Nourmahal (eagerly). Let us go to-morrow. Let us go before the daughter of the King of the East is carried in her palanquin to the palace. I want to see all the places where you have been. I want to know something of the strange things that you have seen.
Mehrab. The women of Saranazett have never traveled.
Nourmahal. But I will not be a woman of Saranazett. There are other worlds and other ways for me than the ways of Saranazett.
Mehrab. You shall not be queen one day and someone else queen in your place the next. I was not born to live in the world's high places, but also I was not born to bend the knee. You shall not suffer because you are not a king's daughter, and because those that are kings' daughters smile at you behind their curtains.
Nourmahal (more dreamily reluctant). If we could make Saranazett over into a new world.
Mehrab. A new world somewhere else, Nourmahal. The packs are being made ready for the camels. Have your women tie up your clothes as if they were bundles of figs. Day after to-morrow or the next day or the next, we shall take horse and follow. We shall go to a world that is an old, old world, wiser than our world, a world where men's thoughts are free and their women's eyes look wherever they will.
Nourmahal (passing to the gate). The women shall make ready.
Mehrab. At once, and tell Zuleika she goes with you.
Nourmahal. Zuleika shall make ready.
She passes out through the gate into the garden. Mehrab turns and sees the spikes driven into the wall by the tower. For a moment he looks at them in astonishment, observing that they pass down to the ground slopingly, and then, one by one, he pulls them out and flings them down on the ground violently.