“Will you stay here all your life?” she asked in awe.
The priest looked at the blazing landscape. His shoulders drooped. Finally he said, “Where on earth is the priest of God so needed as in this wilderness of darkened souls? If I can ever serve you, let me know.” He turned toward the stark rectory.
Julie stood on the spot, and watched the black cassock disappear.
Rousing herself, she walked down the street, stopping to peep wonderingly over the tops of old walls at the contents of gardens, at gay dwellings gleaming like bright fruit or gorgeous birds’ eggs out of the giant foliage. Before one house, most orientally imposing of them all, Julie stopped in amazement.
This dwelling was so extraordinarily different from her conception of human habitations that her fancy coupled it with pillared pagodas. It was painted in a number of strong colors, which, as in none other of these strange houses, made a singularly stirring harmony, even in the spectrum of startlingly tinted pillars supporting the great galleries. Orchids—elfin, super-mundane faces, and air-plants, free from the bondage of the earth, swung like stars in the soft evening wind from the balconies.
Strange flowers, mysteriously unfolding in the treetops, showered the coming twilight with a delirious fragrance. All about the boundaries of the garden towered cocoanut palms, looking with their clean trunks like magic beanstalks leading to higher regions; on the ground were large, brown cocoanuts, their milk spilling over the earth. Ripe fruit hung from many trees; bananas, like huge golden branches, and a strange fruit that looked like little green hedgehogs hanging upside down in the high foliage.
Over the garden the light of the lowering sun lay now like the glow of Aladdin’s lamp, illuminating it to supernatural dimensions. Over in one end of it a little grizzled Malay dwarf, perfect in his proportions even to his uplifted tiny hands, with the aid of a device on a long pole, was cutting flowers from the tops of bushes and trees. Julie, staring at the surprising little being and not perfectly sure what he could be, saw him examine with intentness the insides of the flowers as they fell, as though he might expect to find wrapped up in the great blossoms another of his kind. A young monkey danced down a tree-trunk, and commenced scattering the dwarf’s store. The mannikin pounced upon him, and whimsically thrust one of the golden bells of blossoms upside down on the little furry head.
Of a surety this was a Caliph’s mansion. Julie gazed in longingly, venturing at last inside the gate. In a Chinese ginger-jar a little yellow flower caught her eye. In this oriental and magic garden to find so strange, so alien a thing as an English primrose blooming! It was not a very robust primrose; indeed it was faint and small. Yet clearly it was more carefully tended than anything else in the garden.
Out of a green and bronze lodge a keeper emerged to investigate her. The sun of the East had burned him to all but a cinder. Humbly respectful, he waited for her to speak. Julie explained in broken Spanish that the garden was so beautiful that she had been tempted to enter. She would like to know who lived in this little kingdom.
The queer old wrinkled creature looked quizzically at her, “Una hija del pais,” he answered.