The Translator's Foreword.


This work, labourious as it may appear, has been to me a labour
of love, an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction. During
my long years of official banishment to the luxuriant and deadly
deserts of Western Africa, and to the dull and dreary half
clearings of South America, it proved itself a charm, a talisman
against ennui and despondency. Impossible even to open the pages
without a vision starting into view; with out drawing a picture
from the pinacothek of the brain; without reviving a host of
memories and reminiscences which are not the common property of
travellers, however widely they may have travelled. From my dull
and commonplace and "respectable" surroundings, the Jinn bore me
at once to the land of my pre-direction, Arabia, a region so
familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a
reminiscence of some by gone metem-psychic life in the distant
Past. Again I stood under the diaphanous skies, in air glorious
as aether, whose every breath raises men's spirits like sparkling
wine. Once more I saw the evening star hanging like a solitaire
from the pure front of the western firmament; and the after glow
transfiguring and transforming, as by magic, the homely and
rugged features of the scene into a fairy land lit with a light
which never shines on other soils or seas. Then would appear the