KOOROOKH

Now, they sped from the Cave of Chrysolites by another passage than that by which they entered it, and nothing but the light of the Sword to guide them.  By that light Shibli Bagarag could distinguish glimmering shapes, silent and statue-like, to the right and the left of them, their visages hidden in a veil of heavy webs; and he saw what seemed in the dusk broad halls, halls of council, and again black pools and black groves, and columns of crowded porticoes,—­all signs of an underground kingdom.  They came to some steps and mounted these severally, coming to a platform, in the middle of which leapt a fountain, the top spray of it touched with a beam of earth and the air breathed by men.  Here he heard the youths dabble with the dark waters, and he discerned Gulrevaz tossing it in her two hands, calling, ‘Koorookh!  Koorookh!’ Then they said to him, ’Stir this fountain with the Sword, O Master of the Event!’ So he stirred the fountain, and the whole body of it took a leap toward the light that was like the shoot of a long lance of silver in the moon’s rays, and lo! in its place the ruffled feathers of a bird.  Then the seven youths and the Princess and Shibli Bagarag got up under its feathers like a brood of water-fowl; and the bird winged straight up as doth a blinded bee, ascending, and passing in the ascent a widening succession of winding terraces, till he observed the copper sun of Aklis and the red lands below it.  Thrice, in the exuberance of his gladness, he waved the Sword, and the sun lost that dulness on its disk and took a bright flame, and threw golden arrows everywhere; and the pastures were green, the streams clear, the sands sparkling.  The bird flew, and circled, and hung poised a moment, presently descending on the roof of the palace.  Now, there was here a piece of solid glass, propped on two crossed bars of gold, and it was shaped like an eye, and might have been taken for one of the eyes inhabiting the head of some monstrous Genie.  Shibli Bagarag ran to it when he was afoot, and peered through it.  Surely, it was the first object of his heart that he beheld—­Noorna, his betrothed, pale on the pillar; she with her head between her hands and her hair scattered by the storm, as one despairing.  Still he looked, and he save swimming round the pillar that monstrous fish, with its sole baleful eye, which had gulped them both in the closed shell of magic pearl; and he knew the fish for Karaz, the Genie, their enemy.  Then he turned to the Princess, with an imploring voice for counsel how to reach her and bring her rescue; but she said, ‘The Sword is in thy hands, none of us dare wield it’; and the seven youths answered likewise.  So, left to himself, he drew the Sword from his girdle, and hissed on the heads of the serpents, at the same time holding it so that it might lengthen out inimitably.  Then he leaned it over the eye of the glass, in the direction of the pillar besieged by the billows, and