mind, as if the sentiment that suddenly seized it filled it so
completely as to leave room for nothing else. And he stood still gazing,
feeling as though he were spinning round, though he was standing still
as death. For there before him stood this enigmatical King's daughter.
And like her father, she also seemed an incarnation of the soul of
grief, not as in his case ignominious, and an object of derision, but
rather resembling a heavenly drug, compounded of the camphor of the cold
and midnight moon, that had put on a fragrant form of feminine and fairy
beauty to drive the world to sheer distraction, half with love and half
with woe. For like the silvery vision of the newborn streak of that Lord
of Herbs, she was slender and pale and wan, formed as it seemed of some
new strange essence of pure clear ice and new dropt snow, and she loomed
on the soul of Aja out of the blackness of his trance like a large white
drooping lily, just seen in the gloom of an inky night. And her hair and
brow were the colour of a thunder-cloud in the month of Chaitra[9], and
like that cloud, the heavy sorrow hung in her great dark mournful eyes,
drenching him as it were with a shower of dusky dreamy dewy beauty, and
drawing him down bewitched and lost like the victim of a haunted pool
into the snaky eddy of their silent unfathomable recess. And yet her
deep red lips trembled, as it were on the very border of a smile, as if
they were hinting against their will of a mine of laughter and subtle
snares that they were not allowed to use. And she had risen up to come
and meet him, yet was hanging back as if reluctant, and so she stood,
all reflected in the polished floor, with her head thrown back to look
at him, for she was very small, like one on the very point of imploring
help, yet shrinking, as if too proud to ask it from a stranger, balanced
as it were between reliance on her own pure and pleading beauty and
doubtfulness of its reception. So she halted irresolute, with glorious
throat that was hovering still over the swell of her lifted breasts,
poised as it were on the very verge of tumultuous oscillation, like that