And rather than tell them truly that deforming out big
toes was our custom and our pleasure I told them that I was under the
curse of a malignant god at whose feet I had neglected to offer
berries in infancy. And to some extent I justified myself, for
Convention is a god though his ways are evil; and had I told them the
truth I would not have been understood. They gave me a lady to dance
with who was of marvellous beauty, she gold me that her name was
Saranoora, a princess from the North, who had been sent as tribute to
the palace of Singanee. And partly she danced as Europeans dance and
partly as the fairies of the waste who lure, as legend has it, lost
travellers to their doom. And if I could get thirty heathen men out of
fantastic lands, with their long black hair and little elfin eyes and
instruments of music even unknown to Nebuchadnezzar the King; and if I
could make them play those tunes that I heard in the ivory palace on
some lawn, gentle reader, at evening near your house then you would
understand the beauty of Saranoora and the blaze of light and colour
in that stupendous hall and the lithesome movement of those mysterious
queens that danced round Singanee. Then gentle reader you would be
gentle no more but the thoughts that run like leopards over the far
free lands would come leaping into your head even were it London, yes,
even in London: you would rise up then and beat your hands on the wall
with its pretty pattern of flowers, in the hope that the bricks might
break and reveal the way to that palace of ivory by the amethyst gulf
where the golden dragons are.
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