Shifting Scenes and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Jug Dev arose,
The monarch following, out into the air
Where the night burned with all her cabbala,
With her star symbols and her mystic calm;
All unobserved as yet. The revelry
Went on, but dragged a weary weight. The jibes
Fell dead and stale, and all the merriment
Trod on the skirts of dark forbidden things,
And passed like pageant past a place of tombs
When all the midnight flambeaux flame and flash
Full on the ghastly emblems. Every voice
Had whispered undertones; and every laugh
Was bitter at the core; and though the wine
Ran ripe and red, it warmed, but did not cheer.
Some secret seemed to lurk beneath each word,
And all the conversation rippled on
Like conscious waters, in whose ooze and slime
The uncoffined dead lie white, with glazèd eyes.
Portentous silence drew about the hall.

Each soul sat brooding in a ring of night,
Wherein no step unconsecrate might tread;
Some special terror leered with fiendish eyes
In at the window of each separate heart,
And knocked with ghostly warning at the door.

When, in a moment, all the paled lamps fell,
Sputtering their jets of fire, whereby each saw
White faces leaping ghastly through the gloom,
As all his neighbours rose upon their feet.
Then three sharp shrieks, like deadly daggers, stabbed
The silence:—Out into the breezy night
The revellers hurried through the open door,
And, looking up, beheld the stedfast heavens
Ruddy with stains of fire, and all the far
And dusky mountains staggering through the night,
To meet the fire-king in his furious raid.
High up, the palace was aflame. And there,
Perched on the topmost tower, in agony
Clutching each other were the traitor pair,
Ameer and Sivar; for some unknown hand
Had prematurely kindled the first spark
That caught them in their own thick mesh of fire.

And now the red and roaring surge updashed
Its flaming spume about the buttresses,
Shot up its tremulous tongues of forked wrath,
And grew and gathered round the fated tower;—

Its inpent fury bursting through the rents
And broken fissures, leaping on the night.
Hot lips of flame kissed the black cornices,
Blue jets of fire hissed through the crevices,
Fierce crested waves curled inward, dashed and broke
In glittering spray about the battlements,
Horrible cones shot up into the heavens,
Thin snakes of flame span out into the night,
Long sweeping billows flung their fiery forth
Full on the blistered front of shrinking walls;
And still the two forms, black amid the glow,
Loomed high above the red and rolling sea,
That now retreated, now roared out amain
In threefold fury, with its fiery waves
Lusting for conquest; till, at length, the beams
And rafters bent, and broke, and fell; and then
With a long roll, the mighty fabric lurched
Shuddering inwards.

All the hollow glooms
And dark domains of night, that had been filled
With the fierce splendour, all the startled hills
That on their crests had felt the ruddy glow,
And all the beasts of prey, from holes and dens,
Sank back into the dark, and disappeared,
As silence once more fell upon the night.