got a
full view of the wonderful mosque tossing its splendors into the still
air, its cresting of minarets so much frozen spray against the blue.

The little comedy--or shall I say tragedy?--began a few minutes after I
had opened my easel--I sitting crouched in the shadow, my elbow
touching the plastered wall. Only Joe and I were present. Yusuf, the
guard, a skinny, half-fed Turk in fez and European dress, had as usual
betaken himself to the cafe fronting the same sidewalk on which I sat,
but half a block away; far enough to be out of hearing, but near enough
to miss my presence should I decamp suddenly without notifying him.
There he drank some fifty cups of coffee, each one the size of a
thimble, and smoked as many cigarettes, their burned stubs locating his
seat under the cafe awning as clearly as peanut-shells mark a boy's at
the circus. I, of course, paid for both.

So absorbed was I in my work--the mosque never was so beautiful as on
that day--I gave no thought to the fact that in my eagerness to hide my
canvas from the prying sun I had really backed myself into a small
wooden gate, its lintel level with the sidewalk--a dry, dusty,
sun-blistered gate, without lock or hasp on the outside, and evidently
long closed. Even then I would not have noticed it, had not my ears
caught the sound of a voice--two voices, in fact--low, gurgling
voices--as if a fountain had just been turned on, spattering the leaves
about it. Then my eye lighted, not only on the gate, but upon a seam or
split in the wood, half-way up its height, showing where a panel was
sometimes pushed back, perhaps for surer identification, before the
inside wooden beam would be loosened.

So potent was the spell of the mosque's witchery that the next instant
I should have forgotten both door and panel had not Joe touched the toe
of my boot with his own--he was sitting close to me--and in explanation
lifted his eyebrow a hair's breadth, his eyes fixed on the slowly
sliding panel--sliding noiselessly, an inch at a time. Only then did my
mind act.

What I saw was first a glow of yellow green, then a mass of blossoms,
then a throat, chin and face, one after another, all veiled in a
gossamer thin as a spider's web, and last--and these I shall never
forget--a pair of eyes shining clear below and above the veil, and
which gazed into mine with the same steady, full, unfrightened look one
sometimes sees on the face of a summer moon when it bursts through a
rift