The girl extended her slender arms and with serpentine passes and gestures stroked his forehead; and then, stepping to his left side, with her knuckles she rapped sharply here and there along his spine, making the lost magic of far-off Tibet, whereby men become gods, and gods become beasts. Then in softly purring syllables she continued, "You can not cross the threshold to enter the presence of the Lord of the World. Try and see whether I am right." The sultan sought to advance; but his feet were fixed to the tiles, and a heaviness that forbade all movement possessed him. Again that soft rippling voice: "You have become as immobile as those eleven who were once kings. And with another pass I could weave about you that silence from the ancient mountains, from which you could not emerge until the end of all time...." She faced him, regarded him intently, then continued: "But I shall restore you and make you more agile than the fancies of those who eat the plums that grow on the slopes of Mount Kaf." Whereat she made passes and tapped him as she had done before. "Now, Schamas ad Din, son of the Old Tiger, enter the presence of the Lord of the World." [Illustration: "Now, Schamas ad Din, enter the presence of the Lord of the World."] The sultan advanced, marveling that he could not feel the touch of his feet on the floor. The sighing music ceased piping; and as the rose-and-saffron-shot mists thinned and drew back and vanished, he found himself in a circular vault on whose domed ceiling glittered stars arranged in strange constellations; and the floor of the vault was not tiled, but strewn with powdered cinnabar. In the center of the vault was a low couch of grotesquely chiseled green basalt on which sat an old man whose head was bowed in sleep. "Son of the Old Tiger," said the incredible girl at the sultan's side, "you are before the Lord of the World, he who built this prodigious citadel the day he completed the creation of this and all other worlds. He sleeps, and sleeping, dreams; and all things that seem to be are but the figments of his dream; and those things whereof he ceases to dream at that moment cease to be. For nothing is real, save it be the illusion of him who sits here dreaming." "Then who are you?" queried the sultan. The girl smiled, and patted the twining, jeweled blackness of her hair. "I also am illusion, and his masterwork." "Then if all this be a dream, who and what am I?" "You too are but one of his fancies; and when he ceases to picture you----" The sultan shuddered at the girl's gesture of dismissal; but he resumed, "Then if he were to awaken?" "All things," replied the girl, "would revert to that which existed before he fell asleep. Even I would vanish, just as your dreams when you awaken from them become as nothing."