, while Victor Emmanuel, sly Latin that he
was, thought little of liberty and much about Rome.... Aye, kings!

And so a great nostalgia had come over Shane Campbell on this voyage for
the Syrian port and the wife he had married there. He wanted sunshine.
He wanted color. He wanted simplicity of life. Killing there was in
Syria, great killing too. But it was the sort of killing one understood
and could forgive. A Druse disliked a Maronite Christian, so he went
quietly and knifed him. Another Maronite resented that, and killed a
Druse; and they were all at it, hell-for-leather. But it was passion and
fanaticism, not high-flown words and docile armies and the tradesmen
sneaking up behind.... Ave, war!

And he was sick of the damned Mersey fog, and he was sick of the
drunkenness of Scotland Road, and he was sick of the sleet lashing
Hoylake links. He was sick of Pharisaical importers who did the heathen
in the eye on Saturday and on Sunday in their blasted conventicles
thumped their black-covered craws in respectable humility.... In Little
Asia religion was a passion, not a smug hypocrisy; and though the
heathen was dishonest, yet it was not the mathematical reasoned
dishonesty of the Christian. It was a childish game, like
horse-coping.... And in the East they did not blow gin in your face,
smelling like turpentine....

And he was sick of the abominable homes, the horsehair furniture with
the anti-macassars--Lord! and they called themselves clean.... He wanted
the spotlessness of the Syrian courtyard.... The daubs on the British
walls, sentimental St. Bernard dogs and dray-horses with calves' eyes,
brought him to a laughing point when he thought of the subtlety of color
and line in strange Persian rugs....

And he was sick of British women, with their knuckled hands, their
splayed feet. Their abominable dressing, too, a bust and a brooch and a
hooped skirt--their grocers' conventions, prudish, almost obscene,
avoiding of the natural in word, deed, or thought.... He wanted Fenzile,
with her eyes, _vert de mer_, her full childish face, her slim hands
with the orange-tinted finger nails, her silken trousers, her little
slippers of silver and blue.... Her soft arms, her back-thrown head, her
closed lids.... And the fountain twinkling in the soft Syrian night,
while afar off some Arab singer chanted a poem of Lyla Khanim's:

"_Beni ser-mest u hayran eyleyen ol yar; janim dir_.... The world is a
prison and my heart is scarr