flying-rooms

Updated: May 1, 2025

Marids, and afrits, guardians of hidden gold, who choke or crush the rash seeker; encounters with the long-buried dead in a Cairo back-alley; undreamed-of promotions, and suddenly lit loves are the stuff of any respectable person's daily life; but the white man from across the water, arriving in hundreds with his unveiled womenfolk, who builds himself flying-rooms and talks along wires, who flees up and down the river, mad to sit upon camels and asses, constrained to throw down silver from both hands at once a child and a warlock this thing must come to the Nubian sheer out of the Thousand and One Nights.

Rudyard Kipling - Letters of Travel (1892-1913)