a woman was talking flawless English to her partner, an English officer.  Just before the next dance began, another woman beckoned to her, Eastern fashion, all four fingers flicking downward.  The first woman crossed to a potted palm; the second moved toward it also, till the two drew, up, not looking at each other, the plant between them.  Then she who had beckoned spoke in a strange tongue at the palm.  The first woman, still looking away, answered in the same fashion with a rush of words that rattled like buckshot through the stiff fronds.  Her tone had nothing to do with that in which she greeted her new partner, who came up as the music began.  The one was a delicious drawl; the other had been the guttural rasp and click of the kitchen and the bazaar.  So she moved off, and, in a little, the second woman disappeared into the crowd.  Most likely it was no more than some question of the programme or dress, but the prompt, feline stealth and coolness of it, the lightning-quick return to and from world-apart civilisations stuck in my memory.

So did the bloodless face of a very old Turk, fresh from some horror of assassination in Constantinople in which he, too, had been nearly pistolled, but, they said, he had argued quietly over the body of a late colleague, as one to whom death was of no moment, until the hysterical Young Turks were abashed and let him get away—­to the lights and music of this elegantly appointed hotel.

These modern ‘Arabian Nights’ are too hectic for quiet folk.  I declined upon a more rational Cairo—­the Arab city where everything is as it was when Maruf the Cobbler fled from Fatima-el-Orra and met the djinn in the Adelia Musjid.  The craftsmen and merchants sat on their shop-boards, a rich mystery of darkness behind them, and the narrow gullies were polished to shoulder-height by the mere flux of people.  Shod white men, unless they are agriculturists, touch lightly, with their hands at most, in passing.  Easterns lean and loll and squat and sidle against things as they daunder along.  When the feet are bare, the whole body thinks.  Moreover, it is unseemly to buy or to do aught and be done with it.  Only people with tight-fitting clothes that need no attention have time for that.  So we of the loose skirt and flowing trousers and slack slipper make full and ample salutations to our friends, and redouble them toward our ill-wishers, and if it be a question of purchase, the stuff must be fingered and appraised with a proverb or so, and if it be a fool-tourist who thinks that he cannot be cheated, O true believers! draw near and witness how we shall loot him.