You Divine The
Conversation Between Him And The Cucumber-Man, As The Sultan Used
To Understand The Language Of Birds.
Are any of those cucumbers
stuffed with pearls, and is that Armenian with the black square
turban Haroun Alraschid
In disguise, standing yonder by the
fountain where the children are drinking - the gleaming marble
fountain, chequered all over with light and shadow, and engraved
with delicate arabesques and sentences from the Koran?
But the greatest sensation of all is when the camels come. Whole
strings of real camels, better even than in the procession of Blue
Beard, with soft rolling eyes and bended necks, swaying from one
side of the bazaar to the other to and fro, and treading gingerly
with their great feet. O you fairy dreams of boyhood! O you sweet
meditations of half-holidays, here you are realised for half-an-
hour! The genius which presides over youth led us to do a good
action that day. There was a man sitting in an open room,
ornamented with fine long-tailed sentences of the Koran: some in
red, some in blue; some written diagonally over the paper; some so
shaped as to represent ships, dragons, or mysterious animals. The
man squatted on a carpet in the middle of this room, with folded
arms, waggling his head to and fro, swaying about, and singing
through his nose choice phrases from the sacred work. But from the
room above came a clear noise of many little shouting voices, much
more musical than that of Naso in the matted parlour, and the guide
told us it was a school, so we went upstairs to look.
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