The Italian had kept us all spellbound for hours, while a great yellow
moon was climbing higher and higher above the leaves of the bananas
that nodded weirdly at the windows. Within the great hall a circle of
attentive listeners--composed of that motley mixture of the wanderers
of all nations, such as can be found only in New Orleans, and perhaps
Marseilles--sat in silence about the lamplit table, riveted by the
speaker's dark eyes and rich voice. There was a natural music in those
tones; the stranger chanted as he spoke like a wizard weaving a spell.
And speaking to each one in the tongue of his own land, he told them
of the Orient. For he had been a wanderer in many lands; and afar off,
touching the farther horn of the moonlight crescent, lay awaiting him a
long, graceful vessel with a Greek name, which would unfurl her white
wings for flight with the first ruddiness of morning.
"I see that you are a smoker," observed the stranger to his host as he
rose to go. "May I have the pleasure of presenting you with a Turkish
pipe? I brought it from Constantinople."
It was moulded of blood-red clay after a fashion of Moresque art,
and fretted about its edges with gilded work like the ornamentation
girdling the minarets of a mosque. And a faint perfume, as of the
gardens of Damascus, clung to its gaudy bowl, whereon were deeply
stamped mysterious words in the Arabian tongue.
The voice had long ceased to utter its musical syllables. The guests
had departed; the lamps were extinguished within. A single ray of
moonlight breaking through the shrubbery without fell upon a bouquet
of flowers, breathing out their perfumed souls into the night. Only
the host remained--dreaming of moons larger than ours, and fiercer
summers; minarets white and keen, piercing a cloudless sky, and the
many-fountained pleasure-places of the East. And the pipe exhaled its
strange and mystical perfume, like the scented breath of a summer's
night in the rose-gardens of a Sultan. Above, in deeps of amethyst,
glimmered the everlasting lamps of heaven; and from afar, the voice of
a muezzin seemed to cry, in tones liquidly sweet as the voice of the
stranger--"All ye who are about to sleep, commend your souls to Him who
never sleeps."