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
shimmering there in a wide bright canopy with dropping silver sides. It
was rumoured of the waters of this fountain that they were fed
underground from the waters of the Sacred River, brought there in the
reign of El Rasoon, a former sovereign in the City of Shagpat, by the
labours of Zak,--a Genie subject to the magic of Azrooka, the Queen of El
Rasoon; but, of a surety, none of earth were like to them in silveriness
and sweet coolingness, and they were as wine to the weary.

Now, the King sat on his throne in the Hall, and around him his
ministers, and Emirs, and chamberlains, and officers of state, and black
slaves, and the soldiers of his guard armed with naked scimitars. And the
King was as a sun in splendour, severely grave, and a frown on his
forehead to darken kingdoms, for the attempt on Shagpat had stirred his
kingly wrath, and awakened zeal for the punishment of all conspirators
and offenders. So when Shagpat was borne in to the King upon his throne
of cushions where he sat upright, smiling and inanimate, the King
commanded that he should be placed at his side, the place of honour; and
Shagpat was as a moon behind the whiteness of the lathers; even as we
behold moon and