
Chief of the Beni-Asser.' Thereupon she coursed toward the King, even
where the arrows gloomed like locusts, thick and dark in the air aloof,
and said, 'The victory is with yonder Chief! Hurl on him three of thy
sons of valour.'

The three were s