Now, while they were speeding over the water, Noorna said, ’The end of this fair sea is Aklis, and beyond it is the Koosh.  So while the wind is our helmsman, and we go circled by the quiet of this sea, I’ll tell thee of myself, if thou carest to hear.’

And he cried with the ardour of love, ’Surely, I would hear of nought save thyself, Noorna, and the music of the happy garden compareth not in sweetness with it.  I long for the freshness of thy voice, as the desert camel for the green spring, O my betrothed!’

So she said, ’And now give ear to the following’:—­

AND THIS IS THE STORY OF NOORNA BIN NOORKA, THE GENIE KARAZ, AND THE PRINCESS OF OOLB

Know, that when I was a babe, I lay on my mother’s bosom in the wilderness, and it was the bosom of death.  Surely, I slept and smiled, and dreamed the infant’s dream, and knew not the coldness of the thing I touched.  So were we even as two dead creatures lying there; but life was in me, and I awoke with hunger at the time of feeding, and turned to my mother, and put up my little mouth to her for nourishment, and sucked her, but nothing came.  I cried, and commenced chiding her, and after a while it was as decreed, that certain horsemen of a troop passing through the wilderness beheld me, and seeing my distress and the helpless being I was, their hearts were stirred, and they were mindful of what the poet says concerning succour given to the poor, helpless, and innocent of this world, and took me up, and mixed for me camel’s milk and water from the bags, and comforted me, and bore me with them, after they had paid funeral rites to the body of my mother.

Now, the rose-bud showeth if the rose-tree be of the wilds or of the garden, and the chief of that troop seeing me born to the uses of gentleness, carried me in his arms with him to his wife, and persuaded her that was childless to make me the child of their adoption.  So I abode with them during the period of infancy and childhood, caressed and cared for, as is said: 

The flower a stranger’s hand may gather,
Strikes root into the stranger’s breast;
Affection is our mother, father,
Friend, and of cherishers the best.

And I loved them as their own child, witting not but that I was their child, till on a day while I played among some children of my years, the daughter of the King of Oolb passed by us on a mule, with her slaves and drawn swords, and called to me, ‘Thou little castaway!’ and had me brought to her, and peered upon my face in a manner that frightened me, for I was young.  Then she put me down from the neck of her mule where she had seated me, saying, ’Child of a dead mother and a runaway father, what need I fear from thy like, and the dreams of a love-sick Genie?’ So she departed, but I forgot not her words, and dwelt upon them, and grew fevered with them, and drooped.  Now, when he saw my bloom of health gone, heaviness on my feet, the light hollowed from my eyes, my benefactor, Ravaloke—­he that I had thought my father—­took me between his knees, and asked me what it was and the cause of my ailing; and I told him.