"Death and fury!" he shouted, striking his sword with a fierce clang against the silver pedestal of the throne, . . "Where is Khosrul?" The silence of an absolute dismay answered him, ... Khosrul had fled! Like a cloud melting in air, or a ghost vanishing into the nether-world, he had mysteriously disappeared! ... he had escaped, no one knew how, from under the very feet and out of the very grasp of the irate monarch, whose baffled wrath now knew no bounds. "Dolts, idiots, cowards!".. and he hurled these epithets at the timorous crowd with all the ferocity of a giant hurling stones at a swarm of pigmies.. "Babes that are frighted by a summer thunder-storm! ... Ye have let yon accursed heretic slip from my hands ere I had choked him with his own lie! O ye fools! Ye puny villains! ... I take shame to myself that I am King of such a race of weaklings! Lights! ... Bring lights hither, ye whimpering slaves,--ye shivering poltroons! ... What! call yourselves men! Nay, ye are feeble girls prankt out in men's attire, and your steel corselets cover the faintest hearts that ever failed for dastard fear! Shut fast the palace-gates! ... close every barrier! ... search every court and corner, lest haply this base false Prophet be still here in hiding,--he that blasphemed with ribald tongue the High Priestess of our Faith, the holy Virgin Lysia! ... Are ye all turned renegades and traitors that ye will suffer him to go free and triumph in his lawless heresy? Ye shameless knaves! Ye milk-veined rascals! ... What abject terror makes ye thus quiver like aspen-leaves in a storm? ... this darkness is but a conjurer's trick to scare women, and Khosrul's followers can so play with the strings of electricity that ye are duped into accepting the witch-glamour as Heaven's own cloud-flame! By the gods! If Al-Kyris falls, as yon dotard pronounceth, her ruins shall bury but few heroes! O superstitious and degraded souls! ... I would ye were even as I am--a man dauntless,--a soldier unafraid."