But Bhanavar had bent over the basin of the fountain, and beheld the image of her change therein, and was hurrying from the hall and down the corridors of the palace to the private chamber.  So he made bare the steel by his side, and followed her with a number of the harem guard, menacing her, and commanding her to surrender the crown with the Jewel.  Ere she could lay hand on a veil, he was beside her, and she was encompassed.  In that extremity Bhanavar plucked the Jewel from her crown, and rubbed it, calling the Serpents to her.  One came, one only, and that one would not move from her to sling himself about the neck of Mashalleed, but whirled round her, hissing: 

               Every hour a serpent dies,
               Till we have the sacrifice: 
               Sweeten, sweeten, with thy kiss,
               Quick! a soul for Karatis.

Surely the King bit his breath, marvelling, and his fury became an awful fear, and he fell back from her, molesting her no further.  Then she squeezed the serpent till his body writhed in knots, and veiled herself, and sprang down a secret passage to the garden, and it was the time of the rising of the moon.  Coolness and soothingness dropped on her as a balm from the great light, and she gazed on it murmuring, as in a memory: 

Shall I counsel the moon in her ascending? 
Stay under that dark palm-tree through the night,
Rest on the mountain slope,
By the couching antelope,
O thou enthroned supremacy of light! 
And for ever the lustre thou art lending
Lean on the fair long brook that leaps and leaps,
Silvery leaps and falls: 
Hang by the mountain-walls,
Moon! and arise no more to crown the steeps,
For a danger and dolour is thy wending!

And she panted and sighed, and wept, crying, ’Who, who will kiss me or have my kiss now, that I may indeed be as yonder beam?  Who, that I may be avenged on this King?  And who sang that song of the ascending of the moon, that comes to me as a part of me from old times?’ As she gazed on the circled radiance swimming under a plume of palm leaves, she exclaimed, ‘Ruark!  Ruark the Chief!’ So she clasped her hands to her bosom, and crouched under the shadows of the garden, and fled through the garden gates and the streets of the city, heavily veiled, to the prison where Ruark awaited her within the walls and Ukleet without.  The Governor of the prison had been warned by Ukleet of her coming, and the doors and bars opened before her unchallenged, till she stood in the cell of Ruark; her eyes, that were alone unveiled, scanned the countenance of the Chief, the fevered lustre-jet of his looks, and by the little moonlight in the cell she saw with a glance the straw-heap and the fetters, and the black-bread and water untasted on the bench—­signs of his misery and desire for her coming.  So she greeted him with the word of peace, and he replied with the name of the All-Merciful.  Then said she, ‘O Ruark, of Rukrooth thy mother tell me somewhat.’