What Is in a Name?
For a time that seemed to them long, the two men stood waiting, while still the Mother of Light did not return.

So long was she absent that they began to grow anxious: how were they to find their way from the natural hollows of the mountain crossed by goblin paths, if their lamps should go out?
To spend the night there would mean to sit and wait until an earthquake rent the mountain, or the earth herself fell back into the smelting furnace of the sun whence she had issued--for it was all night and no faintest dawn in the bosom of the world.
So long did they wait unrevisited, that, had there not been two of them, either would at length have concluded the vision a home-born product of his own seething brain.

And their lamps were going out, for they grew redder and smokier! But they did not lose courage, for there is a kind of capillary attraction in the facing of two souls, that lifts faith quite beyond the level to which either could raise it alone: they knew that they had seen the lady of emeralds, and it was to give them their own desire that she had gone from them, and neither would yield for a moment to the half doubts and half dreads that awoke in his heart.
And still she who with her absence darkened their air did not return.
They grew weary, and sat down on the rocky floor, for wait they would--indeed, wait they must.

Each set his lamp by his knee, and watched it die.

Slowly it sank, dulled, looked lazy and stupid.