of colour, light, movement. Brilliantly
picturesque people. Children like Asiatic angels. Magnificently scowling
ruffians in sheepskin coats. In fact, a movie staged for my benefit. I
was afraid they would ring down the curtain before I had had enough. It
had no meaning. When I got back to my diggings I tried to put down
what I had just seen, and I swear there's more inspiration in the
guide-book."

"Did you go alone?"

"Yes, I certainly would not go sight-seeing with the Meryon crowd. Tell
me what you felt when you saw it first."

"I went with Sir John's uncle. He was a great traveler. The colour
struck me dumb. It flames--it sings. Think of the grey pinched life in
the West! I saw a grave dark potter turning his wheel, while his little
girl stood by, glad at our pleasure, her head veiled like a miniature
woman, tiny baggy trousers, and a silver nose-stud, like a star, in one
delicate nostril. In her thin arms she held a heavy baby in a gilt cap,
like a monkey. And the wheel turned and whirled until it seemed to be
spinning dreams, thick as motes in the sun. The clay rose in smooth
spirals under his hand, and the wheel sang, 'Shall the vessel reprove
him who made one to honour and one to dishonour?' And I saw the potter
thumping his wet clay, and the clay, plastic as dream-stuff, shaped
swift as light, and the three Fates stood at his shoulder. Dreams,
dreams, and all in the spinning of the wheel, and the rich shadows of
the old broken courtyard where he sat. And the wheel stopped and the
thread broke, and the little new shapes he had made stood all about him,
and he was only a potter in Peshawar."

Her voice was like a song. She had utterly forgotten my existence. I
did not dislike it at the moment, for I wanted to hear more, and the
impersonal is the rarest gift a woman can give a man.

"Did you buy anything?"

"He gave me a gift--a flawed jar of turquoise blue, faint turquoise
green round the lip. He saw I understood. And then I bought a little
gold cap and a wooden box of jade-green Kabul grapes. About a rupee, all
told. But it was Eastern merchandise, and I was trading from Balsora and
Baghdad, and Eleazar's camels were swaying down from Damascus along the
Khyber Pass, and coming in at the great Darwazah, and friends' eyes met
me everywhere. I am profoundly happy here."

The sinking sun lit an almost ecstatic face.

I envied her more deeply than I had ever envied any one. She had the
secret of immortal