Whilst her great train was picking its way carefully from the mountain-tops of Abyssinia, eight thousand treacherous feet of height, to the littoral of the Red Sea, the slim brown queen had experienced only impatience. In the cool quietness of her mountain home it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to arise and visit the young king of the Jews. On every step of the long journey downhill it had seemed natural. In her own country it seemed right she should do as she had chosen. But now they had left Abyssinia, left the great tropical forests with the gigantic candelabra trees, left the arid cactus-covered plains, left the pleasant green valleys where water trilled and the boxwood trees and wild roses and water cress grew, and had come to arid Ailet by the Red Sea. And here were great stretches of sand and mimosa, here half-naked, cunning black men, here a heat like a pall, here the brooding mystery of Egypt, that knows all things and is silent to questioning.  
A different world, and in the different atmosphere there came a faltering, a waver into the heart of Balkis. Was she a fool? For two miles her royal train stretched. First, the fighting men in their short white robes, graceful, powerful as cats; then the line of laden camels with tinkling bells; then the great black elephants with their gleaming black skin, their gleaming white tusks, their painted trappings; then the litters of her women; then her own litter; a welter of attendants, bearing the provisions of the journey and the present she was bringing to Solomon, the young king of the Jews: spices; and gold of Ophir; and large diamonds from the Abyssinian mines; apes—great red-faced baboons that had the strength of ten men, and delicate blue monkeys, pretty as birds; and peacocks that outdid precious stones in the shimmer of their colors; and tusks of ivory, large as the branches of great trees.... Her heart wavered, and for an instant it occurred to her in panic to go back. But if she returned now, she would be dissatisfied all her life, and grow inward, and become maybe hard as a stone, and that was against nature, for all things grow outward, as a tree grows outward, to fill up the empty spaces of Death....
 
"No! no! I shall go on."
 
Up in the cool mountains decision had seemed so natural, action so easy. But below in humid Egypt subtleties of thought seemed native to the weak Nilotic breeze, and she could see herself as though she were another woman. She could see her orphaned childhood, when the care of all her counselors was to have her gracious and kind, and sweet as a small bird's song. They had instructed her that queens are no............