Page:The strange story book.djvu/291

 'Oh, my aunt, if you could only understand!' cried the princess, wringing her hands. 'I dared not excite the king's suspicions or I should never have escaped! I swear it by the ashes and the soul of the phoenix which were then in my pocket! Tell her, Bird of Wisdom, that what I say is true.'

'It is! It is!' exclaimed the phoenix eagerly. 'But now what we have to do is to go in search of Amazan. I will despatch unicorns in all directions, and I hope before many hours to be able to tell you where he is.'

The phœnix was as good as his word. At length one of the unicorns learned that Amazan was in China. Without losing a moment they set out, and arrived, travelling through the air, in the short space of eight days, but only to find that they had again missed him by a few hours. The emperor would gladly have kept Formosante to show her the wonders of his country, but as soon as he heard her story and how all this misery had its root in a kiss given out of pure fidelity, he saw that the one thing he could do for the princess was to discover for her the road which Amazan had taken.

From that day began a series of journeys such as no Babylonish princess had ever gone through during the thirty thousand years of the monarchy. There was not a kingdom either in Asia or in Europe that Formosante did not visit, and in spite of the fact that she had no room in her mind for any thought except the finding of Amazan (who had invariably left but a few hours before), she was forced to pick up some new ideas on the way. Strange things she saw which her father, King Belus, would never have believed to exist: a country in which the young king had made an agreement with his subjects that the farmer and the noble might sit side by side and make their own laws; another kingdom in which one man had power to prevent any law from being passed by the rest of the assembly; a third in which the will of one queen had changed the face of the world as if by magic, though, perhaps, if the princess had returned for a second visit, she might not have felt so certain that the changes would last. Once it was only a thick fog off an island called Albion which