Five or six months after the birth of Photogen, the dark lady also gave
birth to a baby: in the windowless tomb of a blind mother, in the dead
of night, under the feeble rays of a lamp in an alabaster globe, a girl
came into the darkness with a wail. And just as she was born for the
first time, Vesper was born for the second and passed into a world as
unknown to her as this was to her child--who would have to be born yet
again before she could see her mother.
Watho called her Nycteris, and she grew as like Vesper as possible--in
all but one particular. She had the same dark skin, dark eyelashes and
brows, dark hair, and gentle, sad look; but she had just the eyes of
Aurora, the mother of Photogen, and if they grew darker as she grew
older, it was only a darker blue. Watho, with the help of Falca, took
the greatest possible care of her--in every way consistent with her
plans, that is, the main point in which was that she should never see
any light but what came from the lamp. Hence her optic nerves, and
indeed her whole apparatus for seeing, grew both larger and more
sensitive; her eyes, indeed, stopped short only of being too large. She
was a sadly dainty little creature. No one in the world except those two
was aware of the being of the little bat. Watho trained her to sleep
during the day, and wake during the night. She taught her music, and
taught her scarcely anything else.