Lifted above this troubled throng, one tall, dark figure was distinctly outlined against the dazzling face of the Obelisk--a figure that appeared to be standing on the back of the colossal Lion that lay couchant beneath. And as Theos strained his sight to distinguish the details of the scene more accurately, he suddenly beheld a glittering regiment of mounted men in armor, charging straightly and with cruelly determined speed, right into the centre of the crowd, apparently regardless of all havoc to life and limb that might ensue. Involuntarily he uttered an exclamation of horror at what seemed to him so wanton and brutal an act, when just then Sah-luma caught him eagerly by the arm,--Sah-luma, whose soft, oval countenance was brilliant with excitement, and in whose eyes gleamed a mingled expression of mirth and ferocity.
"Come, come, my friend!" he said hastily--"Yonder is a sight worth seeing! 'Tis the mad Khosrul who is thus entrenched and fortified by the mob,--as I live, that sweeping gallop of His Majesty's Royal Guards is magnificent! They will seize the Prophet this time without fail! Aye, if they slay a thousand of the populace in the performance of their duty! Come!--let us hasten to the scene of action--'twill be a struggle I would not miss for all the world!"
He sprang down the steps of the loggia, accompanied by Theos, who was equally excited,--when all at once Zabastes, thrusting out his head through a screen of vine-leaves, cried after them: "Sah-luma!--Most illustrious! What of the poem? It is not finished!"
"No matter!" returned Sah-luma--"'Twill be finished hereafter!"
And he hastened on, Theos treading close in his footsteps and thinking as he went of the new enigma thus proposed to puzzle afresh the weary workings of his mind. HIS poem of Nourhalma-- or rather the poem he had fancied was his--had been entirely completed down to the last line; now Sah-luma's was left "TO BE FINISHED HEREAFTER."
Strange that he should find a pale glimmering of consolation in this!--a feeble hope that perhaps after all, at some future time, he might be able to produce a few, a very few lines of noble verse that should be deemed purely original! ... enough perchance, to endow him with a faint, far halo of diminished glory such as plodding students occasionally win, by following humbly yet ardently ... even as he now followed Sah-luma ... in the paths of excellence marked out by greater men!