Outside the alabaster hall it was pitch-dark,and I had to grope my way along with hands and feet.At last I felt a curtain,put it aside,and entered the black hall.There I found a great silent assembly.How it was visible I neither saw nor could imagine,for the walls,the floor,the roof,were shrouded in what seemed an infinite blackness,blacker than the blackest of moonless,starless nights;yet my eyes could separate,although vaguely,not a few of the individuals in the mass interpenetrated and divided,as well as surrounded,by the darkness.It seemed as if my eyes would never come quite to themselves.I pressed their balls and looked and looked again,but what I saw would not grow distinct.Blackness mingled with form,silence and undefined motion possessed the wide space.All was a dim,confused dance,filled with recurrent glimpses of shapes not unknown to me.Now appeared a woman,with glorious eyes looking out of a skull;now an armed figure on a skeleton horse;now one now another of the hideous burrowing phantasms.I could trace no order and little relation in the mingling and crossing currents and eddies.If I seemed to catch the shape and rhythm of a dance,it was but to see it break,and confusion prevail.With the shifting colours of the seemingly more solid shapes,mingled a multitude of shadows,independent apparently of originals,each moving after its own free shadow-will.I looked everywhere for the princess,but throughout the wildly changing kaleidoscopic scene,could not see her nor discover indication of her presence.Where was she?What might she not be doing?No one took the least notice of me as I wandered hither and thither seeking her.At length losing hope,I turned away to look elsewhere.Finding the wall,and keeping to it with my hand,for even then I could not see it,I came,groping along,to a curtained opening into the vestibule.
Dimly moonlighted,the cage of the leopardess was the arena of what seemed a desperate although silent struggle.Two vastly differing forms,human and bestial,with entangled confusion of mingling bodies and limbs,writhed and wrestled in closest embrace.It had lasted but an instant when I saw the leopardess out of the cage,walking quietly to the open door.As I hastened after her I threw a glance behind me:there was the leopardess in the cage,couching motionless as when I saw her first.
The moon,half-way up the sky,was shining round and clear;the bodiless shadow I had seen the night before,was walking through the trees toward the gate;and after him went the leopardess,swinging her tail.I followed,a little way off,as silently as they,and neither of them once looked round.Through the open gate we went down to the city,lying quiet as the moonshine upon it.The face of the moon was very still,and its stillness looked like that of expectation.
The Shadow took his way straight to the stair at the top of which I had lain the night before.Without a pause he went up,and the leopardess followed.I quickened my pace,but,a moment after,heard a cry of horror.Then came the fall of something soft and heavy between me and the stair,and at my feet lay a body,frightfully blackened and crushed,but still recognisable as that of the woman who had led me home and shut me out.As I stood petrified,the spotted leopardess came bounding down the stair with a baby in her mouth.I darted to seize her ere she could turn at the foot;but that instant,from behind me,the white leopardess,like a great bar of glowing silver,shot through the moonlight,and had her by the neck.She dropped the child;I caught it up,and stood to watch the battle between them.
What a sight it was--now the one,now the other uppermost,both too intent for any noise beyond a low growl,a whimpered cry,or a snarl of hate--followed by a quicker scrambling of claws,as each,worrying and pushing and dragging,struggled for foothold on the pavement!
The spotted leopardess was larger than the white,and I was anxious for my friend;but I soon saw that,though neither stronger nor more active,the white leopardess had the greater endurance.Not once did she lose her hold on the neck of the other.From the spotted throat at length issued a howl of agony,changing,by swift-crowded gradations,into the long-drawn CRESCENDO of a woman's uttermost wail.The white one relaxed her jaws;the spotted one drew herself away,and rose on her hind legs.Erect in the moonlight stood the princess,a confused rush of shadows careering over her whiteness--the spots of the leopard crowding,hurrying,fleeing to the refuge of her eyes,where merging they vanished.
The last few,outsped and belated,mingled with the cloud of her streamy hair,leaving her radiant as the moon when a legion of little vapours has flown,wind-hunted,off her silvery disc--save that,adown the white column of her throat,a thread of blood still trickled from every wound of her adversary's terrible teeth.She turned away,took a few steps with the gait of a Hecate,fell,covered afresh with her spots,and fled at a long,stretching gallop.
The white leopardess turned also,sprang upon me,pulled my arms asunder,caught the baby as it fell,and flew with it along the street toward the gate.