The beard of King Xixouthros had grown to such lengths that it had already wound itself seven times around the granite table against which he leaned, lost in reverie, as though in slumber.
Further in the distance, through a dim exhalation, across the mists of eternities, I beheld vaguely the seventy-two pre-Adamite kings, with their seventy-two peoples, vanished forever.
The Princess Hermonthis, after allowing me a few moments to enjoy this dizzying spectacle, presented me to Pharaoh, her father, who nodded to me in a most majestic manner.
“I have found my foot—I have found my foot!” cried the Princess, clapping her little hands, with every indication of uncontrollable joy. “It was this gentleman who returned it to me.”
The races of Kheme, the races of Nahasi, all the races, black, bronze, and copper-colored, repeated in a chorus:
“The Princess Hermonthis has found her foot.”
Xixouthros himself was deeply affected.
He raised his heavy eyelids, stroked his moustache, and regarded me with his glance charged with the centuries.
“By Oms, the dog of Hell, and by Tmei, daughter of the Sun and of Truth, here is a brave and worthy young man,” said Pharaoh, extending toward me his scepter which terminated in a lotus flower. “What recompense do you desire?”
Eagerly, with that audacity which one has in dreams, where nothing seems impossible, I asked him for the hand of the Princess Hermonthis. Her hand in exchange for her foot, seemed to me an antithetical recompense, in sufficiently good taste.