The Throne of Solomon
European fashion, all but a collar and the shoes, which were
white cotton Persian givas. He had a pleasant, big-nosed face,
with one wall eye, over which a shock of hair continually came
drooping, and a mouth which seemed always on the edge of a
smile in some secret amusement of its own. He questioned
me capably, and diagnosed malaria and dysentery; " diseases
we are used to," he remarked.
" To-morrow, I will take you to my village, and get you
well in a week," said he, while injecting camphor, emetine,
and quinine in rapid succession, and in die most surprising
quantities. " Now would you like a morphia injection to
make you sleep?"
His ideas on quinine ran to three times the maximum
marked in my medical guide, and I thought that a similar
experiment with morphia might have too permanent an effect
altogether. I refused, and turned my attention to a bowl of a
soup called harira, made of rice, almonds and milk.
" Almonds," said the doctor, who had specially ordered this
delicacy for me, " are most excellent for dysentery. They
scrub one out like soap. Pepper is good also."
He caught a dubious look, and begged me to have confidence.
"We know more than your doctors do about these diseases,"
he said again.
Supper was now brought and laid on a round mat on the
floor by the head of my bed, where my host and the doctor
sat down to it in the light of a small oil lamp. Having dis-
patched it, they settled to the business of opium, handing the
pipe to and fro over a small charcoal brazier, a scene of dissi-
pation in the flickering light that made me think of the " Rake's
Progress," which I used to wonder over at Madame Tussaud's
in my childhood. Here it was all in action, so to say, and I
myself, rather surprisingly, in the picture, with the opium
smokers squatting at my bedside in the Assassins' valley.
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