"What other?"
"Basileus Basileon--'the King of Kings,'" she said softly, and looked out towards the sunrise. But the light had claimed the whole world and sent all shadows flying.
So happily, prosaically, they went home to breakfast. Yet there was one thing which she never told anyone, perhaps because it might have stood in the way of the popular explanation of the whole affair--namely, that Khesroo had happened on the coin and must have put it in Jim Forrester's hand after the latter fell asleep. So, not even when her father proudly pointed out to admirers that the double profile was that of a man and a woman, and that the latter, curiously enough, might almost be a portrait of his married daughter, did she ever say that when she found her husband asleep in the sand that morning, the looped bowstring of Khesroo the goatherd's bow was loose about his neck.
But she often wonders if it would have been drawn tighter had she not gone to seek for what she wanted.
[THE BIRTH OF FIRE]
The night was clear and silent.
The light-pulse of the stars as they wheeled with slow certainty to meet the dawn was the only visible movement in the whole expanse of shadowed earth and sky.
And the only sound audible was my own life breath as I sate beside the glowing embers of the camp fire.
Strictly speaking, however, there was no camp, for I, and the two coolies who carried my breakfast, had missed our way in our detour through the eternal sameness of faint curve and level in the wide uplands, and finally, in despair of rejoining our tents, had bivouacked as best we could on the shore of a small frozen lake; one of those obstinate, rock-bound pools which, even when spring has set seal of conquest on the world, refuse to melt, and so yield up their treasure of sweet water to its renewed thirst for Life.
My servants had forced this particular lakelet to philanthropy with rude blows; wantonly rude it had seemed to me, as I watched the swift shiver with which the stable unity of surface had split into forlorn fragments of ice, each adrift at the mercy of that which they had held prisoner for so long.