midnight
King and women and desert and all vanished out of his mind , as if the sentiment that suddenly seized it filled it so completely as to leave room for nothing else . And he stood still gazing , feeling as though he were spinning round , though he was standing still as death . For there before him stood this enigmatical King 's daughter . And like her father , she also seemed an incarnation of the soul of grief , not as in his case ignominious , and an object of derision , but rather resembling a heavenly drug , compounded of the camphor of the cold and midnight moon , that had put on a fragrant form of feminine and fairy beauty to drive the world to sheer distraction , half with love and half with woe . For like the silvery vision of the newborn streak of that Lord of Herbs , she was slender and pale and wan , formed as it seemed of some new strange essence of pure clear ice and new dropt snow , and she loomed on the soul of Aja out of the blackness of his trance like a large white drooping lily , just seen in the gloom of an inky night . And her hair and brow were the colour of a thunder-cloud in the month of Chaitra -LSB- 9 -RSB- , and like that cloud , the heavy sorrow hung in her great dark mournful eyes , drenching him as it were with a shower of dusky dreamy dewy beauty , and drawing him down bewitched and lost like the victim of a haunted pool into the snaky eddy of their silent unfathomable recess . And yet her deep red lips trembled , as it were on the very border of a smile , as if they were hinting against their will of a mine of laughter and subtle snares that they were not allowed to use .