And now that the ardour of battle had passed away, the spirits of Merimna’s people began to gloom a little, like their leader’s, with their fatigue and with the cold of the morning; and they looked at the sword of Welleran in Rold’s hand and said:  ’Not any more, not any more for ever will Welleran now return, for his sword is in the hand of another.  Now we know indeed that he is dead.  O Welleran, thou wast our sun and moon and all our stars.  Now is the sun fallen down and the moon broken, and all the stars are scattered as the diamonds of a necklace that is snapped off one who is slain by violence.’

Thus wept the people of Merimna in the hour of their great victory, for men have strange moods, while beside them their old inviolate city slumbered safe.  But back from the ramparts and beyond the mountains and over the lands that they had conquered of old, beyond the world and back again to Paradise, went the souls of Welleran, Soorenard, Mommolek, Rollory, Akanax, and young Iraine.

The Fall of Babbulkund

I said:  ’I will arise now and see Babbulkund, City of Marvel.  She is of one age with the earth; the stars are her sisters.  Pharaohs of the old time coming conquering from Araby first saw her, a solitary mountain in the desert, and cut the mountain into towers and terraces.  They destroyed one of the hills of God, but they made Babbulkund.  She is carven, not built; her palaces are one with her terraces, there is neither join nor cleft.  Hers is the beauty of the youth of the world.  She deemeth herself to be the middle of Earth, and hath four gates facing outward to the Nations.  There sits outside her eastern gate a colossal god of stone.  His face flushes with the lights of dawn.  When the morning sunlight warms his lips they part a little, and he giveth utterance to the words “Oon Oom,” and the language is long since dead in which he speaks, and all his worshippers are gathered to their tombs, so that none knoweth what the words portend that he uttereth at dawn.  Some say that he greets the sun as one god greets another in the language thereof, and others say that he proclaims the day, and others that he uttereth warning.  And at every gate is a marvel not credible until beholden.’

And I gathered three friends and said to them:  ’We are what we have seen and known.  Let us journey now and behold Babbulkund, that our minds may be beautified with it and our spirits made holier.’

So we took ship and travelled over the lifting sea, and remembered not things done in the towns we knew, but laid away the thoughts of them like soiled linen and put them by, and dreamed of Babbulkund.

But when we came to the land of which Babbulkund is the abiding glory, we hired a caravan of camels and Arab guides, and passed southwards in the afternoon on the three days’ journey through the desert that should bring us to the white walls of Babbulkund.  And the heat of the sun shone upon us out of the bright grey sky, and the heat of the desert beat up at us from below.