Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Porter of Bagdad, and Other Fantasies
Its body bent, its hands clasped behind, and its long thin legs, brown and shrivelled like a crane's, had grown together in one. As soon as the Porter touched the Djinn's single eye, the whole room was one flood of mellow light, like the Caliph's spice-garden when the thou sand silver lamps are lighted at once. Then you could see how large the room was and how near it lay to the good Haroun's palace. The roof was so high and walls so wide that one would think it was a Sultan's audience chamber. For there was room for busy slaves setting out a banquet in a wide portico that looked upon a garden of palms. They ever poured red wine from crystal goblets so thin, it was a marvel their delicate sides held in the precious liquor. There were trains and troops of dancing-girls, brown-skinned and white, with little tinkling bells at ankle and wrist, and seated choirs of women-singers, with sweet voices, that sang continually. Foreign princesses, in beauty like the full blown lotus flower, knelt before the Porter's divan of silk tissue. But the great room seemed to have no walls, for the Porter could see, from the divan he lay on, far away where the great black and yellow cats played in their lair beneath the forest leaves, and far ther, where the ocean gleamed blue beyond. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
