The Face of the True Sun T HE Brahmins have a
prayer to Savitur, the true sun, whose "longed-for glory" they desire to inspire their lives. It is the oldest prayer known to man. To- day Dr. Saleeby is bringing us back to the wisdom of the Vedas, of Akh-naton, of Hippocrates, and of the Black- bellied Tarantula.
That spider is a sun-worshipper. Her burrow faces south. In spring she basks in the sunshine herself ; and in summer, when she has a family to bring up, she lifts the wallet containing her eggs to the light of life, turning it carefully this way and that, so that every side may be warmed, and repeating the process every day for a month, with an exquisite patience. Then when the young are incubated, she carries them on her back for seven months, giving them feasts of energy from the sun as their only sustenance.
I should like to attempt some comparison between the methods of Dr. Saleeby in making his home beautiful, and the architectural and hygienic activities of the Narbonne Lycosa ; but analogies are dangerous, and my space limited. Moreover, my mind is so full of facts which fascinated me about this house that I shall not divagate into abstractions.
Dr. Saleeby is no millionaire exponent of an old cult in modern dress ; he has made no Mithraic altar on Hamp- stead, nor even a sun-trap such as that of Professor Ashmole near Amersham ; he inherited a stern suburban early-Victorian building, and has converted it and its strip of garden into a place full of light and colour and happiness. His household carry no coals (for there are none) and lift no pails and light no fires : he has con- trived so that there shall be less dirt, more light, and at least as much warmth, air, water and music as in any similar house in London. What he has done we could all do, with a modicum of planning and pence.
We can't scrap London as we do battleships. I wish we could drive a few avenues through its acres of gloomy brick ; I wish we could pull down a few railings, install a few_ more sand-baths and shower-baths, encom.age- Mr. Lansbury's Lidos. These things will collie, maybe ; meanwhile there is much to be done nearer home.
We might instal gas-fires with the new beam-radiants, for instance, which warm without scorching; and buy a vacuum cleaner. For the kitchen furnace, burning coke, we might employ one of the new " gas-pokers " which make it unnecessary ever to lay a fire. And we might put wireless headphones in the garden, if we have one, so that we need not give up the best of the summer evenings in order to listen to the B.B.C. indoors. However, these are improvements which cost money, and call for no par- ticular vision. Let them pass. I have to show how in this house—a house which any Spectator reader who has to live in a big town might have—the greatest amount Of light and air are gotten.
The first impression is one of French windows every- where ; of primrose paint, of a dozen " della Robbia " plaques from Florence to liven grim brick with their hints of heaven, of argent moons and zodiacs on azure bedsteads, of rising suns painted above gas-grates, of bathroom taps of a gentian blue, of a brilliantly-berib- boned cat in the basement and the pop-eyed, silky coated, charmingly complacent Wu Lu Ching Chong up- stairs, and of cleanliness, sparkle, gay young voices ; and again of French windows.
An upper room of the house used to be dark and stuffy : Dr. Saleeby knocked away a part of the outer wall under the ordinary little idiotic top-and-bottom apology for a window, and put in a French window from ceiling to floor-level. The flat roof outside this room was then boarded over and became a charming loggia. The bricks displaced went to make a rockery in the garden. "We have too many bricks in England," he told me, and remembering the awful schools, like prisons, which I have seen in South London, and the contrast of Miss Margaret McMillan's verdure, I knew that he was right. In this room, which had been rarely used, an aged relative of his now lives, and enjoys the last hours of sunlight. The cost of the alteration was only 18.
His niece's bedroom under the roof had the usual aper- ture to be found in London attics. A French window has been substituted, and a sky-light put in, with a step- ladder linked to it, so that when the ladder is down the sky-light is up, and vice versa. On the roof outside, a flat piece of lead sheeting is to be boarded over and a screen erected upon it for sun-bathing. The total cost will be about £11.
"A flat roof costs no more to build nowadays than a pitched one," said Dr. Saleeby ; "and it is a pity that in the excellent new pavilion on the Serpentine, where every inch of space is valuable, the roof has not been built so that it could be used as a solarium. However, we must be thankful for what we have, for it is much that there should be a place in the heart of London where it is possible to bask."
We live not only by the visible octave of light, but by the half-octave above it, which comes to us as ultra-violet rays, stimulating our skins to manufacture Vitamin D, and by the infra-red rays which warm us. Nothing can replace real sunlight, even when it comes through the smoke of the city ; but in the main bedroom of this house it would have been impossible to sun-bathe without being overlooked ; so opaque vita-glass has been in- stalled. In the dressing-room stands a quartz-mercury- vapour lamp for use on winter days, and 'Dr.' Saleeby's Pekinese bitch is one of the members of his household who often gains refreshment and vigour thereat As soon as her goggles are adjusted she leaps on to the bed, wriggles over on her back, and luxuriates in the manner of one whose ancestors were loved by Empresses.
Old Japanese prints on the stairers Is, and a beautiful T'ang horse on the grand piano continue the Oriental note which Wu Lu Ching Chong Sets with her silken serenity.
She listens while her master explains to us the music of the sun, touching the octave which we can see in that fiery face, and playing a few higher notes from the world invisible where the True Face is ; and she grunts and licks her chops. The West is remembering many things
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