Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/24

 for me—or, shall I say, what I imagined the East to be—a country of magicians and mysterious talismans, of crouching Sphinxes and wonderful gardens. I delighted in the more marvellousmarvelous [sic] stories in the "Arabian Nights," and I regretted infinitely that life was really not like that. To go for a walk and fall straightway on some wonderful adventure, that was what I should have loved. I remember poring over a big folio of photographs of Eastern monuments. Those mystical, winged beasts with human heads, in their attitude of eternal waiting and listening, touched some chord in my imagination: they had that strangeness which I adored, and at the same time they had an odd familiarity. I appeared to remember—but, oh, so dimly!—having seen them before, not in pictures, but under a hot, heavy, languid sun, long, long ago. The luxuriousness, the softness and sleepy charm of the Asiatic temper—I had something in common with it, I could understand it. The melodious singing of a voice through the cool twilight; the notes of a lute dying slowly into silence; another voice, low and clear and musical, reading from the "Koran"—where had I head all that? I pictured great coloured bazaars, where grave merchants with long white beards sat cross-legged and silent, where beautiful, naked, golden-skinned slaves stood waiting for a purchaser, where you could buy silken carpets that would carry you over the world, and black, ebony horses, swifter than light.

Mrs. Carroll had given me one of the upstairs rooms at Derryaghy to be my very own, and had let me furnish it myself from a store of old, out-moded furniture, which, for I know not how long, had been gathering dust and cobwebs in a kind of immense, low attic called the lumber-room. Everything was more or less threadbare and worn, but I had plenty to choose from, and the actual rummaging was as exciting as an adventure on a desert island. I had