Persian dawns, Egyptian nights

22
PERSIAN DAWNS
* You will retire to your palace and garden on
Tigris-bank. There you will remain until I give
you leave to come forth.’
Thus the little Worm-King, looking in Berkhu’s
mocking eyes. Then the General made another
prostration, rose, and passed from that room—-
passed, indeed, from all the colourful life of Bagh¬
dad, and for ten long years, in macabre pursuit of
life’s own secret, was remote from it as the dead.
ii
But that pursuit began not at once. The first few
months of exile merely accentuated his boredom—
though Nerses gives it a more theological name—
to an agony almost unendurable. Wearied though
he had been of camp and field, his army and com¬
mand, never had he known such weariness as that
endured, day on day, in the great blue-painted
rooms of the Tigris-bank palace. They were set
with gilded screens of fine mushrabiyeh work, those
rooms, hung with Persian cloths, their floors
mosaic’d by the cunning hands of Shiraz workmen.
In one of them multitudes of chryselephantine
statuettes, idols of pagan gods and spoil of a raid
on raiders of the Hindu Tiger King, stood to peer
unholily from floriated niche and lacquered pedestal
upon the flowing of the Tigris. Fountains sprayed
in the inner courts—fountains in eternal cannonade
of besieging legions of lilies through the early
summer and of roses and mimosa in the intenser