you don't get it as you do here, where races and creeds march past you on the Bridge while you stand by and admire. There's something more secret and ancient about it--more like Homer and the Bible and the Arabian Nights. The caravans gave the most telling touch. You don't often see camels up here any longer, but they're still common enough in the interior. I could hardly believe my eyes the first time a procession of them appeared on my beach. First came a man on horseback, with a couple of Persian saddle-bags to make your mouth water, and then the long string of camels roped together like barges in a tow. What an air they had--the fantastic tawny line of them swinging against the blue of the Gulf! And how softly they padded along the shingle, with the picturesque ruffians in charge of them throned high among their mysterious bales! They passed without so much as a turn of the eye, my Wise Men of the East, and disappeared behind the point as silently as they came. It gave me the strangest sensation. I had felt something of the same before. I could scarcely help it, looking out between those tragic trees at the white strip of beach and the blue strip of sea and the green strip of hills that were so much like other hills and seas and beaches and yet so different. But there had never come to me before quite such a sense of the strangeness of this world where so many things had been buried from the time of Jason and the Argo--of this world of which I knew nothing and to which I was nothing. You may believe that I was delighted when I went back to the village that night and found it full of camels. The air was sizzling with bonfires and _kebabs_--you know those bits of lamb they broil on a long wooden spit?--and strange faces were at every corner. They filled the coffee-house, too, when I finally got there. By that time it was too dark to stare as hard as I would have liked. But perhaps the scene was all the more picturesque for the shadowy figures scattered under the vine in the dusk, and the bubble of nargilehs filling the intervals of talk. A feature would come saliently out here and there in the red of a cigarette--a shining eye, a hawk nose, a bronzed cheek-bone. And out on the _meidan_ were groups around fires, with their little pipes that have all the trouble of the East in them, and their little tomtoms of such inimitable rhythms.