SHAZADPUR,
_5th September 1894._
I realise how hungry for space I have become, and take my fill of it in
these rooms where I hold my state as sole monarch, with all doors and
windows thrown open. Here the desire and power to write are mine as they
are nowhere else. The stir of outside life comes into me in waves of
verdure, and with its light and scent and sound stimulated my fancy into
story-writing.
The afternoons have a special enchantment of their own. The glare of the
sun, the silence, the solitude, the bird cries, especially the cawings of
crows, and the delightful, restful leisure--these conspire to carry me
away altogether.
Just such noondays seem to have gone to the making of the Arabian
Nights,--in Damascus, Bokhara, or Samarkhand, with their desert roadways,
files of camels, wandering horsemen, crystal springs, welling up under the
shade of feathery date groves; their wilderness of roses, songs of
nightingales, wines of Shiraz; their narrow bazaar paths with bright
overhanging canopies, the men, in loose robes and multi-coloured turbans,
selling dates and nuts and melons; their palaces, fragrant with incense,
luxurious with kincob-covered divans and bolsters by the window-side;
their Zobedia or Amina or Sufia with gaily decorated jacket, wide
trousers, and gold-embroidered slippers, a long narghilah pipe curled up
at her feet, with gorgeously liveried eunuchs on guard,--and all the
possible and impossible tales of human deeds and desires, and the laughter
and wailing, of that distant mysterious region.
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