Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 edition. Excerpt: ... chapter vii the kadhl's hospitality pvelightful days followed filled with tourist satisfactions to Townsend, in spite of the heat which the morning and evening sea dip alone made endurable. There were sunrise expeditions to the various Roman ruins of which not a few center about Bemblah; pilgrimages to the local marabouts; even shopping descents upon the meagerly stocked souk with a resultant heterogeneous and amazing spoil. Then long hours of lounge and pleasant talk through the hot afternoons in the cool of the cloistral patio. Under Mabrouk's tutelage Townsend soon got to know the unedited edition, as it were, of the Arabic city. He saw all that he could see and much that he shouldn't. And the easy, gliding days that wound their shadowy arms in an endless chain of sunshine and starshine soon came to wind him, too, in their soft net; until he felt it didn't after all really matter if he never went back to the great ant-hill that is called the Occident. He began to feel that the mystery which separates the East and West lies in the quality of temperament, and not in knowledge or achievement; in the contemplative attitude of the old civilizations to which we, in turn, will come; after we have tired of our playthings--our iron-clad and air-filled toys and explosives--have outgrown our games of theories and politics and cults and come to the higher thought and science of man himself, his destinies and place in the infinitude of the creations. And men of this Eastern temperament--grown-ups--are everywhere. They are not parked in latitudes nor dyed in the wool of climates. In the West they usually sit in doctoral robes apart, and make utterance ex cathedra from pulpit and rostrum. In the East they sit crosslegged and in rags by the wayside...