succession of them touched off her magazine of poetry. And so she sang.

The only infinitely gorgeous songs I ever listened to were Maga's.
Almighty God, who made them, only really knows what country the gipsies
originally came from, but there is not a land that has not felt their
feet, nor a sorrow they have not witnessed. Away back in the womb
of time there was planted in them a rare gift of seeing what the
rest of us can only sometimes hear, and of hearing what only very
few from the world that lives in houses can do more than vaguely
feel when at the peak of high emotion. The gipsies do not understand
what they see, and hear, and feel; but they are aware of infinities
too intimate for ordinary speech. And it was given to Maga to sing
of all that, with a voice tuned like a waterfall's for open sky,
and trees, and distances--not very loud, but far-carrying, and flattened
in quarter-tones where it touched the infinite.

Fred very soon ceased from braying with his bellowed instrument.
Her songs were too wild for accompaniment--interminable stanzas of
unequal length, with a refrain at the end of each that rose through
a thousand emotions to a crash of ecstasy, and then died away to
dreaminess, coming to an end on an unfinished rising scale.

All the gipsies and our Zeitoonli and Rustum Khan's lean servant
joined in the refrains, so that we trotted along under the snow-tipped
fangs of the Kara Dagh oblivious of the passage of time, but very
keenly conscious of touch with a realm of life whose existence hitherto
we had only vaguely guessed at.

The animals refused to weary while that singing testified of tireless
harmonies, as fresh yet as on the day when the worlds were born.