The
boxes, of which a great number lay broken open, as they can be by merely
pulling with the fingers at a pliant crack, contain dates; and the
bottles, of which many thousands lay empty, contain, I saw, old
Ismidtwine. Some fifty or sixty casks, covered with mildew, some old
pieces of furniture, and a great cube of rotting, curling parchments,
showed that this cellar had been more or less loosely used for the
occasional storage of superfluous stores and knick-knacks.
It was also more or less loosely used as a domestic prison. For in the
lane between the region of boxes and the region of bottles, near the
former, there lay on the ground the skeleton of a woman, the details of
whose costume were still appreciable, with thin brass gyves on her
wrists: and when I had examined her well, I knew the whole history of
the creature standing silent by my side.
She is the daughter of the Sultan, as I assumed when I had once
determined that the skeleton is both the skeleton of her mother, and the
skeleton of the Sultana.
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