modes
of travail and estrangement as a fancy careless of pain and indifferent
to life can devise. But it is known that happy they are to be; and if by
the annihilation of time and space then are space and time annihilated.
Adventures are to the adventurous all the world over; but they are so
with a difference in the East. It is only Sinbad that confesses himself
devoured with the lust of travel. The grip of a humourous and fantastic
fate is tight on all the other heroes of this epic-in-bits. They do not
go questing for accidents: their hour comes, and the finger of God urges
them forth, and thrusts them on in the way of destiny. The air is
horrible with the gross and passionate figments of Islamite mythology.
Afrits watch over or molest them; they are made captive of malignant
Ghouls; the Jinns take bodily form and woo them to their embraces. The
sea-horse ramps at them from the ocean floor; the great roc darkens earth
about them with the shadow of his wings; wise and goodly apes come forth
and minister unto them; enchanted camels bear them over evil deserts with
the swiftness of the wind, or the magic horse outspreads his sail-broad
vannes, and soars with them; or they are borne aloft by some servant of
the Spell till the earth is as a bowl beneath them, and they hear the
angels quiring at the foot of the Throne. So they fare to strange and
dismal places: through cities of brass whose millions have perished by
divine decree; cities guilty of the cult of the Fire and the Light
wherein all life has been striken to stone; or on to the magnetic
mountain by whose horrible attraction the bolts are drawn from the ship,
and they alone survive the inevitable wreck. And the end comes. Comes
the Castle of Burnished Copper, and its gates fly open before them: the
forty damsels, each one fairer than the rest, troop out at their
approach; they are bathed in odours, clothed in glittering apparel, fed
with enchanted meats, plunged fathoms deep in the delights of the flesh.
There is contrived for them a private paradise of luxury and splendour, a
practical Infinite of gold and silver stuffs and jewels and all things
gorgeous and rare and costly; and therein do they abide for evermore. You
would say of their poets that they contract immensity to the limits of
desire; they exhaust the inexhaustible in their enormous effort; they
stoop the universe to the slavery of a talisman, and bind the visible and
invisible worlds within the