ABSTRACT
What a Strange thing life is! Every morning, in that condition of semi-slumber wherein reason gradually gains the mastery over the wild pictures of our dreams, I feel that it is natural, logical, and in keeping with my Parisian origin, that I should wake up in the dim light of a grey sky, to the sound of wheels rattling over the paved Streets, in a gloomy room filled with clumsy furniture, in which the imagination beats against the windows like an imprisoned insect, so that it is with an ever more lively sense of astonishment that I find myself a thousand leagues from my native land, gradually allowing my senses to respond to the vague impressions of a world which is a perfect antithesis to our own. The voice of the Turk who chants upon the neighbouring minaret; the little bell and the heavy trot of the passing camel, and sometimes his Strange lowing; the murmurs and indistinct sounds which give life to the air, the wood and the walls; the rapid dawn which reproduces upon the ceiling the multitudinous openings of the fretted windows; the morning breeze laden with penetrating odours, which lifts the curtain of my door, and shows me above the courtyard walls the waving tops of the palm-trees—all this surprises me, delights me ... or 56saddens me, according to the day, for I do not suggest that an eternal summer always makes life merry. The black sun of melancholy which casts its gloomy rays upon the forehead of Albert Durer's dreaming angel, sometimes rises too on the luminous plains of the Nile, just as it does on the banks of the Rhine, in some cold German countryside. I will even admit that when there is no fog, the dust may hide the brightness of an Eastern day beneath a veil of gloom.
