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According to one commentator, Durrell "shares a hearty love of the Arabic world" with Sir Richard Burton. The verdict is not, perhaps, utterly mistaken, but how many glosses and counter-glosses, in Durrell's own style of revelation and counter-revelation, it begs. Pursewarden supplies a number in his letters to Mountolive. Others might be extricated, by a sympathetic hand, from work written when Justine was germinating, such as the Melissa poem in The Tree of Idleness. Others might be sought in older, premonitory work: in Cefalu, now called The Dark Labyrinth; that enigmatic gargoyle, Axelos, for example, is half-Arabic, half-Greek. Others belong to yet more remote years when Durrell was living in the Egypt he commemorates.

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