King Candaules | Page 7

had
resolved to model a statue herself, and to prove that she was still
sovereign mistress in the plastic art.
The grain of snow, the micaceous brilliancy of Parian marble, the
sparkling pulp of balsamine flowers, would render but a feeble idea of
the ideal substance whereof. Nyssia had been formed. That flesh, so
fine, so delicate, permitted daylight to penetrate it, and modelled itself

in transparent contours, in lines as sweetly harmonious as music itself.
According to different surroundings, it took the colour of the sunlight
or of purple, like the aromal body of a divinity, and seemed to radiate
light and life. The world of perfections inclosed within the nobly
lengthened oval of her chaste face could have been rendered by no
earthly art--neither by the chisel of the sculptor, nor the brush of the
painter, nor the style of any poet--though it were Praxiteles, Apelles, or
Mimnernus; and on her smooth brow, bathed by waves of hair
amber-bright as molten electrum and sprinkled with gold filings,
according to the Babylonian custom, sat as upon a jasper throne the
unalterable serenity of perfect loveliness.
As for her eyes, though they did not justify what popular credulity said
of them, they were at least wonderfully strange eyes; brown eyebrows,
with extremities ending in points elegant as those of the arrows of Eros,
and which were joined to each other by a streak of henna after the
Asiatic fashion, and long fringes of silkily-shadowed eyelashes
contrasted strikingly with the twin sapphire stars rolling in the heaven
of dark silver which formed those eyes. The irises of those eyes, whose
pupils were blacker than atrament, varied singularly in shades of
shifting colour. From sapphire they changed to turquoise, from
turquoise to beryl, from beryl to yellow amber, and sometimes, like a
limpid lake whose bottom is strewn with jewels, they offered, through
their incalculable depths, glimpses of golden and diamond sands upon
which green fibrils vibrated and twisted themselves into emerald
serpents. In those orbs of phosphoric lightning the rays of suns
extinguished, the splendours of vanished worlds, the glories of
Olympus eclipsed--all seemed to have concentrated their reflections.
When contemplating them one thought of eternity, and felt himself
seized with a mighty giddiness, as though he were leaning over the
verge of the Infinite.
The expression of those extraordinary eyes was not less variable than
their tint. At times their lids opened like the portals of celestial
dwellings; they invited you into elysiums of light, of azure, of ineffable
felicity; they promised you the realisation, tenfold, a hundredfold, of all
your dreams of happiness, as though they had divined your soul's most

secret thoughts; again, impenetrable as sevenfold plated shields of the
hardest metals, they flung back your gaze like blunted and broken
arrows. With a simple inflexion of the brow, a mere flash of the pupil,
more terrible than the thunder of Zeus, they precipitated you from the
heights of your most ambitious escalades into depths of nothingness so
profound that it was impossible to rise again. Typhon himself, who
writhes under Ætna, could not have lifted the mountains of disdain with
which they overwhelmed you. One felt that though he should live for a
thousand Olympiads endowed with the beauty of the fair son of Latona,
the genius of Orpheus, the unbounded might of Assyrian kings, the
treasures of the Cabeirei, the Telchines, and the Dactyli, gods of
subterranean wealth, he could never change their expression to
mildness.
At other times their languishment was so liquidly persuasive, their
brilliancy and irradiation so penetrating, that the icy coldness of Nestor
and Priam would have melted under their gaze, like the wax of the
wings of Icarus when he approached the flaming zones. For one such
glance a man would have gladly steeped his hands in the blood of his
host, scattered the ashes of his father to the four winds, overthrown the
holy images of the gods, and stolen the fire of heaven itself, like the
sublime thief, Prometheus.
Nevertheless, their most ordinary expression, it must be confessed, was
of a chastity to make one desperate--a sublime coldness--an ignorance
of all possibilities of human passion, such as would have made the
moon-bright eyes of Phoebe or the sea-green eyes of Athena appear by
comparison more liquidly tempting than those of a young girl of
Babylon sacrificing to the goddess Mylitta within the cord-circled
enclosure of Succoth-Benohl. Their invincible virginity seemed to bid
love defiance.
The cheeks of Nyssia, which no human gaze had ever profaned, save
that of Gyges on the day when the veil was blown away, possessed a
youthful bloom, a tender pallor, a delicacy of grain, and a downiness
whereof the faces of our women, perpetually exposed to sunlight and
air, cannot convey the most distant idea. Modesty