Page:Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen (Walker).djvu/223

Rh eyes, and black shining hair. She climbed up the steps to the little house; they were steep and made of sharp bits of marble from the broken columns. Gaily coloured lizards darted about among her feet, but they did not startle her. She was just raising her hand to the bell-pull; this was a hare's foot at the end of a piece of string, such is the bell now in the palace of the Cæsars. She paused a moment—what was she thinking about? Perhaps about the beautiful Infant Jesus wrapped in gold and silver down in the chapel, where the silver lamps gleamed, and where her little friends took part in singing the hymns which she knew, too; I do not know—she moved forward again, tripped, and the jar fell from her head, on to the steps, where it was broken to atoms upon the fluted marble. She burst into tears. The beautiful daughter of the Cæsars, weeping over the poor broken jar. There she stood with her bare feet, weeping, and dared not pull the string—the bell-rope of the palace of the Cæsars."

TWENTY-FIRST EVENING

The moon had not shone for over a fortnight, but now I saw it again; it rose round and bright above the slowly moving clouds. Listen to what it told me.

"I followed a caravan from one of the towns of the Fezzan. They made a halt near the desert by one of the salt plains; it shone like a sheet of ice, and was covered only in parts with quicksands. An elder among them with a water bottle hanging at his belt, and a bag of unleavened bread lying by him, drew a square with his staff in the sand and wrote in it some words from the Koran. After this the whole caravan entered within the consecrated space. A young merchant, a child of the sun—I saw it in his eyes and in the beautiful lines of his figure—rode his fiery white steed thoughtfully. Was he perhaps thinking of his fair young wife? It was only two days since a camel covered with skins and costly shawls carried her,