General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1915 Original Publisher: John Lane Subjects: Fiction / Literary History / General Literary Criticism / European / French Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THE MAN WHO SAW THE SIRENS I KNOW a man who once lived with the sirens. He lives at Zeilah now. He buys coffee from the caravans that come from Abyssinia, giving them in exchange old Marie-Therese thalers, cartridges, empty cartridge cases, and quick-firing guns destined for killing Europeans. But years ago he was lighthouse-keeper on the Farsan Islands in the Red Sea, and that is how he came to see the sirens. He is not mad; I am quite sure he is not, but he cannot speak French very well now, because his trade compels him to converse all the time with the natives in Arabic, Galla or in the dialect of Amharic, which is the language of the mountaineers, the true Abyssinians. Then, when he consents to relate his wonderful adventures, he so often interrupts himself and for such long intervals that people usually haven’t patience to wait and listen to the end. I can’t think what makes him stop in this way. It may be that he sees the sirens in his mind’s eye, and for many other reasons. Perhaps because, when he was with them, he did nothing day after day but sleep and dream away the time, lying on the rocks or in the warm pools, and, although he can still feel the happiness and delight of those days, yet he finds nothing to say about them, because they were empty, absolutely empty, while his heart was full. Perhaps out of an innate delicacy there are things he wishes to keep secret, or he may be afraid that no one will believe him. Perhaps, too, he is suspicious and jealously afraid of…