bagdhad

Updated: May 1, 2025

These are the ruins whose report was carried to Bagdhad by those early caravan traders, and there woven into the flowery tapestries of the "Arabian Nights" nightmare cities, rising like an enchantment out of the desert sand; bereft of the voices and footsteps of men, but teeming with hoarded treasure and graven images of gods that gaze down, inscrutable and sternly resplendent, upon the wanderer who, stumbling fearfully through a labyrinth of silent halls, suddenly encounters, in demon-guarded chamber, some ensorcelled maiden, frozen to stone.

Norman Douglas - Fountains in the Sand : Rambles Among the Oases of Tunisia