The year was 1925, a year memorable in what was known as the "golden age of America." Prosperity abounded, it was seven progressive years after the end of World War I, and the world seemed at last ready to embark upon that concept of universal brotherhood which the leaders of all democracies had so long urged.
But in the mountainous region along the Mediterranean coast of Morocco, there was still conflict and hatred and oppression.
The French ruled Morocco by protectorate along with the Spanish, which event had taken place in 1912, just before the outbreak of the World War, when Germany had agreed to French rule in Morocco in exchange for French territory in Africa.
The history of Morocco was one of eternal struggle, barbarism and violence. It was a kingdom in North Africa on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, its capital Rabat. It was bordered by the Spanish Sahara the south, and by Algeria south and east. Primarily, Morocco was mountainous terrain, and much of it desert. The population was concentrated to the coastal regions where rainfall was the most plentiful. In parts of the Rif, grain could be raised without irrigation, thanks to this bounty from heaven. On the Atlantic plane, olives, citrus fruits and grapes were grown under carefully scheduled irrigation. After World War I, export of iron ore and phosphates provided important sources of foreign exchange and developed the old pirate port of Casablanca as the most important outlet for these trade goods.
Historians tell us that Morocco is roughly coextensive with the ancient Roman district of Mauretania. The lore of Islam was brought there by the Arabs, who first invaded it in the year 683. The independent state of Morocco was first established a hundred and five years after, and Moroccan power reached its zenith under the great Berber dynasties of the Almoravides and the Almohades.
But Europe coveted Morocco, and the first European encroachment began in 1415 with the Portuguese capture of Ceuta and subsequent seizure of most of the main ports. The decline of that Portuguese influence began with their defeat by the Moors in the battle of Alcazaquivir in 1578.
The Alouites, the present ruling house, first came to power in 1660, succeeding the Saadiain or first Sherifian dynasty.
Like all the other Barbary States, Morocco was a pirate base between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. Towards the end of that latter century, its stragetic and economic resources excited the interest of European powers, and an explosive situation was soon created by intense rivalry. A temporary settlement was finally reached by the Algeciras Conference in 1906 which assured protection of German investments and gave France and Spain an authority to police Morocco.
Our story is concerned with the outbreak of virtually undeclared but long-lasting war between the Riffian tribes of Morocco against French troops, a war begun by the intensely nationalistic leader Abd-el-Krim.
Of this conflict, today's readers know only the "pretty" and hazily inaccurate sketch which Rudolf Friml made into the famous musical comedy, "The Desert Song." This Broadway show, with its haunting theme song and the exciting "Song of the Riffs," and the beautiful ballad, "One Alone" caught the fancy of the American public and presented the Riffs as a band of romantic patriots cruelly exploited by the superficial and inhumane French.
But our story goes behind that charming fantasy to show that there was cruelty, avarice, lust and treachery on both sides and that, as with so many wars, it solved little. For although the coalitionist forces of France and Spain defeated the Riffs in 1926 and deported Abd-el-Krim to Reunion Island, he was destined to escape in 1947 to Egypt where, till his death in 1963, he became a leader of the North African Independence movement. Through all his life, therefore, he was a thorn in the French side, and France lost face among its people and its colonies by pursuing the endless conflict with the Moroccans, just as in a sense they did in their useless war against Viet Nam....
"Sapristi!" Captain Edouard Lacombes irritatedly declared as he took off his kepi and mopped his sweating forehead with a grimy handkerchief. "This sacre weather is enough to make a man take to absinthe."
"Many of them do, mon capitain," the immaculate, supercilious Lieutenant Pierre Dezier drawled as he lit a cigarette and stared over from his desk towards his superior officer. Both of them had been stationed here at the little camp of Arzuel, twenty miles from the mountain range where the Berbers were encamped, and they heartily detested their assignment. There was little glory here, only occasional skirmishes which ended with the death of some French trooper shot down by a Moroccan sniper. The Riffs moved like invisible mists from one camp to another, and it was Captain Lasconhes' theory that the very devil was in league with th m.
"Don't be sarcastic, Pierre," he said now as he stuffed his handkerchief back into his trousers pocket and took up his swagger stick. "It's wasted out in this abominable desert. And those dusty mountains beyond, where a man can get cafard if he isn't caught by some of those Berber bitches first, are hardly places where your Parisian wit and sophistication show off to good advantage. We had better save our culture for the salons of lovely woman back in Paris-if, morbleu, we are lucky enough to get back there alive!"
"True enough, mon capitain," Pierre Dezier agreed. He was slim, 36, with a thin black moustache on his upper lip, a cynical face and piercing black eyes, a thin sadistic mouth. It was rumored that back in Paris a famous actress had been his mistress, but it was something he never spoke of. It was also rumored that he was the black sheep of a distinguished old French family who had made a settlement, provided that he joined the army, changed his name and never married. But the few audacious busybodies who had dared to ask him for the proof of those rumors were either dead or wounded in duels, for he was a deadly swordsman and equally adept with the sabre as well.
"Now to business," Captain Lascombes declared in a voice taut with anticipation. "We still want to know where Yusuf Ben Tashfin's main force has its headquarters. I know they're not in those mountains over there." He moved to the window, jerked his thumb out at the distant range of the Atlas Mountains which, even on this hot June day, were whitecapped with snow.
"My guess, mon capitain, is that Yusuf s taken his men to Djebel-el-Oulkal," the debonair lieutenant replied. "It makes sense. There's the desert between him and us, but he's near the big oasis of Katijba, with the hills again."
"I'm not so sure, mon vieux, Captain Lascombes frowned and scratched his chin, "but perhaps we can find out in a most diverting way."
"You mean that Berber girl Sergeant Jardinier captured skulking around our camp last night?"
"Why not? She came here to spy, that's for certain, even though the bitch told him she wanted to see a cousin of hers whom we're keeping in our jail. Listen, Pierre, I "don't trust any of these Moroccan women. They are all in league with the Riffs, and if we could only get to Yusuf and take him alive, we could break this accursed revolt in two. Everybody knows that the rascally dog is a hero here in Morocco and especially here in Marrakesh. Why, tonnere de Dieu, that bastard has even turned the Frenchified whores of Marrakesh against our men. A French soldier can't go into a brothel without the chances being six to one that he'll wind up with his throat cut."
"Or some even more intimate part of his anatomy," the lieu tenant put in with a cynical smile.
"Exactly! Now you know perfectly well that here in Arzuel, we are fifteen miles away from Marrakesh, and two miles away to the west of Marrakesh is our own French town of El Gueliz. It's under the command of Coloner Henry Tuerdier, a really first-rate commander. But his couriers keep reporting that there are still guerrilla attacks from the citizenry whenever his men go into the Djemaa-el-Fra. Now that's not to be tolerated. Pierre! All Marrakesh goes to that huge open square as they would to a fair, with dancing and acrobats and snake-trainers and dancing girls. What the devil! We soldiers out here stand the broiling heat of as much as 120 degrees in the shade when the east wind blows, and even in winter, when there's sun, you're hot on one side and cold on the other. We have to have some diversion, don't we?"
"True enough, mon capitain. But it's going to be hard to take Yusuf alive. First of all, no one even knows what he looks like. And then there's another thing. You know perfectly well that his name is taken from the great Saharan chieftain of the eleventh century. He was the one, indeed, who was first to build Marrakesh on a treeless plain, flat as a table, thirty-five miles from the northern flanks of the High Atlas. He was the one to import the date palm and turn this wasteland into a palm grove, to build the mosques and the markets, before he went on to glorify the name of Allah in Spain."
"Yes, yes, I know," Captain Lascombes testily replied. "I don't need a lesson in Moroccan history, mon vieuxl What I need is information. We'll have more ammunition and a fresh contingent of well-trained men by August. If we can fortify our position here and aid the commandant of El Gueliz until then, the Spanish may come in with us and put an end to this Riffian nonsense. But till then, I propose to use whatever methods I have at my disposal to gather information valuable to France. Come along, we'll pay a visit to this little bitch and make her wriggle about a bit just like a nautch dancer!" He tossed aside his swagger stick, opened the top drawer of his desk and took out a riding crop.
"I wonder," the dapper Lieutenant mused as he lit a Caporal, "what the War Ministry would say about what I think you are proposing to do, mon capitain."
"Sacre nom du noms!" the commandant swore. "Je m'en fou of the War Ministry! I would like to see them out here, fighting dust, the sun, caftad shadows, ticks and lice and poisonous snakes, to say nothing of the Riffs. Allons-y-let's go now!"
The two French officers left the white stone building of their headquarters and walked across a palm-tree-embellished courtyard toward a one-story graystone edifice about a hundred yards away. This was the prison barracks of Arzuel, which quartered not only the deserters, soldiers convicted or awaiting trial for conviction on charges of insubordination, theft, rape, and mutiny against the superior officer, but also those captives of the Riffian forces who had been captured by the French garrison at Arzuel.
Captain Lascombes returned the salute of a stocky, bearded sergeant at the gate of the barracks, and then strolled into the wide receiving room from which ran a narrow corridor on each side of which were cells with strong iron bars set into the stone walls. In the subterranean chambers below, the commander of the Arzuel garrison had punishment apparatus and torture devices installed. At first a bland and humanitarian-motivated career officer, Edouard Lascombes had been cynically corrupted by two years of guerrilla warfare against the rebellious Riffian leaders. Only six months ago, his own subaltern, a book-loving, gentle, philosophical second lieutenant of whom he had been extremely fond, had been abducted while on a short patrol near the mountain range beyond, and a week later his bsadless body had been sent back bound on his own horse and with a note in execrable French deriding the soldiers of the tricolor and promising that similar vengeance would be wreaked on any other Frenchman who dared cross the Riffian lines. His body had been hideously mutilated, obviously by the Berber women, and from that day on Edouard Lascombes had sworn reprisals. He was married, had two young daughters of eleven and thirteen, and his wife and children resided in Aix-En-Provence, a lovely country region where there was no thought of war or cruelty or hatred. But it had been a good two years since he had last slept with Eloise and fucked her while her lithe, creamy-skinned body wriggled and twisted under his. And now, his eyes glinted with cruel lust as, accompanied by his second in command, he strode down the longwinding steps toward the dungeon where the captured Riffian girl was incarcerated.
"What are you going to do with her, mon vieux?" the dapper lieutenant queried.
Captain Lascombes shrugged. "Find out as much as I can about Yusuf, of course."
"And if she doesn't know anything?"
"Find out what she does know. Look, Pierre, she's expendable. Whoever sent her here to spy on us understood that. It's part of the rules of the game. Don't forget what they did to Lieutenant Chardeville. The bastards!" His face hardened and his left hand tensed on the handle of the black leather riding crop which he brandished in the air. "I haven't any scruples about causing this Riffian bitch a little discomfort. Not when I think of what their women do to our soldiers who fall in battle. She's lucky she's not going before a firing squad. If her bottom hurts a little and that pretty con of hers is stretched un petit pen, that's what she has to expect for getting involved in men's affairs, n'est-ce-pas?"
"Well, to be frank with you, mon ami, I've no aversion whatsoever to a little Berber con. I've had little enough of it since I came to this lousy camp. I don't think the government much cares how long it takes to end this skirmish, because that's all it really is. After Verdun and the Sommes, this is like having afternoon tea with a few minor interruptions."
"Go to the devil, Pierre," Captain Lascombes smiled. "You weren't even playing with the big girls at that age. But now let's see what this Djalmah looks like when she's stripped. I hear Berber women when they're young are very luscious. Nice soft brown skins, good hard firm breasts and a pair of solid fesses ideal for thrashing." He swished his crop in the air as if in anticipation. There was a wooden desk in front of the even narrower corridor before them, and a corporal sitting there, who promptly rose and smartly saluted.
"The Berber bitch, Rene, if you please," Captain Lascombes prided himself on preferring to call his rank and file soldiers by their first names. It made for more intimacy, it was good for the morale, and since he couldn't provide them with all of the pleasures of Paris in this desolate outpost, and since very few of them ever got leaves into Marrakesh, which had been declared off bounds for all French soldiers, particularly the native quarter, it was the very least he could do.
"Ah, oui, that one," the bespectacled, tall corporal smirked as he took a large key ring from the top of the desk and began to walk down toward the end of the corridor. "She's a tigress, that one is. I wish you luck with her, mon capitain!"
"We shall use something more scientific than luck, Rene," the commandant of Arzuel drily rejoined.
CHAPTER TWO
The two officers, finding that the young Berber girl Djalmah had backed against the wall of her cell and extended her fingers like talons, ready to defend herself to the very death if need be, conferred in whispers for a moment. Then the dapper lieutenant went outside and commandeered a length of rope. All this while, Captain Lascombes flourished his riding crop to keep the defiant brown-skinned girl at bay.
"Infidel pig! Filthy French swine!" she hissed in pidgin French. "Go ahead, you brave soldiers, have me shot, I'll tell you nothing!"
"I rather think you'll change your tune, you pretty bitch, when you've had a taste of this," he held up the crop and swished it into the air with a vicious whistle. Djalmah hawked and spat at his boots, narrowly missing them. His lips curved in a smile of sadistic anticipation! "And you'll pay me back for that, you little Riffian wildcat!" he muttered. "Ah, here you are, Pierre. Now let's see if you and the corporal can distract this little bitch just long enough to slip that rope around her arms and waist. But watch her feet. These Moorish girls ride horseback when they're only babies, and their feet are calloused and hard as nails. She'll try to kick your balls off, man!"
"I can't have that, as I have use for them, mon capitain," the lieutenant ribaldly jested. He and the corporal approached Djalmah, one from each side, each holding an end of the rope while Captain Lascombes stood between them and kept his riding crop at the ready. With a cry, the lovely captive tried to stoop and run past her tormentors, but Captain Lascombes had anticipated just such a maneuver. His riding crop whistled out and bit over her bare shoulder. Her blouse was tattered, with short sleeves, and it showed the enticing satiny valley between high-perched, round, firm young titties mature as those of a full grown matron. With a cry of pain, Djalmah clutched at the stinging hurt, and in that moment the two men bound her tightly with the rope. Instantly she tried to kick at them, but Captain Lascombes stooped and slashed her across her bare calves. Her tattered skirt reached her knees, displaying elegantly sleek, beautifully muscled calves and the outline of long, slim, lithe thighs. Her bottom comprised two exitingly spacious ovals, with a narrow groove separating them.
Since the lieutenant and the corporal each held an end of the rope, they had merely to hurry forward, and against her will, Djalmah was dragged along with them, so that her kicking was useless. Captain Lascombes had already unlocked the door of the spacious interrogation chamber across the way, and the two men forced the furiously rebellious captive across the threshold.
"We should, mon ami," the lieutenant chuckled,-"allow our good assistant to share in the spoils."
"Absolutely not!" Edouard Lascombes snapped. "Bad for morale. Go back to your post, Corporal, and my thanks for your assistarfce. Leave us with this little spitfire, and we'll see if we can't draw the claws of the tigress."
Gloomily the corporal saluted and left the cell. The two men waited until they heard his footsteps recede down the narrow corridor, and then Pierre Dezier took off the coat of his bemedaled uniform and placed it neatly over a leather-padded footstool near the door. Djalmah, her eyes huge and sparkling with rage and hate, had backed against the opposite wall and was regarding both men, ready to defend herself once more.
"Now then, ma petite" the captain drawled, "it's to your own best interest if you tell us what you know of this fellow who calls himself the immortal Yusuf. He won't be immortal long, once a French bullet or the hangman's rope find him, that I assure you. And you can spare yourself a good deal of needless discomfort if you tell us where you're from, who sent you here and on what mission."
"Va t'en a Venfer!" the girl hissed vituperatively. "It's evident this little bitch isn't going to talk of her own free will. We'll have to use persuasive methods, do you agree?"
"I couldn't agree more, mon capitain, With what shall we begin? The whip?"
"Invariably a good procedure. First of all, in order to receive the whip, a girl must be stripped naked so that we may see the marks upon her flesh and determine the severity of the thrashing. Ah yes, I think we shall start with that. And then we have the electrodes."
"That's rather rough on a young bitch like this, mon capitain."
"True enough, but let me remind you what these Berber women are capable of doing to our enlisted men when they catch them loitering behind the lines or deserting or fallen in battle with a sniper's bullet. Or must I remind you of the numerous reports I have had to write back to Paris demanding that we suspend some of the elegant rules of ancient warfare so that we may repay these dirty traitors in their own kind?"
"No, you have convinced me. And I don't mind a little fun today. I was going to put in for leave, as a matter-of-fact."
"And what would you do with your leave? You couldn't get to and back from Paris in three days, you know. And I don't think you'd like to risk your good looks in the native quarter of Marrakesh. Besides, the bitches there mostly have diseases. Now this one, I'm pretty sure, being a mountain girl, is likely to be clean, even if she may not be a virgin. But we're going to find all of that out."
The girl had listened to them, her magnificent titties rising and falling vehemently, for she comprehended French well enough to understand that she was being discussed in the most ruthless terms. She bared her teeth now as Captain Edouard Lascombes slowly approached her, the riding crop ready in his right hand, while the lieutenant sidled toward her from the other side.
In this chamber, there was a metal chair, not unlike the famous chair used in the United States to put criminals to death, by electrocution. There were straps for the arms and legs and for the waist of the prisoner confined in it, and several wires trailed from its back into a plug in the wall. There was also a sharp wooden sawhorse not far from where Djalmah stood so defiantly. To the right and at the other end of this interrogation chamber, there was an antique kind of stocks, rising to about the level of a man's waist. It had five yoke holes, three above (one for the neck and two for the wrists) and two below for the ankles. There was a low footstool before it, and the stool was studded with bits of gravel, thorns, and coarse desert sand. On a rectangular, short bench beside this stocks, there lay an assortment of whips, from the vicious African kurbash to an elegant French martinet with a red wooden handle and five glossy black leather thongs tapering into fiendishly pointed tips at the very end.
It was a chamber in which the usually mild mannered Edouard Lascombes had found his demon, since leaving his beloved wife in Paris to take duty against the Riffs. And because of what transpired in this chamber and what would now occur, he no longer thought of the gentle woman who had shared his passions and hopes and dreams. His eyes were fixed on the shuddering Berber girl, conjecturing what she would look like when stripped naked and bound over the sawhorse, with the sharp wooden ridge cutting into her furry cunthole.
CHAPTER THREE
In the Ojemaa-el-Fra, the native quarter of Marrakesh, at the little sidewalk cafe known as El Cordoba, an elegant blonde matron in white linen dress and picture hat sat under the protective shade of a multicolored umbrella which kept the ferocious sun from scorching her, her delectable young daughter and their gray-haired escort, Jacques Moundet. Moundet was a journalist from Paris Matin and had been sent here by his newspaper to cover the colorful war between the French and the desert nomads of the Riff tribes, who, after scores of years battling among themselves, had united under the aegis of the dauntless Abd-el-Krim to demand their independence from the land of the tricolor.
The women with him were mother and daughter, and they were English, with a tourist's passport. They were Mrs. Claire Bennings and her daughter Sylvia, and the sophisticated Parisian newspaperman had high hopes of making one or the other his mistress. Mrs. Bennings and her daughter had been enroute to Tangiers when she had come down with desert fever and been hospitalized for nearly three weeks. Her husband, who had been stationed in Tangiers at the English embassy there, had flown in to visit his wife and daughter for two days before being sent on to Gibraltar for an important diplomatic conference. Jacques Moundet had volunteered to look after his wife and daughter, and the English diplomat had been exceedingly grateful for such solicitous attention hardly suspecting the real motives of the lecherous journalist.
Moundet presumed upon his knowledge of the native quarter and the fact that he had written complimentary articles on the Riffian leader with a note of sympathy suggesting that France would be well rid of the thorn in its side by constant supervision of the desert tribes and would do well therefore to grant them independence, for his own safety and that of the two women he was escorting. But even now the proprietor of the cafe was talking to a tall Arab in robe and burnous in a little room upstairs arranging to have the Englishwomen abducted and sent to the Riffian camp where the famous guerrilla leader Yusuf was in command, these women to be used as hostages in the event that the French should attempt reprisals against any of their own captured spies or informers. News of Djalmah's capture and incarceration had already reached the swarthy little owner of El Cordoba, and so he was speaking animatedly to the fierce Bedouin horseman: "By the beard of Allah, Hassan, here is a heaven-sent opportunity for the Riffs!' Those French swine have poor little Djalmah, and one can imagine to what tortures they will subject the maiden. Why do you not seize that stupid Englishwoman and her lovely daughter here and now and take them back to the camp!"
"It is an excellent idea, Mohammet Bey," the tall Arab agreed. "But I will need some distraction. Perhaps you could call them here to the back of the cafe. Give me ten minutes, delay them all you can, and I shall have three strong Riff brothers to help me overpower them and take them out of Marrakesh under the very eyes of those acursed soldiers."
So, a few minutes later, fawning upon his guests, Mohammet Bey urged Claire and Sylvia Bennings to sample a dish of couscous made with lamb and a special curry, the specialty of his humble little cafe, and it would be with his compliments that two such beautiful giaours should partake of true Arabian food at his unworthy cafe.
"It sounds like fun, Mummy! And I've always wanted to have couscous," Sylvia Bennings, a blackhaired, ripe-formed girl of eighteen eagerly declared. Her mother, who was thirty-nine, buxom and with that fair pink and white skin typical of an English blonde, smiled indulgently. "My poor darling, you've had such a dreadful time while Mummy's been in the hospital, haven't you? Very well, you shall have your couscous. Dear Jacques," turning to the grayhaired journalist, "will you tell this man that my daughter and I would be delighted to accept his hospitality and that we look forward to this feast."
On the swarthy face of the cafe owner, a swiftly mocking little smile passed, like the desert wind itself which comes and goes as it wills. He bowed low, tucking his hands in the sleeves of his robe, and then hurried back to the kitchen where Hassan and by now, three sturdy Riffian warriors were waiting. Their horses were tethered in a winding alley just outside, and all of them knew the by-ways of the native quarter as they knew every trail in the mountains where they hid against the French forays. It would be easy to slip out of the northeastern gate of Marrakesh, past the surveillance of the French guards.
"How long will you stay here in Marrakesh, dear Madame Bennings?" Jacques Moundet obsequiously demanded.
The handsome matron, whose hair was gathered around the top of her head and then at the back of her neck into an imposing round decorative bun, the color of new-mown hay, frowned thoughtfully. "Well, Robert won't be back from Gibraltar for at least another two weeks, and I don't want to dash around just after getting over the fever, so very likely, Sylvia and I will remain here until he cables us. Possibly we'll go back to Tangiers after all. I do so want to see that wonderful city and all its mosques and minarets and of course the native quarter."
"But here in Marrakesh, you know, the native quarter is extremely fascinating and colorful."
"It's true, but then I have heard that there is war between the Arabs and the French."
"Between the Moroccans, rather," he corrected with an indulgent smile, as he eyed Sylvia who blushed demurely and lowered her eyes. She found this grayhaired slim elegantly mannered Frenchman quite devastating, and although she was a virgin, she knew perfectly well what went on between men and women-after all, her girlfriends at the private school she attended in Paris had furnished her ample descriptions. She was wondering what it would be like to be held in his arms, to have him take off her clothes and make love to her, to put his hand on her tetons and also on her soft little con. If Jacques Moundet had been able to read Sylvia Bennings' mind, he probably would have aided the four Riffs at the back of the cafe who were already preparing to abduct her and her mother!
For her part, Claire Bennings found the journalist equally stimulating, and it must be admitted that although she had not yet deceived her husband Robert in the twenty years of their marriage, her being alone in a near-Oriental city like Marrakesh and subject to all the temptations of this tropical climate and this colorful atmosphere, together with the long separation from her husband's bed, made her contemplate with a deliciously spicy feeling of being "naughty" the hypothetical sin of adultery in his arms.
"Here comes the proprietor," he now observed as he lit a cigarette. "Doubtless he has the couscous ready for us. It's true that it's a bit early in the day, but there are very light and delightful, and the way the Moroccans cook lamb, I'm sure you'll find it exceptionally tasty."
Mohammet Bey came forward now and bowed low to the two women: "I would be honored if Madame and her daughter would come back for just a moment to the kitchen. My chef, you see, a poor, hardworking Bedouin, spent two years in your London, and he has not seen an Englishwoman since then. Would you do me the illustrious favor?"
"Why, how charming!" Claire Bennings smiled. "Excuse us, dear Jacques. Come along, Sylvia. Besides, I've always wanted to see a foreign kitchen and learn how the cooks turn out such miraculous dishes out of just about nothing!"
The French journalist rose courteously from the table as the two Englishwomen hurried after the proprietor. Then he seated himself again, puffed at his cigarette and sipped his glass of white Moroccan wine. In his mind there was a dream-fantasy. He was in' a villa near the oasis, and Claire and Sylvia were his slaves. They wore the gauzy harem jackets and pantaloons, their feet were bare, with silver bracelets on their arms and ankles, and they were perfumed and their hair was tumbled down to their waists. On their bare arms one could see the marks of the whip which his overseer had given them both because they had refused to fuck. He saw himself lounging on a couch now, with both women kneeling beside him, almost fighting over the privilege of being first to french him to win his favor so that she would not be flogged again. And he could see himself commanding matronly Claire to help hold her daughter Sylvia down by grasping the girl's wrists while he fucked the ripe tittied young brunette, while at the same time forcing Claire to kneel astride her daughter and rub her cunt against Sylvia's mouth with the order that Sylvia was to gamahuch her own mother or else suffer a severe thrashing on the naked behind and titties.
Thus lost in his own lecherous daydream, he" did not hear the scuffle at the back of the cafe, nor did he even note the passage of time until, about half an hour later, having finished his wine and another cigarette, he looked around, saw no one, and with a puzzled look on his face, hurried back into the cafe. Mohammet Bey was talking to a young Bedouin girl, Fazima, who wore a veil over her face and a thin red dress down to her knees. Her feet were bare, and she was the cigarette girl of the establishment, and also the owner's mistress on occasion.
"Pardon me, but have you seen the two women at my table?" he anxiously inquired.
"Oh sir," Mohammet Bey rubbed his hands and bowed his head, "forgive your unworthy servant. The English ladies were feeling a trifle faint and wished to go back to their hotel, so I had a porter bring them a taxi here at the back. They left about fifteen minutes ago. How stupid of me not to have let you know, but I thought they had told you."
"That's damned odd," Jacques Moundet mused aloud, shaking his head. "Oh well, here's the money for what we've had. I'll go back to the hotel now. Perhaps we'll see you again tomorrow. Did they like the couscous?"
"Alas," the cafe owner replied with a mocking smile which was lost on the French journalist, "they did not have time to sample the delicacy, but you may, if you like. My cook was desolated."
* * *
Hassan and his three Riffian colleagues had seized both Claire and Sylvia Bennings, wound cotton scarves around their mouths as gags, and then bound their hands behind their backs and their ankles together with cords. They then had hurried out in the alley, mounted their horses, and ridden through the native quarter by a route they knew to the very end of the district, where a tunnel unknown to the French soldiers had been constructed. Through this tunnel, they could pass beyond the boundary of Marrakesh and avoid the last sentinels who guarded the city against the attacks by roving bands of Riffian tribesmen.
They headed straight for the mountains, some twenty miles away, and pursued a trail known only to them and the followers of the feared Riffian leader, Yusuf.
They arrived in camp, having given the countersign to the sentries posted along the rocks which guarded the twisting and almost impassable trail. They carried their victims into the tent of the chieftain.
For, contrary to what Lieutenant Pierre Dezier believed, the wily Riffian leader had not gone to the oasis of Katijba but to the whitecapped Atlas Mountains. Only a small force occasionally rode the desert between Marrakesh on the oasis for the purpose of decoying the French strength out into the open where the mountain guerrilla fighters could strike at them and then vanish back into their hilly retreat which few of the French cavalry horses could negotiate.
"Well now, Hassan," Yusuf Ben Tashfin smiled as he stroked his black beard, "you have been busy this day, you and your followers."
"For the greater glory of Allah and the damnation of the accursed French, noble Yusuf!" Hassan saluted. "You know of course, that poor little Djalmah has been taken. Even at this moment she may be suffering torture at the hands of those abominable usurpers of our land. Well then, these two giaour bitches will pay us back for what they do to her."
"I think they are Englishwomen, Effendi Yusuf," Hassan observed.
The desert chief, a tall, cruel-faced man of forty-five, in white burnous and sandals, a scimitar thrust through the black leather belt round his waist (a belt which he had torn from the dying body of a sous-lieutenant during a desert skirmish), shrugged, "It matters nothing to me. They are infidels, and the British themselves have wanted to wrest our land away from us, like the French and like the Spanish. Was their husband with them?"
"No, I do not think so, Effendi. There was a French journalist, the one who thinks that because he has written articles praising your valor, he is himself immune."
"He is a Frenchman, and if the time for him to die by my hands comes, he will die, no matter what he has written. Allah wills it," Yusuf devoutly declared. "But now, take these bitches to the tent of Hjalma, let them be given some food and a little wine, but not too much. Hjalma will raise their fears over what is to be done with them. And this night we shall enjoy them. You, since you and your men have done so valiantly in bringing them to us as hostages, are invited to the sport."
"A thousand thanks, o tenor of the desert!" Hassan joyously exclaimed, prostrating himself before the fierce Riffian leader.
Then he gave an order in Arabic to his three friends, who once again lifted up the bodies of the terrified Clair and Sylvia Bennings, and carried them out of the tent to a larger one, where the beautiful Moorish mistress of Yusuf, the girl known as Hjalma, was quartered.
CHAPTER FOUR
The captured Berber girl was drenched in agony-sweat,-as she writhed astride the sawhorse in the interrogation chamber. She was stark naked, and her wrists and ankles had been tethered with strong cords to the lower legs of the apparatus. She was in reality only seventeen, but the magnificence of her body led the two French officers to believe her considerably older. That, however, was not their major concern. So long as there was a chance that she could tell them where Yusuf and his men were hiding out, they meant to extract every possible bit of information, heedless of what the cost to her would be. Their argument was that if they could save but a single French soldier's life, the life of this insignificant Moorish girl meant nothing.
She had fought them viciously, until Lieutenant Pierre Dezier had struck her on the jaw with his fist, stunning her enough to enable both men to drag her to the horse, lay her on her belly upon it, and then swiftly bind her wrists and ankles. Her long black hair tumbled to the floor, and the glossy, warm brown skin of her naked body with its vividly smooth sheen, excited them. Now that she was naked, all the promise of her body was before them, and there was no one to interrupt their leisurely sadism. Her long sleek legs were marvelously muscled, and the flexions along her thighs and calves and into the two broadly oval-shaped globes of her ass drew their constant gaze. The shadowy crease between those nether globes promised lewd delights, and cynically, the dapper blackhaired lieutenant had muttered to his superior officer, "She may be a virgin in front, but I'll lay a thousand francs she's not a virgin there," and he had taken the captain's riding crop and tappled Djalmah along that ambery-shadowy furrow leading to her asshole. "They've already learned that when they fuck a girl there, she can't get a baby for them.Afon Dieu I've heard of virgins in brothels out here in the native quarter, where it's possible for a twenty-year-old Bedouin bitch to have her hymen still intact, but to have lent her bottomhole to a hundred men since she was fifteen, and to go on earning her dowry for her intended husband by the use of that petit trou."
"I well believe you, Pierre. But now let's liven her up a bit." Captain Edouard Lascombes had taken off his uniform coat and shirt, as well as his undershirt, and was naked to the waist in his striped trousers and boots. He was suntanned and sturdily built, with thick brown hair on his chest, while his subaltern had a hairy mane of black glossy hair on chest and belly.
Pierre Dezier stared at the Berber girl with almost fanatic hatred. Women had been his downfall. As a professional soldier, to have reached only the grade of first lieutenant at the age of thirty-six was a disgrace, and if he had sought assignment out here in desolate Marrakesh, to be involved in an unpopular and undeclared war, it was to take himself away from some painful scenes which might have cost him a good deal more than his professional status. Two husbands had challenged him to duels, and they happened to be far better swordsmen than he. His enlistment had been up and he had re-enlisted, willingly giving up the rank of captain which he won under fire in Tangiers when a mob had attacked the French embassy and he and a dozen Legionnaires had driven them off with heavy losses and saved the day. So he had demoted himself in order to save his life. Now he missed Paris and the salons with beautiful women and the intrigues and the nocturnal affairs along the Rue de la Paix and the little sidewalk cafes where he had met so many belles trottoirs.
And so for him, the Berber girl symbolized his chance to avenge himself on the perfidious nature of the female whose caprices had ensnared him and made him commit many a folly so that now, nearly forty, he could expect no promotion unless it was through valorous action against the Riffs.
From a panoply on the wall, he had taken down from the hook a long thick leather strap, about thirty-four inches in length, an inch and a half wide, and a quarter of an inch thick, the end cut into a kind of arrowpoint so as to deal out augmented sting through a mere flick of the wrist. Captain Lascombes retained his riding crop. For half an hour now they had harangued Djalmah, asking her question upon question, and when she had remained stolidly silent, they had amused themselves by whipping her shoulders and upper back. There had been no set pattern of lashes. First a strap would bite down with the tip striping right along the deeply hollowed cleft of her spinal column, and then almost instantly afterwards the flexible riding crop would whistle down and smack brutally over the girl's shoulderblades.
The angry, darkening red welts and streaks between her neck and waist added a kind of lascivious appeal to her smooth brown-sheened naked flesh, and the glistening drops of sweat which bathed her body now as she continued to jerk and writhe against the hellish ridge of the sawhorse which ground into her tender cunt, became a new and perfidious torment.
But she had refused to tell them anything except her name and her age-which they had not believed-and that she was simply coming to the native quarter to find her cousin, one Murad-el-Djimaz, who sold tobacco in the street of a Thousand Scimitars at the end of the native quarter.
"Now you know, you little Riffian savage," Pierre Dezier purred as he moved to the head of the sawhorse and squatted down, so that he could stare into Djalmah's pain-contorted, lovely face, "that your cousin isn't in jail at all. We haven't any such man of that description."
"That's what I was told, when I came to the Djemaa-el-Fna," she hoarsely gasped. Her dark eyes fixed him with a look of ineffable hatred. He smiled with gloating anticipation: "Before much longer, you'll tell us a good deal more than those lies, Djalmah. You'll tell us, mordieu who has fucked you since you were a girl of twelve, and you'll tell us, also, where we can find Yusuf and all his men."
"I would die before I told you that even if I knew it, French dog!" she gasped. Then a grimace of pain convulsed her lovely, defiant features as the grinding rub of the sharp wooden ridge gouged her tender cunthole. At the very moment, Captain Lascombes, lifting up his riding crop, brought it down with an angry thwackkkk straight across her back at the chinkbone, an atrociously sensitive area for the lash. Her head lifted, her eyes bulging, a stertorous groan escaped her.
"You see, Djalmah? There are two of us and you are only a very young bitch, and you can't possible hold out," Pierre Dezier huskily muttered. His eyes feasted on the dangling round titties of this luscious naked Moorish piece, and his prick was agonizedly hard against the fly of his uniform trousers. But of course, there was always the danger that the bitch had a disease, and he'd probably give it to her in the mouth, or he could even give it to her between those big tetons of hers and pretend it was her con!
"That is all I will tell you, son of a cameldriver and a woman who sells dung in the marketplace," she gasped.
His lips twisted at the insult, for his parents meant much to him, even though he had disgraced himself in their eyes and they had tacitly told him to stay in the army and not communicate with them. What he had actually done and what he alone knew was to seduce his first cousin, who had been betrothed to the son of their dearest and oldest friend. When the girl had become pregnant, and the knowledge had come out that Pierre Dezier had tasted her charms in advance of that long-planned alliance, his father had slashed him across the face with his glove and told him to join the army or get out of France entirely and never in any way communicate with him again. And then he had arranged with his banker to send a large cheque to the French Banque de Securite in Marrakesh when he had heard the news of his son's assignment to Arzuel, a cheque which represented Pierre Dezier's legacy with the understanding that it was to be used to separate him from his family for ever after.
Oddly enough, he had loved his first cousin, a shy girl brought up in a convent, Mar the Rigaud, as blackhaired and exquisitely tantalizing as even this young Berber bitch. And that too was why he saw in Djalmah the symbol of all his bitter destiny.
Rising suddenly, he took hold of her tumbled tresses in his left hand and yanked them up viciously so that her face was uptilted. Then, lifting his strap, he cut sideways at her right tittie, so that the arrow-pointed end of the thick strap smacked viciously against the firm satiny side of that resilient, mature loveglobe. Djalmah uttered a strangled cry of pain and closed her eyes, while a long shudder traversed her tethered naked body on the sawhorse.
"That's two insults you'll pay me back for, you Berber slut," he snarled. "Do you see that chair? Very soon, after that pretty ass of yours is blazing from the whip, we're going to sit you down on it, and put wires to your nipples and to the lips of your con. Yes, and to your asshole, sale putainl And then I'm going to turn that lever there in that little black box, and when I do, you'll wish you'd never been born!"
"I wish that already, French dog," she bravely gasped, "for you and your kind have robbed us of our land and of our freedom. It matters nothing that you rob me of my life now, for I will give you no satisfaction."
"Won't you, now, Djalmah, well see. Mon viewc we've spared her ass till now. You take the left cheek, and I'll take the right, and let's see if we can't paint a semblance of the French tricolor on that shapely pair of fesses of hers!" Pierre Dezier proposed-to the commandant.
"Willingly. This is hot work. Perhaps we should have Rene bring in some white Moroccan wine," Captain Lascombes suggested as he took his place behind the sawhorse, playfully flicking the flap of the leather riding crop over the girl's leaked hip, while she gasped and stiffened herself. No matter how she moved on that hellish sawhorse, her cunt grew more and more chafed. The fact was, Djalmah was a virgin save for her mouth; in the Near East and the Orient, many Berber girls, as well as African and Arabian Negresses and Jewesses, are brought up as maricones or professional fellatresses. There are even dancing girls who are called ghazizeh, whose specialty is to french men whom they arouse to frantic desire beforehand by letting them watch her masturbate as she dances. Often while she frenches a man, the ghazizeh will rub her pussy on his leg, thigh, or arm, thus seeking to rouse her own passion to higher pitch.
Moreover, such girls have no objection whatsoever to theingestion of the male spunk, and it is well-known that Arabian wives and even virginal daughters often add to their incomes by prostituting themselves when the husband is away from home. Their commodity is known as perdeh-jerdeh, which means sucking of the penis. It is not considered adultery or a betrayal of the husband, or of the sanctity of the daughter, since conception is impossible and no one is harmed by the deed. Djalmah, herself, at the age of thirteen, had been offered by her father to the tribal chief of her village, and had spent the night with him, sucking him dry. But her hymen was intact nonetheless, as was the maidenhead of her asshole.
"Now let's begin. You first, mon capitain" Pierre Dezier sardonically bowed to his superior. The commandant nodded, his eyes fixing on the spacious oval globe assigned to his flagellatory attentions. Slowly he raised the riding crop, and brought it down with an angry slash and vertically along the edge from hip to the base of Djalmah's bottom cheek. A stifled groan was heard, as the naked girl lifted her head again, and stared at the wall beyond. Her eyes were glazed and dilated, and her lips were trembling uncontrollably, while her nostrils flickered and shrank like those of the mare in rut. The fiery heat of the riding crop bit into her tender flesh, and it had made her body involuntarily jerk over the sawhorse, which in turn had augmented the torture of that infernal friction rubbing her between the thighs.
Playfully, Lieutenant Pierre Dezier dangled the strap over the other buttock, and as he watched Djalmah stiffen her muscles, waited. Then as she relaxed, for even that defense caused her torment in her private parts, he lifted the strap and brought it down with an angry cracckkkkk straight down the very center of the globe. Her piercing cry rose at once, and this time her fingers clawed at the lower legs of the sawhorse, while tears began to run down her flushed, contorted cheeks.
"An excellent start. She'll be talkative soon enough. And if she isn't, we'll use the electrodes," Captain Lascombes decreed.
Now, purposely prolonging the time between strokes, and changing their methods of alternation so as to intensify the agony of the young victim, the two officers resumed the flogging. Sometimes the commandant would apply the riding crop in a diagonal cut, and then after a long pause, Pierre Dezier would send the strap whistling so expertly that the tip would disappear into the shadowy groove separating the two globes and cling horizontally over the base of the cheek which was his terrain. Again, both sometimes whipped in unison so that crop and strap fell on the flesh at the same time, making Djalmah's hips and bottomcheeks jerk and twist and weave in the most salacious contortions. Grinding her teeth, her eyes mad with suffering, the naked young Berber girl tried to suppress her outcries, so as to give her tormentors as little satisfaction as possible. But by the time each had applied twenty strokes, her buttocks were livid, and the soft brown sheen of her skin was angrily marred by violent, empurpling welts and striate.
They paused a moment, dripping with sweat themselves, and their pricks bulged savagely against the flies of their trousers. Captain Lascombes decided that he needed wine as both stimulant and refreshment against the intolerable heat which permeated this cell. He strode to the door, unlocked it, bawled out, "Corporal, ici, w'fe!"And when the corporal hurried up and saluted, he commanded, "Two bottles of white Triffle, and see that they're properly chilled. Bring in a bucket of ice, and well do it ourselves, better still. But be quick about it!"
The corporal saluted and covertly caught just a glimpse through the partly open door of the naked girl on the sawhorse. As he hurried down the corridor to fetch the wind, he lamented the unkindness of a fate that would put him on duty here and within reach of such a tempting morsel of cunt, yet deny him more than a quick glimpse.
While he waited, Captain Lascombes grinned savagely and, returning to the sawhorse, made a sign to his lieutenant. The latter, understanding, let the strap fall to the floor and then, leaning towards the shuddering, groaning naked girl, put his palms on her welted asscheeks and yawned them open, disclosing the dainty pink-lipped cleft of her asshole. With a cynical smile, Captain Edouard Lascombes thrust the handle against that furtive orifice, and savagely pressed it past the ring of sphincter muscles, burrowing it three or four inches into her bowels.
Djalmah's body shook violently, and her head lifted and her eyes rolled to the whiles as her mouth gaped in a frenzied, wordless cry.
"That's just a start, you stubborn slut," he sneered. "You've only had a little thrashing, and after we've had our wine, well go back to work on you. Then if you're still obstinate, so much the worse for you-well warm you up on that chair. Well put the electrodes right where it'll hurt the most, Dhalmah, and when we finish with you, you'll never be able to bear a child. Your womb will be seared raw-it will make you an outcast from your tribe. Think of that while you wait for us to have our wine, you stubborn little whore. Save yourself now, a last chance, and tell us where Yusuf is."
"He is preparing the hell you will die in, dirty pigs, cowards, butchers of women and children," Djalmah panted.
With a smirk of sadism, Captain Edouard Lascombes seized the crop with both hands and crammed it forward. A maddened shriek rent the air, and blood oozed from the distended, martyrized asshole of the young captive. Her body slumped unconscious. But it was to be only a temporary respite.
And yet she would be avenged, for at this very moment, Yusuf, the leader sought by these two sadistic French officers, was in the process of exacting vengeance upon the trembling bodies of Claire Bennings and her ripely desirable blackhaired daughter Sylvia!
CHAPTER FIVE
In the tent of Hjalma, Mrs. Claire Bennings and her daughter Sylvia lay upon soft wide couches, gagged and tied hand and foot, their terrified eyes contemplating the voluptuous houri who was mistress to the, ferocious Riffian leader Yusuf Ben Tashfin.
Hjalma was perhaps twenty-four years of age, at which time a Berber girl has long been married and with her family. But no one in Yusuf s presence would dare call her old, for she was dazzlingly sensual and excitingly beautiful in her primitive, unsophisticated way. She was about five feet eight inches in height, with a haughty oval face in which one could detect, far back in her ancestry, some white blood, perhaps even that of the French who were so detested by their Riffian foes. Her forehead was high-arching, and die had particularly thick brows which surmounted widely spaced, large and expressive dark-brown eyes. Her nose was acquilline, with widely spreading, thin and sensuous nostrils, and her mouth was small but exceedingly ripe and moist and red. Slantingly set cheekbones, a firm chin and sturdy jaws gave her the indomitable aspect of a virtual Amazon. She had that tint which in the Creole district of New Orleans might be called cafe au lait, or "coffee with milk," a kind of golden tan akin to a very beautiful quadroon or light mulatress. It was lighter than the skin of, for instance, the young Berber girl Djalmah whose name was so similar and who, by one of life's ironies, was now in the very position in which the two English hostages found themselves with Djalmah's more illustrious counterpart. Her titties were closely spaced, ripe hard pears, and from the supple waist there veered svelte hips, compactly set, upstandingly rounded bottomcheeks, long, nervously muscled thighs and sinuous calves.
She wore a satin bolero jacket, sleeveless, with a broad V-cut at the valley and descending almost midway down the valley between those sumptuous breasts. At her hips, a filmy skirt, into which bold sequins had been woven, clung, falling to midcalf, and hiding nothing of the thick, crisp black triangle at the peak of her thighs. She herself lounged on a third couch, piled with poufs and perfumed cushions, smoking a French cigarette in an ivory cigarette holder which had been taken from the effects of several French prisoners captured a week ago after a raid upon a small camp near the oasis where Captain Lascombes believed Yusuf to be encamped with the bulk of his fighting men.
Hjalma was attended by a giant Sudanese, who had once been a wrestler at town fairs and carnivals. His head was cleanshaven, and he towered six feet four inches in height, weighing at least 250 pounds. He wore only a loincloth and sandals, and he held an ostrich plume fan over Hjalma, waving it gently back and forth to stir the humid, oppressive air. Her cloying scent of perfume, of musk and myrrh and frankincense filled the air, and the two English captives groaned in discomfort as they lay there on their couches waiting for this exotic beauty to decree their fate. At this moment, a bearded, swarthy Riffian warrior drew open the flaps of the tent which served as doorway, and entered. He inclined his head toward Hjalma and then approached her couch. In fluent Arabic, he told her what her lover's orders had been concerning the two giaours.
Hjalma's eyes sparkled with lust, for although she was a cooing dove and a submissive bed-slave to the ferocious chieftain, she savored the opportunity to torture and degrade any woman who fell into her hands. And she had reason.
When she was sixteen, Hjalma had been sold by her impoverished parents into a bordello in Sousse, near Tunis. From this fate she had apparently been saved when a dissolute-and extraordinarily wealthy Frenchman visiting Sousse on a tour of Mediterranean Africa was smitten with her charms and decided to buy her. She flung herself at his feet and promised him undying gratitude and servitude for having saved her from the brutal, depraved and elderly Arabs, wealthy merchants, sheikhs and the like, who would have purchased her for a transient hour and introduced her to the lash, torture, sodomy and all the deviate sadistic practices in which the debauched Arab is so expert.
But to her horror and shame, when her purchaser took her back to his elegant hotel suite, she discovered that she was not destined for his bed but rather for that of his insolent Spanish mistress, a woman of twenty named Inez Pedrosilla. She found also that the man who had bought her was impotent and that he could be roused only when he witnessed a lesbian amour between two attractive women, where one would take the role of cruel domination. Thus her first night of bondage found poor Hjalma spread-eagled on the bed, gagged, and naked, while Inez, clad in only her filmy slip, flogged her almost to the blood with a leather cravache and then, strapping on an artificial dildo, first sodomized her and then fucked her. Later that night, under the lash, the half-swooning young Moorish girl was obliged to suck that dildo as she might a man's real prick, while, cackling with inane laughter, the man who had bought her sat and watched and masturbated.
After a year of this infernal torment, Hjalma escaped and made her way to Marrakesh. There, she earned a few coppers working as a slave in a little restaurant patronized by the tourists. But when the owner sought to force her to his bed and took a whip to her to compel her to this duty, Hjalma seized a knife and stabbed him to death. She then escaped the French police, made her way to the mountains, and there met Yusuf Ben Tashfin, who was already recruiting soldiers among the mountain tribes of the Riff in preparation for the rebellion against the French.
The news of her act of vengeance had reached him, to be sure, and he admired this young, courageously defiant girl who had endured so much in so short a lifetime. He made her his mistress, but this was an honor, and Hjalma thrilled to be awakened in his virile embrace. As the mutiny against the French grew and Yusuf himself became more and more renowned-having taken the name of that legendary hero and founder of Marrakesh-Hjalma often fought beside him with an ancient musket or a lance taken from some dead French cavalryman. Once she saved his life, and twice he saved hers. Once the French actually caught her and were about to execute her before a firing squad when Yusuf and fifty Riffian riders galloped into the square of the Bjadz-el-Tjar, killed the firing squad and the captain commanding the detail, and rescued her.
They were well mated, this desert hawk and this village girl who had become whore, murderess, and courageous guerrilla fighter in so few years.
But each time a female captive fell into the hands of Yusuf Ben Tashfin, Hjalma implored him to let her administer the torture, for she saw Inez Pedrosilla in every such captive who lay bound and groaning for mercy under her cruel and gloating emprise.
However, this time Hjalma did not approve of what her lover had ordained for the two Englishwomen. They were to be stripped naked, spread-eagled on their couches and prepared for violation by Hassan and his three comrades who had helped abduct them from that cafe, by Yusuf himself and his two chief lieutenants, Murad-el-Fej, and Abu Buazziz. These two men, both in their late thirties, were unwaveringly devoted to Yusuf, and they were murderers with a price on their heads, each having slain at least three or four French civilians long before the "officia!" rebellion of the Riffs against the oppressors had begun.
"Tell your master," Hjalma spitefully declared, "that it is not enough to violate these giaour bitches, but first they must feel the degradation and the shame of their situation. I would prefer that they be stripped slowly, garment by garment, and chastised the way one chastises young children. Let their bottoms be smacked by my hand first and then by the hands of all those men who are to possess them. I know well how these infidel bitches esteem themselves on their great pride and chastity. Well, let them but be smacked like children, and the pleasure of my lover and the loyal followers who are to enjoy these English sluts will be a thousandfold increased!"
The Riff warrior inclined his head respectfully and left the tent. Springing from the couch, Hjalma gave an order to her Sudanese attendant: "Nouraji," she commanded, "stretch those two slaves on their bellies. Make their wrists and ankles fast to the rings sewn into the couches, and let them thus be presented with then-fat bottoms upturned when our glorious sheikh and his men enter my humble abode!"
The Negro grinned and nodded. He moved first to the handsome blonde matron, who uttered a shriek of terror as she saw this ebony giant" approach her, and tried frantically to break the bonds which held her wrists and ankles. In a few moments she found herself stretched on her belly, her ankles and wrists securely fastened to heavy metal rings which had been sewn into the ends of the couch. Ignoring her plaints and groans, Nouraji moved to the other couch now, which was placed at the side and to the right of the one on which Claire Bennings lay, and proceeded to pinion young Sylvia in the same manner.
A few minutes later, Yusuf Ben Tashfin, his two aides and the four cronies, who, as we know, had skillfully abducted the two Englishwomen in the cafe of Mohamet Bey, returned to the tents. Yusuf turned to his mistress, stroking his pointed beard: "You take it upon yourself to give orders now, Hjalma? Do you go against my will?"
"Oh no, my lord, I do but go in advance of your own great pleasure," Hjalma smiled at him. She knelt, took his hand and kissed it. She well knew that he could deny her nothing. And invariably, when she offered advice, it was as she said, his own pleasure was intensified.
"Well, it was no great matter, whether they wait a minute or two before they feel the pricks of our Riffs in their giaour cunts. If it amuses you to smack their big bottoms and to have them stripped so as to show their nakedness to all of us, so be it. Will you then do this yourself, or do you wish us to aid you?"
"Oh, my noble lord Yusuf, I am a woman and I know their secrets well, better than any man. Let me undress them and prepare them. Let me apply the flat of my naked hand against their bare bottoms while you and your men prepare your mighty pricks for satisfaction."
"Let it be done so," Yusuf chuckled.
Her eyes blazing with delight, Hjalma walked over to the couch where Claire Bennings lay, bent down to the frantically struggling woman and rolled up her skirt and thin slip. A roar of laughter from Yusuf made the English matron turn scarlet with mortification, for she was wearing a clinging black cotton sheath which resembled the old fashioned bloomers and which, in England, were called knickers, with elastic waistband and elastic bands at the legs, which descended as far as the knee-hollows. Her stockings disappeared under those legs, and they in turn were held up by elastic garters. In this tropical climate, the buxom English matron had decided to forego the niceties of a corset. Over her breasts she wore a sort of camisole, with shoulder straps, reinforced material over the breasts themselves, a kind of tunic whose hems were tucked into the waistband of the bloomers.
Hjalma giggled, and then lifted her right hand and brought it down with a vigorous smack on first one bottomcheek and then the other. The black cotton knickers were tightly stretched, and the plump curves of that lusciously ripe and mature ass jiggled delightfully under those vigorous slaps. Still gagged, Claire Bennings groaned, but more in shame than in pain, glancing back with frantic eyes at her exotic tormentress. Then her eyes widened still more and a look of consternation dawned upon her face. Yusuf, his two lieutenants, Hassan and his three friends, had doffed their burnouses, and stood only in the short drawers which hid their loins ... but not entirely. For already their pricks were liberated from the fries of these drawers and the sight of these seven already erect male organs was like a nightmarish phantasmagoria to the horrified matron.
She struggled so wildly and she tried so desperately to cry out through the gag that Yusuf made a sign and Hjalma tore the gag away.
"Oh, in the name of mercy, what are you going to do to us? We are Englishwomen, we are tourists here, my husband is in the diplomatic service, why do you treat us this way?" Claire Bennings hysterically cried.
"You are infidels. You come to Marrakesh and you are seen in the company of one of those French swine," Yusuf Ben Tashfin angrily replied. "Moreover, the French have this day captured one of our bravest girls, and they are even now putting her to the torture. Both of you shall be our hostages against her return. But meanwhile, you shall learn what it means to insult the Riffs by coming to the native quarter and amusing yourselves as if you were at a bazaar. We fight for independence here, and we are not a show of entertainment for idle women who would be better off in the beds of their husbands."
"But, sir," startled that Yusuf spoke English at all, and even more that he spoke it so well, Claire Bennings stammeringly tried to answer, "my daughter has done no harm. Oh God, you are exposing yourselves-she is chaste-she has never had a man-surely you would not-oh, you couldn't be so cruel!"
"We are going to make your daughter a woman, and to find out at the same time how much you have taught her and how much you know yourself," was Yusuf s mocking answer. And he signed to Hjalma to continue.
At once she stooped over the struggling Mrs. Bennings, inserted her fingers in the waistband of the knickers, and yanked them down, to expose the plump jutting asscheeks with their pink and white epidermis already vividly marked by those two stinging slaps, on the ripest curves of both nether-globes. Frantic at finding herself so exposed before all those men, Claire Bennings uttered a scream, tried to grind herself into the couch, and to tighten her assmuscles so as to diminish the prominence of that most shameful part of her anatomy at which the Riffs were staring so avidly.
But already Hjalma had proceeded to the next couch, and despite poor Sylvia Bennings' heartfelt plaints and feverish struggles, she lofted the girl's dress and petticoat, revealing a pair of pink batiste knickers whose legs were not quite so long, and flesh-colored silk stockings which, like her mother's were held up at mid-thigh by elastic garters.
Sylvia Bennings' bottom was also spacious, but more oval-shaped, and when her knickers were dragged down, amid her shrieks and tears, it was seen that her skin was wonderfully creamy. Upon this naked virgin ass Hjalma applied five or six energetic slaps, and Sylvia's cries excited the men, who joked among themselves in coarse Arabic.
"It is an interesting game, though childish," Yusuf approved. "Come, my friends, let us play it now."
And soon the tent was filled with the shrieks and prayers and agonized supplications of the two hysterical victims who, side by side on thfcse couches, spread-eagled and helpless, began to wriggle and twist and jerk as the hands of vigorous men fell upon their bare behinds. Sylvia had three men attending her, while her buxom mother groaned and sobbed and jerked frantically, as Yusuf himself, attended by his two lieutenants and also by Hjalma, applied their palms with exemplary vigor to her naked, reddening ass.
"Enough!" Yusuf Ben Tashfin cried, his voice guttural with rut. "Now let us act like men and show these giaour bitches how the Riffs embrace shameless sluts who try to make sport of them by coming to Marrakesh to gaze on them as one does at monkeys at the zoo!"
At this, opening his drawers, he let his elongated, dark-veined prick emerge and knelt down between the straddled thighs of Claire Bennings. Looking back over her shoulder, the maddened woman shrieked and implored mercy.
"Be silent, bitch," he bade her. "I take that which your husband has probably never enjoyed, and he will not miss it now."
With this, sinking his wiry fingers into the cheeks of her well-spanked ass, he yawned them apart and thrust his prickhead against the shrinking inlet of her indeed virgin asshole. Claire Bennings writhed, her head flung back, her eyes exorbitant, as she felt his cocktip pry apart the lips and thrust homeward. But when she saw Hassan kneel between her weeping daughter's struggling, straddled thighs and put his palms on Sylvia's furiously inflamed bare bottom, she shrieked hysterically, "Oh, have mercy on her, don't hurt her-she's a virgin-she's too young-oh, have mercy-do with me what you will, but spare my poor Sylvia!"
"But in your country, you stupid bitch," Yusuf said as he thrust himself halfway into her bumhole, "the marriageability of a daughter is not impaired by the loss of that maidenhead. No, so long as her hymen remains in front, you can still marry her off. Proceed, good Hassan!"
"Oh Mummy, don't let him-he's hurting me-Ahhhrnr-it won't go in-oh Mummy, make him take it out-he's killing me-don't let him-hhhrrrowwww!!!' Sylvia screamed as Hassan, grunting with rut, forced himself into her virgin asshole to the very hilt and then began to fuck her vigorously.
Yusuf chuckled, and then he turned his attention back to the mother. His hand reaching forward and under her and clutching her titties, he began to squeeze them rhythmically and then began to bottomfuck her so mercilessly that she shrieked and prayed for respite. Only when his bubbling spunk flooded her bowels and he pulled out with a grunt of pleasure did she know that her momentary ordeal had ended.
And'before that day was done, both Sylvia and Claire Bennings had had their bottomholes distended by all seven of the Riffs and were left whimpering, nearly fainting, to the tender mercies of Hjalma.
CHAPTER SIX
Djalmah moaned, half-conscious, her head bowed over one side of the sawhorse. Her buttocks were streaked with livid weals and broader splotches from the riding crop and the strap wielded by her two tormentors. But she had still told them nothing of the Riffian leader and his men.
Captain Edouard Lascombes and the Lieutenant Pierre Dezier had paused now to swill the white wine they had ordered from the corporal. Naked to the waist, their eyes burning with lust, they were seated on a narrow bench near the door, contemplating their half-conscious victim. "The obstinate little bitch," the blackhaired lieutenant swore, "I'm convinced she knows where Yusuf is, but she thinks herself a heroine."
"Decidedly, mon ami" the commandant nodded. "But now I think it's time to try the chair. She's been at her ease all the time, lying gently over the horse, and I think she would welcome a change of posture now. Besides, her pretty con must be sore by now."
"I know one thing that's sore, and that's my becque" the lieutenant smirked. "Shouldn't we amuse ourselves a little before electrocuting the sweet bitch?"
"No. Besides, it will wake her up now, and make her mind nice and sharp and clear. Don't worry, I know just how much voltage to apply to her tender parts so we shan't spoil her for our evening's pleasure."
He took another swig from the nearly empty first bottle on the floor beside him, and rose, smacking his belly with the side of his hand as he walked slowly towards the sawhorse. Slowly Djalmah turned her contorted, tearstained face towards him. "Kill me, French pig, kill me, I'll tell you nothing!" she croaked.
"Well see about that, ma pigeonne," the commandant chuckled. He put his right palm on Dhalmah's violently striped bare ass, then raised his hand and gave her a ferocious smack first on one bottomcheek, then on the other. The Berber girl uttered a hoarse cry of pain, her body jerking convulsively under the stinging pain, and once again her chafed cunthole was scraped against the cruelly sharp ridge of the apparatus.
"Come give me a hand with this slut, Pierre. Let's sit her down like the little lady she is and then chat with her."
"Gladly. But I tell you this, I can't stay around too much longer with this naked bitch without wanting a Utile amusement," the lieutenant grumbled as he rose from the bench and approached the sawhorse.
"I told you not to worry, Pierre. I won't spoil her too much for you. And besides, don't forget that as commandant, I have first crack at her tasty little Moorish cunt," Edouard Lascombes chuckled.
The two men now untied Dhalmah's ankles and wrists, lifted her off the sawhorse, and carried her over to the metal chair. They forced her down upon it, and swiftly strapped her wrists to the arms of the chair and her ankles to the legs. Then the commandant went back to retrieve the other bottle of wine, uncorked it, and sloshed a little over Djalmah's drooping head. As she slowly lifted her face, he poured a little more out over her forehead and cheeks, then took a swig from the bottle and handed it to the lieutenant, who emulated him and set the bottle down on the floor.
"Now then I think we're ready to begin, Pierre. Let's start with just one tittie. Hand me that red wire, the one with the little clamp on the end."
"This one?"
"Oui, c'est ca! Now I'll show you how to operate this ingenious little device." The commandant leaned forward, cupped the naked girl's left tittie with his left hand and then deftly forced back the clamp with his right thumbpad and applied it to her dusky nipple. Djalmah uttered a tiny whimpering gasp and stiffened, her swollen eyes staring down at the red metal appliance which set like a deadly insect on the superb brown-sheened gourd of her magnificent bubbie.
The commandant beckoned to his subaltern, and the two men walked over to the little black box set against the wall. There were four inlets and a switch at the very end. Squatting down, Captain Lascombes took the plug of the red electrode and pressed it into one of the inlets. Then, turning to watch the trembling naked victim, he took hold of the lever and slowly pressed it down.
There was a faint hum, and Djalmah's naked body seemed to arch from the chair. Her eyes were enormous, and her fingers clawed the metal arms along which her wrists were strapped so securely. Her bare toes curled and twisted, and they could see her trying to rise from the chair. Then her head tilted back and her mouth gaped in a wild shriek: "Ahhhouuuueeyeowwww!!!"
Instantly the captain lifted the lever. "I've only given the bitch about a hundred volts. But you see how it woke her up, Pierre. Now we have all sorts of combinations. These four inlets allow all sorts of lovely little pairings. For example, I can put this brown electrode to the lips of her bumhole, and this yellow one to the lips of her cunt, and this green one to the other nipple, and when I pull that lever down, all four places will really feel the current. But now let's try the other nipple. Put on the green electrode. Do it yourself, get some practice, mon vieux."
Pierre Dezier nodded, and returned to the chair. He squatted down, picked up the green clamp, did exactly what his superior officer had done with her left tittie, and fixed the clamp with its cruel little jaws to the nipple of her other breast.
"Now we're going to use the both of those clamps, as you'll see. I'll give her a mild dose. Maybe about five seconds," the commandant explained. Slowly his hand touched the lever, and now Djalmah turned her head and stared with agonized, huge tearswollen eyes at that panel box. Her teeth were chattering now as she waited, steeling herself against the galvanizing current.
His hand pressed the lever down and he counted aloud, "Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq." Then he lifted the lever up.
In those five atrocious seconds which seemed like a veritable eternity to the agonized Moorish girl, Djalmah had tried to lift herself up from her chair, and twisting her head this way and that, shrieked aloud in a wordless, raucous cry. Her bare toes scrabbled on the stone floor, her fingernails rasped against the arms of the metal chair. The cords of her throat stood out, and the muscles of her thighs were seen to jerk and convulse and contract violently.
The captain walked over to the chair now and, taking hold of her tumbled mane of black hair, yanked it viciously and tilted up her face towards him as he stared down at her: "Are you ready to talk yet, slut?"
Once again Djalmah hawked and spat into his face. With a savage oath, the commandant of Arzuel backhanded her across the mouth with his right hand, making her head thud back against the metal chair with a cry of pain. Blood began to ooze from her bruised mouth and she regarded him with an expression of contempt and hatred.
"Look at me all you like, you little whore. I'll tame you yet. You'll be crawling on the floor at my feet begging to suck my becque before I'm through with you," he promised. "But now, let's vary the situations. It's been a long time since you had a lover, and I'll bet your little con is itching for a good stiff cock. Well, you'll have that too, though it won't be one of your own filthy Riffian kind. But first we're going to get you into the mood for fucking, Djalmah, by giving that sweet pussy of yours a shot of juice. Now don't worry, it's not the kind that will nuke a baby grow inside of you." With an obscene laugh, he now picked up the yellow electrode and, squatting in front of her, applied his left thumb and forefinger to the lips of her cunt to part the thick black pussycurls, and expose the fleshy pink petals of her slit. Then, opening the clamp with his right thumb and forefinger, he approached it with deliberate slowness towards one of the labia niajora and brutally let it snap shut on the sensitive mucous membrane. Djalmah emitted a shrill scream of pain and squirmed frantically. The lips of her cunt were raw-looking, thanks to her sojourn on the horse.
"Are you going to leave the clamps on her titties too, mon capitavne!" Pierre Dezier asked.
"No, not this first-tone. But if this doesn't work, I'll use all four on that'little bitch until she's wriggling like a nautsch dancer in front of the Sultan of Morocco himself," the commandant grimly promised. With this, he removed the clamps from Djalmah's nipples, and then went back to the panel box. Slowly he advanced his hand towards the level. The naked girl twisted her face towards him, whimpering, shivering, fighting her straps. Her eyes widened enormously as she saw his hand attain it. Then she closed her eyes and the lever went down.
"Ouueeeyeouuuowwahhnaiii!!!" her shriek was highpitched, frenzied, earsplitting. Her body threshed frenziedly as she sought to break the straps that bound her to the metal chair. And when at last his hand lifted the lever, her head roiled to and fro, as she panted almost inaudibly, "Assez, assez, je park, fe parle!"
"Oh you've had enough, and you're ready to talk, are you?" Captain Lascombes smiled. "I thought that would do the trick. Too bad, Pierre, I wanted to see how she would react when she got about a hundred volts for ten seconds in her asshole. But we can try it yet. But now to business. All right Djalmah, talk! Where is Yusuf Ben Tashfin?" He had seized his riding crop again, and now he dealt her a whistling cut across her titties which drew another wild shriek from her.
"In the mountains! Oh put me to death now, I have betrayed him-in the mountains-oh let me be now, I am in such pain, you horrid French pig!"
"How many men does he have with him? Speak, and quickly, or I'll turn the current on again. Pierre, go over to the box and hold onto the lever till I give you the signal!"
"I don't know-that's the truth-oh please-in mercy, I hurt so-put me to death-let them shoot me-I don't want to live now that I have betrayed Yusuf!" the girl wailed.
Captain Lascombes lifted his hand. His teeth bared in a rictus of savage joy, the blackhaired lieutenant shoved the lever down. Djalmah stiffened at once, her body half-rising against the straps. Her eyes bulged, glassy and drowned with tears, and her mouth opened in another frenzied, prolonged shriek: "Aiieoo rrhhhahrreouuu!!"
"That's enough, Pierre, you'll scorch her cunt for her and that would spoil our fun," the commandant exclaimed. Reluctantly, Pierre Dezier lifted up the lever. Djalmah sank back, her head lolling against the back of the chair, her naked titties rising and falling with violent turbulence.
"Now you see we mean business, you little Moroccan whore," Captain Lascombes hissed. "Tell me how many men you think he has. And where in the mountains are all those fine brave desert tribesmen?"
"Oh, Allah save me-truly, truly, capitaine I don't know but I think-I think as many as you have here in the garrison."
"That's only half the answer. Now where in the mountains are these men? Quickly, or I shall put the clamps back on your tetons as well!" Once again he raised the crop over her panting titties, his left hand seizing the tumbled sheaf of hair and giving it a yank that made her sob and groan.
"Still obstinate? All right, Pierre, this time make it ten seconds, and count aloud-"
"Noooo!!! Je parle! Near the Pass of the Demons-oh that is all I know, oh pity, pity, let me die now!" Djalmah wailed.
"The Pass of Demons," Captain Lascombes repeated. "Devil take it, I had them placed at least fifteen miles in the other direction. They have been diverting our attention with those little nomadic runs out to the desert near the oasis, trying to draw us out into the open. Then they would be in range to strike us. Well, we've learned something from this afternoon's work anyway. And we shall have to take counter-measures to lure Yusuf closer to our main strength."
"How do you know that what she's saying is true, mon capitaine?'"Pierre Dezier grumbled.
"I rely on my instincts in such matters. She's really suffering, you can tell that. Look how raw that sweet little pussy of hers is. And her nipples are swollen and puffed and dark. Besides which she's had a good thrashing. No, I don't think she's lying to us. We'll keep her here as a hostage, and we may use her as the means of leading us to this vanishing genius who eludes us at every trap we set. But now, I think I know what you have in mind, Pierre. I myself need a little diversion. But I shall be first, you understand. It's my seniority."
Captain Lascombes now unstrapped Djalmah's wrists and ankles, while Pierre Dezier came forward to help life her from the chair. Listlessly, her body trembling violently, lolling forward, she submitted, without will or strength. They dragged her over to the bench on which the array of whips lay spread out, and the commandant lifted his right booted foot and sent them tumbling onto the floor to clear the bench. Then they forced her down on her back, and the commandant opened his breeches and liberated his swollen prick. He flung himself down atop the Moorish girl, his hands clutching her welted titties, digging his fingernails cruelly into the sweating flesh, and the girl cried out in pain as she felt his prick stab between the chafed lips of her cunt.
"Diable me prends!" he cried out in a startled voice. "The bitch is a virgin, after all. Well, well soon settle that. Now then, Djalmah, you're being honored by the commandant of Arzuel himself. Maybe I will even make a little bastard in you who will teach you Riff savages to keep the peace with France!"
He thrust home, breaking the hymen, hiking himself inside her tight cuntsheath. And then he began to fuck her violently, while Djalmah, averting her face to one side, covering her face with her hands, wept in misery and shame for her betrayal as well as for the degradation of being violated by this detested French officer.
And when he had finished with her, he rose, and Pierre Dezier handed him a scarf which he used to mop his bloodied prick, then a sponge to pat and dry her lacerated pussy. Next it was the turn of the lieutenant, who flung himself over her, reaching his hands under her buttocks to squeeze and pinch and grip them viciously till she cried out in pain.
And when he had finished, they left Djalmah sprawled on the bench, almost unconscious, sullied, the marks of torture marring her voluptuous young brownskinned body. They lifted her then and carried her over to the stocks, sat her down upon that horrid stool covered with thorns and pebbles, and locked her wrists, ankles and neck in the yokeholes.
"Sit there and meditate on how wise you were not to defy us, little putaine!" Captain Lascombes mocked the weeping girl. "It's well that you talked, or I'd have you up before a firing squad at dawn. Well visit you later this evening, after we've had our dinner. And if you're a very good girl, I may bring you a Utile wine and perhaps some chicken."
Then, laughing with joy and pleased with their work as interrogators, the two officers left the dungeon and locked the door behind them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Twenty-four hours had passed since the two French officers had interrogated the lovely Berber girl Djalmah. After her flogging and the torture by the electrodes, and following her violation by both her tormentors, she had been returned to an even narrower cell in which there was no window and only a narrow cot with a worn-out mattress, and an earthen bowl to be used for hygienic necessities. On this cot, naked, her body marred by the stripes of her flogging, her nipples and pussy lips chafed by the atrocious torture of electricity which her civilized captors had inflicted upon her-and of course the lips of her sex further irritated by her multiple fuckings-Djalmah sought the boon of sleep as an anodyne against her suffering.
And in the camp of the Riffs, Claire Bennings and her daughter Sylvia, naked except for their shoes and stockings, after the violation by the Riff leader himself and his aides and the men who had captured the two Englishwomen, had been left in the tent of Hjalma, Yusuf s mistress. The Moorish concubine, savoring her vengeance on these white women who represented to her the tyrannical replacement whom her faithless lover had chosen over her and who had in her turn perverse reign over her, wished to make this handsome matron and her young daughter suffer the tortures of the damned in hell. And as she understood English reasonably well, she overheard Claire and her daughter exchanging in sobbing whispers their reflections on their plight. She lay on her couch, covered with poufs, naked except for a filmy tunic which covered her from mid-bosom to upper thighs, while the two naked captives, bound hand and foot, had been imprisoned on a single couch off to her left, with a cord tied to the bonds at their wrists being hooked to the wall, and a tiny silver bell bound to the hook so that, should they try to escape, she might be wakened from her light slumber.
The buxom young blackhaired daughter, tears running down her cheeks, whispered brokenly, "Oh, Mother, will they ever let us go? Oh, I fell so ashamed, and I hurt so."
"Shhh, darling, try not to think of it, please. I don't know. Maybe your father will learn that we've been seized by these wretched brigands and perhaps British troops will help the French rescue us," Claire Bennings whispered back.
Hjalma smiled to herself in the darkness. It amused her to eavesdrop on the conversation of these tortured women, the giaours whom she so detested.
"But what if Father doesn't learn where we are, Mother? What if they keep us here and-and do those awful things to us again? Oh, it hurt me so-and those awful men-I feel so dirty, so horrible-"
"Shh, child, pray, and try to sleep. It was not your fault, nor mine. You mustn't think of yourself as harmed by what those evil men did. It was against our will-"
"So, you infidel bitches, you speak treasonably, do you?" Hjalma cried as she sprang to her feet, then clapped her hands.
The giant Sudanese Negro Nouraji entered the tent at once and bowed luT head before the beautiful concubine. "Light the lamps, and let us see what these traitorous giaour whores look like when they do not have darkness to talk their treason in," Hjalma arrogantly commanded.
"At once, mistress!" the Negro replied. With tinder, he struck sparks to light the kerosene lamps placed on the tables around the spacious tent where Yusufs favorite was quartered. His eyes glistened as they beheld the cringing naked bodies of the two white women, their hair disheveled, their skins marked by the lashing they had endured before their multiple violations. And Hjalma, comprehending by the way they shrank back with gasps of horror at the sight of his tremendous physique and his cleanshaven head and the Negroid features which made him seem primitive and animalistic to them, conceived a cruel and debauched way of "punishing" these unfortunate captives for their "treason."
"Now!" she gloated as she stood over their couch, a plaited kurbash gripped in her slim hands, triumphantly enjoying the way they shrank before her with whimpering little cries at the sight of that horrid whip, that flagellatory implement fabricated out of rhinoceros hide and so murderously flexible that it could flay the skin from neck to chinkbone in the hands of an expert or, equally used for torment alone, could sting and impart intolerable heat throughout the fustigated regions. "So you think our noble Riffs are brutes and savages, do you, you giaour bitches?" she hissed. "And you try to drag yourselves away from my good slave Nouraji because he is black, just as you shrink from me because my skin is brown and not soft and white and pampered like yours. But Nouraji was a chief in his own village in the Atlas Mountains, and he serves here willingly as a slave, yes, as an inferior, because he knows that we Riffs fight against the infidels who would take our land and destroy all Africa and sell us into slavery far worse than his lot with me and with our glorious leader Yusuf Ben Tashfin!"
Sylvia had begun to weep, seeing the dreadful kurbash and Hjalma perceived the younger victim's greater fear. With a mocking smile, she turned to the giant Sudanese and purred, "Nouraji, you have never yet tasted the flesh of a white-skinned giaour, have you?"
"Never, mistress," the massive black grinned lewdly.
"But you shall here and now. Do you desire those two bitches?"
"Indeed, mistress!" his eyes gleamed with avaricious lust.
"But first," she resumed, delectating over the terror which her two naked captives showed-though, since she was speaking in Arabic, they understood not a word-"you and I shall make them prove what whores they are, what infidel wantons they truly are by nature. We shall make them love each other, Nouraji!"
"Good, mistress! How do we do that?"
"The tentpole is very strong and will support their bodies. Tie cords from it, strong cords, Nouraji, that will hold their wrists and dangle them in the air just off the ground. Then lash a rope round their waists, so that they face each other and so that their sexes press together as well as their breasts. Then you and I, using the whip, will force them to make love, mother and daughter."
"Ah, that will be a rare sight, indeed, mistress," he joyously growled.
"Will it not, Nouraji! Then prepare them, for I abominate the very sight of them, traitresses and harlots that they are, who dare speak ill of our noble tribesmen!" Hjalma contemptuously declaimed.
The giant Sudanese strode over to the couch on which Sylvia Bennings lay, and "She cried out in tenor as he reached down and lifted her up in the air as readily as he would a basket of linen. Bound as she was, she was like a babe in his arms, for all she wriggled and twisted and tried to kick. "Oh, Mother, help me, what are they going to do to us now? Oh, I don't want to suffer any more, I can't bear any more-oh, please, please, don't hurt us, please!" she hysterically entreated.
Rudely dropping her onto the rich Oriental rug which covered the sands in this sumptuous tent reserved for the favorite of the Riffian leader, the Sudanese now mounted a footstool and bound four cords tightly round the horizontal section which joined with the solid round pole in the middle of the tent. He tested them by tugging at each after he had knotted one end of each securely, and then grinned. Descending from the stool, he retrieved the sobbing and pleading Sylvia, mounted the footstool with her in his arms, and swiftly, first cutting with his dagger the cords that already bound her wrists, refettered her with two of the cords he had already affixed above.
Then he let her dangle, and having accurately measured with his eye, it was seen that her stockinged feet lifted just an inch or two off the rug, so that all her weight hung from her wrists. This pose set into relief the wonderfully buxom loveliness of the naked eighteen-year-old brunette, and the Negro's eyes glistened with savage lubricity as he watched the welted cheeks of her bottom contract and jerk, spasms visiting the columns of her thighs and calves, while her boobies thrust out with a kind of marble-like rigidity. The black tufts of private hair in her armpits excited him, contrasting with the white skin. But he satisfied his vision only for a moment, and then strode back to the other couch on which her mother lay.
In a few moments Claire Bennings found herself dangling from her wrists also, facing her daughter, then-bodies brushing together. But when Nouraji, still on the footstool, applied a stout rope round their waists and knotted it securely, Claire Bennings turned scarlet with mortification as she realized that she could feel the grinding of her daughter's cunt against her own, feel the flattening, rasping friction of Sylvia's pare boobies with hers. j
"Oh, this is monstrous! We are only helpless, innocent women!" she turned her head to shriek down at Hjalma, who sat upon the couch toying with the ivory handle of a five-thonged black leather whip, something like a martinet but so designed that the tips of the lashes were notched and tapered to impart ferocious sting. "We are not spies, we have done nothing, in the name of decency and mercy, let us go!
"You bray like a donkey, giaour whore!" Hjalma mockingly retorted as she sprang up and strode towards the two tethered, naked victims. "Nouraji, find a whip and choose which of these two white-skinned infidels you wish to thrash. Now listen, you, the mother-we are going to whip you, Nouraji and I, and if you wish the whipping to be over quickly, you and your daughter will make love. Do you understand me? You will kiss, rub your bodies together, until you have had pleasure with each other. UntO you do, we shall flog you-is that understood?"
Horrified, Claire Bennings moaned, "Oh, it's vile, you've no right, I appeal to you, oh, in the name of heaven, send for your leader! Surely he doesn't make war on innocent women! We're English, not French, we have no part in this."
"But you do, infidel slut! There is a young girl in the French prison now at Arzuel who is suffering worse than you have, that is for certain. We shall exchange the two of you for her, and you had best pray to your Christian God that the stupid French swine agree to this. Otherwise, you will become slaves to cameldrivers, to beggars in the Souk, or perhaps to be sold on the auction block to the dirtiest brothels of Marrakesh. But enough of this, you understand what we wish of you, and now we shall begin to inspire you. Come now," she added mockingly, as she brandished the five-thonged whip and let the frantic mother, who had turned her face back over her shoulder to regard the implacable Moorish beauty, see how the light of the lamps glistened upon the black, gleaming thongs, "solace this faint-hearted spawn of your infidel womb! Console her, make her swoon with pleasure in your maternal embrace, you giaour whore!" And at this, Hjalma drew back her arm and sent the five thongs whistling over the voluptuous ass of the unfortunate English matron.
Claire Bennings stiffened, her head tilting back, her eyes wide and filming with tears, as a raucous cry was torn from her. Her flesh, already tenderized from the previous whipping, had Utile time to regain its resistance. And because Hjalma had flicked her wrist and let the tips of the five lashes bite crueUy into the plumpest curves of both asscheeks, poor Claire Bennings jerked wildly, uncontrollably, and thus involuntarily was made to grind her cunt against that of her daughter.
But at almost the same moment Nouraji, who had seized a thick leather strap, swept it across the base of both of Sylvia Benning's enticingly jutting round asscheeks, and a new, high-pitched shriek of torment resounded as Sylvia, glancing back in agonized terror over her bare shoulder at her formidable black executioner, wrenched forward, and thus simulated the lascivious tribadism of the lesbian, which is done by rubbing pussy to pussy until the stimulus leads to orgasmic fulfillment.
"Kiss, you bitches, as I commanded!" Hjalma hissed, applying a new lash which swept the thongs against the waist of the unfortunate matron, the tips hurtling forward to nip at poor Sylvia's tender side. "Kiss, and put your tongue into each other's mouths! Weave your hips, as you do on the bed of love! What sort of mother are you, that will not give her own daughter comfort in her hour of agony?" And once again the whip whistled out, the thongs cracking sonorously over Claire Bennings' nether rotundities, lunging her forward, making her twist and wriggle despite herself as a new scream of poignant anguish was wrested from her.
Pitilessly, the Sudanesse directed the strap against the lower curves of the young brunette's bottomcheeks, knowing from past experience where most she would feel the torment. The base, the inner edges of both poutingly rounded hemispheres, and even the crease between them, were the most acutely ender parts of her behind. Several lashes to all of these intimate regions confirmed his speculative theory, and soon poor Sylvia was clawing the air with her slim fingers, her head tilting back, her eyes glazing and exorbitant, her body jerking and twisting and grinding incessantly against her mother's. Yet Claire Bennings was not spared by the vindictive Hjalma. The five-thonged whip bit across the backs of her thighs, round this or that lovely curved haunch, or struck the side and once or twice, fiendishly, clacked viciously over the side curve of one lovely ripe tittie, attacking not only poor Claire Bennings' bosom but that of her daughter which was pressed so lasciviously tight up against her own. Thus both women shared at times the punishment of the same stroke, while Nouraji directed his strap solely against Sylvia's tempting, jutting, weaving and twisting naked bottom till it was violently crisscrossed with broad, darkening bands of intense burning agony.
Outside, the Riffian guards in their flowing white burnouses smiled at one another and exchanged obscene speculations as to what was taking place, envying the perpetrators of this torment of the infidel captives. In his own tent, Yusuf was dispatching a courier to ride towards Arzuel with a message for Captain Lascombes, proposing the exchange of Claire Bennings and her daughter for Djalmah.
It would save neither the Berber girl nor the two Englishwomen from their unspeakable ordeals. It would, however, precipitate a treacherous plot which, instead of ending the war, would bring about only the suffering of innocent women exactly like those now undergoing their martyrdom in the prison of the French and in the tent of the mistress of the Riff chieftain.
In her intolerable suffering, poor Sylvia babbled like a child, imploring her mother to save her: "Owwahrr-oh, Mama, I can't stand it-oh, please, make him stop-oh, dear Mama, he's tearing me to pieces-oh please, not any more, I'll be good, oh Mama, Mama, help me, oh please help me!"
"Oh, God, my poor darling," Claire Bennings groaned, grinding her teeth as another ferocious stroke from the five-thonged whip curled across the base of her bottom and made her jerk forward violently so that her mouth was only an inch or two from Sylvia's trembling lips. "The fiends, the merciless, barbaric fiends, to torture my poor girl so-oh God, Sylvia, we must do what they want, I know it's filthy, but I can't stand this much longer, either-oh please, darling, forgive your mother-put-put your tongue into my mouth and kiss-kiss me and rub-rub yourself all you-owwwahhh-oh, is there no end to this torment? Ahrrrrr! Oh, have mercy, we'll do what you want, but only have pity on us, we're only poor helpless women!" For once again, smirking with cruelty, Hjalma had directed the whip this time across the sculptured, sweating back of the English matron.
And so Sylvia and Claire Bennings kissed, their tongues plunging into each other's mouths as they writhed and twisted and moaned under the whip, their pussies rubbing together, while from moment to moment, poor. Sylvia, who was almost at the end of her resistance, would turn her face back to stare down at the grinning Sudanese. At these moments, holding the strap high so that her tear-blinded eyes could perceive it, Nouraji suspended the lash until at last the frantic girl turned back to her mother for consolation. Then with all his strength, he brought it down diagonally over her blazingly striped ass, chuckling lewdly at the frantic cry which it drew from her, and the violent contortions which it caused her naked body dangling from the tentpole.
Once again, it was a symphony of lust, and the orchestration was the smack-clack of the strap and the whistling, hissing, clacking impact of the five black leather thongs, combined with the gamut of shrill, raucous, high-pitched or groaning cries torn from the two naked sufferers.
In order to spare her daughter, Claire Bennings, closing her eyes, had begun to rub her cunt frantically against Sylvia's. "Oh darling," she panted, "do it back to me, quickly, it's the only way to escape this dreadful thrashing-oh, how I suffer, oh my poor darling-what it must be like for you-hurry-do it to me, I want you to, they will forgive us, when they know how we have been tortured!"
"I'll try-Mama-but oh, oh, if he'd only stop-aiii-oh stop it, I'll go crazy from the pain, I'm dying-oohhh-" Sylvia wailed.
"The fat old sow is the more passionate, Nouraji. But you may console yourself with the younger one. You may do whatever you wish to her after she and her mother have had their filthy pleasure," Hjalma joked as she sent the thongs once again smacking over Claire Bennings' swollen, jerked naked ass.
With a desperate gyration, quickening her own libidinous friction against Sylvia's cunt, Claire Bennings rubbed herself all she could. And it was she who first attained the summit of lascivious bliss, her body stiffening and then quaking as her head sagged, and it was Sylvia who received the brunt of Nouraji's strapping as the unfortunate young brunette tried in her own turn to emulate her mother.
"Did I not tell you, Nouraji, that this fat sow is the more passionate? See how she wriggles her big ass, now that she has surfeited herself! Her bottom is so warm from the thrashing I've given her, that she's as ardent as a mare in heat, just as she must have been when she conceived that young brat with whom she's been amusing herself! Now, do what you will with the young one, Nouraji, as I promised!"
The giant Sudanese nodded and chuckled. Flinging aside the strap, he began to fondle Sylvia's bare sides and hips with his black hands, while the half-fainting brunette began to cry out in her desperate terror: "Oh Mama, what is he going to do to me-oh, I'm afraid-oh, please make them stop it-oh, I can't stand any more, my bb-bottom hurts so, Mama!"
Nouraji's strong heavy fingers at last visited the swollen, burningly striped globes of Sylvia Bennings' quaking ass. He squeezed them sadistically, and her pitiful cries rang out again to amuse the listening guards. Then, prying open those luscious cheeks, he bared the crinkly, shrinking orifice of her asshole, and baring his mighty prick, pitilessly pressed himself home between the ring of sphincter muscles, till he had engorged his entire length deep in the rectal channel of the shrieking, agonized young sufferer.
But Hjalma had mounted the footstool and, slashing the rope which tied round both females' waists, cut also the cords which bound Claire Bennings' wrists so that she crumpled to the rug and lay sprawled, whimpering, half-conscious as the waves of burning torment seared her naked ass and back and thighs.
Then Hjalma, casting aside the filmy tunic which she had used as a sleeping garment, fell upon the matron, and greedily, her Ops sucking Claire's, her hands fondling Claire's panting titties just as a man's might in the act of lust, began to pussyrub frenetically to satisfy her own sadistic and perverse passions.
And now again there was a new symphony of agony in that tent, not the song of the whip this time, but the wails and pleas and sobbing groans of a young girl being buggered by a Negro and of a dignified and beautifully buxom English matron being forced to submit herself to the savage lesbian subjugation by her pitiless tormentress.
CHAPTER EIGHT
After having tortured and violated the beautiful young Berber girl Djalmah, Captain Edouard Lascombes and Lieutenant Pierre Dezier went back to their own quarters, satiated and exhausted and seeking deep, oblivious slumber into which they both soon fell. Meanwhile, Yusuf Ben Tashfin had sent a trusted young Riff, Djura-el-Azim, a beardless youth of twenty who had already won fame as an expert marksman and sniper against the French, to the fortification of Arzuel. Djura-el-Azim carried a letter signed by Yusuf himself proposing the exchange of Sylvia Bennings and her mother for the Berber girl. He warned that unless Djalmah were released within forty-eight hours of the receipt of this dispatch, the Riffs would consign the two giaour females to the slave market in the hidden native quarter of Marrakesh, a locale which not even the most experienced French troops could penetrate because it was located within a maze of blind alleys where death lurked for any Frenchman wearing the uniform of the tricolor. Moreover, Yusuf intimated, reprisals would be taken against all French citizens as well as soldiery captured by the Riffs.
The courier arrived at dawn, and the sergeant of the watch, fat Jacques Lepoldi, angrily refused to waken the commandant of Arzuel for a white-burnoused tribesman, even though the latter bore the flag of truce.
"You Riffian dog," he swore at the youth in an abominable mixture of French and Arabic, "you'll wait in the guardhouse until Captain Lascombes is up and has had his breakfast. And it probably won't be until noon." Then with a lewd smirk, "After all, the Commandant needs his sleep after the work he's had with that little Berber slut we captured the other day."
Djura-el-Azim's face darkened with anger, but he held his tongue and meekly agreed to go to the guardhouse to await summons by Captain Lascombes. The sergeant himself escorted the Riffian youth to the very building in which poor Djalmah was incarcerated. The magnificent white Arabian stallion on which the courier had ridden was tethered outside the guardhouse to a wooden post. The sergeant stared covetously at the horse, plucked at his beard and muttered, "I'd give a month's pay for a horse like that, but short of knifing that Riff, there's not much chance of getting it."
Since Djalmah was the only prisoner in confinement, there were only two guards, one just inside the guardhouse, and a replacement for the corporal who had admitted the two French officers the day before into Djalmah's cell. But in the sleeves of his burnoose, Djura-el-Azim had concealed a long, Moorish dagger with a two-edged blade. And after the fat. sergeant had gone back to his post and the courier found himself seated on the stone bench at the door of his jailhouse facing the noncommissioned officer at the desk across the way, a bold plan came into his daring mind. He sat with bowed head, silent, and soon the noncommissioned officer ignored him. It was a matter of but a moment to rise slowly, creep on tiptoe towards the desk, draw the dagger and stab the noncommissioned officer in the heart. Then swiftly Djura-el-Azim went down the winding stairway to the subterranean corridor where he knew Djalmah must be.
Corporal Maurice Levoisier barred his way. "Que diable faites-vous ici?" he angrily exclaimed, and put his right hand to his revolver holster. But the young Riff drew the dagger out of his sleeve and flung it with unerring aim, taking the corporal in the throat. Corporal Jacques Levoisier, his eyes blank and wide, crumpled back onto the desk. Swiftly, the young Riff searched the dead man's uniform for the keys to Djalmah's cell, and found them at last in the top drawer of the desk. He hurried down the corridor, trying this and that door, until at last he came to the interrogation chamber where they had left her. With a furious oath at seeing her naked body so welted and marked by the floggings she had received, he cut her bonds, lifted her up in his arms, whispering to her in Arabic, "Do not fear, Djalmah, I will take you back to Yusuf Ben Tashfin."
At the desk, he swiftly undressed the corpse, and ordered Djalmah to put on the corporal's uniform. Then, seizing the revolver and making certain it was loaded and primed, he and the beautiful young Berber girl crept up the stairway and to the door of the guardhouse. He opened it carefully and saw only a sentry walking in the courtyard, his back turned to the guardhouse. He beckoned to Djalmah, and in a moment he was astride the white stallion, and she behind him her arms clasped around his waist. Kicking the belly of the stallion, Djura-el-Azim urged the great horse on beyond the gates and into the desert wasteland which separated Arzuel from the range of mountains where the camp of the Riffian leader was situated....
Colonel Henri Tuerdier, a bearded and mustachioed man of fifty-two, swore angrily as his orderly handed him a radiogram from Tunis.
"Utter madness of my wife and daughter to try to come here, Benoit!" he growled. "Take this to our radio room at once and get the message back that they're not to attempt the journey. Nom de nom, I can only pray God that they haven't already started their journey."
"Excuse me, mon colone!" Corporal Eve Benoit meekly interrupted, "begging the colonel's pardon, he shouldn't worry. Our troops are secure at Tunis and the road from there to El Gueliz is held by our men. I honestly don't believe there is so much danger."
"What do you know about it, you stupid fool?" Colonel Tuerdier snarled as he rose from his desk, picked up his swagger stick and brought it down on the desk with an angry crack. "I love my wife and daughter dearly, don't you understand? They were going down the Mediterranean, and then Louise had the insane whim of disembarking at Tunis and deciding to come to see me. Didn't she understand that I would have my leave next fall and there would be time enough for us to meet back in Paris? But out here, a single Riff can become an assassin, a kidnapper, a guerrilla. Not get that message off at once, Benoit!"
"Yes, mon colonel!" the corporal saluted.
CHAPTER NINE
Louise Tuerdier was an exceptional beauty, and had, indeed, been the loveliest girl in the province when the young second lieutenant had won her hand in marriage. Now, even after twenty years of marriage and seeing her husband rise from the post of sous-lieutenant to colonel, she was still intensely desirable. She was thirty-eight, about five feet six and a half inches in height, with auburn hair that still showed not a trace of gray, and a sumptuous figure to which her still astonishingly slim waist gave even greater sensual impetus. Her skin was tawny and smooth as a girl's.
Her daughter, Colette, at sixteen, had definitely inherited her mother's beauty, though the girl's was perhaps more subtle and less flamboyantly sensual. The two women thus furnished exquisite contrasts: Colette was five feet five, but seemed taller because of her long legs, slim highset calves and slender thighs which merged into a tightly spaced oval bottom. Her titties were high perched, young ripe pears, widely spaced, and endowed with well developed nipples set in dark coral, narrow aurolae. Her hair was light brown, and her face oval, saucy and impertinent. The dainty uptilted nose with its widely flaring, thin wings, the petulant mouth with riper upper lip, the slantingly set cheekbones and the vivid, flashing dark blue, nearly black eyes completed a physiognomy that combined vivacity and insolence in equal degrees. Her skin was milky, and although she was a virgin, even her mother did not know that just a month or two ago, in the barn at their summer home at a little village in Normandy, Colette had experimented with a handsome young farm boy her own age, had allowed him to put his hand under her skirts and inside her blouse to tickle her pussy and caress her titties until she nearly faintiugly achieved climax. Indeed, it was only the anxious cry of her mother from the house which interrupted this passionate and bucolic idyll and saved her cherry for her.
Louise Tuerdier had eagerly given her maiden head to her handsome young husband. Her parents had left her a comfortable legacy, including the summer house in Normandy, while Henri Tuerdier himself received a substantial inheritance from an uncle who was a vintner along the Cote d'Or, where the great Burgundies were produced. The young couple was happy from the outset and remained thus, and their sexual life was idyllic. Indeed, it was this stability which had led the handsome auburn haired matron to yield to the impulse of visiting her husband in Morocco, in spite of the protests of her friends that this "skirmish" was actually as dangerous as a major war. But Louise Tuerdier, blissfully certain that the French troops which protected Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco would assure her safe reunion with her beloved husband, would listen to no advice. And so she and Colette had sailed from Marseilles, disembarked at Tunis, and then taken a small Tunisian steamer which would ultimately take them to Bizerte, thence to Oran, next to Tangier across from the Strait of Gibraltar, and finally on to Casablanca, from where they would take a limousine carrying them on Safi and thence to Marrakesh. This trip would take a week, and that was why Colonel Henri Tuerdier had frantically ordered his radio operator to get a message back to Tunis and hold off his wife and daughter, warning them of the dangers.
For there were spies everywhere. A sniping party had already killed a dozen engineers who were laying telephone lines between the French army town of El Gueliz and Taouz. It was also rumored that some of the Riffian spies had learned the route of these lines and intercepted them with their own equipment so they could eavesdrop on French military calls and thus be advised in advance of French troop movements into the desert against the wiley Abd-el-Arim. In view of this rumor which had not yet been confirmed at French military headquarters, the possibility of ambushing any vehicles coming in to Marrakesh was a very real possibility, and this was what Colonel Henri Tuerdier had feared in his reaction to the receipt of his wife's radiogram.
But the radiogram arrived much too late. By the time the porter had brought it to the little Tunisian hotel where beautiful Louise Tuerdier and her daughter Colette had stayed for the eighteen hours necessary for transferring to the coastal steamer, the two beauties had already checked out and boarded that vessel en route to Marrakesh....
The young Riff, Djura-el-Azim, rode into the camp of Yusuf with the rescued Berber girl Djalmah, and he and Djalmah were at once taken to the tent of Yusuf Ben Tashfin.
The bearded, crafty Riffian chieftain embraced the weakened, courageous Berber girl and ordered that she be given a tent and two handmaidens, food and wine, and be allowed to rest before she could tell her story. And then he rewarded her rescuer with a magnificent scimitar, whose jeweled hilt was worth a small fortune and which had been pillaged from a Copt temple near the oasis where the French believed he and his troops would he in wait for them. That night, Yusuf tasted lascivious delights in the arms of his beautiful Moroccan mistress Hjalma, who had poor Claire and Sylvia Bennings bound naked hand and foot, gagged and forced to Be upon the huge couch on which she disported herself with her lover. It amused him to pause, while thrust deep into Hjalma's cunt, to reach out and squeeze one of Sylvia Benning's titties, or to reach out with his other hand and pluck a sprig of the matron's pussyhair and watch her twist and jerk and hear her muffled cry against the silencing gag.
But the next morning, when the young Berber girl was brought to his tent, having convalesced from her flogging and the torture of the electrodes, she burst into tears and prostrated herself at his feet, imploring him to put her to death.
"But why, my beautiful child? Come, do not grovel to me. In your veins flows valiant Riff blood, as in mine, and we are one."
"Oh no, great one, blessed by Allah to drive the giaours from our lands! I have betrayed you and your followers. Oh, I could not help myself, they tortured me so cruelly, o my master!" Djalmah wept.
"Now what is this? How could you betray me?"
Slowly the Berber girl rose to her knees, her face haggard, tears streaming down her cheeks. "They put me into a chair, and they fixed wires to the tender parts of my body, of Yusuf Ben Tashfin, and they sent electricity through my body until I could not bear the torment any longer, and they whipped me while it was being done."
"The monsters! The Barbarians!" Yusuf Ben Tashfin bared his teeth and his eyes blazed with fury. "I shall avenge you, lovely Djalmah!"
"Oh no, you must save yourself, you and your men. I told them you were here in the mountains. I had to, or they would have tortured me still more. I am a coward a weakling, and I beg death swiftly by the sword, the sword that you gave that handsome young man who saved me at the peril of his own life taking me from the dungeons of the French themselves."
"Come, do not be overwrought, my pretty one. Tell me what you told them exactly. Remember it well, because it may be that you, who can know nothing of our military stratagems, could hardly have given them information that would have been of military value."
"I-I told him that I believed you had as many men here in the mountains as they in their garrison, o Yusuf Ben Tashfin," Djalmah sobbed, "and that your camp was near the Pass of the Demons."
Yusuf Ben Tashfin swore a vile oath in Arabic. "That you should not have said, even had they torn out your tongue! Now they know precisely where we are. It is true that the access to the Pass of the Demons is not easy, but there is another way, and those accursed French swine will find it. It means that we must move our camp at once. I do not blame you, my poor girl, because we do not expect women to fight our battles for us. But if only you had lied, if only you had said the Pass of the Minarets." The Riffian leader referred to an opening near the top of the mountain crest which was formed by two tall narrow peaks which looked like minarets from which the muzzein would call the faithful to prayer. That was twenty-three miles in the opposite direction, and indeed it was there, or in that vicinity, that Captain Lascombes and his aide Pierre Dezier had believed the Riffs to be encamped.
"Let me die by your own hand, o Sword of Allah!" Djalmah whimpered.
"No, my child. We will make advantage out of your defeat, have no fear. I shall leave half my men at the Pass of the Minarets, and some will go into Marrakesh to be ready to strike against the French military town of El Gueliz, while the rest shall accompany me to the oasis of Katijba. I am certain that the French high command believes that most of our forces are in that vicinity already. Well, we shall prepare an ambush for them. So do not accuse yourself of having betrayed us, my poor girl, I will find you a husband from one of our staunchest warriors, and in his arms you will forget the abominations those giaours have inflicted upon you. Go now, back to your tent, and find repose in the knowledge that I do not condemn you."
With a sobbing cry, Djalmah again prostrated herself, seized the hem of his burnous and brought it to her Ups. Then swiftly she left the tent of the Riffian leader, who at once clapped .his hands and ordered his Numidian attendant Bjartija, to summon his lieutenants for a council of war.
CHAPTER TEN
The courier from Yusuf Ben Tashfin had at last been admitted into the quarters of the commandant of Arzuel, and Captain Edouard Lascombes read the missive which proposed to trade two Englishwomen for the Berber girl. By then, of course, he had already had the news that Djalmah had been rescued, almost impossibly, from the subterranean dungeon. But he had no intention of telling the impassive Riffian courier that, and as he puffed at a cigarette and accepted a cup of coffee from his orderly, he scowled at the sardonic visage of the desert tribesman as he tried to concoct some reply that would be vague enough to save face. For if he admitted that a young Riffian captive, a girl, and helpless, and one who had already confessed under torture, could be snatched out of a French prison in a garrison, by a single man, he and his men would be the laughing stock of all Morocco. The story would go through the mountains like wildfire, and on througfc. Algiers and Tunisia and rouse the natives there against the French protectorate and the troops. In those countries there was no struggle yet, although every day there were rumors of unrest in towns like Casablanca and Oran. So finally he looked up at the burnous-clad rider and drawled in Arabic, "How can I be certain that you have these captives?"
"By the word of our leader, Yusuf Ben Tashfin, who does not lie to a French dog," the courier contemptuously retorted.
Captain Lascombes' face darkened with anger. But the man was under a flag of truce, and therefore he restrained his impulse to strike him, or at least to have him flogged.
"It is not that I dispute the word of your leader," he said with an effort that showed his anger at the insult, "but I must have proof. Moreover, they aie Englishwomen. The English have no protectorate in Morocco, and I am not responsible for their safety, especially as I do not officially know of their presence here."
To be sure, he lied. For the French journalist Jacques Moundet had already reported the abduction of Claire and Sylvia Bennings from the cafe of Mohammet Bey.
The courier inclined his head and retorted, "What proof do you wish, mon capitain! Shall I perhaps bring you the clothing of these two giaours'! Or better still, a finger from each of their hands?"
"You Riffian dog, be careful how you speak to me, the commandant of Arzuel!" Captain Edouard Lascombes rose from his desk, seizing his swagger stick. "Go tell your master that I want no such fiendish proof as that, and if he harms but a hair of their heads, when I capture him-as I shall-I shall have him shot by a firing squad without so much as a trial. I do not think Yusuf Ben Tashfin is immortal before French bullets, and I also do not think that such a disgraceful death will rally all the tribesmen between here and Tunisia. As for the exchange, when you come to me again with a more suitable proposal, and one that does not violate the articles of war concerning the treatment of prisoners and helpless women and children, then I shall be inclined to parley with him. Those are my exact and final words!"
The courier rose, spat on the floor, and with an expression of supreme contempt, strode out of the commandant's office. Captain Lascombes rang for his orderly. "Get me Lieutenant Dezier at once," he commanded.
A few moments later, the cunical, dapper aide stood before his superior. "You heard about that Berber bitch, I daresay, Pierre," Captain Lascombes growled.
"Indeed, I have, mon vieux and a few good soldiers the information we got from that little slut?"
"I shall send five hundred troops this evening towards the Pass of the Demons. But there is another route there, off to the northeast, and an old man who has a little shop in the bazaar of Marrakesh told me this some months ago. He himself used to trade with the roving Riff bands long before they decided to take on all France in their mad ambitions towards the freedom they are not even ready for. It would take men who are skilled in mountain climbing, and the men who have courage, men who can fight with knives and bayonets in their bare hands. But if we can get through the pass, we can be on the back of Yusuf Ben Tashfin's camp and take him in the dead of night."
"It's worth the attempt, mon vieux. I wish to volunteer to head the detachment."
"Permission granted." Captain Lascombes smartly saluted his subaltern. "But first, I've found out from that dog of a courier, that the two Englishwomen who were abducted in Marrakesh, are in their hands. Now, we've no truck with the English, and le bon Dieu himself knows we've been neutral in this entire matter, even though they guard their precious Rock of Gibraltar not far from where this little war is going on. However, since the women were abducted from the cafe of Mohammet Bey, I wish you to send Sergeant Leront and a platoon of trustworthy men with him to arrest the old scoundrel, and also any of his employees who happen to be around. Maybe one of them saw the actual abduction, or knows the Riffs who brought it off."
"I'll see to it at once. Meanwhile, I'll call for volunteers for tonight."
"It should take you about three hours to reach the Pass of the Demons. Only you won't go that way. I've a little map I've drawn, remembering what that old shopkeeper told me. When you're about three-quarters of the way up, you'll change direction and go along a ridge which is hidden from view. It's narrow, but if a camel can make it, or a mountain goat, a good French soldier should be able to do the same."
"Exactly, mon capitain."
"Good! You'll find this narrow pass will take you to the back of the camp of the Riffs, if I'm not mistaken. Send scouts ahead, and you can't possibly be taken by surprise. They may have one or two sentinels there, but the knife is quick and silent. Carry pistols only for close work once you're in the camp. Now get out of here, Pierre, I want to do some serious thinking. By now Djalmah must be back with that military genius who has tricked us at every turn, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's giving orders too, to divert some of his forces, maybe back to the oasis of Katijba. Or perhaps to another region of the mountain range."
* * *
The courier had reached Yusuf Ben Tashfin just before sundown, and related the details of his meeting with the French commandant at Arzuel. The bearded Riffian leader burst out laughing.
"By the bowels of Shaitan, this giaour soldier is a trecherous dog! Of course he would not admit that his captive was rescued by our valiant young fighter! But I will send him back nothing, and the two Englishwomen will remain here as hostages. In the event we encounter greater resistance from the foreign soldiers than we can now forsee, and then, if need be, we can always sell them at the Souk and use the gold to buy more weapons in our war to drive out these barbarians from the lands which our fathers left us."
Already at Yusuf s command, the Riffian tribesmen were moving to the pass of the Minarets, while still another group descended from the mountain on the distant side on a trail unknown even to the French, to go in circuitous route past El Gueliz and to fortify the native quarter of Marrakesh. The remaining troops and Yusuf himself, would by the next sundown, lie in wait in the hills of the djinns, about five miles west of the oasis of Katijba.
But a token force of fifty men was left to guard the mountainous entry to the previous campsite, since the Riffian leader had the premonition of a French attack by nightfall. In that event, he had told his lieutenant, Ali Bjortne, a Bedouin chief in his own right and a ferocious warrior of forty whose massive build and expert swordsmanship had earned him the nickname of "El Haviz," (the desert Goliath) to hold off the French at all costs and to send a courier to him towards the oasis informing him to what extent the French attack had been successful.
And so the day after the Riffian courier had brought Yusufs ultimatum to Captain Lascombes, Yusuf and his best warriors had already made their camp in the hills of the Djinns. There they had already intercepted a French telephone line laid by the murdered French engineers, had taped it and were monitoring the calls from both El Gueliz and Arzuel. This it was that Yusuf Ben Tashfin learned that the wife and daughter of the commandant at El Gueliz were en route to Marrakesh, and he made his plans accordingly. If these two women could be captured, the garrison at El Gueliz might well agree to terms favoring the Riffs. It would be a strategic coupe which would save hundreds of lives and bring the French to their knees, Yusuf devoutly believed.
He could not know that at this very moment, a supercilious, insolent Spanish Colonel, Estaban Montez, was preparing to embark with three thousand crack Spanish troops in an alliance with the French aimed against the Riff uprising. The troops would leave Tangier, march towards Marrakesh, and be sent to Ksar-es-souk, where it was known that Abd-el-Krim had his secret headquarters and was directing the entire Riffian strategy against the embattled French.
Hassan, who with his three comrades had captured Claire and Sylvia Bennings, had already volunteered to attempt a similar abduction of Louise and Colette Tuerdier, and Yusuf Ben Tashfin gave his consent. After leaving the steamer, the women would be transported by a car sent from El Gueliz to bring them to the little French army town outside Marrakesh for their reunion with the commandant. And Hassan and his friends would he in wait along the road. It would be four days hence, they knew, from having intercepted a phone call from Colonel Henri Tuerdier to the commandant at Arzuel. And thus unsuspectingly, Louise and Colette Tuerdier, enchanted by the exotic and colorful cities of Algiers and Morocco, came towards their own destiny which would bring them to the oasis of Katijba and the hills of the Djinns.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lieutenant Pierre Dezier had led his mountain fighters up the precipitous trail to attack the Riffian camp at nightfall. But the fifty men commanded by Yusufs legendary "El Haviz," were waiting for that bold assault. And rifle fire killed the first wave of climbers as they reached the level ground beyond the ridge which led down into the deserted camp. Pierre Dezier himself was wounded in the shoulder, but from his post on the ridge, propped up against a boulder, and returning Riffian fire from the top of the cliff, he ordered his men under his first sergeant to storm the defenders.
But the treacherous mountain terrain was known to the Riffs and familiar to them as their own desert. "El Haviz" and his men took fearful toll of the dapper lieutenant's forces, until they at last abandoned the ridge and galloped off towards the pass of the Minarets and thence to the hidden descent from the other side of the mountain. They had lost thirty of their fifty men, but the French had lost over a hundred and twenty, with many wounded. So when at last the wounded lieutenant and his men entered the camp of Yusuf Ben Tashfin, they found it completely abandoned.
"The devils, they were ready for us!" he swore as he lay on an improvised Utter with the surgeon bending over him to probe for the buUet, which had inflicted a flesh wound and lodged near one of the major muscles. "Give me some morphine for the pain, mon vieux, and then let's get back to Arzuel. I must teU the commandant that Yusuf has vanished, as he's so often done before."
But even as the rest of his men prepared to descend the mountain back to the garrison, a hundred warriors who, having heard the sound of gunfire from their new camp at the pass of the Minarets, rode towards the old camp to take part in the fray. A decimating fire was opened upon the weary French troops and another fifty men died before Lieutenant Pierre Dezier and his remnant of troops could reach the safety of the plain. Agonized by his defeat, realizing that what hope he had had for military glory had vanished with this disaster, Pierre Dezier groped for his revolver holster and before his men could suspect his intent, had blown out his brains. And thus one of the brutal torturers of young Djalmah paid the price for his insensate cruelty and lust....
Colonel Henri Tuerdier had chosen a platoon of eight men led by an astute corporal who was to be made sergeant in the next dispatches, to man the limousine that would be sent from El Gueliz to meet his wife and daughter and bring them safely back to the garrison. The news of Pierre Dezier's disastrous defeat and death had reached him, and he had telephoned Captain Lascombes to extend condolences and to ask for a meeting to plan strategy against the wiley Riffian tribesmen. It was useless to fight in the mountains, but in his opinion a sizable detachment of crack French troops should be sent toward the oasis of Katijba, and there should be a decoy to lure the Riffs out of the hills of the Djinns. Perhaps the ruse of sending out engineers to lay a new telephone line might reveal the strength of the Riffian camp which he was certain must be there....
Louise and Colette Tuerdier were preparing for the final stage of their journey towards El Gueliz. The steamer had ended its journey, and they were quartered in a tiny hotel. The captain of the steamer had informed them that a radiogram had awaited him at the port with the news that a soldier-manned limousine would be ready late that afternoon to drive his distinguished passengers back to El Gueliz. But Hussan and his three men had already sighted the car and, having stationed themselves in a clump of palm trees along the winding road, opened accurate fire on the car, killing the entire platoon. Then, stripping the bodies of the dead and dressing as French soldiers, they went on to that terrible rendezvous. Hussan himself, wearing the sergeant's uniform, entered the little inn and, as he spoke excellent French, told the proprieter to tell Madame Tuerdier and her daughter that the limousine awaited them. A few minutes later, Louise and Colette left the inn and got into the limousine. Perhaps they were surprised by the fact that the French soldiers riding on the top of the car and holding onto the door handles were brownskinned and bearded, but the French uniforms were unmistakable....
Captain Lascombes had ordered that Mohammet Bey, the owner of El Cordoba, the little cafe from which Sylvia and Claire Bennings had been abducted by the very quartet which had now seized Madame Tuerdier and her daughter Colette, was to be brought in for interrogation, as well as any other employees of the cafe. This was the day after the news of Pierre Dezier's tragic death, and so when the obsequious cafe owner, his Bedouin chef, and the attractive girl Fazima, who was Mohammet Bey's mistress, were brought into the garrison, Captain Lascombes determined to interrogate them as severely as he could.
Mohammet Bey and the Bedouin chief were at once taken to one of the subterranean dungeons, stripped naked and there stretched out on the rack and given the bastinado with a bamboo rod upon the soles of their feet. But although the owner of the cafe was fat and soft, he was a fierce chauvinist and for once displayed incredible courage, steadfastly declaring that he knew nothing, that the Riffs who had entered his cafe by force had told him nothing of their plans, and that he could not be held responsible for the unfortunate accident that had befallen the two Englishwomen. His chef, who spoke not a word of English, was equally stoic.
But Captain Lascombes, corrupted by his stay in Morocco and by his experiences in interrogating attractive Moorish women, determined that it would be Fazima who should reveal the plot. And so he had her taken to the very dungeon in which Djalmah had endured her martyrdom.
Fazima spoke only a few words of French, but when she was shoved into the dungeon by two soldiers and Captain Lascombes entered, his riding crop in his hand and his eyes glittering with cruelty, she comprehended only too well what would happen to her. He barked an order, and the soldiers left, closing the dungeon door behind them. Her limpid dark-brown eyes scanned the terrifying apparatuses in this room where Djalman had lost her maidenhead and suffered intolerable anguish. Beside the chair was a wicker basket, and it had been put there in advance at the commandant's order. For he meant to use as ruthless and inhuman methods as would be needed to coerce Fazima into disclosing her part in the plot to abduct the Englishwomen. Moreover, he was convinced that there was a network of spies in Marrakesh, who, though professing loyalty to their French masters, just like Mohammet Bey, were in secret league with the Riffs.
Fazima was nineteen, plump and voluptuous, with light-brown skin. She wore the veil over her face and the clinging red silk dress, which had been a present from her employer and lover. Very deliberately, Captain Edouard Lascombes unbuttoned his coat, took off his officer's cap and undershirt and was naked to the waist in trousers and boots. Fazima shuddered at the sight of the taut, sadist as he turned to her now. He reached out and ripped the veil from her face and she uttered a cry and cowered back against the wall.
"Bedouin bitch!" he said in Arabic. "I have little time to waste with you. I know full well that your master is a spy for Yusuf Ben Tashfin and that it was he who arranged the kidnapping of those two Englishwomen who were at your cafe with the French journalist."
"It is not true, I swear by Allah it is not true!" Fazima protested. But he would not have believed her if she had taken an oath on his own Bible.
Disconsolate over his friend's death, disgusted with this uiending war against shadows and ghosts which the campaign against the Riffs had become, deprived of his sexual joy with his beloved wife, Captain Edouaid Lascombes had at last cast aside the veneer of civilization and humanity. For him now all that existed were this dungeon with its equipment for persuasive torment and the beautiful young girl whose charms he would soon enjoy after the most refined cruelties.
In tearing off Fazima's veil, to be sure, Captain Lascombes had violated a Muslim religious law. However, he well knew that the girl was not a virgin, for it had already been intimated to him that she was the mistress of the cafe owner. And so when she cowered back after he had torn it away, he mocked her in Arabic:
"What? You pretend you still have your flower? But I will prove to you before this little meeting of ours is over, Fazima, that you are nothing more than a whore and that you have no right to the sanctity of that veil. Now take off your dress at once."
"No! It is unworthy-you are a coward! Ask the men, not me-I had nothing to do with it," she protested.
He thrust his hand into the pocket of his uniform trousers, drew out a packet of Caporals, lit one and studied her. The silk dress, thin and clinging, revealed the splendor of her ripe boobies, the lush hips and thighs. Young as she was, she was ripe now, and in a few years she would become flaccid and old. It was the fate of those who dwelt in Africa. But at the moment, the sight of her made his prick ache with longing. And the knowledge that he could do with her what he would, without answering to anyone-for, after all, he was the commandant at Arzuel-enpowered him with relish for what was to come.
"I will teach you to obey, and I will teach you to answer humbly, Fazima," he told her. "And I shall begin by preparing you for my questions."
And with this, putting his hands to the bodice of her dress, he ripped it from her. All she wore was a dirty pair of white cotton knickers, and no brassiere or stockings. Her slim bare feet were thrust into pumps, and so now that the dress was off, not a stitch covered her save those knickers which perhaps she had found in some shop after some tourist had discarded them, and the greedy proprietor of the shop had washed them and tried to sell them for profit. Whatever the reason, she was piquant this way in just the pumps and that Enghsh-originating covering.
Finding herself half-nude before him, she uttered a cry and clapped her hands over her big round titties. With his riding crop he immediately lashed her hands and made her cry out, and she turned to flee towards the door for egress.
"It is locked, I'm afraid, Fazima. You'll have to deal with me here, not your master. And I'm not quite so appreciative of your charms. You are too fat, your skin is sallow, your breasts sag, and you probably are dirty and have a disease," he mocked her. And since he spoke fluent Arabic, Fazima uttered a cry of fury at this denigration of her charms.
"But that's not true! Vicious pig, son of a mule-driver and a chimpanzee, I have never had a disease and I am young and my breasts do not sag!"
"I shall find out for myself. Fazima, have no fear. . But now will you tell me what you know of those two Englishwomen who were at lunch with your master-or at least in your master's cafe, some days ago?"
"I know only that the Frenchman who works for the newspaper came to see my master when I was there, that's all I know. As for the ladies, they left.
Maybe they did not like him."
"Maybe you are lying, too, you little Moroccan whore. I really don't see what Mohammet Bey sees in you. And those filthy knickers-you really need a bath."
Now he seized them and ripped them from her. She struck him in the face and twisted wildly, screaming out, but it availed her nothing. Grinning, his prick monstrously swollen, Captain Lascombes stepped back and laughed at her, but his eyes were cruel and glittering with rut. The black triangle of pussy fur, the plump, round olive-sheened thighs, the dimpled goblet of her belly with its narrow, deep niche, and the sumptuously round, panting titties-these were charms which aroused him in spite of his disparaging comments upon her charms. She stood with the knickers tumbled and twisted around her ankles, and she promptly put a hand over her mound and crooked her other arm over her boobies, just as a white woman would have done under similar circumstances. He tilted back his head and laughed uproariously at this adapted gesture from an effete civilization.
"Now you see, Fazima," he sarcastically rejoined, "if you were really proud of your beauty, you would not hide it. But it is true, you are getting old, you have fat breasts and buttocks, and you smell bad from not having bathed in months."
"Miserable liar! May Shaitan tear your cock off and burn it in his deepest fires!" Fazima fairly shrieked, beside herself with rage at this uncomplimentary exchange.
But now the time for games was over. Captain Lascombes moved towards her, grim purpose in his eyes and tightened mouth. He cut her across the titties with his riding crop and she shrieked and again huddled herself against the waU, turning her back to Slim, with one hand rubbing the darkening welt the crop had left, while the other hand still hid the shadowy fleece over her cunthole. With a curt chuckle, he lashed her across one hip with the crop, and again she shrieked and backed against the wall, facing him with blazing, dilated eyes, clenching her thighs, covering her cunt with one hand and pressing her other arm against her heaving titties.
"Come now, I shall have to hurt you really seriously if you don't talk," he said almost pleasantly. "They mean nothing to you, these Englishwomen. I shall not have your master shot, I give you my word as commandant of Arzuel. Simply tell me who it was that knew the Englishwomen were there and who took them from the cafe. That's all I want. You won't even have to spend an hour in prison if you tell, and I may even give you gold."
"Use it to buy a headstone for your own grave, you French pig!" Fazima spat.
He swore under his breath, then, tucking his riding crop under one arm, he seized her by the wrists and dragged her over to the stocks. She was sturdy and vigorous, more than he had anticipated for her ripe build, but in his rutting strength she could not overcome him and soon she found herself forced to sit in the stocks as Djalmah once had. Her wrists and neck were locked in the upper three holes, brownsheened ankles clamped in the two lower vises, her naked bottom squirming on the gravel and thorns with which the top of the stool was still strewn, and Fazima was now ready for questioning. She was helpless. Her big boobies dangled deliciously, heaving wildly as she tried to jerk her wrists and ankles free of the stocks and could not.
Now, taking his riding crop from under his arm, he dealt her a cut across one tittie and then backhanded her across the hips. Her wild cry resounded, and Fazima tugged with all her strength at the stocks. But all she succeeded in doing was rubbing her bare seat against the bare thorns and gravel, and new cries escaped her as she became aware of this ordeal.
"I'm going to whip you severely now, Fazima. I shan't listen to any of your cries or supplications or your prayers to Allah. I shall whip you until I'm satisfied. And then I shall let you have the little surprise in the basket. I think that will make you talk."
With this, raising the crop, he cracked it down diagonally over her naked back. Instantly an angry red welt sprang up on the soft brown-tinted skin and the girl jerked in her stocks until the apparatus creaked and her cry resounded, high-pitched and agonized.
Sweating and trembling with his rut, he resumed the flogging. Ten more cuts across her naked back, from the shoulder blades to the chinkbone left angry, horrizontal patterns of blazing heat and torment in her flesh. Her cries were deafening, and her wrists and ankles were chafed from their constant jerking against the tightly clamping yoke-holes of the punishment stocks.
Pausing to light another cigarette and studying his handiwork, he at last resumed by whipping her bottom. He laid twelve lashes across both cheeks, and at times she tried to lift her naked ass off the stool, frenzied in torment, her cries raucous and prolonged. But he ignored all this, eyes feasting on the contortions of her naked body, on the multiplying of those angry red welts on the smooth, glossy flesh of her naked body.
When he had finished, he cast aside the riding crop and demanded, "Now do you still defy me? Are you ready to tell me about the Englishwomen and the part you and your master played in their abduction?"
"May-may S-Shaitan consume you in his fires, filthy French giaour!" Fazima groaned tearfully.
"So be it. You have only to blame yourself for what will happen now, Fazima," he told her in a lust-thickened voice.
He strode over to the basket, lifted it, and brought it back to her. Then he seated himself on a low footstool before the stocks, through whose top and middle her flushed, contorted, tear stained face emerged. Thrusting his hand into his other trousers pocket, he drew out a pair of heavy leather gloves, donned them, and then very carefully opened the basket. There was a hissing sound, and the head of a puff adder emerged, striking at the rim of the basket.
Fazima's eyes bulged, her mouth opened, but only a gagging gasp escaped her in her hideous terror.
"You recognize it, don't you? It can be found around the Pyramids and near the oases in your deserts you Moroccan bitch," he told her. "One bite, just one, Fazima, and you will die in horrible agony. Your stomach will be torn apart with cramps and your heart will beat as if it would burst within you. You will have a terrible headache and your temples will pound as if something is going to explode in your skull. Then you will become nauseated and vomit, and you will still be many long moments away from death. I'm going to take the puff adder out-see?"
Deftly he caught the snake by the neck, lifted it out of the basket, and again a gurgling cry escaped the horrified, naked captive. Skillfully he reversed it and held it by the tail, stretching out his arm and stepping well back. Unable to coil, the puff adder was helpless, but it could still strike about in a radius of some six or seven inches. Carefully he saw to it that the deadly fangs of the serpent could not come too close to her congested, honor-tautened face.
"I'm going to count ten, Fazima," he told her. "If by then, you have not told me what I want to know, I will move my arm and the snake will bite you. I think I will let it bite your breasts. They are so big, perhaps it will keep the poison from spreading too quickly."
"No! Oh you accursed infidel beast-no, not the puff adder!" she screamed, her eyes rolling to the very whites.
He moved his arm a bit more, and the range between the dangling puffadder and her face was lessened by an inch. She uttered a wild cry.
"Oh no, no, don't! In the name of merciful Allah, the All-Forgiving, take it away!"
"One ... two ... three ... you had better tell me what I want to know before ten, Fazima. Four ... five ... six...."
Now he paused to move his arm forward an infinitesimal part of an inch closer to her, so next time the puffadder's ugly oval-shaped head turned, it was still closer to her congealed face.
"Seven ... eight, your last chance, Fazima. It will be a slow and very painful death. You say you aren't old? But you will wish that you had died in your bed instead of now, believe me. Nine. No? You won't? I regret it, but this is war and I have no compunction for putting you to death for your part in this espionage and abduction."
So saying, he rose from the stool and made as if to press his arm forward. Fazima, her eyes bulging and glassy, uttered a wild, harrowing scream.
"Oh no, I'll tell-anything, but take it away, please take it away!"
Deftly he dropped it into the basket, closed the wicker top over it and then shoved it out of the way with his booted foot.
"You are ready to talk, then?"
"Yes, yes, have mercy, my master, Hassan is a friend, a Riff."
"I know that. Who is this Hassan?"
"He is a man of the mountain tribes who fights for Yusuf Ben Tashfin. He and three of his friends came to the back of the cafe. They saw the two Englishwomen and they talked to my master. He said he would do nothing to prevent what they wished to do. That is all I know, I swear it oh the Holy Koran itself," she babbled.
He had no doubt that this was true and the girl was only a pawn in this dangerous and complex game. But there was no point in releasing her now. No one would claim her now, least of all Mohammet Bey whose cafe had been seized by the French soldiers and who himself was even now groaning in his prison cell after the bastinado. He could be imprisoned to the end of the hostilities, and he would have absolutely no recourse of appeal. It was, indeed, war and that pardoned everything, even cruelty and lust.
He unlocked the headboard and footboard of the stocks, raised her to her feet, saw with satisfaction that the flawlessly smooth skin of her voluptuously ripe asscheeks was scratched and, here and there, bleeding from the thorns. Then, gripping her by one elbow, he forced her over to the low flat rectangular whipping bench, and ordered her to lie on her back. Swiftly strapping her wrists and ankles so that she was spread-eagled and the pink lips of her cunt gaped lewdly, he freed his prick from its confinement and stared greedily down at her. Sweating, weeping, shuddering, her body writhing from the blazing welts over her back and bottom, Fazima groaned and sobbed in her suffering.
"No reason for tears, you whore," he sneered.
"You're no virgin, and Mohammet Bey's been fucking you for months. Feel honored that a French officer's giving you a taste of his becque in your dirty little con! And try to please me, or I'll let you have another taste of the whip, this time on those big tetons of yours!"
With this, he flung himself down upon the bench, his hands gouging her panting round boobies, and his mouth sought the warm, satiny valley between them as he thrust his prick into the gaping crevice of her cunthole. Fazima arched and squirmed, groaning again as he brutally thrust himself to the very balls. Then he began to fuck her rapaciously, without stint or concern for her discomfort. Driving her body back and forth on the wooden bench, he added to her ordeal by making her hideously welted asscheeks chafe back and forth against the rough wood of the whipping bench, and when at last he had spewed forth his gism, he drew himself out, moved to the head of the bench and, reaching down with both hands to seize the tumbled sheaf of her tumbled hair, wiped his prick dry with it, and then spat in her face as a mark of supreme contempt.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hassan and his three aides had turned the limousine from the road to El Gueliz and headed it now towards the oasis of Katijba. Louise Tuerdier and Colette, their arms around each other, wept in despair as they realized that they were now the captives of the Riffs. For Hassan who spoke good English, had mocked them, and had identified not only himself but told them their own names, and that they had been expected.
"Our glorious leader, may Allah grant him final victory over you detested giaours," he had snarled, "will have a warm welcome for such comely whores!"
"But if you know who we are," Louise Tuerdier had managed some calm to her voice, feeling mostly fear for her daughter and not herself, "then you know that I am the wife of the commandant of El Gueliz, and that if any harm comes to me or my daughter, there will be reprisals. There are thousands of soldiers at the garrison and they will track you down and have you hanged, and it will not be an honorable death."
"Keep your mouth shut, French bitch!" Hassan had jeered, slapping her across the face, as Colette uttered a cry of horror. "In our country, we do not let women be so free with their tongues as they are in yours. We have the lash to chasten willfulness and talkativeness, and Yusuf Ben Tashfin will acquaint you both with it, I am certain."
Hassan knew the way well, which took them out of the desert route where French patrols were likely to be found, and behind to the oasis, to the west of it, where a kind of natural protection of hilly dunes and then a cluster of densely planted palm trees hid the tents of the Riffian leader. Around the oasis he had posted a hundred of the finest marksmen, who were prepared to battle to the death against enormous odds, and the French, since they would be taken by surprise, would fall like ripe apples from the tree.
The tent of Yusuf Ben Tashfin was sparsely furnished, with but a couch, a table, and a chair in which he wrote his orders for his troops. Beside this, the tent of Hjalma, his beautiful mistress, was already occupied by the unfortunate Claire and Sylvia Bennings. Only this morning, Hjalma, wearying of this long wait for the hated French out here in the desert, had amused herself by forcing both Claire and Sylvia under the lash to pussyrub and gamahuch each other. Then she had her Sudanese attendant choose between those two unfortunates, and this time Nouraji had selected the blonde matron as his fucking partner. While Hjalma herself wielded a kurbash and directed him, Nouraji had soothed the unfortunate matron, made her sit astride his lap, and while he mauled and squeezed her panting titties, forced her to impale her cunt upon his giant spear and to rise up and down upon it until his gism spurted abundantly into her tortured cunt.
Hassan and his three comrades bound the wrists of their two captives behind their backs, and brutally shoved them into Yusuf s tent. He rose from his table, his eyes gleaming with joy.
"By the bowels of Shaitan, Hassan, this was well done! I promote you to lieutenant, and you shall head my snipers lying in wait at the oasis. It may well be that the husband and sire of this giaour bitch and her whelp may himself lead the infidel troops against the chosen of Allah! What kismet that would be for us all, eh, Hassan?"
"Indeed, o Defender of the Faith!" Hassan bowed his thanks for this exalted promotion, his dark face radiant with joy. "I promise you that the infidels shall perish and their bones whiten on the sands without once tasting the sweet water of Katijba. What shall we do with these sluts, o Yusuf?"
"Let them be taken to the tent of my beloved Hjalma. Tonight we shall have a great feast, and they and their English companions shall entertain us to the best of their poor talents," Yusuf Ben Tashfin chuckled.
"I warn you, whoever you may be," Louise Tuerdier cried out in French, "that I am the wife of the commandant of El Gueliz, and at your peril your men harm my daughter and myself."
"At our peril, so be it. So shall Allah decide," Yusuf Ben Tashfin mocked her, and made an abrupt gesture with his arm. Hassan and his three comrades forced the two captives out of the tent and into the next one, and there Colette uttered a cry of consternation. For she saw Sylvia and Claire Bennings lying together on a single couch, a rope around their waists, and poor Sylvia forced to lie atop her mother and pussyrub and kiss her, as in the throes of lesbian ardor, while the giant Sudanese amused himself by flicking the backs of Sylvia's supple calves with a bamboo switch to quicken her alacrity and passion. Hjalma, in a thin tunic and sandals, watched with blazing eyes as she lounged, propping herself on an elbow, on her couch nearby.
"Hold, Nouraji!" Hjalma cried, springing from the couch and striding towards the door of the tent. "What new giaour bitches have you here, worthy Hassar?"
"Liei tenant Hassan," one of the other three Riffs, a short, squat, thick and heavily bearded mountaineer in his mid-forties, gleefully exclaimed. "A promotion by Yusuf, no less," one of the others added, clapping his friend on the back joyously.
"Welcome then, Lieutenant of the Riffs! You see how we amuse ourselves with the other two captives you so kindly brought us," the beautiful Moroccan mistress of the Riffian leader laughed. "Are these also for our sport?"
"Not for yours, o dove of the desert," Hassan replied as he saluted her in respect for her status with Yusuf. "But to entertain the great warriors of the tribes who gather now against the infidels and await their coming at the Oasis of Katijba. Take them into your keeping, beautiful one, and let them be readied for the honor which our glorious chieftain will do them presently."
"It shall be as you say, o Lieutenant Hassan," Hjalma exclaimed joyously. "Nouraji, give these bitches wine and some fruit. And since they are dusty and tired from their journey, doubtless they will wish to bathe. Bring tubs of water into the tent so they may cleanse themselves. It would not do for my noble lord to dip his mighty weapon into an unclean giaour cunt."
"I beg of you, M'amselle," Louise Tuerdier spoke in French, "try to help us, for it will be only of harm to you and yours if we are harmed in turn. I am the wife of Colonel Henri Tuerdier, the commandant at El Gueliz, and this is my daughter, Colette."
"Ah, you have done better this time than with the Englishwomen, Hassan," Hjalma laughed. Then scowling at the beautiful auburnhaired matron, she angrily declared, "Here I am mistress in my tent, and I will not take insolence from an accursed French woman or her spawn. Do as I have ordered, Nouraji."
In a few moments the giant Sudanese carried in two large wooden tubs filled with water from a nearby spring at the oasis. Then, at Hjalma's gesture, he seized the kurbash and approached the French women. Meanwhile, Hjalma, taking a dagger, cut the bonds of their wrists and then commanded, "Now you will strip naked, naked as you were born, and each of you will get into one of those tubs and cleanse yourselves. Be quick, or Nouraji will let you taste the kurbash. It is made of rhinocerous hide and its kiss is even more cruel than that of the puffadder."
Colette uttered a cry and clutched her mother's waist and cried, "Oh help me, Mama, I am so afraid. What are they going to do with us?"
"Are you cowards, that you wage war on helpless women?" Louise Tuerdier scornfully asked the Moorish beauty.
Hjalma made a sign. Instantly the Sudanese raised the kurbash and struck the French matron across her rounded shoulders. Louise Tuerdier writhed and twisted under the blow, uttering a cry of pain, and then turned towards the Sudanese: "Coward, monstrous coward! Oh, you can be brave, you Riffs, when you have only women to deal with and you have a whip and we are unarmed. Oh that I were a man with a gun or a sword!"
"But you are not a man, nor is your daughter, and you are giaours, come here to despoil the land from our peoples," Hjalma angrily replied. "You are my enemy as surely as is your husband. Nouraji, if this bitch does not begin to undress, nor her daughter either, let the daughter feel the weight of your kurbash on her bottom. It is nice and plump, and doubtless pampered and soft. The kurbash will be a sweet caress for it."
"Gladly, mistress," Nouraji smiled, and raised the whip.
Colette uttered a cry and again clasped her mother's waist, crying, "Oh, please don't let him whip me, Mama!"
"My poor darling, we must do what they want. They are too many for us and they are cruel, inhuman brutes who do not observe the conventions and decencies of our civilization," Louise Tuerdier explained. "I will do as you wish, and so will my daughter, but only under protest. And when my husband and his soldiers come, you may be sure they will avenge us in blood."
"If it is kismet, it will be so. But until it is, you will make haste, for Nouraji grows impatient," Hjalma mocked her.
Slowly Louise Tuerdier began to undress. Her long dress, a slip, and under it a camisole and corset, whose tabs hooked to gray silk stockings. Meanwhile the two naked English captives watched with mingled compassion and anguish as they saw these two newcomers to misery and shame about to begin an ordeal which for them had been indelibly etched into their flesh and their spirits. When at last the beautiful auburn haired matron was down to her corset, hose and pumps, her magnificent titties naked and swelling with indignation and shame, Djalma made a sign. Nouraji laughed, tossed aside the kurbash, reached out and wrenched off the corset, ripping away the tabs and tearing the stockings, and Louise Tuerdier was naked, the auburn fleece of her cunt hole standing out against the smooth, tawny sheened flesh of her thighs, belly, titties and ass.
The slimness of her waist made the glory of her bubbies all the more appetizing, and his eyes gleamed ferociously as he retrieved the kurbash and turned toward Colette, who began to whimper and sob with terror.
"Bid your daughter obey, or she will be tied to the tentpole and thrashed to the very blood," Hjalma spitefully declared.
"You'd best do what they want, my poor darling! Never mind, Papa will avenge us both," Louise Tuerdier soothed.
"I haven't forgotten, you giaour bitch," Hjalma snapped, "that a moment ago you insulted us by saying to your whelp of a daughter that your civilization was much better than ours. Before your great Charlemagne, the Riffs flourished in their lands and were descended from Roman rule, yes, from Caesar himself. You shall pay for that insult in good time, bitch!"
Colette had begun to undress. Her petulant mouth was trembling, and tears ran down her face. Slowly she removed her blue dress, then the slip. Then, after a long hesitation, which was ended when the kurbash rose menacingly above her, she sobbingly put her hands behind her to remove her brassiere. She wore white batiste drawers, with lacy hems and lace at the waistband. Her milky skin had already excited the Sundanese and he licked hi? lips lecherously in anticipation. As the brassiere fell to the sands, one saw the wide spaced, beautiful titties with their dainty pink buds and their soft coral aurolae, the dimpled smooth belly with the wide, shallow navel niche, and the beautiful long legs were sheathed in tan silk hose of the finest quality.
"That also," Hjalma pointed at the offending drawers.
"Oh Mama, must I?" Colette wailed.
"I fear you must, my poor darling. But it is not a sin, not under force. I would not see you beaten with that horrid whip. Do as your mother tells you," Louise Tuerdier chokingly ordered.
Sobbing hysterically, Colette Tuerdier dragged down her knickers and stood in her hose, elastic garters at the tops, and her pumps. At once her hands clapped over the cunt, leaving free her panting bubbles and Nouraji and Hjalma both laughed with glee at the ingenuous modesty of the teenaged French girl.
"Now into the tubs, and scrub well! You will be honored soon, and your bodies must be clean for our noble chieftain!" Hjalma cried, and under the menace of the kurbash, Louise and Colette Tuerdier squatted in the tubs, a bar of crude soap, strong-smelling and made of lye, provided each oy a contemptuous toss from the hands of the Sudanese, and the two women began to bathe themselves in preparation for a night of violation and the lash!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The newly promoted lieutenant, glowing with pride at having been thus rewarded for his valor against the French by the worshipped leader of the Riffs, had visited the beautiful young Berber girl, Djalmah. Finding her desirable, and having heard that she had sustained the cruelest of tortures at the hands of the two French officers of Arzuel, he had made overtures to her.
"Yusuf Ben Tashfin has told me of your courage, Djalmah," he had told her, "and as I am still without a wife, I ask you to become my mate. If you consent, we shall be married under Moroccan law at the oasis of Katijba."
Djalmah, blushingly, having in her turn heard of the two abductions which Hassan and his three comrades had performed and which had brought the Riffs valuable hostages in their war against the French shyly consented.
"But I am not a maid, Hassan. And I would not come to the marriage bed unspoiled for you," she demurred.
"That is of no importance. You are still a maiden by your own will, and when you give yourself to me, it will be for the first true time. What the giaours did to you counts nothing against your purity. Riff and Riff must stand together, if we are to hurl the accursed infidel from our shores."
And thus they plighted their troth, and it was agreed that as soon as Yusuf had'established full camp at the oasis, the ceremony would be performed. But since he did not have yet to account for a bride, the tall Arab intended to savor to the fullest his pleasure with the wife and daughter of the commandant of the garrison of El Gueliz.
He, and three of Yusuf s bravest aides, as well as Yusuf himself entered the tent about half an hour after Louise and Colette Tuerdier had been taken to Hjalma's quarters and forced to bathe under the kurbash wielded by the giant Sudanese Nouraji.
But at this very moment Spanish troops under their commandant were disembarking and beginning the forced march which would take them into the area of the oasis of Katijba. And within a single day, the single span of twenty-four hours, the destinies of all concerned, prisoners and captors alike, would be determined....
Back at Arzuel, Captain Edouard Lascombes had paid another visit to the cell in which young Fazima languished. She had been forced to spend the night in that same dungeon where her flogging and violation had occurred, and her eyes had fixed almost hypnotically on the wicker basket from which the French officer had taken the deadly puffadder.
This afternoon, Captak Lascombes had returned to the dungeon after having given his men orders to be ready the next day for a march out through the desert to the oasis, there to join with Colonel Henri Tuerdier's forces, in what was hoped to be the final attack against the Riffian strength. And so this afternoon and nightfall, Edouard Lascombes had promised himself, should be devoted to a kind of orgiastic celebration of what would be final victory and perhaps the opportunity at last to return home and see his beloved and beautiful wife. Then, once back in France, he could purge himself of the guilt and disgust he felt for himself in having yielded to his basest emotions. Also, a kind of morose bitterness had come over him at the knowledge of his friend's suicide. For the amoral and cynical Pierre Dezier had been a sort of catalytic demon for him, aiding him towards that debauchery and self-corruption which had allowed him to forget the dictates of humanity in favor of the urgencies of rut.
He rationalized, as most men do under such circumstances, that the lives of these two Berber girls, Djalmah and Fazima, were certainly expendable in the overall cause of defeating the dangerous guerrillas who had plagued French troops for so many torturing months. And so when he entered Fazima's cell, he locked the dungeon door behind him, set down a bottle of chilled white wine on a little table, lit a cigar, and approached the trembling girl who was tied to the rectangular whipping bench where she had been left after her violation. Bread and water had been brought to her this morning, and the grinning corporal who was in charge of the subterranean level of the guardhouse, had given her a chamberpot for her necessities and had paid himself back by caressing her titties and bottom and by fondling her obscenely with his tongue between her lips as his hands squeezed her welted and swollen bottom.
Fazima had passively submitted, for her torture the day before had brought her to a meek docility in which survival was the only vital motivation. She did not want to die, and the terror of being sent to a firing squad by this ferocious officer who had defiled and beaten her, left her in cringing terror. Her eyes were huge now as they fixed on him imploringly and piteously. He approached her now, cigar in hand, a crooked smile on his lips.
"I haven't yet decided what to do with you, Fazima. I have left orders that Mohammet Bey be shot at dawn tomorrow. The chef will be released in a few weeks, after he has cooled his heels in one of our cells. I don't think he is dangerous, but if he happens to be a contact between the people of Marrakesh and the Riffs, he'll be kept harmlessly away from them for a time But as for you, my pigeon, it remains for you to please me enough to keep from sending you to the firing squad to join your former employer and lover before the firing squad tomorrow."
"I ... I don't want to die, mon capitain," Fazima groaned.
"A sensible choice. If I untie you, will you obey me in all my orders?"
"Oh yes!" she gasped.
He swiftly unstrapped her wrists and ankles, and with a groan of pain, flexing her muscles, the beautiful young, ripe-formed Moroccan girl sat up on the bench, then rubbed her chafed and swollen bottom, wincing as her fingers encountered the inflamed ridges left by the last. He had flogged her mercilessly, and she was still badly marked.
Then her eyes again moved to the wicker basket which still contained the deadly puffadder. He intercepted that look and chuckled grimly.
"You don't want another little look at it, do you, my pet? However, there's no need for you to concern yourself. You're quite safe from death so far as that species is concerned."
"I-I don't understand-it is one of the deadliest snakes, next to the karait, in all Africa," she gasped hoarsely.
"Quite right. Except that after it has been defanged, it is no longer dangerous, except, of course, to scare pretty girls."
"What? Do you mean...." her eyes were huge and her voice choked in her throat.
"Of course. Did you think that I am a snake tamer, you primitive little savage? Did you think that I could hold a deadly puffadder which could recoil and strike me, while I was trying to learn your secrets? If you did, you are more of a fool than I thought-and apparently you were. My! You nearly fainted when the snake got close to you, didn't you? And there wasn't anything you wouldn't do for me."
"You mean that it couldn't have poisoned me if it had bit me?"
"That's precisely what I mean."
"You pig! You monster! You dirty coward!" she hawked and spat in his face.
"Ah! Temper. That's an excellent sign. I like a spitfire in bed, not a passive yielding bitch with soft flesh that is simply submissive. But I'll tame you, you little Riffian slut! And remember, it's the firing squad for you along with Mohammet Bey unless you do precisely what I tell you to."
He wiped away her spittle with his sleeve, and then calmly struck her across the cheek, almost toppling her to the floor. As Fazima cried out and tried to right herself, Captain Edouard Lascombes took his cigar, puffed at it until the end glowed red, and then pressed it into her navel. With a wild shriek she grabbed at it with both hands, but he brushed her hands aside and forcibly thrust it home until the stench of burned flesh filled his nostrils. Her wild, prolonged cry was deafening. At last he let her take hold of the extinguished cigar, and observed with cruel satisfaction, the blackened, charred niche into which it had passed, with such merciless incendiary effect.
"You can put a silver franc there and wear it as a souvenir when this war is over, Fazima," he jested. "Now get down on your knees and suck my becque!"
He had with him, tucked under his left arm, his black leather riding crop. Brandishing this, he slashed her across her big round titties, and with a shriek of pain, Fazima knelt down, tears running down her cheeks. One hand still rubbed her bellybutton and her face was twisted in pain. The look of agony, hatred and pain which filled her limpid dark-brown eyes added a kind of erotic stimulus to the French officer's mounting lust. Here in this dungeon he felt himself empowered, a virtual sovereign and here was all the world in the person of this one naked girl, his subject and his vassal.
He plunged his left hand into her tumbled hair, twisting it, brutally lifting up her contorted face.
"Do what I commanded, or back you go on that bench for a thrashing over your tetons and your con!"
With a sobbing cry, Fazima signalled that she would obey. He relaxed his grip on her hair as she crouched towards him, and kept his riding crop held high above her to quell the least movement of rebellion or repugnance. Her trembling, full, ripe lips took hold of his throbbing prick and she began to nuzzle it.
"Ah, that's good. C'est magnifiquel Slowly, now, work me up to it, and then I'll feel myself dug into that tight sheath of yours. This Mohammet Bey may have fucked you a good deal, you Moorish slut, but you're still nice and tight, almost like a virgin. And in your asshole, you're tighter than that. We shall have a pleasant day and night of it, Fazima. And if you please me, perhaps I shall let you watch Mohammet Bey die under the rifles of the firing squad and you shall walk away from it hand in hand with me."
Again she nodded and seemed to concentrate on her task. The pangs of lust throbbed through him as he stared down greedily at this beautiful naked young girl, her hand still pressed over her navel, the other hand caressing his trousered leg, her mouth engorging itself upon the spearhead of his swollen prong.
And then suddenly he uttered a wild shriek of horrified agony, his eyes bulging and glassy. With all her strength, Fazima had sunk her teeth into the circumcisional groove of his prick and nearly severed it. Wild with agony, yanking at her hair, slashing at her shoulders and breasts and bottom with the crop, he tried to extricate himself, but she clung to him as a terrier to a rat, and even his bellows of agony and cries for help remained unheard for a fatal time. For when at last Fazima straightened, she held between her teeth the bleeding glans of his prick, and this she spat out on the floor as he staggered backward, dropping the crop, dropping the cigar from his hand, both hands clapped over the severed, bleeding stump of his sex, unmanned by his own lust victim.
His cries had brought the corporal of the guard stationed at the other end of the corridor at a desk. Hammering at the door, the corporal cried out, "It's locked, mon capitain!"
With his last remaining strength, Captain Edouard Lascombes staggered to the door, drew back the bolt, and the corporal forced his way in.
The corporal drew his revolver and handed it to the agonized commandant of Arzuel. His teeth chattering with pain, his left hand covered with his own blood, cupped over his severed organ, Captain Edouard Lascombe levelled the revolver at Fazima's heart and pulled the trigger. She was still on her knees and she jerked back, her eyes widening. Then a kind of mocking smile appeared on her lips as she crumpled to the stone floor of the dungeon.
A kismet which had been written for this tormented girl and her tormentor had come to pass.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The surgeon of the garrison at Arzuel had staunched the commandant's bleeding, but Captain Edouard Lascomes lay in his bed, weak from the loss of blood and shame and rage. He could clearly see now to what abysmal end his lust had led him, and its ultimate futility. He thought of his good friend, the blackhaired lieutenant who had led him so persuasively into the byways of evil and inhumane lust, and he groaned aloud. By nightfall, since he was out of danger, only one nurse drowsed at the desk of the infirmary where he lay in his bed, brooding.
Another nurse, new and pretty and cheerful, just in from France and knowing nothing of the long, arduous Riffian war, had given him a sedative so that he would sleep more easily. It had not taken effect at once, and she had gone off, her hips swinging, for she was thinking of her fiance back in Paris. She was perhaps twenty-four, overly patriotic and idealistic. She had thought Captain Lascombes rather handsome in a distinguished and mature way. To be sure, she hadn't been told the nature of his wound. He had begged the surgeon to spare him that final grace and the old man had agreed. But in her haste to get back to her room where she might write a love letter to her amour, she had left the empty syringe in a disposal backed under the table beside his bed. He stared at it, and black despair seized him. Oh, to be sure, he would live, but to go back to his beloved wife and to have to tell her that he would nevermore again be a man-no, it was unthinkable. And she would wonder how such a wound had occurred-oh God why had he wallowed in such filth!
Slowly, laboriously, fighting the drowsiness of the sedative, he leaned from his bed and plunged his arm down into the container. He drew out the hypodermic syringe and needle. Then, glancing around furtively and seeing that no one had noticed his act-for there were perhaps half a dozen soldiers sent to the infirmary for desert fever, the bite of the scorpion or a minor wound suffered from a sniper's bullet-he pushed up his sleeve and thrust the needle into the arterial vein, then, closing his eyes and murmuring a prayer, he thrust the plunger home. There was only air in the hypodermic, but it traveled along the veins to the heart in less than a minute. Captain Edouard Lascombes uttered a choking gasp, fell back upon the pillows, and breathed no more. Djalmah and Fazima had been avenged indeed!
* * *
But back in the tent of Hjalmah, Yusuf and his chief lieutenant, Hassan and two other able warriors of the Riffs whom Yusuf had personally decorated for valor, had gathered, wearing only silken burnouses and sandals and naked under them, to enjoy the spoils of war. They had already slaked their rut on poor Claire Bennings and her daughter Sylvia, but now their eyes burned with avaricious passion as they contemplated Louise Tuerdier and her daughter Colette.
After their bath, the two captives had not been permitted to dress. Hjalma and Nouraji had called two of the Riff guards to aid them in presenting these new captives to the mighty chieftain and his distinguished followers. Thus Louise and Colette Tuerdier found themselves stretched out on their backs upon couches, side by side, their wrists and ankles tied with cords which pulled under the couches to affix to metal rings and thus held them taut, spread-eagled and stark naked on display, vulnerable to the most obscene caresses and the most savage violations which their Riffian captors might conceive.
Yusuf Ben Tashfin, in rare good humor, put his arm around his newly appointed lieutenant, Hassan, the man who had engineered the coups by which all four beauties had become hostages to the Riffs.
"You have outdone yourself, my good lieutenant! I swear to you by the bear of Mohammet, the Prophet of the All-Knowing Allah, that these French giaours are even more toothsome than those cold English bitches. Observe, my good friends. There is the wife of the commandant of El Gueliz. See how scornfully she stares upon us. She prays to her smug little gods that she will be inviolate and that we will respect the maidenhead of her daughter. But observe how handsomely made this mature red-haired houri is! Do you see that wide cleft in her belly, a fitting place for a man's sword to press! And how thick and dark-red the fleece between her thighs! I warrant you her husband has not used that entrance to Paradise in many a moon. Well, we shall satisfy her cravings."
"Truly spoken, most noble Yusuf!" Hassan cried, beside himself with joy at this mark of favor and the tempting ecstasies which awaited him this night, an accolade which had already brought him as promised bride the beautiful Berber girl Djalmah.
"But see you, valiant Yusuf, how light the skin of the young whelp is, and there on the left thigh, near the thick brown curls of her maidenhood, a tiny birthmark. Indeed, a place to caress and to lick and make her squirm like any whore!"
"Most noble master," Hjalma burst out, "their skins are too soft and smooth. Would they not be lovelier in your sight and more exciting if they bore the marks of the lash?"
"Perhaps. But there is no hurry, Hjalma, my dove," Yusuf chuckled. "First we will do them the courtesy of presenting our weapons to them, and if they accept in the spirit of hospitality, we may spare them some discomfort."
Mockingly, therefore, he stode forward to the couch on which Louise Tuerdier lay stretched and straddled. Lofting his burnous, he bared his mighty prick and pressed it against her cheek. She uttered a shriek of loathing, twisting her face away.
"Thus do you spurn me? That was unwise, you giaour bitch! For this your daughter shall pay. I'm going to flog her until she begs to take my weapon into her mouth and to cherish it as she would that of her own father," Yusuf Ben Tashfin blasphemously mocked the groaning mother.
The two Englishwomen had been bound together on a single couch at the back of the tent, slightly to the rear of the couches on which the newest captives lay tethered. A rope around their waists, their arms bound behind their backs, and their ankles tethered together also, they lay on their sides facing each other, part of Hjalma's vicious lesbian mockery. They could see with horror the ordeal of the newcomers, and realized that it would presage another night of infamous degradation and torture and shame for themselves.
Yusuf turned to Nouraji, and accepted a thin bamboo switch from the Sudanese attendant. Whistling it in the air, he approached the couch on which Colette lay, and applied a stinging cut along the tender part of her left thigh.
"Maman, it hurts me-oh mon Dieu-please don't!" Colette wailed as she arched from the couch. The switch now visited her other thigh. Again she wailed, and Louise Tuerdier, tears running down her cheeks, protested.
"Oh, cowards, vicious cowards! You call yourselves civilized, when you are savages. My husband, as commandant, would never touch any of your women thus and profane them, he makes war upon your men! Why do you not follow his Christian example?" she indignantly sobbed.
"Because, giaour bitch, we are Muslims and because Allah, in His great wisdom, has decreed that women shall be the playthings of the male," Yusuf scornfully retorted. "But silence now, for you cannot aid your daughter with maternal advice. This is her moment, come upon her, and it is her kismet. Now, my dove, tell me that you will be ready and eager to accept our pricks inside that soft, pouting little mouth of yours!"
And with this, lifting the switch, he cut Colette Tuerdier across both naked titties.
A wild shriek resounded and the girl thrashed about on the couch, her head turning from side to side, her eyes wide with fear.
"No! No! For the love of heaven, take me instead," Louise Tuerdier cried as the switch again visited the young girl's milky flesh, this time across the belly, then across the abdomen where the soft pussy-curls began to grow in such profusion.
Cries continued to resound from poor Colette; her fingers clawed her sweating palms and her wild shrieks and sobs attested to her agony. Now, pressing the tip of the switch against the pink gape of her cunt, Yusuf purred, "And now you shall have it on the tenderest part of all, whelp of Shaitan! And you shall have it nowhere else until you agree to obey the chieftain of the Riffs! For I swear to you that this night I shall sleep with the daughter of the commandant of El Guiliz, and shall visit into her womb the seed that will make her a Riff and no giaour. Then in a sense the commandant of El Gueliz, my enemy, will be my father-in-law!"
The four men with him burst into obscene laughter at this quip, but Yusuf had drawn back his arm and cut up between Colette's milky, yawning thighs, attacking her tender maiden cunthole.
Her head lunged back, her eyes glassy and bulging, and her mouth gaped in a frenzied, prolonged shriek: "Aiieowwwouu!!! Par pitie, pas la! In the name of pity, not there!"
"Yes, there, little dove, little giaour," Yusuf Ben Tashfin mouthed, his eyes glittering with his augmented rut. "It shall be only there until you agree to salute my weapon and those of all my men!" And for the second time the switch whistled up between the girl's naked thighs, then a third time and then again, and again.
But in the clamor of poor Colette Turdier's wild screams and hysterical cries, her plea for mercy was ignored. The other men watched, shuddering with lust, and Hjalma and the Sudanese attendant were also excited by the torment of the young French girl.
Then pausing, Yusuf Ben Tashfin demanded in a harsh, angry voice, "Well, little giaour, I await your answer. If you do not speak, I shall continue until you are whipped to death!" And once again he pressed the switch against Colette's chafed, throbbing cunthole.
"Oh, not there again-oh, I shall die. I'll do anything, anything you want-oh, Maman, help me-I can't stand it-I have to do what they want-please forgive me, Maman!" the young girl screamed.
Yusuf tossed the switch to his mistress, and then doffed his silken robe. Naked in his sandals, he clambered onto the couch and knelt over the shuddering, milky-naked body of the daughter of the commandant of El Gueliz, while her agonized mother, praying to le bon Dieu to save poor Colette from this frightful fate, again besought him to take her instead.
"Let my newest lieutenant comfort the mother," was the sardonic reply of Yusuf Ben Tashfin, and Hassan, with a cry of joy, stripped himself and threw himself upon Louise Tuerdier, his large hands greedily squeezing the panting titties, his bearded mouth silencing her lips with a savage, draining kiss as his lean prick stabbed into the shaggy fleece between her gaping thighs.
Her body arched and a groan escaped her, attesting to his penetration of her cuntsheath, and then he began to fuck her pitilessly, while Colette's screams rang out, trying to keep Yusufs cock from finding its entryway to the tender gape of her virgin cunt. In vain! And now her cry rang out and her head fell back as her cherry was rent asunder, and Hjalma's lips were moist and twisting with sadistic joy as she followed the sufferings of these two women who again to her represented that female who had mocked and degraded her and upon whom she once again found new vengeance.
And long into the night the torture of Louise Tuerdier and her daughter continued till all five men had had their fill of the two panting, sobbing, agonized captives. And when they were sated, they turned their attention once more to the two Englishwomen who lay captive, Claire and Sylvia Bennings; and even Nouraji had his fill of FUCK IT!
And Colette, once again menaced with the switch on her inner thighs and cunt and titties, was compelled, while her mother tearfully watched, to suck each of those Riffian pricks, as well as that of the giant Sudanese.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was nearly dawn out on the desert, and the sentries around the tents and near the oasis of Katijba drowsed, for the night had been still and not a sign of the French troops. In the tent of Hjalma, Yusuf Ben Tashfin, his principal aides, and the newly promoted Hassan had sated themselves with the four helpless naked white female captives. Fucked in turn by all the men, Louise Tuerdier, clad only in her hose and pumps and elastic garters fixed at the tops of those fine silken hose, had been forced to watch her own daughter's martyrdom.
On the couch beside her mother's, Colette, clad equally in only hose, garters, and pumps, had writhed and shrieked and begged for mercy while one of the Riffs fucked her slowly and luxuriatingly, looking over to comment to his colleague of the moment who was atop the mother, so that both men compared salaciously the reactions of their coerced, defenseless partners.
Not satisfied with this, the insatiable and vengeful Hjalma had, as the men lounged on the poufs on the floor and sipped Algerian wine and puffed at strong cheroots and cigars which had been part of the booty fallen to them after a raid some weeks ago in a small French garrison some twenty-five miles from Marrakesh, ordered that the four women now amuse then captors by making love among themselves.
First Louise Tuerdier and Colette were commanded to he together on a couch in front of the avid spectators and kiss and fondle each other, rubbing then pussies together. When Louise Tuerdier vainly protested this infamous and shameful order, Hjalma simply replied, "Giaour bitch, if you do not instruct your daughter how to obey us, she will be bound to a stake out there in the sun and offered to any of our soldiers who wish to fuck her. And she will be left there till nightfall. With her tender skin under the broiling Moroccan sun, I do not think she will live very long after that." And so the wife of the commandant of El Gueliz, tears streaming down her face, took her weeping daughter by the hand and tried to soothe the unfortunate young girl by urging her not to think of the shame and the sin, but rather as an act forced upon them by their ruthless conquerors, adding, "My poor Colette, ma petite, if they wish to see us love each other, it is true that I do love you, and thus in a sense what we must do is not a sin before le bon Dieu."
"Well spoken, you French whore," the ferocious Moroccan beauty sarcastically jeered. "Justify it as you will, you will do it and you will please us, or Nouraji will bugger you both!"
And while Sylvia and Claire Bennings, themselves exhausted and agonized from their own ordeal this unending, shameful night, watched from their couch, auburn-haired, matronly Louise Tuerdier and her brown-haired sixteen-year-old daughter embraced as lesbians do. And yet there was a strange chastity to this embrace, a tenderness and protectiveness and maternal solicitude which angered Hjalma.
Soon she tired of this sport and angrily commanded, "No, no, we shall fall asleep watching you that way! Now then, you, the mother, put your head between your daughter's thighs and you, girl, do the same for you mother. Suck and lick each other's cunts. And the one who does not have pleasure from it shall be buggered by Nouraji, this I promise on the Koran."
Louise Tuerdier uttered a cry of consternation and revulsion. But the giant Sudanese, his loincloth already off and his prick enormous, slowly approached and lifted his kurbash. The matron's eyes fell on that enormous prong, and she shuddered in apprehension. Sobbingly, she rearranged herself on her couch so that she knelt over the girl's body and bent her head down to the girl's brown-thatched cunthole, while at the same time lowering her own ample bottom towards her daughter's tearstained face.
"We must, my darling," she groaned, "I will try to give you pleasure, for I do not wish to see that horrible creature abuse you in that vile way!"
"Nouraji, this French giaour bitch insults you again. Well, you will have your answer. But while she gamahuches her brat, see that fat ass of hers is blistered by the good kurbash."
"Willingly, mistress," the giant Sudanese sniggered as he planted himself at one end of the couch so that he faced the upreared, naked bottom of the wife of the commandant of El Gueliz.
Now Louise Tuerdier, closing her eyes to shut out Hjalma's taunting face, began to kiss Colette's chafed quim. The blood of the girl's defloration had been sponged away, and throughout the night she had been anointed with fragrant oils and perfumes to render her skin more supple and smooth, to freshen her and to make her still more desirable to the brutal Riffs who were enjoying her. At the first kiss, Colette uttered a sobbing gasp and squirmed: "Ohhh, Maman, je veux mourir!"
"Oh no, my poor child, you shan't die. We shall both li e to see these vicious savages punished," Louise Tuerdier whispered back in French.
But Hjalma understood, and made a sign. Instantly the rhinocerous-hide whip smacked viciously across both jutting asscheeks, and Louise Tuerdier uttered a shriek of agony, jerked and twisted violently as she lifted her head from between her daughter's straddled thighs and looked back over her shoulder with tears streaming down her cheeks.
"That is his answer," Hjalma mocked her. "Now back to work. And you, little bitch, you had best find pleasure under your mother's sweet caresses, or that monstrous prick you see between Nouraji's sturdy legs will visit the little hole between the cheeks of your bottom. So I have pl-edged."
And as Nouraji raised the kurbash slowly again over the whip-streaked spacious bottomrounds of the unfortunate matron, Louise Teurdier uttered a wail of terror and plunged her head back down to resume the gamahuching of her own teenaged daughter. This time her tongue slushed deeply into that ravaged quim, and she sought out the button of Colette's dainty clitoris, determined that at least her daughter should not suffer the hideous fate of buggering by the savage Sudanese attendant of Yusufs diabolical mistress.
Colette moaned and squirmed, her thighs spreading wide and the muscles convulsively flexing as she felt this erotic stimulus. Hjalma jeered, "The little whelp is already well trained to be a whore, Madame Tuerdier! Take heart, for even if you are not rescued, you can earn your daily bread, the two of you, in one of our brothels in free Marrakesh!"
"Suck me too, lick me, ma petite!" Madame Tuerdier groaned to Colette. "Oh, do what I tell you to, or they will whip you cruelly! Oh, what infamy, what horror! But we shall be avenged, Henri will not abandon us."
Colette, her trembling fingers grasping her mother's stockinged thighs, assiduously gamahuched her in return by way of distraction. Ardent as the young girl was, for she had already secretly tasted some of the pleasures of lust, she found herself furiously excited as Louise Tuerdier's pink tongue continued to lap her cunt and rub the swollen nodule of her clitoris. And thus it was that she reached climax, thrashing about and moaning, and Hjalma proclaimed, "Did I not tell you that the Utile bitch was the more wanton of the two? Very weU, Nouraji, take your reward of the mother."
"A thousand thanks, good mistress," Nouraji exclaimed. Casting aside the kurbash, he ascended the couch and knelt behind the frantic, naked matron. Then, seizing her welted bottomcheeks with his dark hands and forcing them apart, he exposed the puckering rosette of her asshole and the tip of his prick pressed apart the shrinking Ups and entered the portals of Sodom.
"Oh no-ca me brule, ayez pitie dune femme" the auburn-haired matron screamed, trying vainly to extricate that massive spear from her bowels. Twisting and arching, she sought to eject it, all her sphincter muscles in wild revolt. But Nouraji was too well planted and now, reaching forward to grab her titties and squeeze them cruelly, he jammed himself violently and almost to the hilt in a single thrust, drawing a frenzied wail of unspeakable suffering from the wife of the commandant of El Gueliz.
Erotically excited by all that had taken place this night, Hjalma, naked in her sandals, flung herself upon the couch where Claire and Sylvia Bennings lay. She mounted the girl, her hands reaching under Sylvia's behind to squeeze the cheeks, and then she hissed, "English bitch, rub me, kiss me, love me, or Nouraji shall do the same to that dainty little hole where my finger now lodges!"
And, to suit action to word, she jabbed her forefinger into Sylvia's tender asshole and worked it about while she proceeded to grind her cunt salaciously against the English girl's.
Thus constrained by tenor and the threat of more flogging and of bestial injury, Sylvia Bennings was forced to lock her arms around the Moorish girl and to tender her mouth to the biting and bruising and draining kisses of Yusufs implacable mistress.
And to add to Hjalma's ecstasies, the hoarse cries and sobbing plaints of the auburn-haired matron while Nouraji buggered her evoked frenetic lust. Even the men who sprawled against their poufs, languid and sated from a night of orgiastic pleasure, felt themselves once more aroused by the sight of all that naked skin. Yusuf staggered to his feet, downed a beaker of wine, and strode over to the couch on which his mistress lay entwined with Sylvia. Plunging his left hand into the dishevled hair of Sylvia Bennings, he bent down over her upraised face, his prick, limp now, presented to the blonde matron, hissing, "Suck me well, make me alive again to fuck you again, English whore!" And Claire Bennings, closing her eyes and shuddering, had to obey....
Colonel Esteban Montez had deployed his forces in an attempt to defeat Abd-el-Krim; of his three thousand fighting men he sent his best captain, Pedro Alicante, towards the oasis of Katijba, while he at the head of his remaining two thousand marched all through the night on towards Ksar-es-souk, the headquarters of the wily leader of all Riffian revolt against the French.
Pedro Alicante was a swarthy Castillian of forty-five, a seasoned fighter, and known to be pitiless and unorthodox in his methods of attack. He personally had little love for the French, who were his sillies, but the thought of Abd-el-Krim was as much a menace to Spain with its foothold in Africa as it was to the French. Moreover, if he and his troops could defeat the Riffs, the eyes of the world would once again be focused on Spain, as it was in the glorious days when Spain was the world and ruled it absolutely. Almost a fanatic in his love for his own country, he was equally-fanatic when it came to the interrogation of prisoners and to the ruthless disposal of them. Unwed, with a young nineteen-year-old mistress back home in Seville whom he had taught to pleasure him under the whip and in bondage, Pedro Alicante swore that by dawn the camp of the Riffs near the hill of the Djinns would be razed, and no survivors given quarter.
Two miles away from the oasis, he conferred with his first lieutenant, Majjuel Castilar, an ambitious, handsome black-haired man of twenty-seven, who fancied himself as a Don Juan but who was also a superb swordsman and marksman with rifle and pistol.
"You'll take a hundred men, Lieutenant, and you'll go on to the oasis. Well flank you to the north and south, and when we hear gunfire, I'll send in my two hundred horsemen. The Riffs don't expect us Spanish to know much about cavalry, but then they know very little of our history. We defeated the Moors centuries ago in our own beloved Spain, and the difference is only that we shall now do it here on their own abominable sand."
Manuel Castilar saluted smartly and then gave his orders. The sun was just beginning to rise over the oasis of Katijba when he reached the clump of palm trees beyond which were hidden the tents of Yusuf s camp. But Lieutenant Hassan, who commanded the hundred marksmen posted around the oasis, had seen through his binoculars the advent of the Spanish forces, and had sounded the alarm.
Lieutenant Manuel Castilar barked a command to his first sergeant: "Beware of snipers, Sergeant Alessandro. They're certain to have them posted below those palm trees and there at the opening of the oasis. Have two of your best marksmen try to draw their fire so we can see where they are. We'll take cover on these little ravines in the sand. The geography helps us as attackers, for if it were flat plain, we should all be in danger."
Three Spanish marksmen began to fire at the palm trees. Immediately a shout of joy rose from the Spanish troops as they saw an Arab in his burnous tumble out of the top of one of the trees near the oasis and sprawl upon the sand, his long rifle by his side. But answering fire from the snipers took fatal toll of a dozen Spanish soldiers, yet it served to show where most of the hidden Riffian defense was lodged.
The lieutenant waved his saber and ordered a charge, with fixed bayonets at the ready. Firing from the hip at the least shadowy movement from behind the palm trees, he led the attack. A bullet grazed his side, but he fired at the sniper who had wounded him and saw the Riff stagger back and then sprawl inert beside one of the towering palm trees.
Yusuf Ben Tashfin, hearing the gunfire, strode back to his tent, followed by his new lieutenant, Hassan, and the other aides. Hastily dressing in their robes, arming themselves with pistols, rifles and sabers, they hurried out towards the oasis to rally their men. But the bulk of the Spanish force waited a mile beyond, hidden in a deep ravine of sand. Captain Pedro Alicante heard the gunfire too, and gave orders to his cavalry force: "You'll attack from the left in a single line. Then when you reach the oasis, encircle it. No quarter, not even for the women. These Riffs enlist their women, too, and they are the dirtiest of fighters. Don't let them get near you with their long daggers, or you won't have any becques left for the girls back in Seville and Madrid!"
The Riffian snipers had blunted the Spanish attack, but Lieutenant Castilar and his men had engaged their fire and made possible an attack on their flank. Now from the other flank the Spanish horsemen rode, with rifle fire pouring in. A dozen Riffs tumbled from the palm trees or dropped behind them, and by now Yusuf Ben Tashfin, surveying the carnage, had perceived not only the cavalry, but also the troops beyond, just coming up the ravine.
"We must retreat beyond the hill of the Djinns, and send a courier to Abd-el-Krim's headquarters that we are falling back and that they must come out to engage these new forces. They fly the Spanish flag-there is an alliance between them and the French.
We are outmanned and outnumbered here!" he cried to his subalterns.
Lieutenant Castilar with a dozen of his men had now reached the fringe of the oasis. With his saber, the Spanish officer struck down two bearded tribesmen who sprang at him with scimitars, and with a revolver in his left hand, he killed a Riff who was leveling a rifle at him. That Riff was Hassan, the intended bridegroom of beautiful Djalmah, and now Yusuf Ben Tashfin sprang forward, saber in hand, to engage the wounded lieutenant.
"Your grave awaits you here before you taste the water of Katijba, Spanish giaour!" he mocked as he slashed at the lieutenant's head.
Parrying the blow, Lieutenant Castilar stooped and thrust forward. Yusufs eyes bulged as he stared down at the saber which had transfixed his belly. He staggered back, dropping his own saber and clapping his hands over his wound. Then he sank down on his knees, a look of wonder and agony mingled on his bearded face, and he fell forward, dead.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Within half an hour, the Spanish cavalry had decimated the Riffian snipers and the rest of Captain Alicante's troops were rushed into the oasis and beyond towards the tents of their enemies. Nouraji, seizing a saber, had rushed out of Hjalma's tent and killed two Spaniards. But a third, behind him, clubbed him over the head with the butt of his rifle, and the giant Sudarlese went down. Stunned but not unconscious, he groped for his saber. Pedro Alicante himself set 'lis boot down on the giant Sudanese's wrist, lifted his saber, and, his lips thin and cruel, thrust it down into the throat of Hjalma's attendant, then callously wiped the blade on the dead man's side.
Now he strode towards the larger tent, the tent of Hjalma, followed by Sergeant Alessandrc and a corporal. As he entered, he swore an incredulous oath, seeing the four naked captives on their couches and beautiful, dark-skinned Hjalma, in only a tunic and sandals, a pistol in one hand and a scimitar in the other. With an imprecation, she fired at him but missed, the bullet striking his corporal in the arm. The sergeant rushed forward with a bellow of rage, lifting his saber, but Captain Pedro Alicante cried out, "Don't kill her! I've sport for this one!"
"Giaour dog, I'll kill you, I'll kill you," Hjalma screamed as she lunged at the sergeant with her scimitar. But stepping to one side, he struck with the flat of the saber, and the scimitar was swept from her grasp. With a mocking laugh, he seized her by the scruff of the neck and flung her back onto one of her own couches. Then he barked an order, as three Spanish soldiers entered the tent with rifles ready.
"Tie up that bitch, and be quick about it!"
Pedro Alicante approached the cringing captives.. "You are now free. Who are you, SenorasV
"I am the wife of Colonel Henri Tuerdier of El Gueliz," Louise Tuerdier gasped, one hand covering her pussy and the other arm over her titties, while her blushing and tearful daughter emulated her in attempting to conceal her tender charms from this swarthy officer's eyes.
"Find some clothes for them, you, Basaman, and you, Cordona," the captain barked. "And you, ladies?"
"I-I am Claire Bennings, and this is my daughter Sylvia. Oh, thank God you have come! Have you driven them off? Are we safe at last?"
"Quite safe, Senora Bennings," the captain bowed.
The two privates had found tunics and robes, and hastened to give them to the four unfortunate naked women who had endured such unspeakable degradation. Hurriedly they clothed themselves, and Captain Alicante ordered his sergeant, "As soon as the fighting is over, see that these women are returned to Marrakesh. And send a courier at once to Commandant Tuerdier at El Gueliz that we have his wife and daughter safely and that we have defeated the Riffs at the Oasis of Katijba."
When at last the tent was empty except for himself and two privates and the shuddering, hatefully glowering Hjalma, he stared greedily at her.
"And you, Senorita, are what we call the spoils of war. Who are you?"
"I am Hjalma, consort of Yusuf Ben Tashfin, the leader of the Riffs! Oh, do not boast of your victory yet, you infidel dog."
"Yusuf Ben Tashfin-I have heard his name. And I think he is dead, Senorita."
"You Ue!"
"We shall identify his body, have no fear. Now then, privates, tie that bitch up, her wrists behind her back, her ankles tightly bound and leave her there on the couch."
It was swiftly done, and then the captain reached forward and ripped off Hjalma's tunic and she was naked. "A morsel worthy of myself," he mocked. "I shall attend to you very shortly, linda."
At this moment, two Spanish soldiers entered and smartly saluted, while two more dragged in one of the burnoused Riffs. "Captain, this man speaks French and has asked to surrender. He says there is no use fighting now that the great Yusuf is dead," one of the privates reported.
"No! No! It isn't true!" Hjalma cried. "Alas, dove of the desert," the burnoused tribesman panted, "it is kismet. He lies dead at the oasis of Katijba, I saw him with my own eyes."
"Take him out," Captain Alicante curtly ordered. And when it was done, he began to unbuckle his belt and to remove his bemedaled coat. "He was your lover, si, SenoritaV
"He was a man such as you could never be, you giaour pig!" Hjalma spat.
"It would be interesting to see if I could not make you change your mind, linda," Captain Pedro Alicante chuckled. Gripping his belt, he began to flog her over her titties and belly, over her inner thighs, until at last, shrieking in agony, Hjalma, bound though she was, managed to roll over onto her belly. Then the belt continued to rise and fall onto her naked back and bottom until she was hoarse from shrieking.
Then, oblivious to all else, alone with her in the tent, he liberated his swollen prick and flung himself upon her. It added to his sadistic joy that her ankles were tightly bound and her thighs thus clenched, as he forced himself pitilessly between the lips of her cunt and thrust himself home, his hands reaching under her welted body to squeeze her bottomcheeks. Hjalma twisted her face to one side, closed her eyes, and tried to remain impervious to his determined fucking.
"I'll waken you, I'll make you wriggle, you Moorish slut," he growled as he quickened his tempo inside her tight lovechasm.
Through the door of the tent there now crept a wounded Riff, one of the three who had aided Lieutenant Hassan in abducting the four white captives who had furnished such lubricious pleasure to the Riffs. Gripping a dagger, he moved toward the couch silently, and as Hjalma opened her eyes and stared over the shoulder of her ravisher, she saw him straighten and lift the dagger. Her eyes burned with a savage joy and she nodded.
Captain Pedro Alicante turned, but not in time. The dagger swept down and buried itself in his back. Blood oozed from his lips, and he sagged on the naked body of his ravished victim.
"Oh, quickly, Mouradi," Hjalma panted, "untie me, and get me a robe, and we shall ride out to Abd-el-Krim's camp and there stand against these giaours one last time and hurl them back."
"Swiftly, o dove of the desert," the Riff replied, pulling the bloody dagger out of the dead captain's back and rolling the corpse onto the sandy floor of the tent. Then he went on to slash Hjalma's bonds. But at that moment, a Spanish calvalryman wandered into the tent in search of booty. He saw the two Riffs and raised his rifle quickly as Mouradi came at him. He fired and the force of the blast knocked the Riff back, the shot tearing through his face and leaving him dead on the floor near Hjalma.
The Riff woman scowled at the man.
"You dog!" she screamed.
The cavalryman saw her nude beauty and was overwhelmed. He put his rifle by the door and jumped at her as she screamed and punched.
He knocked her to the floor and pinned her with his heavy body. Her arms flailed his back wildly. Her movement was too much for the man. He punched her hard in the mouth, knocking her almost unconscious.
She lay motionless on the floor while the man pulled down his pants and took out his long hard cock. He looked down at her nude body with amazement, staring at her dark firm breasts and the deep dense black bush between her soft legs.
He was filled with mad desire. He had never seen such beauty. And now it lay before him, his for the taking. He looked outside the tent, pants around knees, and saw soldiers streaming by. He ran back into he tent and jumped on Hjalma just as she came to.
He pinned her to the floor, spreading her bound legs with his hand and probing for her cunt. She realized what was going on and began beating him on the back. He raised his hands to smash her again and she stopped. She realized there was nothing she could do. She was going to be raped. If she tried to fight back, she would only get a punch in the face for her effort.
The man slid his cock between her soft lips and into the wetness of her cunt. He pushed with his hips until his cock was buried deep in her cunt, his bush bristling against hers. He began to thrust in and out, moaning at the delight of her warmth around his throbbing tool.
The nude beauty lay still, ignoring the man as he huffed and puffed on top of her. She would have to wait until he shot his cursed load into her and went on his way. Then she would try to escape.
The man pumped slowly, feeling his cock sliding easily in and out of the woman's wet hole. He grabbed hold of her full tits, squeezing them tight and pinching her nipples. He kissed her on the neck and shoulders, reveling in the warm softness of her dark skin.
He looked down to see his long fat ord sliding out of her cunt, gleaming with the wetness of her juices. He pulled it out until the head alone was buried between her lips, then thrust hard to drive it back. The rod disappeared into her bush.
He pumped furiously, but was disappointed that the thrusts of his long cock did not excite the woman.
"What's the matter?" he said. "Don't you Riffs like to fuck?"
"Not with cursed dogs," she screamed at him. He pinched her nipples hard and she winced in pain. He bit her neck until she was ready to strike out at him again, but she checked herself.
He resumed his work, sliding in and out of her warmth with long powerful thrusts. The woman lay patiently on her back as he breathed hard into her ear, rising towards his climax.
He was bouncing up and down on Hjalma as his balls swung against her ass and his cock slid into her pussy. He screamed loudly at the delight as his head swelled in her hole, swollen with come.
He held onto her nude body tight and pumped with his hips at a furious pace as he howled and shot his load into her cunt. She did not move as he huffed over her and she felt the hot wetness of his gism in her cunt. She wanted to spit in his face.
He emptied his balls in her pussy and dismounted her. For some reason he was mad. He had released his sexual excitment and now was angry that she did not cooperate.
He pulled off his pants, for they were wrapped around his ankles such that he could hardly move. He was preparing to put them on again when he saw the woman looking up at him in scorn.
"Aren't you going to at least untie me?" she asked.
"After that?" he laughed.
"I could have beat you so much you wouldn't have enjoyed it," she said.
"I would have knocked you out again," the soldier replied.
"And then you would have made love to an unconscious woman?" she barked, in scorn.
"It wouldn't have been much different," the man said. "You didn't do a thing."
"What do you expect me to do when my legs are bound?" she said, still trying to trick him into releasing her.
"I could have beat you senseless," said the man.
"You're lucky I chose only to rape you."
"But it could have been so much better for you," she smiled.
"Oh?" he said.
"And for me too," she laughed.
"You too?" he said, eyes wide.
"Yes, I would have enjoyed it if I had been free," she said, still smiling.
"You would have?" he said, beginning to swallow her yarn.
"Yes," she replied, "and when I enjoy it, I can make it so good for my man."
"I don't believe you," said the cavalryman. "You're just trying to trick me."
"That could be," she smiled. "But how do you know. You wouldn't believe how good I could nuke it. It's worth a try."
"What would you have me do?" he asked.
"Untie me," she said. "Just untie me and I'll do anything you want."
"You aren't lying?" he said.
"No, just give me a chance," she said. "I'll make sure that you never regret it."
"Just what will you do?" he asked.
"I'll take your cock in my hand and caress it so smoothly that you will rise immediately. Then I will take it in my mouth," she said with eyes wide, "and suck it so gently you will scream out in ecstasy."
"Yes, yes, go on," he said.
"I will kiss your swollen head many times and suck on your staff until you moan," she continued. "I will put the whole thing in my mouth and suck on your balls at the same time. Then you can suck on my cunt as long as you want, and stick your cock back into my cunt and fuck me all day. Just release my bonds."
The man's cock had begun to swell at her narrative.
Now it throbbed in front of him. He was too hot to refuse.
"You are not lying," he said.
She reached out and touched his pulsing cock.
"Try me," she smiled.
The man took out his knife and cut the bond on her legs. She was free.
"Now suck on my cock," he said, standing in front of her.
Hjalma knelt in front of the standing man and touched his cock. She looked up and saw him close his eyes at her touch. She thrust her head between his legs and pushed him to the floor.
As he toppled to the ground, Hjalma ran to the door for the rifle. The man hit the ground hard and then sprang to his feet as the woman reached the gun and took it in her hands.
Fear flashed across the man's face as he saw her raise the rifle at him. He ran with all his speed at her. He was almost on her when the rifle exploded in her hand, sending out its hot lead into his crotch. The shot tore his cock off and ripped open his stomach, and he was thrown back far into the tent.
The woman laughed at him as he lay staring up at her with his last few seconds of life. He looked into her mocking face, the face that had cost him his life. Then he rolled over and blood poured out his mouth as he died.
Hjalma stood over him and spit.
"Cursed dog," she scowled.
She heard a noise in the door and turned to see the sergeant who had earlier tried to kill her with his saber. His pistol was in his hand.
Hjalma raised the rifle at him, but even as she screamed in terror, the revolver spoke. She coughed, stared up at the sergeant with agonized, filming eyes, and then fell forward between the bodies of Mouradi and the dead cavalryman.
It was over. And two weeks later, Abd-el-Krim and all his forces surrendered. The Riffian chief was exiled. But he was to escape and again stir revolt against the French. Once again the saga of lust and blood and sadism and merciless inhumanity would be renewed as it is in every war in which there are no victors.
