Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/213

and his failure. It was failure no longer. He would find that old life fair and satisfying. He might even find the lesser gods.

The opium sizzled with a reedy, fluting song. There was no other sound. Even the whispering wind had died; the street cries had guttered out like spent candles.

He smoked. …

Then came to him the vision.

He saw very little now except the house itself, and, of the house, veiled through the opalescent saraband of the poppy fumes, he saw really only the three violet lanterns above the door.

He had seen the house so often, remembered it so well. It was part of his dreams, thus part of his real life. He had always loved it, with an almost physical, sensuous love. It was like a fretted, chiseled ingot, with a pagoda roof that shimmered in every mysterious blending of blue and green and purple, like the plumage of a gigantic peacock, or the shootings of countless dragonflies.

Too, he had always loved the three lamps below the carved, deep-brown pagoda beam. They were of a glorious, glowing violet, faintly dusted with gold; and, depending from them, fluttered long streamers of pottery-red satin, with inscriptions from the Chinese classics in archaic Mandarin hieroglyphics.

These inscriptions changed every night; they seemed to blend with his own changing moods. That was their greatest charm.

Last night he had been in a poetic mood, and the silken strips had lisped some of Han Yu's lilting lines, about "moonlight flooding the inner gallery, where the japonica stammers with silvered petals." To-