# Oriental Stories/Volume 1/Issue 1/The Souk

"THE East never sleeps, never rests. Its maze of confusion and mystery flows onward endlessly."
With these words Frank Owen, in Singapore Nights, hits off the appeal of the Orient. It will be the purpose of Oriental Stories to present in fiction the glamor and mystery of the East. There seems a genuine need for such a magazine, to fill a want that has long been felt. The Orient makes a romantic appeal to the imagination that no other part of the world can equal. The inscrutable mystery of Tibet, the veiled allure of Oriental harems, the charge of fierce Arab tribesmen, the singing of almond-eyed maidens under a Japanese moon, the whirling of dervishes, the barbaric splendor of mediæval sultans, the ageless life of Egypt—from all these the story-writers weave charms to shut out the humdrum world of everyday life, and transport the reader into a fairyland of the imagination, but a fairyland drat exists in its full reality in Asia.
Oriental Stories will publish not only tales of Asia and Asia Minor, but will include also fascinating tales of the East Indies, of Egypt, and of the littoral of North and East Africa, which is Oriental in language and character though not in geography. We shall present for your delectation not only vivid tales of romance, intrigue and red war in present-day Asia, but will offer you also vivid historical tales—of Genghis Khan the Red Scourge, of Tamerlane the Magnificent, of Saladin the Intrepid, of the wars between the Cross and the Crescent, of the spread of the Mogul conquerors into India, of the British conquest, of the awakening of China and Japan, and of Russian intrigue to set Islam against the British Empire. Samarcand, Singapore, Delhi, Bagdad, Damascus, Cairo, Herat and its Hundred Gardens, Ispahan, and a host of other cities whose very names weave a spell, will be the locales for these stories; Karakorum the desert capital of Genghis Khan; Xanadu the wonder-city of Kubla Khan; the Vale of Cashmere, long famed in song; Angkor, the fabled city in the forests of Cambodia; the Taj Mahal, tomb of Shah Jehan's favorite wife—where except in the Orient can such marvelous settings be found for fascinating stories?
We have been fortunate in obtaining a number of original poems by the contemporary Chinese poet, Hung Long Tom. These are not translations from the Chinese, but are written in English. However, as the style is entirely different from that of English poetry, a word or two about them might not be out of place. "Chinese poetry," writes Hung Long Tom, "is different from the poetry of other countries in so far as it attempts to be a picture rather than a poem. In China at times tiny bits of verse are written on squares of silk and hung on the walls. They are known as written pictures." So that ​is what these poems by Hung Long Tom are: written pictures. We will use two or three of these in each issue.
Oriental Stories will follow no hard and fast rule as to the spelling of Oriental proper names. The Punjaub or the Punjab, dakaits or dacoits, Sheykh or Sheik—the authors will be allowed full license to follow whatever Oriental spellings they wish. Several of the Oriental languages, notably Arabic, contain sounds that can not be represented in English pronunciation; and to attempt to insist upon any set scheme of transliteration of these sounds would be foolish.
When T. E. Lawrence, who led the Arabs in their successful revolt against Turkey during the Great War, wrote his book, Revolt in the Desert, he spelt the same Arabic words in different ways even in the same paragraph, and his publisher's proofreader objected strongly to the apparent inconsistencies of spelling. A long and entertaining correspondence ensued between author and publisher, and as this colloquy bears directly upon the diversity of spelling of Oriental words which will be found in this magazine, we think a few extracts from that correspondence will be interesting to our readers. The publisher wrote: "I attach a list of queries raised by F, who is reading the proofs. He finds these very clean, but full of inconsistencies in the spelling of proper names, a point which reviewers often take up. Will you annotate it in the margin, so that I can get the proofs straightened?" To this Lawrence replied: "Annotated: not very helpfully perhaps. Arabic names won't go into English, exactly, for their consonants are not the same as ours, and their vowels, like ours, vary from district to district. There are some 'scientific systems' of transliterations, helpful to people who know enough Arabic not to need helping. I spell my names anyhow, to show what rot the systems are." The proofreader queried: "Jeddah and Jidda used impartially throughout. Intentional?" To which Lawrence replied: "Rather!" The proofreader noted: "Bir Waheida was Bir Waheidi." Lawrence replied: "Why not? All one place." Again the proofreader noted: "Nuri, Emir of the Ruwalla, belongs to the 'chief family of the Rualla.' On Slip 33 'Rualla horse,' and Slip 38, 'killed one Rueili.' In all later slips 'Rualla'." Lawrence replied: "Should have also used Ruwala and Ruala." Another query was: "Jedha, the she camel, was Jedhah on Slip 40." Lawrence answered: "She was a splendid beast." Again the proofreader queried: "Sherif Abd el Mayin of Slip 68 becomes el Main, el Mayein, el Mucin, cl Mayin, and cl Muyein." Lawrence commented: "Good egg. I call this really ingenious."
E. Hoffmann Price, one of the authors whose work will be published in this magazine for your dcleaation, comments in a letter to the editor: "Lawrence is right; Arabic can't be transliterated. Of course, a great deal can be passably approximated with Latin letters, but when you come to words involving certain sounds peculiar to the Arabic language, you are stuck. One sound can not be expressed by any letter or combination of letters in our alphabet; although some of the lesser terrors can be closely approximated by comparison with German, as in 'acht.' Worse than that, the pronunciation is difficult to approximate, to say nothing of transliteration. Lawrence was entitled to his little jest. Any Occidental who becomes proficient in that language is entitled to any flights of fancy he may find amusing."
Readers, it will help us to keep the stories in this magazine in line with your wishes if you will tell us which stories you prefer in this issue. Either write a letter, or fill out the coupon on page 31, and mail it to The Souk, Oriental Stories, 840 North Michigan Ave., Chicago.