tance, at the end of the corridor. This light came to them through the lace-work of a carving that evidently made part of the room in which the corridor terminated. The slave again touched a spring, and Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed found himself in a great hall paved with white marble, with a basin and fountain in the middle, columns of alabaster, walls covered with mosaics of glass and sentences from the Koran, interspersed with flowers and other decorations, while over all was a vault, intricately and laboriously carved, like the interior of a beehive or of a grotto roofed with stalactites; the decoration was completed by huge scarlet poppies growing in great Moorish vases of blue and white porcelain. Seated upon an estrade piled with cushions, in a sort of alcove that had been excavated in the thickness of the wall, was the princess Ayesha, unveiled, radiant with beauty and surpassing in loveliness the houris of the fourth heaven.
"Well! Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed," she said, addressing him in a most gracious tone and signing to him to be seated, "have you been making more verses in my honor?"
Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed cast himself at Ayesha's feet and, drawing the papyrus from his sleeve, recited his ghazel in most impassioned tones; in truth it was a remarkable piece of poetry. As he read the princess's cheeks brightened and flamed like a lamp of alabaster that has been newly lighted. Her eyes shone like stars and emitted rays of surprising brightness, her form seemed to become transparent, and there was a faint apparition as of butterfly-wings growing from her pretty, vibrating shoulders. Unfortunately Mahmoud-Ben-Ahmed, too deeply engrossed in reading
