‘Sir,’ said Fleur, ’hear the whole truth—­I am son to the King of Spain, and seek my stolen Blanchefleur, without whom I cannot live; help me to her, and I will give you gold to your heart’s content, for ere another moon has waxed and waned, find her I must or die.’

‘Life,’ replied Daries, ’were ill lost for sake of a maiden, whom no aid of mine can make your own, seeing that not, were the whole world to help you, could Blanchefleur be taken from the Admiral, Lord of a hundred kings, whose city Babylon is a four-square of twenty miles, and has for its defence walls full seventy feet in height, built of a stone so hard that no engine of war from enemies without can pierce their stony front, and in these walls are three-and-thirty doors of solid steel let in with cunning art, and high uplifted are seven hundred towers, the loftiest ever seen by mortal eye, and these towers are guarded by seven hundred great lords, each one of whom is great as any king; and if all these suffice not to prove the madness of your quest, know that in the heart of the city a mighty castle stands; four stories high is the castle, and on the fourth and topmost dwells your Blanchefleur, together with four other noble damsels in a fair chamber, whose windows are cased in wood of the sweet-scented myrtle tree, while its doors are formed of ebony that never yields to fire, and this ebony is overlaid with beaten gold, on which are graven strange devices of words and scroll and flower-work, and, because none but maidens dwell there, this tower is called the Maidens’ Tower.  In its midst stands a crystal pillar, and from the pillar gushes forth a fountain, whose waters are led on arches into every room, and so back into the pillar; and from the maidens’ chamber a winding stair leads to that wherein dwells the Admiral himself, and whither, for fourteen days’ service at a time, two maidens must wait morning and evening on their Lord, one with a fair linen towel, the other with water in a golden bowl.  Fierce and cruel beyond words is the watchman of this tower, and any man who, without good and lawful cause, approaches it, he slays.  Besides all this, the tower day and night is guarded by sixteen furious men, who never close their eyes in sleep; and there is yet another strange thing which you shall hear.

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’Every springtide the Admiral takes to him a wife; and when the year is out, he calls to him all the lords, kings, and princes of his realm, and in their presence casts off his wife, and causes a knight to behead her, that no man may wed her after him; thus with the bitterness of an early death does she pay for the fleeting honour of royal wedlock; and when his wife is dead, the Admiral, with intent to replace her with another, summons the maidens who are within the tower to appear before him in a garden, which trembling they enter, none coveting the fatal honour of his choice.  This garden, which walls of gold and lapis-lazuli enclose, contains noble trees of