bind-weed tendrils, a continuous curtain, flaming with large flowers,
but sombre as the falling shades of night, rather resembling jungles of
Ceylon and the Filipinas; and she, that day, lying in the single car
behind, where I had made her a little yatag-bed from Tatar Bazardjik,
continually played the kittur, barely touching the strings, and crooning
low, low, in her rich contralto, eternally the same air, over and over
again, crooning, crooning, some melancholy tune of her own dreaming,
just audible to me through the slow-travailing monotony of the engine;
till I was drunken with so sweet a woe, my God, a woe that was sweet as
life, and a dolour that lulled like nepenthe, and a grief that soothed
like kisses, so sweet, so sweet, that all that world of wood and gloom
lost locality and realness for me, and became nothing but a charmed and
pensive Heaven for her to moan and lullaby in; and from between my
fingers streamed plenteous tears that day, and all that I could keep on
mourning was 'O Leda, O Leda, O Leda,' till my heart was near to break.

The feed-pump eccentric-shaft of this engine, which was very poor and
flaky, suddenly gave out about five in the afternoon, and I had to stop
in a hurry, and that sweet invisible mechanism which had crooned and
crooned about my ears in the air, and followed me whithersoever I went,
stopped too. Down she jumped, calling out:

'Well, I had a plesentiment that something would happen, and I am so
glad, for I was tired!'

Seeing that nothing could be done with the feed-water pump, I got down,
took the bag, and parting before us the continuous screen, we went
pioneering to the left between a rock-cleft, stepping over large stones
that looked black with moss-growths, no sky, but hundreds of feet of
impenetrable leafage overhead, and everywhere the dew-dabbled profusion