To travellers journeying on,

The shutting of thy fair face from my sight.
Might I look on thee in death,
With bliss I would yield my breath.

Oh! what warrior dies
With heaven in his eyes?
O Bhanavar! too rich a prize!
The life of my nostrils art thou,
The balm-dew on my brow;

Thou art the perfume I meet as I speed o'er the plains,
The strength of my arms, the blood of my veins.

Then said he, 'I make nothing matter of complaint, Allah witnesseth! not
even the long parting from her I love. What will be, will be: so was it
written! 'Tis but a scratch, O my soul! yet am I of the dead and them
that are passed away. 'Tis hard; but I smile in the face of bitterness.'

Now, at his words the damsel clutched him with both her hands, and the
blood went from her, and she was as a block of white marble, even as one
of those we meet in the desert, leaning together, marking the wrath of
the All-powerful on forgotten cities. And the tongue of the damsel was
dry, and she was without speech, gazing at him with wide-open eyes, like
one in trance. Then she started as a dreamer wakeneth, and flung herself
quickly on the breast of the youth, and put up the sleeve from his arm,
and beheld by the beams of the quarter-crescent that had risen through
the leaves, a small bite on the arm of the youth her betrothed, spotted
with seven spots of blood in a crescent; so she knew that the poison of