CHAPTER XLIX.
Yillah While for a few days, now this way, now that, as our craft glides along, surrounded by these locusts of the deep, let the story of Yillah flow on.
Of her beauty say I nothing.

It was that of a crystal lake in a fathomless wood: all light and shade; full of fleeting revealings; now shadowed in depths; now sunny in dimples; but all sparkling and shifting, and blending together.
But her wild beauty was a vail to things still more strange.

As often she gazed so earnestly into my eyes, like some pure spirit looking far down into my soul, and seeing therein some upturned faces, I started in amaze, and asked what spell was on me, that thus she gazed.
Often she entreated me to repeat over and over again certain syllables of my language.

These she would chant to herself, pausing now and then, as if striving to discover wherein lay their charm.
In her accent, there was something very different from that of the people of the canoe.

Wherein lay the difference.