THE MARSH KING'S DAUGHTER
mummy, in the midst of the great hall with its many-coloured walls; it looked just as if he was lying in a tulip. His kinsmen and servants stood around him; he was not dead; you could not call him alive; he existed. The healing moss-flower from the northern land, which should have been searched for and gathered by her who loved him most dearly, would never be brought. His young and beautiful daughter, who flew in swan's-plumage over sea and land, far towards the north, would never return. 'She is dead and gone!' the two swan-maidens had told him on their return. They had invented a whole history of it. Said they:—
'We all three flew high in the air: a hunter saw us and shot an arrow; it struck our friend, and singing her farewell, like a dying swan, she slowly sank, in the midst of a forest lake. There we buried her, near the shore of the lake, under a fragrant weeping-birch. But we took our revenge! We bound fire under the wings of a swallow which had built under the hunter's thatched roof! The thatch caught; the house blazed up! He was burned in it, and the light shone over the lake as far as the drooping birch tree under which she is buried. She will never come back to the land of Egypt.'
And so they both wept; and the father-stork, when he heard it, chattered with his beak till it rattled again.
'Lies and make-up!' said he. 'I have a great mind to drive my beak into their hearts.'
'And break it off!' said mother-stork. 'And what good would that do? Think first of yourself and your own family; everything else is of no consequence!'
'However, I will seat myself on the edge of the open court in the morning, when all the learned doctors are met to talk about the illness. Perhaps they will come a little nearer the truth.'
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