The girl smiled, and patted the twining, jeweled blackness of her hair.
"I also am illusion, and his masterwork."
"Then if all this be a dream, who and what am I?"
"You too are but one of his fancies; and when he ceases to picture you——"
The sultan shuddered at the girl's gesture of dismissal; but he resumed, "Then if he were to awaken?"
"All things," replied the girl, "would revert to that which existed before he fell asleep. Even I would vanish, just as your dreams when you awaken from them become as nothing."
The girl smiled at the dazed sultan, and continued, "But I shall not and can not vanish, since he can not cease dreaming his most wondrous vision. Nor can he awaken, since I have made his sleep eternal. He ascribed to me all perfection; and thus I have the power which you perceived in my greeting of you. And more than that: it is I who cast a spell over him whose dream I am, so that through the boundless wastes of time he can not awaken; and I can even now whisper in his ear that which I wish him to dream, and straightway his visions create that which I desire."
"Then," deduced the sultan after a long pause, "you are greater than this Lord of the World whose fancy you are?"
The girl stared fixedly as a brooding fate. Then finally she spoke.
"There you have that which few men have ever known: that their illusion transcends and finally conquers them—even as this god is the toy of his own dream, and the prey of an old magic from Tibet."