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Updated: September 8, 2025
We were quickly mounted and off like the wind, past turbans, flowing bournouses, tarbooshes, past grand old mosques, petty cafés, where the faithful were squatting on bamboo-seats, smoking pipes or drinking coffee-grounds, while listening to a storyteller, possibly relating some story in the Arabian Nights; then we were through the bazaars, all closed now and silent; then up in the citadel, and through the mosque of Yusef; then down and scouring over the flying sand among the grand old tombs of the Mamelukes and of the caliphs; then off at break-neck speed toward the Mokatamma mountains, from a rise on the lower spur of one of which we saw, in the shadow of the coming night, the Pyramids and the slow-flowing Nile.
The heroine once transported from the lagunes of Venice to the frontier of Bohemia and the castle of Rudolstadt, the character of the story becomes less naturalistic; the storyteller loses herself somewhat in subterranean passages and the mazes of adventure generally.
The importance of a definite time and place for the story hour, for a prompt beginning and for an ending before it becomes tedious, cannot be too strongly urged. The storyteller should "size up" the conditions and suit the story hour to them.
Delhi is a great place most bazaar storytellers in India make their villain hail from there; but when the agony and intrigue are piled highest and the tale halts till the very last breathless sprinkle of cowries has ceased to fall on his mat, why then, with wagging head and hooked forefinger, the storyteller goes on: 'But there was a man from Cairo, an Egyptian of the Egyptians, who' and all the crowd knows that a bit of real metropolitan devilry is coming.
A shade of annoyance crossed the Sultan's face, a look of thunder that you had scarcely seen, but in those lands they watched his visage well, and though his spirit was wandering far away and his eyes were bleared with hasheesh yet that storyteller there and then perceived the look that was death, and sent his spirit back at once to London as a man runs into his house when the thunder comes.
As traveller and storyteller, the beggar was admitted in the halls of chieftains, and often treated like a guest; though sometimes, also, no doubt, with contumely. Ulysses charged his son not to betray, by any display of unusual interest in him, that he knew him to be other than he seemed, and even if he saw him insulted, or beaten, not to interpose otherwise than he might do for any stranger.
I am no storyteller, and love as it is cannot be portrayed in a literature dominated and enthralled by the debasing tyranny which "sentences letters" in the name of the Young Girl. Under the Young Girl's blighting reign or rather under the rule of those false Ministers of the Censure who have appointed themselves to the custody of her welfare love
The same dilettante spirit which refuses to see the connection between art and money has also a tendency to repudiate the world of men at large, as being unfit for the habitation of artists. This is a still more serious error of attitude especially in a storyteller. No artist is likely to be entirely admirable who is not a man before he is an artist.
It may be embodied in some oral tradition that shall one day be found; but as yet the mists of forgetfulness hide it from the storyteller of to-day as deeply as the sea fogs are wont to lie between Lingborough and the adjacent coast. The little old ladies of Lingborough were heiresses. "And how should she know how to walk?" said Miss Betty. Aye, aye!
She pronounced it with the long sound of the vowel, and was promptly corrected by Marie Louise. "I said it was my great-grandfather, not my niece," said the storyteller sharply. "Well, onct upon a time he was engaged in a war the Communism war, I think it was. In the heat of battle one day he cut off a great general's head, just like that. Goodness, don't jump so, Rosemary!
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