Page:A child of the Orient (IA childoforient00vakarich).pdf/189

 She bent her head and listened, while I told her some of my favourite tales; and as I talked she became excited, and laughed when the stories were funny, and cried if they were sad.

During the two days I spent with her, I related many of the books I had read; and at the end of my stay we were close friends, for if I was a child in years she was one in experience. And she was so delightfully simple, with a simplicity which must have made God glad to have created human beings.

If she was ignorant of books, she was curiously full of ideas concerning things she had observed. Because she lived in solitude and watched the sky, she knew all the stars—not by their scientific names, but by ones she invented for herself. As we sat on the balcony over the water she told me that at certain seasons of the year a large luminous star kept watch over the opposite side of the Marmora. She called it the Heavenly Lily, and knew the exact hour it appeared every night, and how long it would stay. She told me that the coming of certain stars had to do with the growth of certain flowers and crops. She spoke of them not as stars, but as heavenly watchers, whose earthly worshippers were the flowers. The water she referred to as the earth's milk. She disliked the winds, but she loved the storms, "because they proved that Allah could lose his temper. It is nice," she