No
modern of the most ultra-modern school had ever revelled in such
gorgeous colour combinations, in such daring contrasts and lurid
extremes, as did these dark hued people, in their primitive
simplicity. He liked them all, decent and docile. He liked their
earrings--only that day he had counted a row of nine in the ear of
some wandering juggler. Nose rings too--how pretty they were, nose
rings. Rubies too, and most of them real, doubtless. How well they
looked in the nostril of a thin, aquiline brown nose. It all went with
the country. Barbaric, perhaps, contrasted with other standards, but
beautiful--in its way. He would not change it for the world.

And the perfumes! A faint scent of gardenias was at that moment being
wafted in from his well-kept, rich gardens, where somehow his boys
managed to make flowers grow in the brown, devitalised earth. For the
soil was devitalised, surely. It got no rest, year in, year out. For
centuries it had nourished, in one long, eternal season, the great
rich mass of tropical vegetation. European flowers would not grow in
the red earth, or the black earth, whichever it was--he had been
accustomed to think of red or black earth as being rich, but out here
in the Tropics, it was unable to produce, for more than a brief
season, the flowers and shrubs that were native to his home land. But
gardenias and frangipanni----

The next bead that slipped along was the memory of an Arab street at
dusk--the merchants sitting at their shop fronts, the gloom of the
little, narrow shops, the glow of rich stuffs and rich colours that
lay in neat piles on the shelves, and the scent of incense burning in
little earthenware braziers at the door of each shop--how sweet was
the warm air, laden with this deeply sweet smell of burning, glowing
incense----

A step sounded on the verandah, and the Bishop concluded his revery
abruptly. It was not the nearly noiseless step of a bare foot, such as
his servants. It was the step of someone in European shoes, yet
without the firm, decided tramp of a European. Yet the tread of a
European shoe, muffled to the slithering, soft effect of a native
foot. A naked foot, booted. This was the Bishop's hour of rest, and
his servants had instructions to admit no one. Well, no one in a
general sense, yet there were always two or three recognised
exceptions. But it was not one of these exceptions, coming in
noiselessly like that. The Bishop sprang up, standing straddle of his