Round and round, a gleaming form slow circled in the deepest eddies:— white, and vaguely Yillah.
Straight I plunged; but the currents were as fierce headwinds off capes, that beat back ships.
Then, as I frenzied gazed; gaining the one dark arch, the revolving shade darted out of sight, and the eddies whirled as before.
“Stay, stay! let me go with thee, though thou glidest to gulfs of blackness;—naught can exceed the hell of this despair!—Why beat longer in this corpse oh, my heart!”
As somnambulists fast-frozen in some horrid dream, ghost-like glide abroad, and fright the wakeful world; so that night, with death-glazed eyes, to and fro I flitted on the damp and weedy beach.
“Is this specter, Taji?”—and Mohi and the minstrel stood before me.
“Taji lives no more. So dead, he has no ghost. I am his spirit’s phantom’s phantom.”
“Nay, then, phantom! the time has come to flee.”
They dragged me to the water’s brink, where a prow was beached. Soon— Mohi at the helm—we shot beneath the far-flung shadow of a cliff; when, as in a dream, I hearkened to a voice.
Arrived at Odo, Media had been met with yells. Sedition was in arms, and to his beard defied him. Vain all concessions then. Foremost stood the three pale sons of him, whom I had slain, to gain the maiden lost. Avengers, from the first hour we had parted on the sea, they had drifted on my track survived starvation; and lived to hunt me round all Mardi’s reef; and now at Odo, that last threshold, waited to destroy; or there, missing the revenge they sought, still swore to hunt me round Eternity.