Page:Edmund Dulac's picture-book for the French Red cross.djvu/52

LAYLA AND MAJNUN was wrenched away. At the touch of his lips upon hers, she swooned in his arms. He let her fall, and ran, shrieking, out of the forest and into the desert; shrieking her name, far into the desert.

'''Laylá! Laylá! Laylá!'''—his maniac cries echoed on and on until, in the hopeless waste of wilderness, he fell exhausted. But Zeyd, who had followed his voice, at last found him. Many a day and night he tended his master, but to no purpose. Joy had done what grief had failed to do: he was mad!

Laylá awoke from her swoon, and, hearing her own name repeated again and again,—that wild cry coming from farther and farther in the desert,—divined the truth and returned, slowly and wringing her hands, to the palace.

From time to time Zeyd sent news of Majnún and his undying love, which even his madness had failed to touch.

Day by day, and week by week, Laylá's eyes grew brighter and her cheeks paler. Slowly she pined away, and then she died of a broken heart. Her last words were a message to Majnún—a message of love that could not die, though it must quit the beautiful, unhappy house of clay in which it had suffered so much.

'And tell him,' she said, 'that my body shall be buried by the side of the fountain where he first clasped me in his arms. And tell him, too, these very words: Majnún, lift thine eyes! See, yonder are the Fields of Light, and a fountain springing in the sunshine—yonder—a fountain of eternal waters, where lovers meet, never to part again;—thou shalt find me there!' And with that she died, and her spirit sped on her parting thought to that place of lovers' meeting;—the immortal font of lovers' meeting.

Dawn was breaking on the desert when two figures came running. Each held the other by the hand, and on the face of one was that look which told how he had been driven mad by love. Majnún, outstripping Zeyd, left him to follow, and plunged into the forest. Soon he came to the open space in which the fountain played. Well he knew the spot where he had first clasped Laylá 26