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"One may be black and yet not ill-looking," she said. "Balkis!" cried the king. He said no more, but seized her in his arms, and the head of the queen sank back under the pressure of his lips. But he saw that she was weeping. Thereupon he spoke to her in the low, caressing tones that nurses use to their nurslings. He called her his little blossom and his little star. "Why do you weep?" he asked.
The queen soon reappeared dressed in the blue seamless garment of the women who work in the fields. "Come!" she said. And she dragged Balthasar along the narrow corridors towards a little door which opened on the fields. The night was dark, and in the darkness of the night Balkis looked very small.
"The thirteenth century could not give a fitting presentment of that queen, whom we picture to ourselves as dressed with foolish magnificence, rocking on a camel across the desert at the head of a caravan under the blazing sky across the furnace of sand. Her charms have appealed to writers, and not the smallest of them; Flaubert for one this Queen Balkis, Mékida or Nicaule.
Profiting by the terror of the survivors, and fearing that Balkis might be injured, he seized her in his arms and fled with her through the silence and darkness of the lonely byways. The stillness of night enveloped the earth, and the fugitives heard the clamour of the women and the carousers, who pursued them at haphazard, die away in the darkness.
Balthasar listened with rapture to the star. He felt himself becoming a new man. Prostrate beside him, Sembobitis and Menkera worshipped, their faces touching the stone. Queen Balkis watched Balthasar. She realised that never again would there be love for her in that heart filled with a love divine. She turned white with rage and gave orders for the caravan to return at once to the land of Sheba.
They ruled over two great kingdoms, each of which required the presence of its sovereign; so Queen Balkis soon went back to Sheba with more wealth, more soldiers, more camels, horses, and grand surroundings of every kind, than she had brought with her. She carried in her baggage-train her royal throne, but she did not take with her the beautiful Liridi.
For a long time they walked through streets thronged with chariots, street porters, donkeys and donkey-drivers, until all at once the marble walls, the purple awnings and the gold cupolas of the palace of Balkis, lay spread out before them. The Queen of Sheba received them in a courtyard cooled by jets of perfumed water which fell with a tinkling cadence like a shower of pearls.
For he gave to the fair Balkis all that she desired and everything she asked, because he admired so much this splendid Queen of whom the Hoopoe had first told him. And so, the Bible says, the Queen of Sheba turned and went to her own country, she and her servants. But the Mussulmans' tales say that in later days she married Solomon and they lived happily ever after.
The bird answered, "The princes, your brothers, must conform to the emperor's pleasure, and in their turn invite him to come and see your house." Their writers relate that Balkis, the Queen of Sheba, had a bird called Hudhud, that is, lapwing, which was her trusty messenger to King Solomon.
"Tell me," Balkis asked, "is the water good in the wells of your capital?" "Yes," Balthasar replied in some surprise. "I am also curious to know," Balkis continued, "how a dry conserve of fruit is made in Ethiopia?" The king did not know what to answer. "Now please tell me, please," she urged.
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