This is true likewise of the word for water, and others I might mention, and certain emotions such as joy, fear. I have traced words with interest and pleasure through many languages, I usually come back with increased belief in basic oneness, far away, but findable. Words that express suffering, fear, grow grim and gaunt in any tongue. Their surfaces are shriveled with emotion. Those on the contrary that express love, call with singing softness of vowel liquids. Words are the patient camels of the grey, lonely deserts of the mind, bearing carefully for increased knowledge, increased welfare, the treasured burdens of intellect. You can feel the atmosphere in which a word was born, brought up, so to speak, no matter in what tongue it happens to be incorporated. Words have personality. They keep securely the aroma of the past. Many years ago when I was learning Spanish a word in that tongue puzzled me. My Spanish teacher was not a scholar; he knew nothing about it. I felt sensitively fluttering over its surface the atmosphere of another race, the thinking of a different people. Later I found it came from the East, from Persia. It meant _master_. Then I understood. It had been brought to Spain by the Moors. It had pride, dignity, patriarchal sternness, a peculiar harsh browed aloofness to my ear that Spanish words did not have. It was a memory incorporated in daily speech of Spain of the four hundred years of Moorish rule. It belongs in the Court of the Lions of the Alhambra. It is draped, turban-crowned. It has nothing in common with the pale, long-faced, ascetic, Spaniard who created the Inquisition. I think it was an Arab poet who declared words are the thin, embroidered veil in which we wrap thoughts. Races have loved them. In their structure, after the crumbling of ages, may still be felt the stress of composite emotions, ancient, semi-cosmic loves. Words are as near reality as anything life possesses. There are words that for me keep peculiar qualities. The word _Delhi_, for instance, is a carved pendant made of amethyst. It is richly hued, lovely. It could not be any kind of jewel save pendant. Nor made of anything save amethyst. The word _Agra_, on the contrary, is a stone-white cameo, hard, sharp, cold of line. It is not impossible that words, in effort to catch plastic beauty, may possess extentions not readily catalogueable; that they may build (for sensation) with vowels, with consonants interwoven like a fugue, with guarded emphasis of recurrent letters, similar _sound-pictures_ that echo the sensation of objects of art, rebuild them, in short, in the mind, in a different medium.