or Ar-hap? What a fool I was to risk myself day by day in quaint and
dangerous adventures, wearing out good Government shoe-leather in other
men's quarrels, all for a silly slip of royal girlhood who, by this time,
was probably making herself comfortable and forgetting both Hath and me
in the arms of her rough new lord.

And from Heru my mind drifted back dreamily to poor An, and Seth, the
city of fallen magnificence, where the spent masters of a strange planet
now lived on sufferance--the ghosts of their former selves. Where was
An, where the revellers on the morning--so long ago it seemed!--when
first that infernal rug of mine translated a chance wish into a horrible
reality and shot me down here, a stranger and an outcast? Where was the
magic rug itself? Where my steak and tomato supper? Who had eaten it? Who
was drawing my pay? If I could but find the rug when I got back to Seth,
gods! but I would try if it would not return whence I had come, and as
swiftly, out of all these silly coils and adventuring.

So musing, presently the firelight died down, and bulky forms of
hide-wrapped woodmen sleeping on the floor slowly disappeared in obscurity
like ranges of mountains disappearing in the darkness of night. All those
uncouth forms, and the throb of the sea outside, presently faded upon my
senses, and I slept the heavy sleep of one whose wakefulness gives way
before an imperious physical demand. All through the long hours of the
night, while the waves outside champed upon the gravels, and the woodmen
snored and grunted uneasily as they simultaneously dreamt of the day's
hunting and digested its proceeds, I slept; and then when dawn began to
break I passed from that heavy stupor into another and lighter realm,
wherein fancy again rose superior to bodily fatigue, and events of the
last few days passed in procession through my mind.