Singing Doughty in the Bath

Reading my latest charity bookshop purchase – Ariel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris, by Derek Johns (with line drawings by Jan Morris) – I learn that Morris early in his career fell under the spell of Charles Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta. This is one of those books that is deeply enchanting to some and quite unreadable to others. James (as he then was) Morris was very much in the former camp: 'It called to me out of desert lands,' Jan recalled in an interview, 'but its meanings were less seductive to me than its sensually exciting rhythms ... For years I used to sing its opening paragraph in the bath, to a melody of my own invention.' That would have been something to hear... 
This is that opening paragraph:

'A new voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from the Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus which is called Straight; and suddenly taking me wondering by the hand, "Tell me (said he), since thou art here again in the peace and assurance of Ullah, and whilst we walk, as in the former years, toward the new blossoming orchards, full of the sweet Spring as the garden of God, what moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?"'

Happily Doughty does not seem to have had much effect on Morris's literary style. A more benign influence was surely Kinglake's Eothen, the first book Morris read on the Middle East, an idiosyncratic and hugely enjoyable masterpiece. Here is the opening paragraph of Eothen:

 'At Semlin I still was encompassed by the scenes and the sounds of familiar life; the din of a busy world still vexed and cheered me; the unveiled faces of women still shone in the light of day. Yet, whenever I chose to look southward, I saw the Ottoman's fortress – austere, and darkly impending high over the vale of the Danube – historic Belgrade. I had come, as it were, to the end of this wheel-going Europe, and now my eyes would see the splendour and havoc of the East.'

That seems to me rather more musical than Doughty's paragraph, but I wouldn't care to sing either in the bath.