About two miles from Hussun Abdaul were those Royal Gardens,[306] which had grown beautiful under the care of so many lovely eyes, and were beautiful still, though those eyes could see them no longer. This place, with its flowers, and its holy silence, interrupted only by the dipping of the wings of birds in its marble basins filled with the pure water of those hills, was to LALLA ROOKH all that her heart could fancy of fragrance, coolness, and almost heavenly tranquillity. As the Prophet said of Damascus, “it was too delicious;”[307]—and here, in listening to the sweet voice of FERAMORZ, or reading in his eyes what yet he never dared to tell her, the most exquisite moments of her whole life were passed. One evening, when they had been talking of the Sultana Nourmahal, the Light of the Haram,[308] who had so often wandered among these flowers, and fed with her own hands, in those marble basins, the small shining fishes of which she was so fond,[309]—the youth, in order to delay the moment of separation, proposed to recite a short story, or rather rhapsody, of which this adored Sultana was the heroine. It related, he said, to the reconcilement of a sort of lovers’ quarrel which took place between her and the Emperor during a Feast of Roses at Cashmere; and would remind the Princess of that difference between Haroun-al-Raschid and his fair mistress Marida,[310] which was so happily made up by the soft strains of the musician, Moussali. As the story was chiefly to be told in song, and FERAMORZ had unluckily forgotten his own lute in the valley, he borrowed the vina of LALLA ROOKH’S little Persian slave, and thus began:— ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Light of the Haram ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Who has not heard of the vale of CASHMERE, With its roses the brightest that earth ever gave,[311] Its temples, and grottos, and fountains as clear As the love-lighted eyes that hang over their wave?