Oriental Stories/Volume 1/Issue 1/The Cobra Den

"Upstairs was a man cold in death."

The Cobra Den
By Paul Ernst
Venomous snakes and a wild adventure among the Arabs of Northern Africa
When Edwin Weiss came to Kairouan, one of the thin trickle of tourists who pass through that grimly dirty city, he made several mistakes that would have seemed incredible had not one remembered that never before had he lifted his shiny, pointed shoes off the pavements of New York.
His first mistake was when he landed from the overland touring-bus that had carried, among the twenty or so others, the dark-haired woman with the lights in her eyes who was the wife of Dancherman. He looked around him then, glanced furtively into the face of the woman, gazed again at the fairy-tale wildness of surrounding city and plain—and decided that in such a place a man might take in his own hands any laws he chose and break them with impunity!
​Now, Kairouan is two cities. The first is the enigmatic Arab stronghold peopled with strange beings and mystery and age-old dirt. Seven pilgrimages here equal one trip to Mecca itself; and even as in Mecca the citizens have their own harsh laws and their own discrimination in enforcing them.
The second city is not so much

Đọc bản gốc tại Wikisource tiếng Anh