Explore "Saïd the Fisherman" by Marmaduke Pickthall on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
For more than a month the partnership of Saïd with Selìm proved to the profit and contentment of both. But at length Saïd began to tire of it. His mind kept reverting to his roving life as to a period of great happiness.
To sit in the shade of an archway, where two noisy streams of wayfarers elbowed and jostled one another all day long, and cry aloud in praise of paltry wares, seemed a tame, not to say shameful, means of livelihood to one who had sipped of the cup of greatness. The wretched room, too, which he shared with Selìm vexed him with its meanness. It was buried away in the heart of the poorest and most crowded quarter. The approach was through a series of stinking tunnels, where one stirred a sleeping dog with every step, up a worn stairway always slippery with offal. Even at noon the daylight never reached it. The squalor and the evil smells were of no account to Saïd; but to abide in a quarter whose very name was a byword for wretchedness -- that it was which disgusted him.