ringing from our curtains we fling open the shutters, expecting to see a great conflagration, and behold, it is the sunrise!

The sun does not greet us in such boisterous fashion in England! Here it fills the sky with a blood-red radiance[Pg 76] and lights up the palm groves in the garden below, where a mighty congregation of small birds are shrieking out their joy to greet the god of morning. There is an intensity in it all, in the flaming sky, and in the thrill of the birds' clarion that sends exhilaration into our veins and makes us feel it is good to be alive!

It is not long before we are out and around the garden—and what a garden! Strange coffee-coloured men in blue garments like smock frocks, with baggy blue trousers caught tightly round their ankles, appear and disappear noiselessly, their bare brown feet making no sound on the sanded paths. There is something unreal about it all, something that makes one think of the Arabian Nights and an enchanted garden. The hotel is called "The Winter Palace," and in England we should associate such a name with a vast artificially warmed glasshouse filled with broad-leaved plants of dark green; here, right overhead, is a tall bush covered with masses of sulphur-coloured flowers, shaped like tiny trumpets, hanging in festoons against a sky of glorious blue. Through plumed palms we catch glimpses of the spreading fingers of a deep red poinsettia; there is a pink frilled flower shooting toward the sky, so decorative that it looks exactly like those made of crinkled paper for decorations; this is the well-known oleander. The grass is so vividly green that it seems as if the greenness sprang away from the blades; as we draw near to it we see that it is not all matted together and interwoven, as is our grass, but is composed of separate blades, each one apart and upright, all together standing like a regime