_Chapter XXIV_
_NEFTA AND ITS FUTURE_
There are cities in the East where, from ramparts that support fairy-like
palaces--complicated assemblages of courts and plashing fountains and cool
chambers through which the breeze wanders in an artificial twilight of
marble screens pierced so craftily, one might think them a flowing drapery
of lace-work--where, from such wizard creations of Oriental pomp, you
glance down and behold, stretched at your feet, a burning waste of sand. A
fine incentive to the luxurious imagination of a tyrant, this contrast,
that has all the glamour of a dream....
But such abrupt transitions are not the rule. Midway between the pulsating
town-life and the desert there lies, mostly, a sinister extra-mural
region, a region of gaping walls and potsherds, where the asphodel shoot
up to monstrous tufts and the fallacious colocynth, the wild melon,
scatters its globes of bitter gold. For it is in the nature of Orientals
that their habitations should surround themselves with a girdle of
corrupting things, gruesome and yet fascinating: a Browning might have
grown enamoured of its macabre spell.
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