“There is not a person among them, high or low, who does not eat them in his house daily, both in the morning and at evening. This is what has ruined their intelligence and affected their brains and degraded their senses and distracted their faculties and crushed their spirits and spoiled their complexions, and so altogether changed their temperaments that everything, or almost everything, appears to them quite different from what it is.” “That gentleman from Bagdad is a man after my own heart,” she declared triumphantly. “I have always 239been sure that people who eat onions must be those to whom ‘almost everything appears quite different from what it is,’ for if they had the slightest idea of ‘what it is’ for other people to be near them after they have indulged that meretricious appetite they would certainly never do it!” This Arab impress, though visible everywhere, is more a general atmosphere than definite remains; for with but few exceptions their creations are so overlaid and modified by subsequent Occidental work that it glows through this overlay rather than defines itself. It was while searching for Moorish fragments that Jane and Peripatetica came upon La Ziza. The guide-books unanimously asserted that Al Aziz—La Ziza—was the work of the Norman King, William I., but the guide-books, they had long since discerned, were as prone to jump to unwarranted conclusions, and, having jumped, to be as aggravatingly cocksure in sticking to their mistakes as was Peripatetica herself. So they took leave to doubt this assertion, and concluded that William probably seized the lovely country-house of some Moorish magnate, adding to it sufficiently to make of it a “lordly pleasure dome” for himself in the wide orange gardens, but the core of the place was wholly Moorish in character; well worth the annexing, well worth its name Al Aziz—The Beloved. They came through the hot, white sunshine up wide, low steps, through a huge grille in an enormous archway, to find a windowless room where the glaring day paled to glaucous shadow against the green tiles of a lofty chamber, as cool and glistening as a sea cave. And the sound of rippling water echoed from the lucent sides and honeycomb vaultings, for a shining 240fountain gushed from the wall into a tiled channel of irregular levels, artfully planned to chafe the sliding water into music before it slept for awhile in a pool, and then slipped again through another channel to another pool, and so passed from the chamber—having glinted over its shining path of gold and green and blue, and having filled the place with cool moisture and clear song. “With fierce noons beaming, Moons of glory gleaming, Full conduits streaming Where fair bathers lie—” Quoted Peripatetica—who might be safely counted on to have a tag of verse concealed about her person for every possible occasion.