A man is a small thing and the night very large and full of wonders. 
You may well not see him.

Queen: 

I should like to see him.  Why cannot I see him?

King Karnos: 

I have sent the camel-guard to search for him and to stop him playing his lute.

    [To Ichtharion]

Do not let the Queen know about this prophecy.  She would think...  I do not know what she would think.

Ichtharion: 

No, your Majesty.

King Karnos: 

The Queen has a very special fear of the gods.

Ichtharion: 

Yes, your Majesty.

Queen: 

You speak of me?

King Karnos: 

O no.  We speak of the gods.

    [The earthly music ceases.]

Queen: 

O do not speak of the gods.  The gods are very terrible; all the dooms that shall ever be come forth from the gods.  In misty windings of the wandering hills they forge the future even as on an anvil.  The future frightens me.

King Karnos: 

Call the Queen’s maidens.  Send quickly for her maidens.  Do not let the future frighten you.

Queen: 

Men laugh at the gods; they often laugh at the gods.  I am more sure that the gods laugh too.  It is dreadful to think of the laughter of the gods.  O the lute! the lute!  How clearly I hear the lute.  But you all hear it?  Do you not?  You swear that you all hear it?

King Karnos: 

Yes, yes.  We all hear the lute.  It is only a man playing.

Queen: 

I wish I could see him.  Then I should know that he was only a man and not Gog-Owza, most terrible of the gods.  I should be able to sleep then.

King Karnos:  [Soothingly]

Yes, yes.

    [Enter Attendant]

Here comes the man that I have sent to find him.  You have found the lute player.  Tell the queen that you have found the lute player.

Attendant: 

The camel-guard have searched, your Majesty, and cannot find any man that is playing a lute.

    [Curtain]

Act III

    [Three days elapse.]

Tharmia: 

We have done too much.  We have done too much.  Our husbands will be put to death.  The prophet will betray them and they will be put to death.

Arolind: 

O what shall we do?

Tharmia: 

It would have been better for us to have been clothed with rags than to bring our husbands to death by what we have done.

Arolind: 

We have done much and we have angered a king, and (who knows!) we may have angered even the gods.

Tharmia: 

Even the gods!  We are become like Helen.  When my mother was a child she saw her once.  She says she was the quietest and gentlest of creatures and wished only to be loved, and yet because of her there was a war for four or five years at Troy, and the city was burned which had remarkable towers; and some of the gods of the Greeks took her side, my mother says, and some she says were against her, and they quarrelled upon Olympus where they live, and all because of Helen.