Now, he beheld the sword and the ripples of violet heat that were breathing down it, and those two venomous serpents twining together, and the size of it, its ponderousness; and to essay lifting it appeared to him a madness, but he concealed his thought, and ...went forward to it boldly, and piercing his right arm between the twists of the serpents, grasped the jewelled haft. Surely, the sword moved from the slings as if a giant had swayed it! But what amazed him was the marvel of the blade, for its sharpness was such that nothing stood in its way, and it slipped through everything, as we pass through still water,--the stone columns, blocks of granite by the walls, the walls of earth, and the thick solidity of the ground beneath his feet. They bade him say to the Sword, "Sleep!" and it was no longer than a knife in the girdle. Likewise, they bade him hiss on the heads of the serpents, and say, "Wake!" and while he held it lengthwise it shot lengthening out. In fact, it lengthens across the world, if the owner so desires, to kill an enemy thousands of miles away. With this wonderful sword at last Shagpat is shaved. But notwithstanding the power of thousands of good spirits who help the work, and the white magic of the beautiful Noorna, the shaving is an awfully difficult thing to do. The chapter describing it reads as magnificently as the description of the Judgment Day, and you will wonder at the splendour of it. What does all this mean, you may well ask. What is the magical hair? What is the sword? What is every impossible thing recounted in this romance? Really the author himself gives us the clue, and therefore his meaning ought to have been long ago clearly perceived. At the end of the story is this clue, furnished by the words-- The Sons of Aklis were now released from the toil of sharpening of the sword a half-cycle of years, to wander in delight on the fair surface of the flowery earth, breathing its roses, wooing its brides; for the mastery of an event lasteth among men the space of one cycle of years, and after that a fresh illusion springeth to befool mankind, and the Seven must expend the concluding half-cycle in preparing the edge of the Sword for a new mastery. From this it is quite evident to anybody who has read the book that the sword of Aklis is the sword of science,--the power of exact scientific knowledge, wielded against error, superstition, humbug, and convention of every injurious kind. Do not, however, imagine that this bit of interpretation interprets all the story; you must read it more than once, and think about it a great deal, in order to perceive the application of its thousand incidents to real human nature.