Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night - Volume 1.djvu/23



HIS work, laborious as it may appear, has been to me a labour of love, an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction. During my long years of official exile to the luxuriant and deadly deserts of Africa, Eastern and Western, and to the dull and dreary half-clearings of South America, it proved itself a talisman against ennui and despondency. Impossible even now to open the pages without a vision starting into view; without drawing a picture from the pinacothek of the brain; without reviving a host of memories and reminiscences which are not the common property of travellers, however widely they may have travelled. From my dull and commonplace and "respectable" surroundings, the Jinn bore me off at once to the land of my predilection, Arabia, a region so familiar to my mind that even when I cast my first glance at the scene, it seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone metempsychic life in the far distant Past. Again I stood under the diaphanous skies, in air glorious as æther, whose breath causes men's spirits to bubble like sparkling wine. Once more I saw the evening star hanging like a golden lamp from the pure front of the western firmament; and the after-glow transfiguring and transforming as by magic, the gazelle-brown and tawny-clay tints and the homely and rugged features of the scene into a fairy-land lit with a light which never shines on other soils or seas. Then would appear the woollen tents, long, low, and black, of the true Badawin, mere dots in the boundless waste, and the camp-fire dotting like a glow-worm the village centre. Presently, sweetened by distance, would be VOL. I.