midnight
Drowned in his frenzy of thwarted passion and baffled anger , the King was unaware that a woman had entered the open space from the mountain-path , and was moving with light steps across the grasses towards the spot where he sat and ate his heart . The new-comer was beautiful with a beauty so different from that of the girl whose kingdom was the hill-top that few to whom the one seemed perfect would have found the other all-conquering fair . Tall and imperious as some evil empress of old Rome , her black hair bound with ivy leaves of gold , her fine body draped in strangely dyed silks -- snake-colored , blue and green and golden-scaled -- that shot a shimmering iridescence with every movement of the limbs , whose whiteness their transparency rather betrayed than veiled , she trod the earth with such an air as Balkis may have worn when she came a-visiting Solomon . The painters of the antique world would have welcomed in that voluptuous flesh , in the poppy of her mouth , in the midnight of those eyes that glowed with the fires of Thessalian incantations , their ideal for some image of the goddess of all-conquering desire . The Sophists of the antique world would have read her story charactered in every lithe line , in every appealing motion , and saluted in her the priestess of sheer appetite , for whom the gods were dead , indeed , yet living in their material form -- Dionysus as wine , Aphrodite as the act of love , Apollo as the kindling sunlight . As Balkis came to seek Solomon , so this woman came to the mountain-summit seeking a king . But she had thought to greet him coming out of the gray church , and it was with a start of surprise that she saw the glittering figure crouched in an attitude of woe upon the fallen column , and recognized in that image of abasement the Prince of Naples , the young lord of Sicily .