All nature seemed rich and glowing with the deep expectance of my heart. The sunrise and the sunset seemed conscious of Winnie, and the very birds seemed to be warbling at times 'She's alive.'
I think, indeed, that I had passed into that sufistic ecstasy expressed by a writer often quoted by my father, an Oriental writer, Ferridoddin—
With love I burn: the centre is within me;
While in a circle everywhere around me
Its Wonder lies—
that exalted mood, I mean, described in the great chapter on the Renascence of Wonder which forms the very core and heart-thought of the strange book so strangely destined to govern the entire drama of my life, The Veiled Queen.
The very words of the opening of that chapter came to me:
'The omnipotence of love—its power of knitting together the entire universe—is, of course, best understood by the Oriental mind. Just after the loss of my dear wife I wrote the following poem called "The Bedouin Child," dealing with the strange feeling among the Bedouins about girl children, and I translated it into Arabic. Among these Bedouins a father in enumerating his children never counts his daughters, because a daughter is considered a disgrace.
'Ilyàs the prophet, lingering 'neath the moon,
Heard from a tent a child's heart-withering wail,
Mixt with the message of the nightingale,
And, entering, found, sunk in mysterious swoon,
A little maiden dreaming there alone.
She babbled of her father sitting pale
'Neath wings of Death—'mid sights of sorrow and bale,
And pleaded for his life in piteous tone.
'"Poor child, plead on," the succouring prophet saith,
While she, with eager lips, like one who tries
To kiss a dream, stretches her arms and cries
To Heaven for help—"Plead on; such pure love-breath,
Beaching the Throne, might stay the wings of Death
That, in the Desert, fan thy father's eyes."
'The drouth-slain camels lie on every hand;
Seven sons await the morning vultures' claws;
'Mid empty water-skins and camel maws
The father sits, the last of all the band.
He mutters, drowsing o'er the moonlit sand,
"Sleep fans my brow: sleep makes us all pashas;
Or, if the wings are Death's, why Azraeel draws
A childless father from an empty land."
'"Nay," saith a Voice, "the wind of Azraeel's wings
A child's sweet breath has stilled: so God decrees:"
A camel's bell comes tinkling on the breeze.
Filling the Bedouin's brain with bubble of springs
And scent of flowers and shadow of wavering trees,
Where, from a tent, a little maiden sings.