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Updated: June 16, 2025
His daughter was remarkable for her perfect beauty. Her feet were the smallest in the world; her eyes were long and slanting and bright as brown onyxes, and when you heard her laugh it was like the listening to a tinkling stream or to the chimes of a silver bell.
The impressions wrought on the observer were those of richness, warmth, color, quietude, uniformity, softness, delicacy, daintiness, voluptuousness, and a miraculous extremeness of culture that suggested dreams of a new race of fairies, laborious, tasteful, magnificent, and fastidious; but as the eye traced upward the myriad-tinted slope, from its sharp junction with the water to its vague termination amid the folds of overhanging cloud, it became, indeed, difficult not to fancy a panoramic cataract of rubies, sapphires, opals, and golden onyxes, rolling silently out of the sky.
On their return, when they were not far from Medina, the army removing by night, Ayesha, on the road, alighted from her camel, and stepped aside on a private occasion; but on her return, perceiving she had dropped her necklace, which was of onyxes of Dhafar, she went back to look for it; and in the mean time her attendants, taking it for granted that she was got into her pavilion, set it again on the camel, and led it away.
Among the stones met with were rock-crystals, carnelians, onyxes, agates, and other hard stones of every variety; and further there were paste jewels, cylinders in soft stone, statuettes in burnt clay, earthen vases, and also many objects in bronze, as lamps, tripods, candelabra, chairs, vases, arms, &c. &c. A certain amount of order reigned in the repository.
The pretty colours in her limestone-books form those variegated marbles which all mankind have taken delight to polish and build with from the beginning of time; and the pretty colours in her flint-books form those agates, jaspers, cornelians, bloodstones, onyxes, cairngorms, chrysoprases, which men have in like manner taken delight to cut, and polish, and make ornaments of, from the beginning of time; and yet, so much of babies are they, and so fond of looking at the pictures instead of reading the book, that I question whether, after six thousand years of cutting and polishing, there are above two or three people out of any given hundred, who know, or care to know, how a bit of agate or a bit of marble was made, or painted.
Into the virgin gold of which its hair and collar are composed must have been stirred, while the metal was yet molten, crystals, topazes, sapphires, rubies, onyxes, amethysts, and diamonds, the stones crude, or rudely cut, and blended in such proportions as might enhance to the utmost imaginable limit the beauty and the cost of the adored effigy.
His rooms were crowded with mosaic cabinets set with jasper, bloodstone, and lapis-lazuli, ormolu escritoires, buhl chiffoniers, Japanese screens, massive musical clocks, damask ottomans, with Persian carpets and Pompadour rugs on the floor, and costly tapestries on the walls; enamelled caskets set with onyxes, rubies, opals, and emeralds loaded the tables; the chimney-pieces, sculptured by Banks, were decked with bronzes, cut-glass, models in wax and terra-cotta, Nankin, Dresden, and Worcester china: altogether the place must have been quite a broker's paradise.
In Phoenician necklaces, glass beads alternate frequently with real agates, onyxes, and crystals; while sometimes glass in various shapes is the only material employed.
Notwithstanding its great size it is wholly covered with plates of pure gold; yet the gold is scarce seen because it is covered with various precious stones as sapphires, balasses, diamonds, rubies and emeralds; and wherever the eye turns something more beautiful than the rest is observed; nor in addition to these natural beauties is the skill of art wanting, for in the midst of the gold are the most beautiful sculptured gems, both small and large as well as such as are in relief, as agates, onyxes, cornelians and cameos; and some cameos are of such size that I am afraid to name it; but everything is far surpassed by a ruby, not larger than a thumb-nail, which is fixed at the right of the altar.
"Oh, what is it? What is it?" she gasped. "Tell me quickly! It's better for me to know. It's better for me to know." He put out a narrow, claw-like hand and laid it upon her arm. His eyes were like onyxes, Oriental, quite emotionless. "Do not agitate yourself, madam!" he said. "My patient is better. I think, that with care he may live. That is, if he finds it worth while."
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