So the tenderness of her fondling melted the silence in him, and presently his tongue was loosed, and he breathed in pain of spirit, and his words were the words of the proverb: 

He that fighteth with poison is no match for the prick of a thorn.

And he said, ’Surely, O Bhanavar, my love for thee surpasseth what is told of others that have loved before us, and I count no loss a loss that is for thy sake.’  And he sighed, and sang: 

Sadder than is the moon’s lost light,
Lost ere the kindling of dawn,
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 the serpent had entered by that bite; and she loosened herself to the violence of her anguish, shrieking the shrieks of despair, so that the voice of her lamentation was multiplied about and made many voices in the night.  Her spirit returned not to her till the crescent of the moon was yellow to its fall; and lo! the youth was sighing heavy sighs and leaning to the ground on one elbow, and she flung herself by him on the ground, seeking for herbs that were antidotes to the poison of the serpent, grovelling among the grasses and strewn leaves of the wood, peering at them tearfully by the pale beams, and startling the insects as she moved.  When she had gathered some, she pressed them and bruised them, and laid them along his lips, that were white as the ball of an eye; and she made him drink drops of the juices of the herbs, wailing and swaying her body across him, as one that seeketh vainly to give brightness again to the flames of a dying fire.