Publisher's Synopsis
An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English Cathedral tower behere! The well-known massive gray square tower of its old Cathedral? How can that behere! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of thereal prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set upby the Sultan's orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousandscimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in numberand attendants. Still the Cathedral Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, andstill no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rustyspike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some vague periodof drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility.Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantasticallypieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling frame upon his arms, andlooks around. He is in the meanest and closest of small rooms. Through the raggedwindow-curtain, the light of early day steals in from a miserable court. He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the weightupon it. Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind ofpipe, to kindle it. And as she blows, and shading it with her lean hand, concentrates its redspark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a lamp to show him what he sees of
