drove through valleys and burnt up the harvest; she reduced villages to dust; she dried up rivers; and before her, the mountains split asunder.
Her sceptre made a way for her, and no law of nature resisted her power. The air was grey with the clouds of ash, which rained down upon the earth.
She went along as swiftly as an arrow, swiftly as lightning, swiftly as light, swiftly as thought. She went so swiftly, that in a single hour she had gone all round her wide kingdom intoxicated with the pride of annihilation, and she drove her maddened horses through endless plains of sand.
Desert after desert she consumed; the lions fled before her; she overtook them in a moment; clouds of sand she sent up into the air. . . .
But then she relaxed her speed. She stopped.
Before her, grey and high through the clouds of sand and falling ash, there loomed a most dreadful shadow.
The shadow was like a gigantic beast, squatting in the sand, with a woman’s head in a stiff basalt veil. The woman’s head had
