Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 2, 2025
Presently his eyes travelled away from that, and examined the room and everything in it. That man whom he had seen driving the Russian horses, and squatting on the floor of the hashish café, might well be at home here. And he himself could not he be at home here, with these marvellous prayer-rugs and embroideries, into which was surely woven something of the deep and eternal enigma of the East?
One of the little open rooms was hung with Persian prayer-rugs which Stephen thought were like fading rainbows seen through a mist; and there were queer old tinselled pictures such as good Moslems love: Borak, the steed of the prophet, half winged woman, half horse; the Prophet's uncle engaged in mighty battle; the Prophet's favourite daughter, Fatma-Zora, daintily eating her sacred breakfast.
Baruch so complete in himself, so perfect an entity had added to himself a wife. The taste that manifested itself alike on battered blue lacquer and worn prayer-rugs from Persia had not failed him then; he had found a thing perfect of its kind. From the uneasy Caucasus, where the harem-furnishers of Circassia jostle the woman-merchants of Georgia, he had brought back a prize.
As soon as the sun had risen and the markets and shops were open, they went out to the bazaar and opened their shop, which their servants had already furnished, after the handsomest fashion, with prayer-rugs and silken carpets and a pair of divans, each worth a hundred dinars.
The Bedouins have spread their prayer-rugs, and behind them burns the west. Lescott caught in that, as he had caught in his mountain sketches, the broad spirit of the thing. To paint that canvas, he had endured days of racking camel -travel and burning heat and thirst. He had followed the lure of transitory beauty to remote sections of the world.
Although lovely in itself both in colour and material, fiercely lovely, like the skin of some savage beast, it did not blend with the rest of the room, with the dim hues of the superb embroideries and prayer-rugs, with the dark wood of the lattices that covered the windows.
And as I sit there thinking of what I have to do without, I envy the women I've known in other days, the women with all their white linen and their cut glass and silverware and their prayer-rugs and period rooms and their white-tiled baths and their machinery for making life so comfortable and so easy. I envy them. I put away my list, and go to bed envying them.
Stephen had never seen an Arab of the aristocratic class until to-day; and before, only a few such specimens as parade the Galerie Charles Trois at Monte Carlo, selling prayer-rugs and draperies from Algeria. This man's high birth and breeding were clear at first glance.
Here and there over the warm earth old-fashioned pinks spread their prayer-rugs, on which a worshiper might kneel and offer thanks for life and spring; and towering over all, rows of many-colored hollyhocks flamed and glowed in the light of the setting sun like the stained glass windows of some old cathedral.
Higher up the twenty-foot walls, heads of sambhur, markor, and the lesser deer of the Himalayas showed dimly in the light of one lowered lamp. Skins of bear and leopard, and one or two costly Persian prayer-rugs, partially hid the groundwork of dusty matting, taken over with the bungalow from its former occupant, and in places revealing the stone floor beneath.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking