Zarion E. Weigle.
The Pipe of Zaidee
BY FRANK E. ANDERSON
“Mr. Lomax, seek your evening’s pleasure with me—”
At this unexpected sentence in English, addressed to him by name in Constantinople. Page Lomax wheeled sharply from the railing over which he had been watching the shadows of silver minarets dissolve like Cleopatra’s pearl in the Golden Horn, now amber as Rhine wine beneath the dying sun. By his elbow stood a Turk, whose snowy turban capped bold features from which only one eye glittered. A sabre scar, which ran across the man’s cheek until it lost itself in his flowing beard, accounted for the absence of the other. The fellow was of middle stature, but powerfully made. A loose caftan hanging from his broad shoulders framed within its folds of vermilion the white linen swathing his chest and the orange sash—whence the arabesqued head of a stiletto scolded at its neighbor, a Mussulman rosary of russet beads—and the green trousers of zouave cut stretching to his saffron half-boots. He extended a card, on which Page Lomax read:
THE BRISTOL
Boulevard des Petit Champs,
PERA.
Hosein Aga, Chief Dragoman.