Wishful thinking

There was a ruler of men. His harem was packed full of voluptuously luscious females. Females with eyes, green as the sea in tempest, lusting for him only, and what he didn’t get up to with them isn’t worth mentioning. Yet what has come down the ages to us is not how he satiated his barbarous appetite for pleasure, nor we know about his nights cavorting in passionate dances and sensual embraces, but his yearning for making love to the maiden nymph of Mount Sylph, and that is known to every soul tethered by desire. But where can we find that very place where the tryst took place? Where is the nymph’s abode? The legend says the nymph turned into a floating cloud in the morning, and into drifting rain at dusk: how can we account for that? Are there any signs we can trace, any facts we can set out? Or was all an illusion? For the force of an illusion is a thousand times that of fact; and that is why that story lives on.