Chapter V: Part THREE: The Book of Doonham

“Though a Woman’s Tongue be but Three
Inches Long, It can kill a Six-foot Man.”

7.
Evasherah of the First Water-Gap

“A GOOD-MORNING to you, ma’am,” Gerald had begun. His horse was tethered to a palm-tree, and Horvendile was gone, so that there now was only the Princess to be considered. “And in what way can I be of any service?”

Yet his voice shook, as he stood there beside the alabaster couch.... For Gerald was enraptured. The Princess Evasherah was, in the dawn of this superb May morning, so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women his gaze had ever beheld. Her face was the proper shape, it was appropriately colored everywhere, and it was surmounted with an adequate quantity of hair. Nor was it possible to find any defect in her features. The colors of this beautiful young girl’s two eyes were nicely matched, and her nose stood just equidistant between them. Beneath this was her mouth, and she had also a pair of ears. In fine, the girl was young, she exhibited no deformity anywhere, and the enamored glance of the young man could perceive in her no fault. She reminded him, though, of someone that he had known....

Such were the ardent reflections which had passed through Gerald’s mind in the while that he said decorously, “A good-morning, ma’am: and in what way can I be of any service?”

But the Princess, in her impetuous royal fashion, had wasted no time upon the formal preliminaries which were more or less customary in Lichfield. And while Gerald’s patriotic republican rearing had been explicit enough as to the goings-on in monarchical families, he was whole-heartedly astounded by the animation and candor which here confronted him. There was no possible doubting that the Princess Evasherah was prepared to trust him and to give him all.

“But, oh, indeed, ma’am,” Gerald said, “you quite misunderstand me!”

For he had it now. This woman was uncommonly like Evelyn Townsend.

Gerald sighed. All ardor had departed from him. And with a few well-chosen words he placed their relationship upon a more decorous basis.

Now the Princess Evasherah, that most lovely Lady of the Water-Gap, was lying down even when Gerald first came to her, just after sunrise. She was lying upon a couch of alabaster, which had four legs made of elephants’ tusks. Upon this couch was a mattress covered with green satin and embroidered with red gold; upon the mattress was the Princess Evasherah in a brief shirt of apricot colored silk; and, over all, was a saffron canopy adorned with fig-leaves worked in pearls and emeralds.

This couch was furthermore shaded by three palm-trees, and it stood near to the bank of the river called Doonham. And by the sparkling ripples of that river’s deep waters—as the Princess Evasherah explained, some while after she and Gerald had reached a friendly and clean-minded understanding, with no un-American nonsense about it,—was hidden the residence of the Princess, where presently they would have breakfast.

“But,” Gerald said, a little dejectedly, “I have just now no appetite of any kind.”

“That will not matter,” said the Princess: and for no reason at all she laughed.

“—And to live under the water, ma’am, appears a virtually unprecedented form of royal eccentricity—”

“Ah, but I must tell you, lord of the age, and most obdurate averter from the desirer of union with him, that very long ago, because of a girlish infatuation for a young man whose name I have forgotten, I suffered a fiery downfalling from the Home of the Heavenly Ones, into the waters of this river. For I had offended my Father (whose name be exalted!) by stealing six drops of quite another kind of water, of the water from the Churning of the Ocean—”

“Eh?” Gerald said, “but do you mean the divine Amrita?”

“Garden of my joys, and summit of sagacity,” the Princess remarked, “you are learned. You have knowledge of heavenly matters, you have traversed the Nine Spaces. And I perceive that you who travel overburdened with unresponsiveness upon this road of the gods are yet another god in disguise.”

“Oh, no, ma’am, it is merely that, as a student of magic, one picks up such bits of information. I am the heir apparent to a throne, I cannot honestly declare myself any more than that: and I am upon my way to enter into my kingdom, but it is not, I am tolerably certain, a celestial kingdom.”

The Princess was not convinced. “No, my preceptor and my only idol, it is questionless you are a god, all perfect in eloquence and in grace, a temptation unto lovers, and showing as a visible paradise to the desirous. Here, in any event, out of my keen regard for your virtues, and in exchange for that great gawky horse of yours which reveals in every feature its entire unworthiness of contact with divine buttocks, here are the five remaining drops, in this little vial—”

Gerald inspected the small crystal bottle quite as sceptically as the Princess had regarded his disclaimer of being a god. “Well, now, ma’am, to me this looks like just ordinary water.”

She placed one drop of the water upon her finger-tip. She drew upon his forehead the triangle of the male principle, she drew the female triangle, so that one figure interpenetrated the other, and she invoked Monachiel, Ruach, Achides, and Degaliel. No student of magic could fail to recognize her employment of an interesting if uncanonical variant of the Third Pentacle of Venus, but Gerald made no comment.

After that the Princess Evasherah laughed merrily. “Now, then, companion of my heart, now that you have promised me that utterly contemptible horse of yours, I unmask you. For I perceive that you, O my master, more comely than the moon, are the predestined Redeemer of Antan—”

“That much, ma’am, I already know—”

“In short,” said the Princess, “you are Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones, thus masked in human flesh and in human forgetfulness and in peculiarly unhuman coldness. Yet very soon the power of the Amrita will have bestowed unfailing vigorousness upon your thinking, and presently the hounds of recollection will have run down the hare of your inestimable glory.”

“That is well said, ma’am. It is spoken with a fine sense of style. And I conjecture that, although the better stylists usually omit this ingredient, it has some meaning also.... Yes, you do allude to my having red hair, but the hare of my inestimable glory, which you likewise mention, is not capillary, but zoölogical,—in addition to being also metaphorical.... You state, in brief, in a figurative Oriental way, that by and by I shall recollect something which I have forgotten.... But just what is it, ma’am, that you so confidently expect me to recollect?”

“My lord, and acme of my contentment, you will recall, for one matter, the love that was between us in this world’s infancy, when you did not avert from me the inspiring glances of fond affection. For you, the bright-tressed, the resplendent, are unmistakably the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones. I perfectly remember you, by your high nose, by your jutting chin, and by the eminence of yet another feature whose noble proportions also very deeply delighted me during my visit to your Dirghic paradise, and which I perceive to remain unabatedly heroic.”

Gerald, gently, but with decision, took hold of her hand. It seemed to him quite time.

Then the fair Lady of the Water-Gap, she who would have been so adorable if only she had not reminded Gerald more and more of Evelyn Townsend, began to talk about matters which Gerald as yet really did not remember.

She spoke of Gerald’s golden and high-builded home, in which, it seemed, this Princess had trusted him and had given him all: and she spoke also of the unresting love for mankind which had led Gerald to quit that exalted home, among the untroubled lotus-ponds of Vaikuntha, upon nine earlier occasions, and of his nine fine exploits in the way of redemption.

She spoke of how Gerald had visited men sometimes in his present heroic and elegant form, at other times in the appearance of a contemptible looking dwarf, and upon yet other occasions as a tortoise and as a boar pig and as a lion and as a large fish. His taste in apparel seemed as fickle as his charitableness was firm. For over and over again, the Princess said, it had been the power of Gerald, as Helper and Preserver, which had prevented several nations and a dynasty or two of gods from being utterly destroyed by demons whom Gerald himself had destroyed. It was Gerald, as he learned now, who had preserved this earth alike from depopulation and from ignorance, when during the first great flood the Lord of the Third Truth, in his incarnation as a great fish, had carried through the deluge seven married couples and four books containing the cream of earth’s literature: whereas, later, during a yet more severe inundation, Gerald had held up the earth itself between his tusks,—this being, of course, in the time of his incarnation as a boar pig,—and swimming thus, had preserved the endangered planet from being as much as mildewed.

And Evasherah spoke also of how when Gerald was a tortoise he had created such matters as the first elephant, the first cow, and the first wholly amiable woman. He had created at the same time, she added, the moon and the great jewel Kaustubha and a tree called Parijata, which yielded whatever was desired of it, and it was then also that Fair-haired Hoo, the Well-beloved Lord of the Third Truth, had invented drunkenness. There had been, in all, Evasherah concluded, nineteen supreme and priceless benefits invented by Gerald at this time, but she confessed her inability to recall offhand everyone of them—

“It is sufficient,—oh, quite sufficient!” Gerald assured her, with wholly friendly condescension, “for already, ma’am, it embarrasses me to have my modest philanthropies catalogued.”

Yet Gerald, howsoever lightly he spoke, was thrilled with not uncomplacent pride in his past. He was not actually surprised, of course, because logic had already pointed out that the ruler of Antan would very naturally be a divine personage with just such a magnificent past. To be a god appeared to him a rather beautiful idea. So he first asked what was the meaning of that skull over yonder in the grass: the Princess explained that it was not her skull, but had been left there by a visitor some two months earlier: and then Gerald, after having agreed with her that people certainly ought to be more careful about their personal belongings, went on with what was really in his mind.

“In any event, ma’am,” he hazarded, with the brief cough of diffidence, “it seems there have been tender passages between us before this morning—”

“I trusted you! I gave you all!” she said, reproachfully. “But you, disposer of supreme delights, and fair vase of my soul, you have forgotten even the way you used to take advantage of my confidence! For how can the modesty of a frail woman avail against the brute strength of a determined man!”

“No, Evelyn, not to-night—I beg your pardon, ma’am! My mind was astray. What I meant to say was that I really must request you to desist.” Then Gerald went on, tenderly: “To the contrary, my dear lady, our love stays unforgettable. I recall every instant of it, I bear in mind even that sonnet which I made for you on the evening of my first respectful declaration of undying affection.”

“Ah, yes, that lovely sonnet!” the Princess remarked, with the uneasiness manifested by every normal woman when a man begins to talk about poetry.

“—And to prove it, I will now recite that sonnet,” Gerald said.

And he did.

Yet his voice was so shaken with emotion that, when he had completed the octave, Gerald paused, because it was never within Gerald’s power to resist the beauty of a sublime thought when it was thus adequately expressed in flawless verse. So for an instant he stayed silent.

He caught up the lovely, always straying hands of the Princess Evasherah, of this impulsive and investigatory lady, who so troublingly resembled Evelyn Townsend, and Gerald pressed these hands to his trembling lips. This lovely girl, returned to him almost miraculously, it might seem, out of his well-nigh forgotten past, was not merely intent once more to trust him and to give him all. She trusted also, as Gerald felt with that keen penetration which is natural to divine beings, to delude and to wheedle him into some material loss. What the Princess desired to cajole him out of was, perhaps, not wholly clear. Nevertheless, he felt that, in some way or another way, Evasherah was attempting to deceive him. It might be that neither her explanation as to that skull nor even her so candid seeming adoration of his wisdom and his comeliness was entirely sincere. For women were like that: they did not always mean every word they said, not even when they were addressing a god. And so, the gods had over-painful duties laid upon them, Gerald decided.

After that he sighed: and he continued the reciting of his sonnet with an air of lofty resignation, with which was intermingled a certain gustatory approval of really good verse.

“Light of my universe, that is a very beautiful sonnet,” the Princess remarked, when he had finished, “and I am proud to have inspired it, and I am almost equally proud of the fact that you (through whose supreme elegance and amiable aspect my heart is once more rent with ecstasy) should remember it so well after these thousands of years.”

“Years mean very little, ma’am, to Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones: and centuries are, quite naturally, powerless to dim my memories of any matter in any way pertaining to you. Yet affairs of minor importance do rather tend to become a bit ambiguous as the æons slip by.... For example, what, in the intervals between my redemptory exploits—upon mere week days, as it were,—what do I happen to be the god of?”

“That,” said the Princess, “O my master, and pure fountain-head of every virtue, is a peculiarly silly question to be coming from you, who are, as everybody knows, the Lord of the Third Truth.”

“Ah, yes, to be sure,—of the Third Truth! My divine interests are invested in veracity. Well, that is highly gratifying. Yet, ma’am, there are a great many gods, and it is a rather beautiful idea to observe that, even where their professional spheres are the same, these gods differ remarkably. Thus, Vulcan is the lord of one fire, and Vesta of another, but Agni and Fudo and Satan rule over yet other fires, each wholly individual. Cupid and Lucina traffic in the same port, but not in the same way. Æolus controls twelve winds, and Tezcatlipoca four winds, and Crepitus only one wind—”

“Director of my life, and comely shepherd of my soul, I know. Few gods are strange to me or to my embraces. Many a Heavenly One has invited me to love, and I have yielded piously: my kisses have written the tale of my religious transports upon many divine cheeks.”

“—And I imagine that this water from the Churning of the Ocean was not intended, in the first place, to further my apotheosis. I mean, ma’am, I do not suppose you went to the trouble of stealing six drops of the Amrita in order just to recall to me that divinity which, in the press of other affairs, I had somehow permitted to slip my mind?”

“Disposer and sole archetype of the seven magnanimities, you speak the truth. For the five remaining drops, as I was trying to tell you when you kept interrupting me, O my lord, and beloved of my heart, and joy of both my eyes, were intended for the five human senses of the young man about whom I was then rather foolish; and upon whom I meant to bestow immortality and eternal youth. The first drop, inasmuch as the Amrita confers a never-ending vigorousness, I had of course already placed. So my Father (whose name be exalted!) smote us both with lightnings, in his impetuous way, and tumbled us both from out of the Home of the Heavenly Ones into this river. My young man was thus drowned before I had the chance to confer upon him any of the favors which I greatly fear your superior strength and your pertinacity are now about to force from me—”

Gerald replied: “I really do think you would get on far more quickly with your story if you were to keep both of these like this. The position, you see, is much more American: it lacks that earlier air of such personal freedom as a democracy does not think well of.”

“Light of the age, I hear and I obey. Yet all my tale has been revealed to your consideration—”

“Yes,” Gerald assented, “but your history interests me far more—”

“Far more than what, O cruel and resplendent one?”

“Why, far more than I can say, of course. So let us get on with it!”

“But my sad history is now as refined glass before your discerning glance. It suffices to add that the immortal part of my young man was happily removed from the waters of this river, and is now worshipped as a god in Lytreia. But for me, alas! the squirrel of calamity continued to revolve in the cage of divine wrath. For, so perfectly ridiculous is the way my Father (whose name be exalted!) behaves when the least thing upsets him, that I was condemned through the length of nine thousand years to assume certain official duties in the waters of this river, in the repugnant shape of a crocodile.”

But with that statement Gerald took prompt issue. “What may be your official duties as the guardian of these waters I can no more guess than I can guess how your visitors happen to be so careless about leaving their skulls behind. That really is a sort of slapdash and inconsiderate behavior which I cannot condone without considerable reflection. But I do know that the shape which I have beheld, and still see a great deal of, in nothing resembles the shape of a crocodile.”

“Epitome of every excellence, and exalted zenith of my existence, that is because the nine thousand years of my doom have now happily expired. The proof of this is that already my luckless substitute arrives. We shall now behold her encounter with the terminator of delights and the separator of companions. Thereafter, when we have had breakfast, O vital spirit of my heart, whom my unmitigated love incites me to devour out of pure affection, I shall ride hence upon the horse with which you have so gallantly presented me, to enter again into the Home of the Heavenly Ones.”

With that, the Princess pointed.

8.
The Mother of Every Princess

WITH that, the Princess pointed. And Gerald also now looked toward the river.... He viewed an unsolid-seeming world of dimly colored movings. Directly before him the deep river sparkled and rippled eastward with unhurried, very shallow undulations. But, under the sun’s warmth, mists rising everywhere above the waters streamed eastward too, unhastily, and in such unequal volume that now this and now another portion of the wide landscape beyond the river was irregularly glimpsed and then, gradually but with a surprising quickness, veiled. Very lovely medallions of green lawns and shrubbery and distant hills thus seemed to take form and then to dissolve into the mists’ incessant gray flowing, toward the newly risen sun....

And Gerald also saw that, some fifty feet away from him, an unusually unclad elderly woman was approaching the river bank, carrying in her thin arms a child. The woman trudged forward toward the river like a drugged person, because of the doom which was upon her.

Now this woman seemed to stumble, and she fell into the water, but in falling she cast the child from her, so that it remained safe in the coarse tall-growing grass.

The woman whom divine will had led hither to serve as a scapegoat for the Princess Evasherah proceeded to drown satisfactorily, and with indeed a sort of decorum. She sank twice, with hardly any beating or splashing of the waters, because of that doom which was upon her. The child, though, whom no long years of living had taught to accept a preponderance of unpleasant happenings, screamed continuously, in candid, mewing disapproval of divine will.

Out of the near-by reeds came a bright-eyed jackal; and it furtively approached the child.

The Princess rose from the alabaster couch and from Gerald’s partially detaining arms. She stood for an instant irresolute. In her lovely face was trouble. Her mouth, a little open, trembled. Gerald liked that. Here was revealed the ever-tender heart of womanhood and the quick generous sympathy with all afflicted persons which living had taught him to look for only in the best literature.

The Princess quitted Gerald. She hastened to the river bank. The jackal backed from her, crouching in a half-circle, with bared teeth, and the reeds swallowed the beast. The Princess leaned down, and with a lovely gesture of compassion the Princess caught the drowning woman by one hand and assisted her ashore.

It was then that the Princess Evasherah cried out in wordless surprise. Then too her raised hands clenched, and her little fists jerked downward in a gesture of candid exasperation.

And then also the woman whom the Princess had just saved from drowning unfastened the small copper bowl and the knife which hung by copper chains about her waist. The Princess took these, she approached the wailing child, she stooped, and the crying ceased. The Princess returned to the strange woman, calling out, “Hrang, hrang!” To the gray lips of this woman Evasherah applied the blood which was now in the copper bowl, and the remainder of the child’s blood she sprinkled over the woman’s unveiled breasts and between the woman’s legs, which were held wide apart for this fecundation.

“Hail, Mother!” said Evasherah. “All hail, O red and wrinkled Mother of Every Princess! Hail, patient and insatiable Havvah! A salutation to thee! Spheng, spheng! a salutation to thee, and all delight to thee for a thousand years of thy Wednesdays! Drink deep, beloved and wise Mother, for an oblation of blood which has been rendered pure by holy texts is more sweet than ambrosia.”

At first the elder lady had seemed peculiarly red and inflamed and hideous among her tousled tresses. Now she was placated, she panted, and her eyes rolled languorously. She began, with aggrieved reproach, “But, O my dearie! you have relapsed into a masculine display of clemency such as has flung away your allotted chance of redemption.”

“Sorrow and mourning reside in my heart, O my Mother: my limbs are rendered infirm by remorse. For I had no least notion it was you. I thought only that some mortal woman was to take over my duties in the repulsive shape of a crocodile; and I could not bear to hear the small voice of the little child crying out as the sharp jackal teeth drew nearer, and to reflect that I was destroying two lives in order to purchase my freedom from this endless love-making and over-eating.”

“But it was a boy child. Dearie, you are talking as though these sons of Adam were of real importance. And to hear you, nobody would ever give you your due credit for having piously ended the ambitions of so many hundreds of them, since you have protected the entrance to the road of gods and myths against the impudence of these romantics.”

“Yet, refuge of the uplifted, and asylum of the vigorous, the persons whose blood has nourished my exile were all young men aflame with impure intentions. And a child is different. It is not right that the stainless flesh of a little boy, which is an offering acceptable to all our exalted race, should be torn by the long teeth of an undomesticated dog.”

“That is true. That is alike a truthful and a pious reflection. A child is different from all other afflictions, because a child alone can always be an endless and a quite new sort of trouble. That nobody knows better than I who am the Mother of Every Princess, with my daughters everywhere policing the wild dreams of men so inadequately. Yet a thing done has an end. And it may be that by and by I can get around your Father—”

“Whose name be exalted!” remarked Evasherah.

“That also, dearie, is a wholly proper observation,—though, as I was saying, you know as well as I do how pig-headed he is. Meanwhile, there is nothing left for you, for the present, save another incarnation, and another century or two of seductiveness upon the verge of Doonham.”

“But I have been,” observed the Princess, “a crocodile professionally for nine thousand years, for all that my chest is so delicate. The cats of conjecture are therefore abroad in the meadows of my meditation purring that this time I would prefer something a little less damp.”

“Dearie, since your next incarnation is but a matter of form, do you by all means please yourself, so that you stay a destruction to young men and to their upsetting aspirations. You have been wholly inadequate this morning, I observe—”

“Why, but—” said the abashed Princess.

Her voice sank as she went on rather ruefully with a talking which to Gerald was now inaudible. He could merely see that the elder lady had hazarded a suggestion which Evasherah at once dismissed with an emphatic toss of her lovely head. He saw too the Princess place together the palms of her hands and then draw them about seven inches apart.

“Oh, fully that, at first!” she stated, in the raised tones of mild exasperation, “so that, altogether, this unresponsive person (within whose ancestral tomb may all goats propagate!) remains quite incomprehensible.”

The old woman replied: “In any event, you have failed; but that does not really matter. He travels, you assure me, with his assured betrayer. And the road he follows, that also, is lively enough and long enough to betray him in the end. For he will meet others of my daughters; and if all else fails, he will meet me.”

“The ship of my enduring resolution is not yet wrecked upon the iceberg of his indifference; and I am not through with him, by any means. I am returning to this unremunerative occupier of my couch,—for breakfast, O my Mother,” the Princess added, with a merry laugh.

And the old lady answered her with a mother’s ever-responsive tenderness. “That is my own child. One has to persevere with these romantics, no matter how hard the task may seem. For none of us knows yet what these romantic men desire. My daughters prepare for them fine food and drink, my daughters see to it that their homes are snug, and at the end of each day my daughters love them dutifully. All things that men can ask for, my daughters furnish them. Why need so many of these men nurse strange desires which do not know their aim? for how can any of my daughters content such desires?”

“One can but summon, O my Mother, the terminator of delights and the separator of companions and the ender of all desires.”

“There are other ways, my dearie, which are more subtle. That way is of the East, that way is old and crude. Still, that way also quiets over-ambitious dreaming; and that way serves.”

Gerald blinked. He was a bit troubled by the matter-of-fact occurrence before his eyes of a perfectly incredible happening.

For the elder lady became transfigured. She became larger, all ruddiness went away from her, and she took on the black and livid coloring of a thunder cloud. In her left hand she now carried a pair of scales and a yardstick. Her face smiled rather terribly as she steadily grew larger. Her necklace, you perceived, was made of human skulls, and each of her earrings was the dangling corpse of a hanged man in a very poor state of preservation. Altogether, it was not a grief to Gerald when the Mother of Every Princess had attained to her full heavenly stature, and had vanished.

But the Lady of the Water-Gap was changed in quite another fashion. Where she had stood now fluttered a large black and yellow butterfly.

9.
How One Butterfly Fared

SO it was in the shape of a large butterfly that Evasherah returned toward Gerald, to careen and drift affectionately about him, in a bewildering medley of bright colors. He cried to her adoringly, “My darling—!” He grasped at her: and she did not avoid him.

Gerald now held this lovely creature, by the throat, at arm’s length. He began the compelling words, “Schemhamphoras—” And in Gerald’s face was no adoration whatever.

Instead, he continued, rather sadly, “—Eloha, Ab, Bar, Ruachaccocies—” and so went through the entire awful list, ending by and by with “Cados.”

His prey was now struggling frantically. The unreflective girl had not allowed for her lover’s being a student of magic. And her restiveness was—well, it might be, pardonably,—a bit interfering with Gerald’s æsthetic delight, now that he paused to admire the splendor of the trapped Princess’s last incarnation, before he used the fatal Hausa charm.

For Evasherah’s wings were of a wonderful velvety black and a fiery orange color, her body was golden, and her breast crimson. He noted also that Evasherah, in her increasing agitation of mind, had thrust out from the back of her neck a soft forked horn which diffused a horrible odor.

And those curved, strong, needle-sharp fangs which were striking vainly at him were so adroitly designed that Gerald fell now to marveling, still a little sadly, at their superb efficiency. A yellowish oil oozed from their tips. They had, he saw, just the curve of two cat claws: whensoever such fangs struck flesh, their victim’s recoil would but clamp fangs which were shaped like that more deeply and more venomously; it was a quite ingenious arrangement. It perfectly explained, too, how the visitors of this soft-spoken, cuddling and utterly adorable Princess happened to leave their skulls in the thick grass around her alabaster couch.

Then Gerald said: “O Butterfly, O Gleaming One, your breakfast this day is disappointment, your fork is agony, and your napkin death. O Butterfly, repent truly, abandon falsehood, put away deceit and flattery, cease thinking about your deluded lovers even remorsefully. Repent in verity, do not repent like the wildcat which repents with the fowl in its mouth without putting the fowl down. Where now is the artfulness which was yours, where are the high-hearted, tricked lovers?—To-day all lies in the tomb. This world, O Butterfly, is a market-place: everyone comes and goes, both stranger and citizen. The last of your lovers is a pious friend, he assists the decreed course of this world.”

Still, it was rather strange that the body she had chosen appeared to belong to the species _Onithoptera crœsus_,—Gerald decided, as his foot crushed the squeaking soft remnants and rubbed all into a smeared paste of blood and gold-dust,—because, of course, this kind of butterfly was more properly indigenous to the Malay Archipelago than to these parts, over and above the fact that for any butterfly to have the fangs of a serpent was false entomology.

However, the geography and local customs and all else which pertained to the Marches of Antan were tinged with some perceptible inconsequence, Gerald reflected, as he returned to his tethered stallion. He mounted then, cheered with the yet further reflection that he had got from Evasherah the rather beautiful idea of being a god, and had got also the four remaining drops from the Churning of the Ocean. The properties of this water were sufficiently well known to every student of magic.