The Carpet From Bagdad | Page 4

George sat on the
tea-veranda of the Hotel Semiramis in Cairo. A book lay idly upon his
knees. It was one of those yarns in which something was happening
every other minute. As adventures go, George had never had a real one
in all his twenty-eight years, and he believed that fate had treated him
rather shabbily. He didn't quite appreciate her reserve. No matter how
late he wandered through the mysterious bazaars, either here in Egypt
or over yonder in India, nothing ever befell more exciting than an
argument with a carriage-driver. He never carried small-arms, for he
would not have known how to use them. The only deadly things in his
hands were bass-rods and tennis-racquets. No, nothing ever happened
to him; yet he never met a man in a ship's smoke-room who hadn't run
the gamut of thrilling experiences. As George wasn't a liar himself, he
believed all he saw and most of what he heard. Well, here he was,
eight-and-twenty, a pocket full of money, a heart full of life, and as
hopeless an outlook, so far as romance and adventure were concerned,

as an old maid in a New England village. Why couldn't things befall
him as they did the chap in this book? He was sure he could behave as
well, if not better; for this fellow was too handsome, too brave, too
strong, not to be something of an ass once in a while.
"George, you old fool, what's the use?" he thought. "What's the use of a
desire that never goes in a straight line, but always round and round in
a circle?"
He thrust aside his grievance and surrendered to the never-ending
wonder of the Egyptian sunset; the Nile feluccas, riding upon perfect
reflections; the date-palms, black and motionless against the translucent
blue of the sky; the amethystine prisms of the Pyramids, and the
deepening gold of the desert's brim. He loved the Orient, always so new,
always so strange, yet ever so old and familiar.
A carriage stopped in front, and his gaze naturally shifted. There is
ceaseless attraction in speculating about new-comers in a hotel, what
they are, what they do, where they come from, and where they are
going. A fine elderly man of fifty got out. In the square set of his
shoulders, the flowing white mustache and imperial, there was a
suggestion of militarism. He was immediately followed by a young
woman of twenty, certainly not over that age. George sighed wistfully.
He envied those polo-players and gentleman-riders and bridge-experts
who were stopping at the hotel. It wouldn't be an hour after dinner
before some one of them found out who she was and spoke to her in
that easy style which he concluded must be a gift rather than an
accomplishment. You mustn't suppose for a minute that George wasn't
well-born and well-bred, simply because his name was Jones. Many a
Fitz-Hugh Maurice or Hugh Fitz-Maurice might have been-- But, no
matter. He knew instinctively, then, what elegance was when he saw it,
and this girl was elegant, in dress, in movement. He rather liked the
pallor of her skin, which hinted that she wasn't one of those athletic
girls who bounced in and out of the dining-room, talking loudly and
smoking cigarettes and playing bridge for sixpenny points. She was tall.
He was sure that her eyes were on the level with his own. The grey veil
that drooped from the rim of her simple Leghorn hat to the tip of her

nose obscured her eyes, so he could not know that they were large and
brown and indefinably sad. They spoke not of a weariness of travel, but
of a weariness of the world, more precisely, of the people who
inhabited it.
She and her companion passed on into the hotel, and if George's eyes
veered again toward the desert over which the stealthy purples of night
were creeping, the impulse was mechanical; he saw nothing. In truth,
he was desperately lonesome, and he knew, moreover, that he had no
business to be. He was young; he could at a pinch tell a joke as well as
the next man; and if he had never had what he called an adventure, he
had seen many strange and wonderful things and could describe them
with that mental afterglow which still lingers over the sunset of our first
expressions in poetry. But there was always that hydra-headed monster,
for ever getting about his feet, numbing his voice, paralyzing his hands,
and never he lopped off a head that another did not instantly grow in its
place. Even the sword of Perseus could not have saved him, since one
has to get away from an object in order to cut it down.
Had he really ever tried to