without considerable reflection. But I do know that the shape which I have beheld, and still see a great deal of, in nothing resembles the shape of a crocodile.” “Epitome of every excellence, and exalted zenith of my existence, that is because the nine thousand years of my doom have now happily expired. The proof of this is that already my luckless substitute arrives. We shall now behold her encounter with the terminator of delights and the separator of companions. Thereafter, when we have had breakfast, O vital spirit of my heart, whom my unmitigated love incites me to devour out of pure affection, I shall ride hence upon the horse with which you have so gallantly presented me, to enter again into the Home of the Heavenly Ones.” With that, the Princess pointed. 8. The Mother of Every Princess The Mother of Every Princess WITH that, the Princess pointed. And Gerald also now looked toward the river.... He viewed an unsolid-seeming world of dimly colored movings. Directly before him the deep river sparkled and rippled eastward with unhurried, very shallow undulations. But, under the sun’s warmth, mists rising everywhere above the waters streamed eastward too, unhastily, and in such unequal volume that now this and now another portion of the wide landscape beyond the river was irregularly glimpsed and then, gradually but with a surprising quickness, veiled. Very lovely medallions of green lawns and shrubbery and distant hills thus seemed to take form and then to dissolve into the mists’ incessant gray flowing, toward the newly risen sun.... W W And Gerald also saw that, some fifty feet away from him, an unusually unclad elderly woman was approaching the river bank, carrying in her thin arms a child. The woman trudged forward toward the river like a drugged person, because of the doom which was upon her. Now this woman seemed to stumble, and she fell into the water, but in falling she cast the child from her, so that it remained safe in the coarse tall-growing grass. The woman whom divine will had led hither to serve as a scapegoat for the Princess Evasherah proceeded to drown satisfactorily, and with indeed a sort of decorum. She sank twice, with hardly any beating or splashing of the waters, because of that doom which was upon her. The child, though, whom no long years of living had
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