Black, and crowned and heaped with jewels, she looks down at, or
through, or over you with her slanting fish-shaped eyes. Her small
ears, her flat nose, her arms, her pendant breasts are smothered in
priceless gems; a huge red tongue protruding through the stretched
mouth hangs far down upon the chest, ready to lick up the flames of
sacrificial fires; a magnificent tiara binds the black hair which
streams in masses behind her small distorted body; rows of pearls,
flower garlands, and a string of skulls hang about her short neck; one
hand holds a knife, the other a bleeding head, two are raised in
blessing, while behind her shines a sun of flaming tongues of fire, and
over all is spread an umbrella.

Yet it is not the horror of the repulsive physique hewn in stone which
holds you breathless before her; you know it is stone you are looking
at, just as you know that the Sphinx is stone; but as with the Sphinx
you feel the life of centuries throbbing through the carved monster;
you feel that its breath, which is about you, is the wind which has
swept across the desert places and teeming cities of the East; you feel
that the eyes which are upon you have seen all things; in fact you are
almost mesmerised by the force of ages into falling upon your knees in
worship, before you suddenly wrench yourself violently round to face
the sun outside the open door; and even as you do it involuntarily put
your hands to your neck, upon the nape of which, by the suggestion of
unconfessed fear, you have felt the stealthy, longing, jewelled fingers.

On this night the slanting fish eyes of the goddess seemed to look
through the doorway, and to linger upon the exquisite figure of a child
dancing upon the extreme edge of the terrace between the two flights of
steps.

Dancing!--hardly that, as she stood, her body swaying slightly in the
whirl of her mixed emotions, and totally unconscious of four young men
who, arms entwined, stood below, watching the beauty of her body and
her movements with half-shut eyes.

Her ankle-length, full muslin skirt swung this way and that, as she
moved slightly from her bare, over-slender waist, which accentuated the
wonder of the young bosom out of all proportion in any but an eastern
maid of ten years.

Jewels flashed in her delicate nose and ears, and on her slender
fingers and parted toes, for was she not on the eve of her marriage,
this little maid? Who, finding herself upon this unwonted night, alon