The noise of the revellers in the great court had not yet died away; and Fidá debated whether he dared pass through them on his way to bed. For the first time in many weeks he was thoroughly exhausted; and the chilly night air swept over his parched and burning body with grateful effect. All at once he felt that he dreaded to be alone because of the thoughts that might come upon him. Entering the north wing, he rapidly traversed the narrow passage leading past Ragunáth’s rooms, turned instinctively in the usual direction, and presently emerged at the court, where the ceremonial was over, the fires burning low, and the soma revellers lying or standing about in various degrees of intoxication. Near the door of the audience hall stood a little group of priests and officials, among whom were the Rajah and Ragunáth. Not daring to approach these, and giving not more than a passing thought to the matter, gradually overcome by vague, chaotic ideas that were rising in his mind, Fidá went on, out into the road, and along it till he came to the water palace that stood on the edge of the plateau, overlooking the south plain, through which the great Narmáda rushed. Here, in the stillness, Fidá halted, looking around him. He was beside one of the smooth water-basins overhung with slender bamboos and tamarind shrubs, with tangles of lotus-plants floating, brown and dead, upon its mirror-like surface. Before him rose the low, level walls of this charming accident of Indian architecture. On high, overhead, hung a late moon, wreathed in a feathery mist of night clouds, and throwing a faint light over the plain and the distant river. To the right, in the distance, a long, black, irregular shadow, rose the giant barrier of the Vindhyas, beyond whose mystic recesses, far northward, lay distant Delhi, the city of the slow-conquering race, the people of the captive now standing here alone with the night. Gradually, as Fidá looked, a great awe stole upon him. His body had grown cold with the night chill; but his mind took no heed of the flesh. A change was upon him. His chaotic thoughts were shaping themselves. Gradually, before the vastness, the high dignity of nature, the ugliness of his last weeks became clear to him, and he trembled with horror of himself. Slow tears ran down his cold, set face. He locked his hands together, and rocked his stiffened body to and fro. A cry was welling up in the heart of him, standing there in the face of Allah’s creation: the high-reaching hills, the wide, moonlit plain. To his overstrained nerves it seemed that they judged him, in their immense incorruptibleness:—him, the corrupt. And presently the mountains lifted up their voices and spake. Plainly to his ears, out of the dim, black recesses, came low, deep tones, uttering first his name: “_Fidá ibn-Mahmud ibn-Hassan el-Asra_,” and then, after a long pause, the words, old and familiar to him since childhood, the tradition of his race: