Excerpt from In the Eyes of the EastYet I need hardly say that I have clung as strictly as possible to fact. The people in this book are all real people who still go up and down upon the highways of the world. Only in some cases I have introduced a de liberate, though transparent, confusion of non-essential detail, in order to provide any one who wishes to dis claim the portrait with an alibi. In some cases, too, I have used the dramatist's license, and have concentrated into brief episodes what was more widely scattered in time and space. But such liberties are comparatively rare, and, on the whole, my narrative is as close to fact as common courtesy and the art of the raconteur will permit. I have been under no temptation to invent, be cause the truth was always much more interesting than anything I could imagine. Yet, just because I was tell ing of unknown people and incidents that would offer no inspiration to the newspaper headline, I have adhered to one principle which seems necessary to raise such a record above triviality: I have written only of facts and people who would be interesting if they were ficti tious. And so I have tried to put into my book not only the pageantry of the East, but a little of the common heart of humanity.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.