“His fierce eyes watched mine as a tiger might a stag’s, and with a dark smile which seemed to say, ‘You’re a deep one, I see.’ He nodded his head and touched his glass again. Still he seemed to hesitate, and to be fast losing his self-possession, as if either the liquor he had drank, or something in the way I received his first hint, had flustered him. I did not think at the time that he doubted me, either; so I sat still, smoking my sheroot, and watching the traces of irresolution gleaming across his sun-seared face, until, making a strong effort to control himself, he suddenly asked if I was a married man. On my replying in the negative, he tacked ship again, asking me if I ever read poetry, alluding particularly to Moore’s Lallah Rookh.
“ ‘I don’t care a rope’s end for the Veiled Prophet or Nourmahal,’ he said, while I wondered again what he was driving at, ‘but I always admired certain descriptive parts of the Fire-Worshipers, which I always thought Byron must have touched up for Moore—for instance
‘—’Mid damp and gloom and crash of boughs,
And fall of loosened crops that rouse
The leopard from his hungry sleep,
Who, starting, thinks each crag a prey,
And long is heard, from steep to steep,
Chasing them down their thundering way.’
“ ‘Muscat, you know,’ continued he, ‘is the poet’s Oman.’
“ ‘Yes,’ I answered, hardly knowing what to say, ‘and a wretched place enough it is, in spite of Moore’s fancy.’