She clutched one at her elbow, a hairy serpent with yellow languid eyes in flame-sockets and livid-lustrous length—a disease to look on, and cried:
Treble-tongue and throat of gall!
There's a youth beneath the pall.
And the Serpent replied:
Brilliant eye! bloody tear!
He has fed us for a year.
She squeezed that hairy serpent till her finger-points whitened in his neck, and he dropped lifelessly, crying:
Treble-tongues and things of mud!
Sprang my beauty from his blood?
And the Serpents rose erect, replying:
Yearly one of us must die;
Yearly for us dieth one;
Else the Queen an ugly lie
Lives till all our lives be done!
Bhanavar stood up, and hurried them to Karatis. When she was alone she fell toward the floor, repeating, ''Tis the Curse!' Suddenly she thought, 'Yet another year my beauty shall be nourished by my vengeance, yet another! And, O Vizier, the kiss shall be thine, the kiss of doom; for I have doomed thee ere now. Thou, thou shalt restore me to my beauty: that only love I now my Prince is lost.'
So she veiled her face in the close veil of the virtuous, and despatched Ukleet, whom she exalted in the palace of the King, to the Vizier; and Ukleet stood before Aswarak, and said, 'O Vizier, my mistress truly is longing for you with excessive longing, and in what she now undergoeth is forgotten an evil done by you to her; and she bids you come and concert with her a scheme deliberately as to the getting rid of this tyrant who is an affliction to her, and her life is lessened by him.'