Page:Man in the Panther's Skin.djvu/129

 not wearisome to her. That sun met in his bedchamber a slave with a courteous word. She ordered him to come to her. Tongue cannot tell how pleased he was.

675. The knight went joyful, tender, not ill content, the lion who had roamed the fields with the lions of the field and had lost his colour, a knight of the world, in quality a gem and a faultless ruby, but for heart's sake he had exchanged heart for heart.

676. Bold sits the sun upon her throne, majestic, unconstrained, a fair aloe planted in Eden, generously watered by Euphrates' stream; the jetty hair and the eyebrow thickets adorned the crystal and ruby (of her countenance). Who am I that I should praise her? It needs the myriad tongues of Athenian sages to praise her fitly.

677. She set the joyful knight before her with his chair, they both sat full of gladness to converse as befitted them; they spoke with dignity and fluency, not with unpolished words. She said: "Thou hast found him in whose quest thou hast seen misfortunes?"

678. He answered: "When the world gives a man his heart's desire, it befits not to recall grief (which is) as a day that is past. I found the tree, an aloe in form, watered by the stream of the world; there (I found) the face (which was) like the rose, but now is wan.

679. "There saw I the cypress, the rose-like, whose power was spent; he (Tariel) says: 'I have lost the crystal, and that where the crystal unites with glass (?).' I burn (for him) because, like me, unendurable fire consumes him." Then again he told the story he had heard from (Tariel).