A yataghan might have been at his throat, a bowstring at his neck, eunuchs might have slaughtered, and pachas have impaled him, Galahad would have seen more of that loveliness: headlong he plunged down the slope, crushing through the almond thickets and scattering the green tree-frogs right and left; the caïque was just rounding past as he reached the water's edge, and the beauty's veil was drawn in terror of her guard. But as the little cockle-shell, pretty and ticklish as a nautilus, was moored to a broad flight of marble stairs, the Circassian turned her head towards the place where the Unbeliever stood in the sunlight--her eyes were left her, and with them women speak in a universal tongue. Then the green lattice gate shut, the white impenetrable walls hid her from sight, and Sir Galahad stood looking down the Sweet Waters in a sort of beatific vision, in love for the 1360th time in his life. And certainly he had never been in love with better reason; for is there anything on earth so divine as your antelope-eyed and gold-haired Circassian?
"I shall be inside those walls or know the reason why," said he, whom two gazelle eyes had fired and captured, there by the side of the sunny Sweet Waters, where the lazy air was full of syringa and rose odors, and there was no sound but the indolent beating of the tired oars on the ripples.
"Which reason you will rapidly find," I suggested, "in a knock on the head from the Faithful!"
"Well! a very picturesque way of coming to grief; to go off the scene in the sick-wards, from raki and fruit, would be commonplace and humiliating, but to die in a serail, stabbed through and through by green-eyed jealousy, would be piquant and refreshing to the last degree; do you really think there's a chance of it?" said Galahad, rather anxiously--the eager wistful anxiety of a man who, athirst for the forest, hears of the rumored slot of an outlying deer--while he shouted the Greek fishermen to him, and learned after sore travail through a slough of mixed Italian, Turkish, and Albanian, that the white palace, with its green lattice and its hanging gardens, belonged to a rich merchant of Constantinople, and that this veiled angel was the favorite of his harem, Leilah Derran, a recent purchase in Circassia, and the queen of the Anderùn.