concluded to do precisely what Long Stick said we should do, namely, to set up housekeeping in the bin. The carpets and portmanteaus were thrown in, the rest of the freight thrust after to promote an air of cheerfulness, and Mohammad erected his furnace before the door, and proceeded to cook the dinner. Fortunately it was possible to obtain fresh fruit from Gaza, and the Commander, who was as good a cook as he was warrior, undertook to commemorate the day by an original pudding. Ah! Hadji Hamed, long cook of the Ibis, in whose destiny a desert journey with these Howadji was not included, your image returned in that dreary quarantine, fragrant and cloud-wreathed with the fumes of Kara Kooseh and of Yakhnee. Hadji Hamed, it is as impossible to speak of the Commander's commemorative pudding, as it was to eat it. Quarantine is not lovely. On shipboard it is more tolerable, or in any place, however miserable, whence your eye and soul may refresh themselves with the vision of earth or water. But in a glaring square court, with no green thing, and no gay thing, and no pleasant motion to greet the eye-with the consciousness of the loathsome diseases that have raged in the very bin which incloses you, and the conviction that if excited imagination should affect your health, longer and more torturing imprisonment and mortal disease, nursed by a cheerful Long Stick in waiting, and attended by an idiot of an Italian Medico, who looks at you from a distance, through assafetida smoke, would be your portion until the good angel Death removed you,-under these circumstances the quarantine is an exquisite torture, and is a refinement of cruelty well worthy the attention of the anti-humane movement, which deplores model prisons. If Mr. Carlyle, as Chairman of a Committee of the Anti-Rosewater Philanthropists, would proceed upon a visit of examination to the quarantine at Gaza, he would discover its paramount advantage of the combination of the greatest amount of practical physical suffering with the smallest possibility of mental comfort. There is not the faintest odour of rose-water in any corner of the establishment, or of the policy which dictates it. Had the journey been earlier performed by that gentleman, we should surely have had one other proposal for the solution of the Irish question, namely, the erection of a quarantine upon the Gaza model, large enough to shovel all Ireland into, there "to digest itself at leisure." In the quarantine you would read if you could. But your books are as tasteless to your listless mind, as cakes to a fevered palate. Carelessly you turn the pages, and rise to stroll in the court. The Guardiano steps nimbly up and flourishes his pole. You stalk idly about in the sun, veering toward any chance figure standing in the court, that it may be thrust away by Long Stick. From some neighbouring bin, heaped with a mass of filthy Arabs, among whom some Dervish or Santon chances to be, you hear the wild howl of religious frenzy. Nor can you but shudder, dreading that much longer residence would tune your witless voice to the same measures. The Commander, lying smoking among the pots and pans, has an introverted aspect, as if meditating some further atrocity in the shape of pudding. And what diabolical puddings might a man not make, who lived long in quarantine! Wind and Shower pass in animated conversation, actually resigned, apparently, to this hiatus in life. You lurch toward them, and your Long Stick parries poles with theirs. The venerable Armenian, whose bin is next our own, is sleeping in the sun; his grave white beard flowing over his vesture-like a Roman Senator, you try to fancy, as if fancy had not long since perished. "After all," you say, looking up and striving to cajole your intolerable ennui, "after all, that is the Syrian sky." In vain. Even the sky has turned against us. It is brazen and monotonous. Not one soft cloud wreathes and melts in its depths-not a bird flies, singing, through the blue. Only in the twilight your heart is a little comforted; for it touches with soft splendour the rough plaster walls, melting them and fusing, until the compassionate moon rises behind the palms of Gaza, which you cannot see, and looking into the court of desolation, it builds in the dim air a marble palace of your prison. And in that moonlight sits Khadra at the door of her bin, singing Arabic ditties of love and sorrow. |