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spell. During dessert a basket was
brought in full of prehistoric pottery, with a bronze
spear-head in addition the fruits, as I gathered, of
that afternoon's work. Mrs. Adam, though, like Don
Juan's mother, ' her favourite science was the mathematical,'
betrayed in discussing these objects the
fact that she was a Greek scholar. Colonel Falkland,
who had lived much in the East, interwove with his
talk about archseology many interesting observations
as to the unsuspected power, the politics, and the future of Islam. He explained to us problems of
which in the Western world the very existence is
hardly so much as dreamed. As he spoke, mysterious
regions with sounding legendary names, which had
always seemed to me to belong to the land of fable-
Armenia, Karamania, and even Thibet and Persia
began for the first time to assume a sort of spectral
reality; and when at half-past ten we all of us
separated for the night, I felt that my mind, like my
body, was moving against a new background. Strange
mountains seemed to be towering up around me whose
snowy passes shut out the Western world, and I
seemed to discern, half-transparent in the air, the
gigantic shadowy shapes of new powers and presences.
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