"The Gabriel Hounds"

[fiefoe]

With quotations in front of each chapter with characters' names imbedded, it's hard not to suspect that Mary Stewart picked those out first before writing her stories.

• I wasn't a small girl any more, I was twenty-two, and this was only my cousin Charles, whom of course I didn't worship any more. For some reason it seemed important to make this clear. I tried to echo his tone, but only managed to achieve a sort of idiotic deadpan calm.
• The family's what they call a 'good family' over here, which in Syria just means stinking rich.'
  'Nice going. At that rate we'd be well up in the stud book.'
  'Well, aren't we?' My cousin was crisply ironic. I knew what he meant. My own family of merchant bankers had been stinking rich for three generations, and it was surprising how many people were willing to overlook the very mixed, not to say plain bastard blood that pumped through the Man sel veins.
• 'The sickening thing about you,' I said tartly, 'is that you're sometimes right. What were you buying for yourself along Woolworth Alley, if it comes to that? A ring for Emily?' <> 'A jewel for my love, certainly. A blue bead for my car.'
• Faute de mieux - for lack of anything better
• There's something very satisfying about Arab building, I always think--all poetry and passion and romance, but elegant with it. Like their literature, if it comes to that. But you ought to see the furniture; my bedroom's done up with the rejects from Bluebeard's chamber.' <> 'I know what you mean, I saw some choice pieces in those homey little rooms in the Azem Palace--all inlaid with mother-of-pearl like smallpox, or else pure Victorian and made of arthritic bamboos.
• * What we certainly had in common was the 'spoiled' quality that we were so quick to recognize in one another; a flippant cleverness that could become waspish, an arrogance that did not spring from any pride of achievement but was, I am afraid, the result of having too much too young; a fiercely self-conscious rejecting of any personal ties (including those of our families) which we called independence, but which was really an almost morbid fear of possessiveness; and something we called sensitivity, which probably only meant that our skins were too thin for our own comfort.
• We also had a Polish Jew, a Dane and a German among our assorted great-grandparents, and counted ourselves English, which was fair enough... It had occurred to neither of us, in actual fact, that we could be the object of one another's sexual stirrings.
• Perhaps they saw more clearly than could Charles and I the basic security in our lives which made his restlessness and my indecisiveness nothing more than the taking of soundings outside the harbour. Perhaps they could even see, through it all, the end that would come.
• When she stayed with us that time she brought eight King Charles spaniels.'
  'It's Tibetan terriers now, and salukis--Persian greyhounds, the dogs the Arab princes used for hunting. Oh, she's gone the limit, I gather--turned Arab herself, male at that, dresses like an Emir, smokes a hubble-bubble, never sees anybody except at night, and lives in this dirty great palace--'
  'Palace?' I said startled. 'Who does she think she is? Lady Hester Stanhope?'
• The lilies were pale blue, held on stiff stems a few inches above the water, where their glossy leaves overlapped the still surface like tiles of jade. Gold fins winked here and there below them, and a gold bee sipped water at a leaf's edge. A powder-blue petal shut, and another, till one by one the lilies were turbaned up, stiff and quiet for the night. Another late bee, almost caught by a folding flower, wrestled his way angrily out of the petals, and shot off like a bullet.
• Her fortress, perched on a hot bare hilltop, was described by a contemporary as 'an enchanted palace,' and was a world in itself of courtyards, corridors as complex as a Chinese puzzle, walled gardens approached by winding stairs, secret exits cut in the rock where the Lady's spies came and went, the whole exotic with murmuring fountains and luxuriant gardens. <> It was a deliberate re-creation of an Arabian Nights' wonderland with all the fantastic properties of Eastern fairytale solidly at hand. Roses and jasmine, mute black slaves and nightingales, camels and sacred cats and Arab horses, she had them all. Fearless, utterly selfish, arrogant and eccentric, and growing with the years beyond eccentricity into megalomania
• The end came as it comes to the determined puissante et solitaire--she died alone, old and destitute, her fortune spent, her fortress rotting around her, her servants robbing and neglecting her.
• my great-aunt merely personified in herself the family's genius for detachment.
• No ugly diffusion of city lights spoiled the deep velvet of that sky; even hanging as it was above the glittering and crowded richness of the Damascus oasis, it spoke of the desert and the vast empty silences beyond the last palm tree. The courtyard itself was quiet. The far murmur of city traffic, no louder than the humming in a shell, made a background to this still quiet, where the only sound was the trickle of the fountain.
• The source of the Adonis River has been magic, time out of mind. To the primitive people of a thirsty land, the sight of the white torrent bursting straight out of its roaring black cave half up a massive, sun-baked cliff, suggested God knows what gods and demons and power and terror. It certainly suggested fertility . . .  <> So here, treading on the ghostly heels of Isis and Ishtar and Astarte and the Great Mother herself who was Demeter and Dia and Cybele of the Towers, came Aphrodite to fall in love with the Syrian shepherd Adonis, and lie with him among the flowers. And here the wild boar killed him, and where his blood splashed, anemones grew, and to this day every spring the waters of the Adonis run red right down to the sea.
• Hemp: 'Oh, yes. Have you never seen it? I believe you grow the same plant in England, to make rope, but only in hot countries does it bear the drug.
• It was the locals who started calling her 'Lady Harriet,' and it simply stuck. Your great-aunt was amused at first, I gather, and then she discovered it suited her to be a 'character,' and in the way these things have, it gradually grew beyond the point where it could be stopped, and certainly beyond the point where she could treat it as a joke, even to herself. I don't know if you can understand this?'
  'I think so,' I said. 'She couldn't detach herself any more, so she simply went with it.'
  'That's it. Nor did she want to detach herself. She'd lived out here for so long, and in a way she'd made it her country, and in a curious way I believe she feels she has a kind of right to the legend.'
• I suppose you could call yourself her steward or something.' <> 'Malvolio in person, yellow stockings, cross garters, and all.' A flick of feeling in his voice that I didn't like, gone as soon as heard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvolio
• a wide stretch of water, almost a lake, which held at its center a small island crowned with a grove of trees. On this, at the heart of the green grove, I saw the glint of gilded tiles--the roof of a miniature building like an exotic summerhouse or folly; a Persian-style kiosk, with an onion dome, decorative pillars and latticed arches and shallow, broken steps... The contrast between the formal design of oblong lake, graceful arches and elegant kiosk, and the riotous natural growth that had invaded them, was excitingly attractive. It was like a formal Persian painting gone wild.
• looking out over the gorge where the last of the light netted the tips of the trees with gold.
• She didn't make the usual disclaimer, but this may only have been because her English wasn't good enough for polite skirmishing.
• De Quincey. I turned the pages idly while Halide stacked the dishes rather loudly on the tray. <> _The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities, or aspirations: he wishes and longs, as earnestly as ever, to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt.
• so when I realized I had a copper-bottomed excuse to call to see you, and even bulldoze my way into the palace--well, boiling oil might have stopped me, but nothing much short of that.'
  'Make a note of that, John; boiling oil is what we need.
• * only you said if he went you'd go too because the rest of the family were as dull as ditchwater, and anything Charles did shone like a bad deed in an insipid world?
• * 'I know Aphrodite met him in the Lebanon and he died there, and that every spring his blood stains the river and it runs red to the sea. What is it, iron in the water?'
  'Yes. It's one of the spring resurrection stories, like Persephone, or the Osiris myth. Adonis was a corn-god, a fertility god, and he dies to rise again. The 'Adonis Gardens' are-- you might call them little personal symbols of death and resurrection; and they're sympathetic magic as well, because the people who planted them and forced the seeds and flowers to grow as quickly as they could thought they were helping the year's harvest. The flowers and herbs sprang up and withered and died all in a few days, and then the 'gardens' with the images of the god were taken, with the women wailing and mad with grief, down to the sea and thrown in. <> See? It was all mixed up, here, with the Dionysiac cult, and Osiris, and the rites of Attis, and it still persists--only in nice, pure forms!--all over the world, believe it or not.
• 'That's not my fault, that's the will of Allah. I'll bring you a toothbrush tonight, but I'm damned if I'll climb back across the cascade carrying a nightie. You could always borrow a djibbah from Great-Aunt Harriet.'
  And on this note of unfeeling comfort he led the way back towards the cascade and the gully.
• After wandering for nearly two hours, getting my hands grimy and my shoes grey with dust, I was no nearer finding any door that could be the postern, or any staircase that took me down to it.
• The scene was in three panels, a triptych divided by painted tree trunks, stiff and formal, following the line of the pillars that framed the section of wall. At one edge of the center panel, all down the side of the trunk, a dark line showed.
  'Here we go,' said Charles, approaching it.
  'You mean it's a door?'
  He made no reply. He was playing the light slowly over the picture, his hand following the probing beam, sliding and patting over the surface of the wall. Then he gave a grunt of satisfaction. From the middle of a painted orange tree a section of the leaves seemed to detach themselves into his hand; the ringbolt of a door. He turned it and pulled. The painted panel opened on quiet, accustomed hinges, showing a gap of blackness behind.
• Gabriel Hounds: It was a creature which might have been a dog or lion, about six inches high, made in vivid yellow porcelain with a glowing glaze. It was sitting back on its haunches with one paw down and the other poised delicately on a fretted ball. The head was turned over one shoulder, at gaze, ears back, wide mouth grinning as dogs grin. It had a thick, waving mane, and its plumed tail curled over its back.
  Its air was one of gay watchfulness, a kind of playful ferocity.
  Its mate on the floor, her bright coat fogged with dust, had a plume-tailed pup under her paw instead of a ball... 'They're what are known as Dogs of Fo, or Buddhist lions... 'The Buddha himself. These are the only creatures in the Buddhist mythology that are allowed to kill, and then only in the Lord Buddha's defense. They're officially the guardians of his temple.'
• 'That's what 'Hunting Dog' is, did you know? The word 'saluki' is the Arabic seluqi or slughi and means 'hound.' I imagine the Nahr el-Sal'q is some sort of corruption meaning 'Hound River.'
• 'Whenever a government takes anything seriously you will find that it is not a moral problem but an economic one,' <> said Hamid cynically. 'In Egypt, for instance, the problem is very serious--your addict is pretty useless as a worker, you know--and the Government has been getting badly worried about its illegal imports from the Lebanon, so it makes representations to the National Assembly, and unhappily at present we all have to take a lot of notice of what Egypt thinks and wants.'
• I don't know how long I must have stood there on the breezy hillside, staring at the empty stretch of road where the white car had been. It was as if I had been lifted up into the vacuum of its wake, and then dropped, dazed, into its dust.
• * 'If you keep still you won't be hurt.' The voice, whispering now, was recognizable. The eyes, too, uncovered and staring into mine. The long nose, the olive face that would look pale in lamplight . . . <> But it was mad. If it was mad to suppose John Lethman was riding out here forty miles from Dar Ibrahim it was still madder to suppose that my Great-Aunt Harriet, disguised as a man of forty-odd, was holding me with this ferocious strength with one hand, while the other came up holding something that gleamed . . .
• 'Who are you?' It was a last gasp on the edge of hysteria, and I saw him recognize the fact. His voice was smooth. He had me still now, boneless, dumb.
• 'Oh, belt up,' I said wearily. 'Never mind about the tray, I can last out, just stop yelling and making me feel like an extra in Kismet, will you? And I'd still like the coffee. You can heat it up again before you bring it. I dislike lukewarm coffee.' <> The look she gave me this time was pure bastinados and boiling oil and I was glad to have deserved it.
• 'Drink this. Better? Here, have another cigarette. It'll help you.'... I flattened my hands on the carved lacquer of the chair arms. Somehow the little, practiced touch of solicitude had changed the tone of the interview; the doctor-patient gesture had put him back, subtly, on top.
• 'When you rang up my house and were told I was gone, did they tell you anything about me?' <> 'Not exactly, but they played hell with the silences. I gather you're in trouble.'
• John Lethman tried to hurry me out, and heaven knows I'd have gone, but you wouldn't let me, you were enjoying yourself too much making a fool of me.' <> He was grinning. Grotesquely, it was Great-Aunt Harriet's face as I had thought of her, vaguely seen through the smoke and the dusty shaft of sunlight, remote as something glimpsed down the wrong end of a telescope.
• 'I thought at first your being stopped at the frontier was going to bitch all our plans, but it worked out like a dream. You didn't see me, but I was there, and I saw what happened. My driver followed yours into the frontier buildings and heard the whole thing, so I sent him through to tell Yusuf to go on south and get rid of your cousin's car, but as luck would have it you'd seen it yourself from above the road, and came running down to tell your driver to go through after it.
• I supposed it was too much to hope that the primitive mind would see it as anything other than a sort of Robin Hood gesture of bravery. To the peasant, the hashish brought pleasure, and money. If an unreasonable government chose to forbid its growth for private purposes, why then the government must be fooled. It was as simple as that. It was the same mentality which, in more sophisticated societies, assumes that the tax and speed laws are made to be broken.
• the black eyes bright and deadly as an oil-slick.
• And before I knew what he was about, he had whipped the bowl up from the tray and was advancing on the girl with it held up to the level of her mouth. <> I think I gave a gasp and then said weakly: 'Oh, no!' It was somehow too much, so absurdly the stock situation from a thousand and one Arabian Nights, an Eastern melodrama come ludricrously to life.
• * The sky all around was ringed with fire, vivid tongues and spires and meteors of fire, so that the stars which swarmed thick and glittering overhead seemed cold and infinitely distant. Through the bright heart of the flames shot flashing pulses of blue and purple and green, and the noise they made was like the galloping of wild horses with the wind in their manes. There was very little smoke, and what there was streamed mercifully away in the light winds that fanned the blaze. The lake was a sheet of melted copper, so bright that it hurt the eye, with red and gold and silver flying through the stiff black spears of the irises, till the very water seemed alive, rippling and beating with flame like the sky.
  I rubbed my stinging eyes to dispel the illusion. But when I looked again I saw that it was true. The water was moving, and not with the wind. This garden was a pocket of calm overleapt by the winds, but in it the water was moving, alive with spearhead ripples as the creatures of the garden, driven by the fire, came arrowing towards the island.
  The peacocks came first. The two hens flew, clumsily and in panic, from stone to stone of the broken bridge, but the cock, weighted by the magnificence of his springtime tail, came noisily yelling across the open lake , half paddling, half flying, his great useless wings flailing the golden water, his streaming train bedraggled with mud and damp and laying a wake like a VC. 10; then the three big birds, oblivious of me and the hounds, raced with hunched and staring feathers up the rocky shore, and clucked to an uneasy roost near us on the marble steps.
  The little rock partridges flew more easily. There were seven of them round my feet, fluffy with fear, their bright eyes winking like rubies as they stared at the flames that ringed the garden. In the flashing scarlet light their feathers shone like chased metal. One of them quivered warm against my ankle...
  Lizards darted and weaved up the stones like something in an alcoholic's dream, and I saw two snakes within a handspan of my shoes; they lowered their beautiful deadly heads and went past like smoke, and the dogs never moved, and nor did I. I hadn't room for fear of them, or they of me; the only thing that mattered was the fire.
• I don't remember his moving, but one moment he was there in front of me, with the firelight sliding in lovely slabs of rose and violet over his wet skin; the next he was down beside me on the marble floor, and Star was elbowed out of the way, and Charles's arms were round me and he was kissing me in an intense starving, furious way that somehow seemed part of the fire, as I suppose it was. They say that this is how fear and relief can take you. I know I went down to him like wax.
• Anyway, I knew you were in the garden, because when I was half-way up I heard you swearing at the dogs, and as soon as I got in I saw the Noah's Ark act on the island.
• Through the filthy hair an eye shone out eagerly. An apology for a tail wagged furiously. 'Not yours, surely?'... 'Mophead nothing,' said my cousin. 'Don't you remember Samson? This is Great-Aunt Harriet's wedding present to me, Father. My personal Gabriel Hound. We can hardly leave him here to fend for himself; he's one of the family.'