A stairway led to a high
shrine where hung the crucified Tyrian sphinx. The room was like a
singing voice summoning one to delights which it described. But
whatever way one looked all the lines neither pointed nor seemed to
have had beginning, but being divorced from source and direction
expressed merely beauty, like an altar "where none cometh to pray."
Prince Tabnit, in his trailing robe of white embroidered by a
thousand needles, looked so akin to the room that one suspected it
of having produced him, Athena-wise, from, say, the great black
shrine. When he paused before the shrine he seemed like a child come
to beseech some last word concerning the Riddle, rather than a man
who believed himself to have mastered all wisdom and to have nailed
the world-sphinx to her cross.
"Surely there is a vein for the silver
And a place for the gold where they fine it.
Iron is taken out of the earth
And brass is moulton out of the stone.
Man setteth an end to darkness
And searcheth out all perfection:
The stones of darkness and of the shadow of death,"
he was repeating softly.
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