And here in Alexandria I found one that might have been lifted out of Royal Street or Lafayette Square. A ramshackle wooden building, bleached and blistered by many a dust-storm and torrid sun, its cracked and distorted window-panes were curtained with decayed illustrated papers in many tongues, discoloured Greek and Italian penny-dreadfuls, and a few shelves of cheap curios. Over the door a long shingle displayed on one side the legend _Librairie Universelle_, while the other bore the word [Greek: BIBLIOPOLION], which you may translate as it please your fancy. Inside the narrow doors were craters and trenches and redoubts and dug-outs of books. They lay everywhere, underfoot and overhead. They ran up at the back in a steep _glacis_ with embrasures for curios, and were reflected to infinity in tall dusty pier-glasses propped against the walls. High up under the mansard roof hung an antique oriental candelabrum with one candle. Hanging from twine were stuffed fish of grotesque globular proportions, and with staring apoplectic eyes. A stuffed monkey was letting himself down, one-hand, from a thin chain, and regarded the customer with a contemptuous sneer, the dust lying thick on his head and arms and his exquisitely curled tail. And out of an apparently bomb-proof shelter below several tons of books there emerged a little old gentleman in a brilliant _tarbush_, who looked inquiringly in my direction. For a moment I paused, fascinated by the notion that I had discovered the great Library of Alexandria, reported burnt so many centuries ago. For once within those musty, warped, unpainted walls one forgot the modern world. I looked out. Across the street, backed by the immense and level blaze of an Egyptian sunset, blocks of Carrara marble blushed to pink with mauve shadows, and turned the common stone mason's yard into a garden of gigantic jewels. The hum of a great city, the grind of the trolley-cars, the cries of the itinerant sellers of nuts and fruit, of chewing gum and lottery-tickets, of shoe laces and suspenders, of newspapers, and prawns, and oysters, and eggs, and bread, the rattle of carriages and all the flashing brilliance of the palaces of pleasure, were shut out from that quiet street near the Greek Patriarchate. I had the sudden notion of asking for permission to sit in that Universal Library, and write. And Mr. Bizikas, the little old gentleman in the vivid _tarbush_, who was lighting a very dirty tin lamp to assist the one candle in the oriental candelabrum, had no objection. I have a feeling occasionally that here I topped the rise of human felicity, as I conceive it. Perhaps I did. Anyhow, _Aliens_ grew.