* * * * * * * Calming the frenzy of his thoughts by a strong effort, he began to vaguely wonder why and how it happened that the place where he now was, . . this small and insignificant court,--had so far escaped the fire, and was as cool and sombre as a sacred tomb set apart for some hero, ... or Poet? Poet!--The word acted as a stimulant to his tired struggling brain, and he all at once remembered what Sah-luma had said to him at their first meeting: "There is but one Poet in Al-Kyris, and I am he!"
O true, true! Only one Poet! ... Only one glory of the great city, that now served him as funeral pyre!--only one name worth remembering in all its perishing history.. the name of SAH-LUMA! Sah-luma, the beautiful, the gifted, the famous, the beloved, . . he was dead! This thought, in its absorbing painfulness, straightway drove out all others,--and Theos, who had carried his comrade's corpse bravely and unshrinkingly through a fiery vortex of imminent peril, now sank on his knees all desolate and unnerved, his hot tears dropping fast on that fair, still, white face that he knew would never flush to the warmth of life again!
"Sah-luma! Sah-luma!" he whispered, "My friend ... My more than brother! Would I could have died for thee! ... Would thou couldst have lived to fulfil the nobler promise of thy genius! ... Better far thou hadst been spared to the world than I! ... for I am Nothing, . . but thou wert Everything!"
And taking the clay-cold hands in his own, he kissed them reverently, and, with an unconscious memory not born of his recent adventures, folded them on the dead Laureate's breast in the fashion of a Cross.
As he did this an icy spasm seemed to contract his heart, . . seized by a sudden insufferable anxiety, he stared like one spell-bound into Sah-luma's wide-open, fixed, and glassy eyes. Dead eyes! ... yet how full of mysterious significance! ... What--WHAT was their weird secret, their imminent meaning! ... Why did their dark and frozen depths appear to retain a strange, living undergleam of melting, sorrowful, beseeching sweetness? ... like the eyes of one who prays to be remembered, though changed after long absence! What hot and terrible delirium was this that snatched at his whirling brain as he bent closer and closer over the marble quiet countenance, and studied with a sort of fierce intentness every line of those delicate, classic features, on which high thought had left so marked an impress of dignity and power! What a, marvellous, half-reproachful, half-appealing smile lingered on the finely-curved set lips! ... How wonderful, how beautiful, how beloved beyond all words was this fair dead god of poesy on whom he gazed with such a passion of yearning!