I had to tell her that having spent three years within walking distance, so to speak, of it, I had never visited it.
“I had never even heard of it,” she was frank enough to confess. “But it was more like Persia than anything else I saw. We had to go in disguise, you know. I was supposed to be the wife of the Adorner of the Monarchy, and Peter and Claudine were our servants! It was immense fun. But that costume is horribly stuffy, I assure you. And I couldn’t half see anything through that little strip of openwork in front of my eyes.”
She almost left me speechless.
“Perhaps,” I allowed myself to suggest, “that was why you liked it so much.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” she was again human enough to admit. “But there’s really a lot of colour there, besides those usual horrid mud houses and flat roofs. Miles before we got there we could see the dome of Fatima’s tomb glittering like a great gold bubble above the plain, with iridescent mountains behind it. And as we got nearer we made out the big turquoise minarets around it, and smaller domes of peacock tiles, and little blue-and-green tiled pinnacles, above cream-coloured walls. You have no idea how attractive it was.”
That, I must confess, would ordinarily have been enough to quench my interest. When beautiful ladies call a place attractive, the game, so far as I am concerned, is up. But this was a different game.
“Did you really go into the shrine itself?” I asked.
“Of course we did. We had to, to carry out the comedy. And I didn’t know what it didn’t cost us. They were dreadfully afraid we would betray ourselves and get them into trouble. They whisked us out in no time. I got only the vaguest impression, through my strip of open-work, of a dim-lighted octagon, and a catafalque covered with cloth of gold behind a tall silver grille. But it was worth it.”
I was grateful to them, whoever they were, for delaying me no longer than necessary. It came to me a little enviously, though, that beauty and gold are indeed magic keys. Also that dessert was disappearing all too rapidly. Likewise that the lady from Pittsburgh was eyeing Mrs. Maturin through her lorgnette.
“Then they took us,” the latter went on, “through a porcelain gateway into the loveliest little cloister I ever saw—all blue and green tiles, with a toy river running through it, in a channel of mossy marble that widened in the centre into a big oblong pool. Some enormous cypress-trees were reflected in it.”