In times long past there went, pressing on through the night,

a caravan of Arabs of the desert,

until, as it drove deep into the plains,

behold — it saw the horses all around it

striking the breast of the earth with their hooves,

tails arched, ears pricked,

snapping their tethers

and backing away.

The she-camels bellowed in terror and rumbled,

necks stretched high, then fell back

and bolted into the wilderness — what a bolting!

And in the desert there blazed up

a tempest of fire and light, stretching

its neck through the darkness toward the sky.

Then it rose little by little, circling in the dome of the boundless worlds,

until it became a sun, then a sinking moon, then a planet, then a blazing star.

Is it a mountain of fire splitting open, or is the earth burning? Do I see the world coming to an end, the universe returning to darkness? The whirlwind has stilled, and everything has gone back to what it was.

And the old man of the caves completes the legend, saying:

The desert Arabs gathered their scattered company, and the wastes regained their calm,

and they set out for the dune to which the ray of that star was fastened,

and they beheld upon the ground a maiden whose beauty no slender beauties ever rivaled,

with a face that is the ornament of youth, cut from the very heart of morning,

still of sense: her breast did not flutter, nor did her black lashes stir,

her bosom withered, as though the clusters had withered upon their vines,

a dark girl beguiled by doom — parting, at the hand of death, sat upon her neck.

Her eyelid stares up at the star on high, as though it were knotted to the star.

They cried, "Anahid!" — and the echo went shrieking: "Anahid! Anahid!"

And on earth there was a funeral for her, and in the chambers of the heights, a feast.

*

Thus was "Anahid" transformed into a star — but what lies behind it?

She was one of the sorceresses of love: no youth ever slumbered in her tresses but went away drunken, never sobering, never coming to himself... until there passed by her tent a horseman whose glances scattered youth and perfume. Anahid looked out and saw:

As though his colt's two eyes disclosed to her what the horseman kept hidden,

her depths quivered with love, and the fruit-laden bough of her trembled,

and the dark girl wished that no garment had ever been rent for passion at her hands,

and that she had never gone on beguiling one youth after another before that dark horseman appeared.

She, the sorceress who felled men, is felled in her turn: bound, skin and soul, to the one who poured love into her heart like deadly poison! And now Cupid's arrow drives home and travels deep into her bones:

Three nights passed as if they were the shadow of a lance — or longer;

neither does the dark horseman disclose to Anahid's heart what he feels,

nor does Anahid, who has tried on him every incantation of sorcery, prevail.

And at the close of the third day, sleep touched her eyelids after the long wakefulness... a few seconds... then... the beat of a horse's hooves, which she felt striking upon her very heart: her fleeting dream had fled, and the dark horseman had wrapped himself in a fog of dust raised by a steed that outruns the wind! There she is, the love-maddened one, striking out across the wilderness, worn down by running, by hunger, and by the biting heat; and she went on running and falling and running again, until near the bend she saw a pillar of fire — the greatest god, guardian of the people of purity and cleanness, standing in her path — she, the daughter of error and temptation:

There