Well, here I am on the last pages, and I will have to go quickly, I am very nicely settled with everything I can ask for, gold floor and all, in the Palace of the great City built into the mountain (all the terraced streets and main buildings and open places make use of the natural bridges and caves, to say nothing of all the stalagmites and stalactites, and it is a white and blue-veined mountain) on the innermost island of all the concentric circles of land separated by narrow circles of sea which make up Atlan.

The courtyard of the Palace is a glass floor over a deep, green lake. When their masters are late in coming, or when an octopus passes underneath and disturb them, the horses will strike with their diamond hooves on the courtyard. Their hooves are shod with crescents all of whole diamond—and when they snort and paw the ground the diamonds cut and groove the thick glass. It has been happening for years, the glass is grooved all over, and that is why nobody slips on it.

Yes, all the other lands we have known are subservient to us, and after the most elementary of campaigns. The Northern King’s final humiliation is among the keenest of my husband’s triumphs. I

I insisted on accompanying him, as I’ve put up with so much while a hostage that campaigning seems nothing with the comforts of an empress, and we had some wonderful times together, though it all went so easily that we could hardly have been said to have had any adventures. I think the most memorable incident was seeing a scarecrow by the wayside dressed in the Superlativity’s robes.

It was a shock when my mother came bustling to me. I’d almost forgotten her. “Clever girl, to get him. You’re not going to kill him though.” “I wouldn’t dream of it.” “Good girl. I offer him my country—I presume he’ll let me stay to rule as regent—on condition he deals with the High Priest. Your father is getting too much for me.” That old quarrel, that old striving for that little mastery, had been going on all the time! It was like the unending struggle we are told souls suffer in hell, trying over and over to get the drink which is always removed at the last instant and then with toil nearly gained again.

So at long last my little birth-land is famous and important, the base from which an eye is kept on Northkingdom.

And my birth-prophecy, about which all that fuss was made —I have helped to bring my country under stranger-rule— though, heaven knows, in a very quibbling way, one could say only by being married to the stranger.