She bent her head and listened, while I told her some of my favourite tales; and as I talked she became excited, and laughed when the stories were funny, and cried if they were sad.
During the two days I spent with her, I related many of the books I had read; and at the end of my stay we were close friends, for if I was a child in years she was one in experience. And she was so delightfully simple, with a simplicity which must have made God glad to have created human beings.
If she was ignorant of books, she was curiously full of ideas concerning things she had observed. Because she lived in solitude and watched the sky, she knew all the stars—not by their scientific names, but by ones she invented for herself. As we sat on the balcony over the water she told me that at certain seasons of the year a large luminous star kept watch over the opposite side of the Marmora. She called it the Heavenly Lily, and knew the exact hour it appeared every night, and how long it would stay. She told me that the coming of certain stars had to do with the growth of certain flowers and crops. She spoke of them not as stars, but as heavenly watchers, whose earthly worshippers were the flowers. The water she referred to as the earth’s milk. She disliked the winds, but she loved the storms, “because they proved that Allah could lose his temper. It is nice,” she added in a very low tone, as if afraid that he might hear her, “it’s nice to feel that Allah himself has failings.”
But if she were ready to talk of her thoughts, there was a certain aloofness about her which exempted her personal affairs from discussion. Indeed I still had the impression of talking with the bronze lady of the fountain. This attitude of hers several times arrested on the tip of my tongue the sentence: “Why did you leave handsome Nouri Pasha?”
Just before I went away, she asked, à propos of nothing, “When do you leave for Paris?”
“At the end of September, or may be the first week in October.”
“It is a very long way off,” she murmured, half to herself.
“It will pass quickly enough.”
She remained silent, in that silence which is full of whispers. One felt the talking of her thoughts.
After this first visit it became a habit of hers to send for me often to spend entire afternoons with her. She let me climb her trees and gather fruit for our afternoon meal, while the slaves drew cool water from the well.