Strona 366 z 490

He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget. He

read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little cafe at

Smyrna where the Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the

turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk

gravely to each other; he read of the Obelisk in the Place de la

Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile

and longs to be back by the hot, lotus-covered Nile, where there

are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded

claws, and crocodiles with small beryl eyes that crawl over the

green steaming mud; he began to brood over those verses which,

drawing music from kiss-stained marble, tell of that curious

statue that Gautier compares to a contralto voice, the "monstre

charmant" that couches in the porphyry-room of the Louvre. But

after a time the book fell from his hand. He grew nervous, and a

horrible fit of terror came over him. What if Alan Campbell

should be out of England?