noon
And now those wonderful kingdoms of song that the dark musicians established all night by magical chords dropped back again to the sway of that ancient silence who ruled before the gods , and the musicians wrapped their cloaks about them and covered up their marvellous instruments and stole away to the plains ; and no one dared ask them whither they went or why they dwelt there , or what god they served . And the dance stopped and all the queens departed . And then the female slave came out again by a door and emptied her basket of sapphires down the abyss as I saw her do before . Beautiful Saranoora said that those great queens would never wear their sapphires more than once and that every day at noon a merchant from the mountains sold new ones for that evening . Yet I suspected that something more than extravagance lay at the back of that seemingly wasteful act of tossing sapphires into an abyss , for thee were in the depths of it those two dragons of gold of whom nothing seemed to be known . And I thought , and I think so still , that Singanee , terrific though he was in war with the elephants , from whose tusks he had built his palace , well knew and even feared those dragons in the abyss , and perhaps valued those priceless jewels less than he valued his queens , and that he to whom so many lands paid beautiful tribute out of their dread of his spear , himself paid tribute to the golden dragons . Whether those dragons had wings I could not see ; nor , if they had , could I tell if they could bear that weight of solid gold from the abyss ; nor by what paths they could crawl from it did I know .