BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE SOUL OF A CAT. THE VENTURE OF RATIONAL FAITH. CAPITAL LABOUR AND TRADE AND THE OUTLOOK. SUBJECT TO VANITY. THE TEMPLE OF MUT IN ASHER. (With J. A. Gourlay .) THE COURT OF THE KING AND OTHER STUDIES By MARGARET BENSON T. FISHER UNWIN LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20 First published, 1913 ( All rights reserved )...

“We wake with wrists and ankles jewelled still.” There are many ways of entering fairyland; sometimes there is a door in the ground, and he who goes through finds himself in some great hall or carved and painted chamber. Sometimes we find the morning dew on a flower and touch the eyes with it; or, like John Dietrich, catch the cap which the fairies are flinging and put it on our own heads: and immediately the little people spring into sight, we hear the sweetness of their music and see the glitt

The favourite game with Noah’s Ark was to make the nursery table an Island of Delight. The Delight must have centred in the looking-glasses, which, with frames discreetly hidden in moss, mirrored in their unruffled surfaces forms of numerous ducks and geese and other less decided species of birds. Certainly the other furnishings of the Island were not particularly delightful, for it was thickly populated with wild beasts of horrid aspect and defective limbs, and specimens of that strange pinkish

There were other such enchanted places in this land, and one could step aside from the high-road of life into a place of fantasy and sweet illusion. The dawdling, leisured train set us down one day at a wayside station. No houses were in sight, but behind a clump of trees a cloud of steam rose into the air, as if all the world was a-washing. The train dawdled away across the plain and we went towards the trees to find ourselves in face of a shining, misty waterfall. The white stone was streaked

In the desert not twenty miles from Cairo there has sprung up the mushroom growth of a wonder-working Health Resort. It possesses several hotels, an “Establishment,” a golf links, and everything which a really desirable Health Resort must possess. [1] But at the time when I first knew that tract of sand on which it stands the case was far otherwise. If one must have summarized the attractions of the place they would have run:— An English advertisement of foreign appearance bore witness to these

When Alice went through the Looking-glass, she sprang down into a world where a change had passed on all familiar things; so that she must walk away from the things she wanted to arrive at, and time ran backwards and stopped. When a merman brought a girl through the translucent mirror of the water to be his wife in the great caves below the sea, she heard but dimly the church bell and the sounds of the world above, and saw but seldom its sights when she rose through the bay. And when Tom slipped

The cock has been defying Achmet Bukdadi again to-day. It is a very little cock, hardly larger than a bantam; its plumage betokens a fine disregard of race; if you were pressed you might suggest a remote relationship to a game-cock. The cries of Achmet Bukdadi drew me to the window to see the cock, feathers raised, parading angrily and scornfully in front of him. Achmet’s cries attracted two or three other children, and they ran about on our terrace trying to hustle the cock off the edge of it.

The moon had risen as we rode down the steep, sandy road and threaded our way through the little mud enclosures, where dogs, alive for the excitement of the night, were prowling on the walls, listening with ears pricked up for warnings of enemies, looking with vigilant eyes for some alien to draw near. As we crossed into that part of the village where they did not know us, a hoarse storm of barking filled the air, but in a minute or two we had passed beyond this, and were out among the sand-hill

The great square doorway of the tomb showed inky black on the face of the cliff, golden in the moonlight; the shaft plunged steeply downwards into the rock, with short, high steps roughly cut against one wall. Down these we slowly made our way, the utter darkness pricked here and there by the flame of a candle in some one’s hand. A flame shone for a moment on the little shelf cut back into the rock, where the string bed and wooden pillow of the guard still wait his return, just where he went out

Mahmoud was crouched on the hot sand, in the shade of a great granite figure of an old Egyptian king. On the temple wall at his right hand was incised the figure of a large hawk, which had a certain life-like stare and stride. Below lay the thick green lake; a little pied kingfisher fluttered and poised over it. Mahmoud’s donkey had strayed a little from his owner, and was pulling at some few blades of thin, straggling weed. The Father of the Box, who had ridden him out to Karnak, had some fooli

The donkey-boys were sitting outside the garden gate of the hotel. Mahmoud was against the wall, and taking little part in the flow of conversation. “Achmet Effendi will make a big feast to-morrow,” said one. “He has killed two sheep for his feast.” “Achmet Effendi is a very rich man,” said Maouad. “Twenty years ago he sent his servant Gameel Gameel to dig up stones to burn and lay on his field, there where the English ‘ sidi matre ’ (cemetery) is. But Gameel Gameel found a big pot of golden coi

Abu el Haggag’s boat had come and passed, poor starveling representative of the longest pedigree in the world. Here passed of old the Sacred Bark of the gods, carrying the precious images and emblems, the king burning incense before it, the oxen lotus-garlanded for the sacrifice. And later this sacred bark lent its outward form to the Ark of the Most High God, bearing the simple symbols of justice and mercy, in the long desert wanderings and in the Holy Land. And now the poor, sordid boat on its

The first time Mahmoud woke the moon had won the battle, and was shining on the temple, turning all to unreal, ethereal building, faintly roseate, a temple seen in a dream. Mahmoud looked towards the lake and all was still; the moon made a white sheet of water. The second time Mahmoud woke the moon was down, but from the lake came a light—soft, lambent, golden. He looked towards it, and oh the glory, the wonder! a golden boat was riding on the water. Mahmoud had often seen under the hot sun, in

The whole world had faded and darkened to a uniform tint, black and dingy. The woman who stood there could hardly say whether this tint were brown or grey, for there was no colour to contrast it with, nothing but her own black dress seen through the same sordid medium. In front of her, rather lighter in tint, she could see a few inches of parapet, on which her hands were lying, and dimly could discern the ground at her feet. If she leant over the parapet she could not see the water, but where sh

In a room in an hotel of the south some one was lying ill. It was March, and an airless, parching heat lay outside, the palms drooped yellow leaves, the bee-eaters chattering on a carob-bush dived luxuriantly into corn so green that they were in no wise distinguished from it; they turned and fluttered like butterflies, and from the bronze wing feathers a sheen of gold rippled over their emerald in the sun. Inside the room was as cool as it might be; when, from time to time, the shutters were ope

Many have written of the journey down to the dark river; few have told of the road backward from the river’s brink; a road of sudden ecstasies and sordid pitfalls. For the radiance lay over the earth when he turned his face to it again. Nothing was ever sweeter than the sight of palm leaves against the blue upon the banks of the Nile. As the shores streamed past, with the rosy hills and yellow lights above them, winged feluccas furling sail, or sweeping like birds across the blue, with the roari

The year came round again, and this man had found no contentment for mind or heart. He was such a one as had always believed in the unity of God and nature, had held the visible universe to be the robe of His glory and the material to be like clothing which partly hides and partly reveals the form. He was a man whom God had chastened a little in the flesh, so that He might know the Hand that touched him, yet had given him no loathsome evil thing to be with him, so that he must hate even the body