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Along the south of White Horse Beach the lapidary surf had strewn quartz pebbles that gleamed in the clear sun like precious stones. It took little effort of the imagination to find pocketfuls of rubies, pearls, sapphires, and amethysts among these, and had it indeed been "bright jewels of the mine" which the voyagers sought they might have been pardoned for thinking they had found them there.
Wares of China and Japan and the spices of the southern Moluccas were carried in Chinese or Malay junks to Malacca, and thence by Arab or Indian merchants to Paulicut or Calicut in southern India. To these ports came also ginger, brazil-wood, sandal-wood, and aloe, above all the precious stones of India and Persia, diamonds from Golconda, rubies, topaz, sapphires, and pearls.
And thus she sings of the river, even of Lo Lang Ho: she sings that he is indeed of all rivers the greatest, born of more ancient mountains than even the wise men know, swifter than hares, more deep than the sea, the master of other rivers perfumed even as roses and fairer than the sapphires around the neck of a prince.
He laid on the broad marble top of the baluster a little chamois-bag. "Will you have these reset and wear them for me?" "The sapphires? Why, you mustn't let them go out of the family. They are wonderful heirlooms." "I do not intend to let them go out of the family," he replied quietly. Kitty stirred the bag with her fingers. She did not raise her eyes from it.
When the king rides abroad, he is accompanied by a strong guard and many nobles, and often rides on an elephant having a great castle on its back superbly gilded; sometimes he travels on a great frame of wood like a horse-litter, having a small house or canopy upon it, covered over head, and open at the sides, which is all splendidly gilded with gold, and adorned with many rubies and sapphires, of which he hath an infinite store, as a vast many of them are found in this country.
That museum holds an immense number of interesting things, and masses of jewels and plate which make all other European collections mean. The visitor wanders among clumps of diamonds and sacks of pearls and a nauseating wealth of rubies and sapphires and emeralds.
Then by degrees I saw that all these flashing hues came from one jumbled heap of gems some large, some small, but together in value beyond a king's ransom. I caught my breath and looked again. Diamonds, rubies, sapphires, amethysts, opals, emeralds, turquoises, and innumerable other stones lay thus roughly heaped together and glittering as though for joy to see the light of heaven once more.
The entrance-door was of gold, covered with sapphires, which shone so that scarcely could the strongest eyesight bear to look at it: this was the light the prince had seen from the forest. The walls were of transparent porcelain, variously coloured, and represented the history of all the fairies that had existed from the beginning of the world.
"My sapphires! They were taken, too. My sapphires! They fell on their knees, regardless of their filmy draperies, and grasped at one shining treasure after another.
The scrawls which might have been mistaken in the darkness for patterns embossed or incised on the surface of the steel, developed into figures draped in long, straight, pleated robes; and at the highest point of the firmament there hovered amid a sparkle of rubies and sapphires a woman crowned, pale of face, dressed like the Moorish mother of the northern side in Carmelite-brown and green; and she too held an infant, a child, like herself, of the white race, clasping a globe in one hand, and extending the other in benediction.
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