noon
Now , when the King heard of the attempt on Shagpat , and the affair of the Pomegranate Grain , he gave orders for the admission of the people , as many of them as could be contained in the Hall of Justice : and he set a guard over Baba Mustapha , and commanded that Shagpat should be brought to the palace even as he then was , and with the lather on him . So the regal mandate went forth , and Shagpat was brought in state on cushions , and the potency of the drug preserved his sedateness through all this , and he remained motionless in sleep , folded in the centre of calm and satisfaction , while this tumult was rageing and the City shook with uproar . But the people , when they saw him whitened behind a lather , wrath at Baba Mustapha 's polluting touch and the audacity of barbercraft wrestled in them with the outpouring of reverence for Shagpat , and a clamour arose for the instant sacrifice of Baba Mustapha at the foot of their idol Shagpat . And the whole of the City of Shagpat , men , women , and children , and the sheikhs and the dervishes and crafts of the City besieged the King 's palace in that middle hour of the noon , clamouring for the sacrifice of Baba Mustapha at the feet of their idol Shagpat . Now , the Great Hall for the dispensing of justice in the palace of the King was one on which the architect and the artificers had lavished all their arts and subtleties of design and taste and their conceptions of uniformity and grandeur , so that none entered it without a sense of abasement , and the soul acknowledged awfulness and power in him that ruled and sat eminent on the throne of that Hall . For , lo ! the throne was of solid weighty gold , overhung with rich silks and purples ; and the hall was lofty , with massive pillars , fifty on either side , ranging in stateliness down toward the blaze of the throne ; and the pillars were pillars of porphyry and of jasper and precious marble , carven over all of them with sentences of the cunningest wisdom , distichs of excellence , odes of the poet , stanzas sharp with the incisiveness of wit , and that solve knotty points with but one stroke ; and these pillars were each the gift of a mighty potentate of earth or of a Genie .