They sang and drummed, they scratched their fiddles and twanged their guitars, they played the harps and clanked the cymbals to the admiring assemblage of noblemen, who wondered how this miserable, half-starved vagabond dared to compete with his wretched little instrument.
When the musicians had ended, Asneha got up, announcing the Song of Songs.
It began imperceptibly, but as insinuatingly as the language of a couple of loving eyes whispers to another loved pair; so indistinct to the ear that it was as the incipient melody in the mind of the composer.
Then it continued, soothing and muffled as the patter of small naked feet dancing the nautch on the marble flooring; rattled speedily as an incessant cascade of rubies, diamonds, sapphires, pearls and emeralds on a basin of gold. Steadily it flowed, like a Song of Desire and Voluptuousness, filling the hall with a scarlet inundation of light; heavy and numbing as the exhalation of soporific flowers.
But now it ascended to healthier altitudes like a Song of Victory and Exultation, direct and concise, in a blast of crystal trumpets, higher, slowly, in the manner of the eagle.
