Hence, her pilgrimage every year to Haifa. She comes with presents and gold; and Abbas Effendi, who is not impervious to the influence of other gods than his own, permits her into the sanctuary, where she shares with him the light of divine revelation and returns to the States, as the Priestess of the Cult, to bless and console the Faithful.
Khalid was dining with Ahmed Bey at the Grand Hotel—but here is a portion of the Letter.
By a devilish mischance she occupied the seat opposite to mine. And in this trap of Iblis was decoy enough for a poor mouse like me.
It is an age since I beheld such an Oriental gem in an American setting; or such a strange Southern beauty in an exotic frame. For one would think her from the South, or further down from Mexico. Nay, of Andalusian, and consequently of Arabian, origin she must be.
Her hair and her eyes are of the richest jet; her glance, voluptuous, mysterious; her complexion, neither white nor olive, but partakes of both—a gauze-like shade of heliotrope, as it were, over a pink and straw surface, if you can imagine that; and her expression, a play between devotion and diabolism—now a question mark to love, now an exclamation to sorrow, and at times a dash between both.
By what mysterious medium of romance and adventure did America produce such a beauty, I can not tell. Perhaps she, too, can not. If you saw her, O Shakib, you’d do nothing for months but dedicate odes to her eyes—to the deep, dark infinity of their luring, devouring beauty—which seem to drop honey and poison from every arched hair of their fulsome lashes.
Withal—another devilish mischance—she was dressed in black and wore a white silk ruffle, like myself. And her age? Well, she can not have passed her sixth lustrum. And really, as the Novelist would say in his Novel, she looks ten years younger. …