" Add to all these elements of fascination the unbroken
luxuriance of style; the easy flow of casual epigram or negligent
simile;--Greek holy days not kept holy but "kept stupid"; the mule
who "forgot that his rider was a saint and remembered that he was a
tailor"; the pilgrims "transacting their salvation" at the Holy
Sepulchre; the frightened, wavering guard at Satalieh, not
shrinking back or running away, but "looking as if the pack were
being shuffled," each man desirous to change places with his
neighbour; the white man's unresisting hand "passed round like a
claret jug" by the hospitable Arabs; the travellers dripping from a
Balkan storm compared to "men turned back by the Humane Society as
being incurably drowned." Sometimes he breaks into a canter, as in
the first experience of a Moslem city, the rapturous escape from
respectability and civilization; the apostrophe to the Stamboul
sea; the glimpse of the Mysian Olympus; the burial of the poor dead
Greek; the Janus view of Orient and Occident from the Lebanon
watershed; the pathetic terror of Bedouins and camels on entering a
walled city; until, once more in the saddle, and winding through
the Taurus defiles, he saddens us by a first discordant note, the
note of sorrow that the entrancing tale is at an end.
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