A Bottle of Perrier by Edith Wharton

The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

Tony Walker

Science Fiction, Fiction, Drama

4.9 • 835 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2026

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Join the mailing list for an occasional newsletter https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal A man arrives at a desert fortress to visit an old friend. The friend is not there. The English servant says he will return shortly. The heat presses down. The water tastes wrong. And the waiting stretches on in ways that are difficult to explain. Edith Wharton set this story not in her usual territory of New York drawing rooms, but somewhere in North Africa, in a crumbling pile of Crusader stonework and Arab plasterwork, where the palms rattle like rain above an ancient well, and the desert stretches out in every direction, golden and merciless. She wrote it without a single ghost. She didn't need one. First published in the Saturday Evening Post in March 1926 under the title "A Bottle of Evian," the story was collected in Certain People (1930) and later reprinted in Wharton's posthumous ghost story anthology Ghosts (1937). Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist and short story writer, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence in 1921. She published more than forty books across four decades. 📚 Buy my paperbacks here: https://books.by/tony-walker-books 🎙️ Buy my ebooks and audiobooks here: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-classic-ghost-stories-podcast--7002956/support.

*To buy my paperback books:* https://books.by/tony-walker-books

The Classic Ghost Stories Newsletter — short essays on the genre, odd discoveries, and recommendations. Free, fortnightly. Subscribe: https://www.classicghost.com/#/portal

To buy my ebooks and audiobooks: payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast

Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk

*Intro and Outro Music by The Heartwood Institute* 🎼 https://bit.ly/somecomeback

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Everybody dies, don't they?
0:10.5	Everybody come back, isn't that so?
0:14.4	You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?
0:17.4	How do the dead come back, mother?
0:19.9	What's the secrets of dead come?
0:21.6	A bottle of Perrier by Edith Wharton.
0:25.6	A two-day struggle over the treacherous trails in a well-intentioned but short-winded fliver,
0:33.6	and a ride of two more on a hired mount of unamiable temper had disposed young
0:40.6	Medford of the American School of Archaeology at Athens to wonder why his queer English friend
0:47.5	Henry Almidham had chosen to live in the desert. Now he understood. He was leaning against the roof parapet of the old building,
0:57.0	half Christian fortress, half Arab palace, which had been Almodan's pretext, or one of them.
1:05.0	Below, in an inner court, a little wind rising as the sun sank, sent through a knot of palms the rain-like rattle,
1:12.9	so cooling to the pilgrims of the desert.
1:15.9	An ancient fig tree, enormous, exuberant, writhed over a whitewashed wellhead, sucking
1:22.1	life from what appeared to be the only source of moisture within the walls.
1:26.4	Beyond these on every side, stretched
1:28.6	away the mystery of the sands, all golden with promise, all livid with menace, as the sun
1:35.0	alternately touched or abandoned them. Young Medford, somewhat weary, after his journey from
1:41.9	the coast, and awed by his first intimate sense of the
1:45.2	omnipresence of the desert, shivered and drew back. Undoubtedly, for a scholar and a misogynist,
1:51.5	it was a wonderful refuge, but one who would have to be incurably both. Let's take a look at the
1:58.5	house, Medford said to himself, as if speedy contact with man's
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Tony Walker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Tony Walker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.