thousands of candles were glowing all about, and their light shone
in the wine that the Princes drank and on the huge gold candelabra,
and the royal faces were irradiant with the glow, and the white
table-cloth and the silver plates and the jewels in the hair of the
Queens, each jewel having a historian all to itself, who wrote no
other chronicles all his days. Between the table and the door there
stood two hundred footmen in two rows of one hundred facing one
another. Nobody looked at Leothric as he entered through the hole in
the door, but one of the Princes asked a question of a footman, and
the question was passed from mouth to mouth by all the hundred
footmen till it came to the last one nearest Leothric; and he said
to Leothric, without looking at him:

'What do you seek here?'

And Leothric answered: 'I seek to slay Gaznak.'

And footman to footman repeated all the way to the table: 'He seeks
to slay Gaznak.'

And another question came down the line of footmen: 'What is your
name?'

And the line that stood opposite took his answer back.

Then one of the Princes said: 'Take him away where we shall not hear
his screams.'

And footman repeated it to footman till it came to the last two, and
they advanced to seize Leothric.