were great slabs of unleavened bread and a variety of sample pickles and jams. Abdul was encouraged to talk, and waxed eloquent in weird English. He spoke of a riot in the streets which had made his legs tremble. "It was very shame!" he concluded, with tragic eyes. By "shame" he meant "terrifying," just as by "famous" he meant "agreeable to the palate." The divergence of his vocabulary from the English norm was as wide as that of journeymen from that of metaphysicians; yet, Paul mused, one could with a little imagination reconcile any verbal discrepancies, One listened to a specialized vocabulary until one had heard it in a sufficient number of connotations to commence transposing. If this sort of thing were conscientiously done, one might end by discovering that every human being was saying exactly the same thing as every other. Every utterance, when balanced by the sum of circumferences which had brought it into formulation, was simply part of the One utterance, the eternal verity, just as every colour was simply a part of the spectrum that constituted light. Once we were intelligent enough to take this fact into reckoning, we should enter for the first time in history upon an era of civilization. He was sure Babel was the stumbling block in the way of human progress.
After luncheon they mounted to the dazzling white roof. The old city sent up a thousand muffled sounds. Against patches of light and shade moved a living kaleidoscope: olive and copper faces under scarlet tarbooches; flowing gallabias of purple and garnet; vermilion and lemon-coloured slippers; lilac cotton tunics and jade silk scarfs; pasty black-gowned women with coquettishly transparent white veils. And through the tortuous thoroughfares passed donkeys laden with emerald-green fodder. Paul was lazy-minded enough to wonder how the beasts dared eat it uncooked.
"We got to celebrate," said Patrick, "seeing it's your
