And yet, all this beauty was nothing but a mask, and a lie: and so far from expressing the nature of that soul which it covered and disguised, it actually added evil to its original defect; and he resembled a bamboo, looking like a very incarnation of loveliness and symmetry outside, and singing in the wind, and yet absolutely hollow and without a heart, within. For from the very moment he was born, he did exactly as he pleased, and nothing else, being as capricious as the breeze that blows only as it chooses. For beginning with his parents, nobody ever crossed him, or placed any obstacle whatever in the path of his desires, which grew up accordingly like a very rank jungle impervious to the light, in which his will wandered like a wild young tiger-cub, wayward, and passionate, and absolutely uncontrolled. And he gave in to others, and was guided by them, in one point only, and that was in their extravagant admiration of himself. For finding others worship him, he fell in with their opinion, and followed their example: and became as it were the devotee at the shrine of his own beauty, making it a deity to which every other thing or body was only fitted to be sacrificed. And he filled his rooms with mirrors of many colours, made of crystal and lapiz-lazuli, and polished gold and silver, and the water of tanks whose slabs were of marble of every variety of hue; and he used to sit alone, when he had nothing else to do, for hours, watching his own image that seemed to offer him reciprocally worship as he watched it, as if it were doubtful which of the two, the reality or its reflection, was the deity, and which the devotee. And gradually the world with all its objects came to appear in his eyes as nothing but a playground, and all its men and women merely his own animated toys. And from being utterly indifferent to everything but his own momentary pleasure and caprice, he became, little by little, first callous to the sufferings of others, and finally positively cruel, finding his amusement in making others victims to his own peremptory desires. And his appetite, like a fire, grew with the fuel that it fed upon, till it resembled voracity, and an intolerable thirst for more. But as long as he remained still a child, the fire, remaining as it were without its proper aliment, lay hidden: till he grew into a man. And then, all at once, it blazed out furiously like a very conflagration, striking terror into all the subjects of the kingdom, and threatening to consume them all, like forest trees and grass.