nd 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 a fish scaled with
splendours that hath darted and seized upon a prey, and is bearing it
greedily to some secure corner of the deeps to swallow the quivering
repast at leisure. Surely, the heart of Noorna was wise of what she bore
against her bosom; and it beat exulting strokes in the midst of the rush
and roar and gurgle of the torrent, and the gulping sounds and
multitudinous outcries of the headlong water. That verse of the poet
would apply to her where he says:

Lead me to the precipice,
And bid me leap the dark abyss:
I care not what the danger be,
So my beloved, my beauteous vision,
Be but the prize I bear with me,
For she to Paradise can turn Perdition.

Praise be to him that planteth love, the worker of this marvel, within
us! Now, she sped in the manner narrated through the mazes of the cavern,
coming suddenly to the point at the entrance where perched Koorookh
gravely upon one leg, like a bird with an angling beak: he caught at her
as she was hurling toward the sea, and drew her to the bank of rock, that
burden on her bosom; and it was Shibli Bagarag, her betrothed, his eyes
closed, his whole countenance colourless. Behind him