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The air was full of the resinous breath of the pines, whose boughs, meeting and interlacing overhead, formed an arabesqued roof, through the openings of which the afternoon sunshine sifted, as if through stained glass. With the slender stems of the trees rising on each side in the semi-twilight, the grove was like the transept of a cathedral. It seemed a profanation to speak in such a place.
What might that mean? None could imagine, but not one even thought of turning back. The walls and floor in this straight, descending passage were now no longer smooth, arabesqued, polished. To the contrary, they showed a rough surface, on which the marks of the chisel could be plainly seen as it had shorn away the yielding metal in great gouges.
One sinewy brown arm was outflung, now almost wholly buried in the growing sand-drift. The hand still gripped a long, gleaming rifle, its stock and barrel elaborately arabesqued in silver picked out with gold. "Ah!" exclaimed the Master again, pulling at a thin crimson cord his questing fingers had discovered about the old man's neck. With hands that trembled a little, he drew out this cord.
Passing through these, they entered a shady courtyard, on one side of which was a stone pavilion. The flat ceiling was supported by massive columns, closely covered with intricate sculpture. The roof was arabesqued with deeply cut patterns, picked out in bright colours. A fountain played in the middle.
Nevill led him there by way of many tile-paved corridors, lit by hanging Arab lamps suspended from roofs of arabesqued cedar-wood.
These early painters have made up their Paganism for themselves, out of all pleasant things they knew; their fancy has brooded upon it; and the very details that make us laugh, the details coming direct from the Middle Ages, the spirit in glaring opposition occasionally to that of Antiquity, bring home to us how completely this Pagan fairyland is a genuine reality to these men. We feel this in nearly all the work of that sort least, in the archæological Mantegna's. We see it beginning in the mere single figures the various drawings of Orpheus, "Orpheus le doux menestrier jouant de flutes et de musettes," as Villon called him, much about that time piping or fiddling among little toy animals out of a Nuremberg box; the drawing of fauns carrying sheep, some with a queer look of the Good Shepherd about them, of Pinturicchio; and rising to such wonderful exhibitions (to me, with their obscure reminiscence of pageants, they always seem like ballets) as Perugino's Ceiling of the Cambio, where, among arabesqued constellations, the gods of antiquity move gravely along: the bearded knight Mars, armed cap-
A black boy in a gorgeous, plumed turban and a long, crimson surcoat arabesqued in gold there were three or four such attendants about the room proffered him a cup of posses on a golden salver. The King rose, thrust aside the little blackamoor, and with his spaniel under his arm, sauntered across to Miss Stewart's table.
"Enough to decimate France," he said, screwed the stopper carefully into place, and put the flask in his pocket. "Release the drawer, if you please, monsieur," he added to Simmonds. It sprang back into place on the instant, the arabesqued handle snapping up with a little click. "You will observe its ingenuity," said M. Pigot. "It is really most clever.
We were received by an old gentleman, who appeared to be a public officer, and found ourselves in a small room, wainscoted with beautifully carved oak, roofed with a coved ceiling, painted with symbols of the planets, and arabesqued in rich designs by Raphael, and lined with splendid frescos of subjects, scriptural and historical, by Perugino.
Burton found tame, for the girls did nothing but eat sweetmeats and occasionally run forward and twirl round for a moment with a half-bold, semi-conscious look. Then followed the visit to Golconda and its tombs of wax-like Jaypur marble, with their arabesqued cupolas and lacery in stone.
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