She stood thus almost as if again turned to stone, until his fear left him and he saw only her beauty, and knew only her living loveliness in a tunic of the sacred purple fringed with tinkling discs, that was clipped to her waist with a zone of gold and veiled, even in the stone, her secret hips and knees. The slender feet were guarded with pantoffles of crimson hide. Green agates in strings of silver hung beside her brows, depending from a fillet of gems that crowned and confined the black locks tightly curled. Buds of amber and coral were bound to her dusky wrists with threads of copper, and between the delicacy of her brown breasts an amulet of beryl, like a blue and gentle star, hung from a necklace made of balls of opal linked with amethysts.
“Wonder of god! who are you?” whispered the warrior; but while he was speaking she ran past him sweetly as an antelope to the dark god. He heard the clicking of her beads and gems as she bent in reverence kissing the huge stone feet of Sarkkon. He did not dare to approach her although her presence filled him with rapture; he watched her obeisant at the shrine and saw that one of her crimson shoes had slipped from the clinging heel. What was she—girl or goddess, phantom or spirit of the stone, or just some lunatic of the desert? But whatever she was it was marvellous, and the marvel of it shocked him; time seemed to seethe in every channel of his blood. He heard her again call out his name as if from very far away.
“Talakku!”
He hastened to lift her from the pavement, and conquering his tremors he grasped and lifted her roughly, as a victor might hale a captive.
“Pretty antelope, who are you?”
She turned her eyes slowly upon his—this was no captive, no phantom—his intrepid arms fell back weakly to his sides.
“You will not know me, O brave Assyrian captain,” said the girl gravely. “I was a weaver in the city of Eridu....”
“Eridu!” It was an ancient city heard of only in the old poems of his country, as fabulous as snow in Canaan.
“Ai ... it is long since riven into dust. I was a slave in Eridu, not ... not a slave in spirit....”
“Beauty so rare is nobility enough,” he said shyly.