HASSAN
Oh, Ishak! The fire of the heart of beauty!
RAFI Leave me, Pervaneh! Walk not upon my path! You do not know what a foul doom is mine.
PERVANEH Foul dooms? Foul dooms? Rafi, I can forget ten centuries of doom now that I see your eyes again!
RAFI
I conspired against his throne to win you freedom.
Through my fault I failed, through my fault my thousand followers
are dancing in the wind.
PERVANEH
For me you conspired? For me—for me?
RAFI
I would have drowned Bagdad in blood to kiss your lips again.
PERVANEH
O lover!
RAFI
(Showing his fettered hands) Lover indeed!
PERVANEH There are a thousand eyes around us, O my beloved, but what care I? The voice of the world cries out, "Thou art a slave in the Palace, and thy lover a prisoner in chains." (Embracing him.) But we have heard the Trumpets of Reality that drown the vain din of the Thing that Seems. We have walked with the Friend of Friends in the Garden of the Stars, and He is pitiable to poor lovers who are pierced by the arrows of this ghostly world. Your lips are the only lips, my lover, your eyes the only eyes— all the other eyes but phantom lights that glitter in the mist of dream.
COURTIER
This is sheer heresy.