Julian hastened to his aid, destroyed the army of the infidels, laid siege to the town, slew the Caliph, cut off his head, and threw it like a ball over the ramparts. Then he took the Emperor from his prison and caused him to remount his throne in presence of all his court.
As the price of such a service, the Emperor presented him with much silver in baskets; Julian would have none of it. Believing that he desired more, he offered him three-quarters of his wealth; another refusal. Then to share his kingdom; Julian thanked him and declined. And the Emperor wept for vexation, not knowing how to testify his gratitude, when he struck his forehead, said a word into the ear of a courtier, the curtains of a tapestry were raised, and a young girl appeared.
Her great black eyes shone like two soft lamps. A charming smile parted her lips. The ringlets of her hair were caught in the jewels on her open dress; and under the transparence of her tunic her youthful form was half-revealed. She was all dainty and plump, with a slender waist.
Julian was dazzled with love, the more so as he had so far led a life of extreme chastity.
So he received the Emperor’s daughter in marriage, with a castle which she held of her mother; and, the nuptials ended, they parted with no end of compliments on either side.
The palace was of white marble, built in the Moresque style, on a headland, in a grove of orange-trees. Terraces of flowers stretched down to the border of a bay, where pink shells crunched under the feet. Behind the castle extended a forest in the shape of a fan. The sky was always blue, and the trees bent now beneath the sea-breeze, now beneath the wind from the mountains that framed the distant horizon.
The rooms, full of twilight, were illumined by the incrustations upon the walls. Tall columns, slender as reeds, supported the vaulting of the cupolas, which were decorated with reliefs in imitation of the stalactites of grottoes.
There were fountains in the halls, mosaics in the courtyards, festooned partition-walls, a thousand refinements of architecture and everywhere such silence that one could hear the rustling of a scarf or the echo of a sigh.
Julian made war no longer. He rested, surrounded by a people at peace; and each day a crowd passed before him with genuflexions and hand-kissing in the Oriental fashion.
Clad in purple he leaned on his elbows in a window-recess and recalled his hunts of bygone days; and he could have wished to be coursing over the desert after the gazelles and the ostriches, to be hiding in the bamboos on the watch for leopards, to be traversing the forests full of rhinoceroses, climbing to the summit of the most inaccessible mountains to get better aim at the eagles, or fighting the white bears on the icebergs of the sea.