Page:Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen (Walker).djvu/224

186 his lovely bride, round the walls of the town, to the sound of drums and pipes. Women sang and festive salvoes were fired; the loudest and most frequent were fired by the bridegroom himself, and now—now he was leading the caravan through the desert. I followed them for many nights; I saw them rest by the wells among the dwarf palms. They stuck their knives into the breast of the fallen camel, and roasted the meat by the fire. My beams cooled the burning sand, my beams showed them the buried rocks like submerged islands in a sea of sand. They encountered no unfriendly tribes on the trackless plain, no storms arose, and no sandstorm swept mercilessly over the caravan. At home the lovely wife prayed for her husband and her father. 'Are they dead?' she asked my golden horns. 'Are they dead?' she asked my shining disc. Now the desert lies behind them, and this evening they sit beneath the lofty palm trees, where the crane spreads its broad wings and the pelican watches them through the branches of the mimosa. The luxuriant thicket is trodden down by the heavy feet of the elephant; a troop of negroes are returning from the market far inland. The women have copper beads twisted round their heads of frizzled hair, and they are clad in skirts of indigo blue. They drive the heavily laden oxen, on whose backs the naked black children lie sleeping. A negro leads by a rope a young lion which he has bought; they approach the caravan. The young merchant sits motionless and silent, thinking of his lovely bride; dreaming, in the land of the blacks, of his white flower beyond the desert; he lifts his head!"

A cloud passed over the moon, and then another; I heard no more that evening.

TWENTY-SECOND EVENING

"I saw a little girl crying," said the moon. "She was crying at the wickedness of the world. The loveliest doll in