Two leautiful women
older woman, with a sweet and gay face, was mistress of the
tent; it was her daughter, and a daughter-in-law, and a
friend, who had brought us in, and showed us off as a delightful
find picked up by rare good fortune. I soon discovered that
I carried a kind of radiance about me, a magic not my own,
derived from the city of Baghdad from where I came. The
two young women had spent a few months there when their
husbands worked as coolies, and the memory lived with them
in a glorified vision. They stroked my city clothes with a
wistfulness pathetic to see.
" Kahraba," electricity ! I lit my torch and they murmured
the word as if it held a whole heartful of longings. The
worship of the East for mechanical things seems to us deplor-
able and shallow; but seen here against so naked a background,
the glamour of the machine, of something that gives comfort
without effort in a place where bare necessities themselves are
precarious, and every moment of ease comes as a boon and
a miracle; seen here by the fire in the tent that swayed in the
cold night, the light that sprang at will from the palm of my
hand did indeed hold a divinity about it—a Promethean
quality as of lightning snatched from heaven and made gentle
and submissive to the uses of man. So their eyes saw it, more
truly, perhaps, than ours, who buy the thing as soulless glass
and wire.
I watched the beauty of the two girls—a fine beauty of an
old race, with small hands and thin lips and long oval faces.
On their heads they wore little skull caps embroidered with
beads round which they wound the voluminous dark turban.
There were beads round their ankles too, where the scarlet
trousers were fastened tightly and ended in a woollen fringe
over the little bare heels. This is a good and decent costume
for women who sit about on the ground all the time. Over
it they wore loose gowns of printed cotton, like the flowery
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