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 fountain 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.
“Did you ever see anything that so adequately embodied the Arab conception of pleasure? Coolness, moisture, the singing of water, noble proportions, and clean colour wrought into grave and continent devices? Was there ever anything,” she went on, “so curious as the contradictions of racial instincts? Who could suppose that this would be the home-ideal of those wild desert dwellers who always loved and fought like demons; who were the most voluptuous, the most cruel, the most poetic and the ‘so fightingest’ race the world has probably ever seen!”
“Oh, contradictions!” laughed Jane. “Here’s a flat contradiction, if you like. Please contemplate the delicious, the exquisite absurdities of these frescoes.”
For, needless to say, the Eighteenth Century had not allowed to escape so exquisite an opportunity to make an ass of itself, and had spread over the clean, composed patterns of the tiled walls a layer of lime-wash on which it had proceeded to paint in coarse, bright colours indecently unclad goddesses, all flushed blowzy and beribboned; all lolloping amourously about on clouds or in chariots, or falling into the arms of be-wigged deities of war or of love. Fortunately the greater part of these gross conceptions had been diligently scrubbed away, but enough remained to make Peripatetica splutter indignantly:
“Well, of all the hideous barbarians! The Eighteenth Century was really the darkest of dark ages.”