Quaking and full of wonder, Zohra followed the old woman down a dark, cool corridor and into another court, shadier and more fragrant, with the sounds of the doves in the fruit trees, and a trickling mossy fountain, and a dark pool with lilies and marvelous fish of silver, gold, and pearl. Opening upon the garden was a large room hung in dark velvets and richly carpeted, aitd strewn with rose petals and sumptuous pillows. There, gross and bloated with the food that was his remaining pleasure, lying on his fat flanks, clad in a white jalaba, smoking a narghile, was the once grand sheik.
She bowed low to him. He said nothing, and she bowed the second, then the third time, and then she stood, her eyes slightly downcast, but peeking from the coloured veils slyly. He appraised her, something lighting in his small, evil eyes. He puffed at his narghile with his narrow mouth which, as a result of his continuing displeasure, had grown into a tense fine of hideous cruelty."
* * *
Europeans, knowing that Moslem women are cloistered and appear veiled in public, begin with believing them to be mere articles of luxury; and only after long residence they find out that nowhere has the sex so much real liberty and power as in the Moslem East.
-Sir Richard Burton
* * *
CHAPTER ONE
Old Sheik Fawzi had four wives and so many concubines he could not keep any of them happy. He was wealthy and his tribe was one of the strongest in all the Adas, and the valleys and slopes their flocks grazed were green, and the waters of their springs everlasting and sweet, the palms in the valleys were abundant in dates, and the pines of the heights harbored hives of the purest honey.
Furthermore, Allah blessed the old sheik with men who were strong warriors, diligent farmers, alert herdsmen, and cunning traders; and-dream upon this-the most beautiful girls of all the tribes of the mountains. The Blue Men carried their praises with them into the hottest reaches of the Sahara, and it is said their fame crossed to the plains below the great desert, and that the black men woke up wet in their sleep because of the girls from the valley of Ain Sebaa.
The girls were prized for their variety: in the tribe's blood ran the blood of Negroes, and some were dusty, as of Arabs, and some were brown as almonds, and there were blond Berbers, as pink as almond trees in bloom. From the coasts of the two great seas to the edge of the greater sea of sand, men had a saying: Blonde, Brown, Black of Ain Sebaa, pleasure aplenty and pain assure.
For the women of Ain Sebaa were lascivious indeed.
Old Sheik Fawzi was rich in all that gave pleasure, but that of the greatest pleasure: the Sheik's once stately flower, had wilted. Witches, Jews, sorcerers, magicians came to ply him with potions and philters, and quacks came to sell him rejuvenating devices, and all women came to try out their charms.
One was a girl named Zohra, who had the tender eyes of a gazelle and the voluptuous, carnal manners of a leopard in heat. Of hot Zohra will we speak, and of her adventures in the harem, and how she brought Jafar, her lover, into the harem secretly so that they both might taste of delights rarer than one dares utter, for shameful creatures the women of Ain Sebaa be!-and potent lovers their men!
Now Zohra's father was a shepherd on the coldest edge of the mountains, and so he slept with two of his daughters to keep them warm, and let his flocks and his other daughters run wild. And though they were all prettier than the wildflowers growing among the rocks, their father could not get them married off because they were such good lovers they would be terrible wives.
Zohra was just slipping from the majesty of her girlhood into the majesty of womanhood. Her soft breasts were beginning well to swell, and their small, pale nipples tingled at the sight of a man. She had just begun to use the razor upon her slender, energetic little body, her skin the color of a bitten almond. Her large, soft gazelle eyes pleaded for love, her thoughts of it moistened them. At the sight of a man she was a leopard; she leapt, she squirmed, she rolled, she cried, ah, what things she did not do, and how many did them with her, and how often she did it!
And so when the word of his daughter's especial loveliness and her cachet of erotic enchantments reached her father, he thought: I will send her down to old Sheik Fawzi to be his concubine, for he has already four wives. If she succeeds in rousing the old man's sleeping strength, then she, and I, and my abundant daughters will be rewarded, perhaps even the flocks will graze on a warmer slope. Why, Allah might even see fit that he should divorce one of his wives and marry her, but this would be a blessing too great to bear. Therefore I will call her in from her sheep now and tell her. It is bedtime anyway, and getting cold.
And so he called her, and she answered from afar in the pines, and when she was finished she came obediently home to her father, who kissed her for being his most obedient daughter, and took her inside the tent, and sat her beside him on the rugs, and she lighted his pipe, and he sipped at his glass of mint tea.
"O my daughter," said he, "do not hide your gazelle eyes from me. Soon, inshallah, they will look upon the old Sheik Fawzi."
Her soft eyes looked strange, for she was thinking: But who wishes to be with a king who isn't a man?
Her father went on, "For-open your kaftan, my dear-yes-for your charms, and your ways I am not at all unaware of, and if you should succeed in making the old king a young man again, we will be richly rewarded."
Zohra was very quick-minded and knew to keep her sweet-tasting lips shut. So she thought: And how shall I contrive to get my beloved Jafar into the harem to see me? For I cannot be long away from my heart. But she remembered that Jafar was the cleverest, most disdainful, but still the best of her lovers, and that doubtless he would find a way into the harem-if indeed he hadn't one already.
So she thought as her father examined her smooth skin marred only by a love bite in the shape of a heart on her slender neck. He quoted old poets upon her young breasts, and the gaze of his eyes made them rise into taut, eager points like little brown flower buds. Between them hung a finely-worked gold chain with a big chunk of amber on it, the color of her nipples.
At her belly he dared not look, though she was holding open her dark robes obligingly for him, and gazing sadly, thoughtfully at him. She licked her lips a little and sat very still.
Her pearl belly, her pearl thighs, the sweetness that rose like jasmine as she blushed, beginning at the lovely brown curls about her forehead, then lighting her face another hue, the blush suddenly flushed in her neck that spread like a slow flame beneath the skin over her belly and thighs and her slim legs, caused her to shudder faintly under the arousing stare.
Her father nodded, and viewed her almost gravely. He swallowed. His daughter shifted slightly on her hips, drawing his gaze from the softest part of her to the smoothness of her thighs and the strong, feminine rise of her buttocks. His lips tightened and spit gathered in his mouth. Old One Eye stirred.
"Turn around, my almond," he said. She obeyed, rising quietly, her eyes slightly lowered, edged by thick black lashes, her hair hiding part of the sensuous, expectant face. The curls were dark and profuse against the paleness of her back, and they reached almost to the two smiling dimples that marked the beginning of her buttocks. Her buttocks blushed faintly, too, and her long legs were turned as gracefully as a swan's neck. Another little quake shot through her body, the cold after the flame.
"Cold, my daughter?" said her father.
"Hot," said Zohra. She smiled a little wickedly with her teeth, but her eyes kept their gazelle look of wonder, and her readiness was betrayed in the two dimples of her cheeks.
Oh, she was the flower that hides among the rocks, she was the hawk, the swallow, she was the honey of the trees of the valleys of Ain Sebaa!
"Well, I'm cold," lied her father, who was a simple man, "and it's time to sleep, so close your robes around your poor little body before you tremble again, and get the blanket to cover us with."
She obeyed most readily, and put his pipe and his glass of mint tea by his head, and blew out the lamp, and covered him up in the blanket, and crawled in beside him cozily, with her buttocks to him, snuggling as if for warmth, and her back to him, and her elbows drawn up under her pillow, as if she were going to sleep. She sighed a great sigh of contentment and went to sleep, or so she pretended.
Her father lay there a while, trying to make his breath sound as if he were sleeping, for he was thinking, one does not buy a camel with one's eyes alone, one must try with one's hands the merchandise. I wouldn't want to send the old sheik a defective article, he would leave me here on the coldest cliff side. And so he stealthily lifted the kaftan from her legs, slowly working the soft cloth up over her smooth legs, inspecting them to find them smooth as rubbed wood, the skin soft as honeysuckle juice, and when he touched the softer flesh of her buttocks, and the firm young muscle in them, an odor, a scent rose up out of her body like a cloud of wine.
Now, he was trembling and she lay still as stone, but her body was hot under his hands, hotter about the lower part of her swelling buttocks, cooler along the ridge of her back, hot about her neck. He inspected the surface of her skin, ran his hands around her and got her honey breasts, and fingered the nipples, every little bump, and rubbed her ivory belly, and then he very slowly opened, with his fingers, the little door, and put his finger in: it was hot, and she sighed and another earthquake rocked her little body, but she did not move.
Hm, thought the simple old man, I should inspect her deeper than my fingers can explore. And so he slowly, stealthily lifted her leg and drew closer to her back, and that instrument he had used to make her with he inserted into the searing warmth of her fragrant, fleshy cave, slowly, so as not to wake her. A bit at a time he sneaked in the closed door and half way in if opened of its own, and her trembling sigh greeted him.
As he slowly imbedded himself in her tight, scorching body a dizzying pleasure rose up in his head and he forgot his inspection, and ran his inspector all round her premises. His dutiful daughter said not a word, but little noises of pleasure escaped from her, and she began to lift her buttocks this way, press down with that, pull forward, push back, so that he might reach all comers or pockets or secret places, indeed, he felt, so that he might reach to the very center of her lovely body.
He gripped her breasts and drew her even closer, and put his face in the fragrant curls and bit her neck. Soon enough her body was rocking forward and back in the greatest delight, and his could only do the same, and the more she rocked and pushed the more he did, until he was running faster than the gazelle upon the plain and she faster than the cheetah, until his mind and being soared higher than the hawk above the mountaintop, and his fish swam to the deepest part of the sea.
Before his excitement could be wrenched out of him she gave a fair squeal of joy, and slammed so hard against him he thought she would knock him out, and her body closed upon him even tighter, and certain secret muscles of hers-wonder that she was!-contracted upon him to draw from him the most exquisite pleasure, and, indeed, to pull from him the ultimate pleasure, and he wildly yelled as from him flowed his precious milk, and her body again reached its own highest pitch, and as each jerk drained from him he was sitting upon a mountain top, or deep in the cool gardens of the shady valley, he knew not which.
He was worn out, then, with the inspection, too tired to move, or remove himself. He was so deeply lodged he felt he could not escape, but what sweet prison it was. In fact, the solidity of his vigor did not diminish, and so after he had rested for a while, dreaming of the honors his precious little Zohra might bring upon him, he decided to inspect her again. And so he did, flipping her over to face him, so that he might not miss something that escaped him the first time. His second inspection proved as satisfactory as his first. And his third was longer, and still revealed not a single defect. He went to sleep a proud father, and she a happy daughter.
In the morning the family gathered, slaughtered a sheep, and feasted all day and into the night, and everyone cried to see lovely Zohra go, and Zohra, though she was thrilled at the prospect of leaving the rocky mountainside for the comforts and highlife of the town, was busy in her fertile head thinking how best to signal Jafar to join her there.
She knew one must be very clever-but that, Jafar was. But how dangerous it was for a man to go near the harem, which the cruel old sheik so jealously guarded. Above the gates of his qasbah hung heads whose once lustful eyes were now nests for flies, and much worse was the sight of their once brave, now shrunken members thrust into the mouths of their skulls. It was fearful to see, worse to remember.
When their feasting and crying were done, they dressed Zohra in the finest kaftan of blue and gold, and covered her in veils and a robe of pollen color, and put her atop a white mule, and accompanied her with flutes and drums and cries of joy, as if she were a bridge. They went down from the mountainside, through the almond trees, down through the fruit trees, and through the groves of palms to the qasbah of Ain Sebaa.
The walls of the qasbah were red and high, and there were eight parapets each crowned with the head of a male intruder, and there were heads above the gate, and two black guards at the gate. They were admitted readily into the courtyard for a conference with Zibilli.
Zibilli was the sheik's favorite brother, a thin, bright-eyed man with a lecherous mouth. He was the only male in the truculent sheik's confidence, for it was well known that gaunt Zibilli cared not even a sneer for the charms of females, but was known to have put every pretty boy in the valley of Ain Sebaa on his belly and filled him with the noble milk. He was so disdainful of women that he never even looked at them, and spoke to them calling them all 'mama'; he always looked past them to their sons and little brothers. Therefore he was sole in the grace of the old Fawzi, and he was rewarded with a little brother for the trust he afforded, and for his job-which was a bit odious to him-of receiving the magicians, witches, and charming women who were always knocking at the gate to gain entrance to the sheik and attempt a cure of his ailment.
Zibilli sat in the perfumed shade of an orange tree, robed in silks from Marrakesh, with a pot of gold coins before him on his right, and on his left a pot that was covered, and it was a brew that made a man a woman for a year and a day, and this he gave to fakes and quacks, all those males who failed in their claims. To the girls and women who came willingly, or were brought against their will, he gave not even a smile or a glance, he simply motioned them, with a graceful gesture of his long, ringed fingers, into the bedchamber of his older brother. He did not attempt to judge their beauty, claiming that men who rode camels could not criticize men who rode cows.
Even Zohra, trembling under her veils, did not move his head or arrest his eye. Gazing from the shady, perfumed court through the portals to her brothers, he ignored the women of her family and gestured for Zohra to go with an old woman, and dismissed her womenfolk.
Quaking and full of wonder, Zohra followed the old woman down a dark, cool corridor and into another court, shadier and more fragrant, with the sounds of doves in the fruit trees, and a trickling mossy fountain, and a dark pool with lilies and marvellous fish of silver, gold, and pearl. Opening upon the garden was a large room hung in dark velvets and richly carpeted and strewn with rose petals and sumptuous pillows.
There, gross and bloated with the food that was his remaining pleasure, lying on his fat flanks, clad in a white jalaba, smoking a narghile, was the once grand sheik.
She bowed low to him. He said nothing, and she bowed the second, then the third time, and then she stood, her eyes slightly downcast, but peeking from the coloured veils slyly.
He appraised her, something lighting in his small, evil eyes. He puffed at his narghile with his narrow mouth, which, as a result of his continuing displeasure, had grown into a tense line of hideous cruelty. Even his fingers were fat, and they tightened upon the mouthpiece of the narghile, and he puffed profusely, Ms eyes consuming her. There was not a sound but the doves gurgling in the of other birds from all about.
Zohra's heart cracked with sorrow when she saw this limp old frog, and she watched with disgust as he shifted faintly on Ms Mp. But she was obedient, and she was thinking of Jafar, and she trembled and shyly averted her eyes.
He said nothing. With a slight, lazy gesture of his white-turbaned head he indicated her to remove the veils that hung over her face and hair.
With a gesture as languid as the moon rising she lifted the first veil, which was the color of the spring moon, and let it fall as lightly as the spring rain to the grass on which she stood.
He nodded again, and she approached, and with two little flicks left her slippers on the doorsill, and stepped her delicate feet upon the soft carpet, and stood motionless before him, holding her breath. At Ms nod she raised her hands to remove the second veil, green as a young willow leaf, and let it flutter down. He squirmed again, and even grunted. She let the third and last veil, white, fall, and stood before him clad in rich gold and blue. She cast her eyes this way and that, and in spite of her sorrow and disgust, began to tremble with the presence of a man.
But this prince had no subtlety, he nodded again with his lips tightly shut and dry, and she stepped closer, within Ms reach. Another moment he gazed, while a blush brightened her lovely face and slowly he nodded again, and she stepped forward. Then, to her immense surprise, he put one hand upon her neck and pushed her from her standing position to a kneeling one before him, and grunting and groaning in his old obesity, he sat up, and his lazy hands fiddled with her belt, and she knew to loosen it and let it fall. Then he ran Ms hands up under her skirts, drawing them up to reveal her legs, up over her embroidered drawers, which he pulled down over her buttocks, murmuring and gurgling and clumsy. She held her kaftan up, lifted it even higher than he seemed to want it, so that her glorious breasts were revealed, and the scratchy material of her kaftan all gathered up about her neck and face as he stroked and pinched at her buttocks. He pinched hard, at the base of her spine, working Ms way languidly, with both hands, one on top, one on the bottom, around her buttocks and her warming femininity, and she clenched her teeth at the pain but nevertheless began to breathe harder and tried to keep her body from squirming too wildly.
With her buttocks thus revealed he laid her across Ms lap, and she felt the sleeping giant beneath Ms robes and knew that in Ms younger days he was a warrior and prince indeed, and sensed a sorrow for him that was mitigated only by her sorrow for herself that such a giant should doze so soundly. He pinched with Ms sharp fingernails, he poked with Ms fat fingers, he probed at her, he made her bounce her bottom on his lap.
An awesome hunger and heat rose up in her so her behind flushed, and he pinched and poked harder, but what could she do thus laid across his lap, her behind in the air, her head almost hidden in the kaftan, her legs awkwardly stretched and spread, bouncing upon him? She thought of her Jafar, of their bed of pine needles and their canopy of pines, and their bodies naked as Adam and Eve, and she was both miserable and hot, and bounced more viciously with the thoughts, and shut her eyes and bit her lips as he pinched, poked, and drooled over her. He put his fat fingers where he could not put anything else, and dug them as deep as they would go. This gave her some pain, but some pleasure too, and she bounced all the harder across his lap, her belly bumping upon the hidden giant, but sound asleep-cruel, terrible life!
He was occupied fully now, he had got a bit clever with his fingers, lacking the eleventh, and his left hand under her had two fingers within her, and his right hand pinched about her buttocks and kneaded the great, soft bright mounds of flesh, first the left, then the right, then he drew his fingers along the crack, and tried to bounce his bulk some too, but there was not even a stir in the sleeping giant she was rubbing so hard through the cloth with her belly.
She thought: If the fat old beast would let me up, the giant might wake-Oh, Allah! what am I to do, Oh, Jafar my heart is with you though the hands of the sheik himself are within me, oh Jafar my heart-!
And she wept secretly into her kaftan and bit her rose lips white and kicked her feet as much as she dared, and endured the pinching and pulling of her flesh.
Then to her shocked amazement she felt his hand come crashing down on her bared buttocks with a clap so loud it made the doves in the trees flutter away in fright. This unexpected and uncalled for slap stung so much she could not even cry out, only a voiceless breath rushed from her lungs. It cooled her completely. She lay in astonishment across his lap, completely still and expectant, but buttocks automatically tightened, awaiting the next spank.
It fell, more violent than the first, and at the same time he jammed his fingers in so she cried out, but dared not cry loudly, and bit her lips. And then to her horror the fat flat of his hand fell again, with a vigor unbelievable from such a gross mass of flesh, and her buttocks and the prints of his hands were rose upon her lovely brown flesh. She endured his spanking, swaying her hips this way and that as much as she dared, trailing her legs, biting her lips and clenching her fists into the carpet, her head and curls smothered, her body hot and cold. He spanked her with such vicious delight she thought she might never stop weeping, but the giant slept on.
He slapped for what seemed hours, then years to her, and finally his strength ebbed and his drooling murmuring grew, and he beat her so hard she had not the strength for anything but lying limp across his lap roused by such violence and probing, but starving for the real thing.
Then at last he shoved her viciously from him, tumbling her onto the carpets amidst the disarray of her clothing and finery. He began to swear and rail, shouting incomprehensible things so that the birds hushed singing and the old woman came running into the court and bowed low in the doorway, while poor little Zohra lay writhing and whimpering among her robes, gathering her veils about her bruised nudity.
"Take her away, take her away!" he roared, "Take the vile temptress away, lock her with my other concubines and send her whoreson father and all his family and flocks further up the mountain, to where the snow remains even under the hottest sun of summer, take the slut and lock her away, and bring me some fig brandy!"
And before she knew it, she was being gathered up by the clucking old woman and rushed out of the room and through the court, which echoed with his oaths and groans.
The old woman roughly pushed her through a grilled doorway and into another courtyard, and she was still trying to gather her robes about her nakedness. The old woman slammed the grilled metal gate behind her and turned a great key in its lock, and dropped the key down her bosom, and Zohra stood there dazed, whimpering, with scarcely enough strength to cover her shame.
But suddenly she felt kisses and caresses on her face and neck, and felt feminine words of consolation and adoration, and she dared lift her eyes. Three of the concubines-a fair one, a black one, and one whose brownness was only slightly less perfect than her own-had gathered about her and were kissing her and petting her and consoling her, and whispering to her, and hiding her among the thick leaves of a fig tree; and one of the hands, which she did not know, lifted the skirts that she had just managed to adjust again, and was examining and stroking the marks on her tender buttocks. She heard a voice wistfully say, "Oh, what an houri, straight from Paradise she must have fallen, and this old wretch has beaten her, oh, see the purple prints on her skin of his hands. Oh, beautiful little wildflower, let us stroke your poor body and heal your sufferings."
And she felt the soft, full lips of the lovely Negress kissing away her tears.
CHAPTER TWO
Jafar sat smoking his pipe under the palm's shade in sight of old sheik Fawzi's qasbah, pondering. The women were washing clothes in the river nearby, and Jafar had his eye on a nut-brown girl, and his thoughts on the treasures in the harem. All those poor, hungry women, and all those poor heads on the parapets and above the gate.
"O my brother," said Allal, his friend, a faun-like boy with green eyes, "put off such thoughts and accept the beauty Allah has given us, look at the girls pounding their clothes on the rocks in the river, and forget about the concubines of the sheik. Would you like to have your head so choked with your own member stuck up there for all your old lovelies to see? Keep your head and your brain in it, and your member with its strength, and let the old sheik keep his girls in prison."
"What a waste," was all Jafar murmured, puffing on the pipe.
"Do not philosophize," said the boy. "Thinking is the path to unhappiness."
Jafar smoked a while and then said, "But he has taken all the delights away from us and locked them up, and can't even keep one of them happy."
"Such speculations are not for our mouths," said Allal, casting a longing look toward the imposing red qasbah through the palms, and sighing.
"From as far away as Marrakesh and Fes and even Tangier they come with their daughters and their tricks, and he imprisons the best of the lot. What greed, what torture. Oh, that-"
"Speak not so," said Allal, sad-eyed and shaking his head morosely.
"No, I will think no longer," said Jafar, rising. "Come with me into the village, for I have a few purchases to make. Perhaps I can arouse old Sheik Fawzi with a device of mine."
The boy's green eyes narrowed suspiciously and lit with delight. He hid a smile as they strode off through the tall palms, blowing kisses to the girls, who giggled over their wash, and adjusted their skirts even higher about their legs and thighs-ah, what lascivious beauties the girls of Ain Sebaa! what magnificent sweets are hidden in the harem of the sheik! Jafar winked, but did not smile, he disdained such minor loves and hurried into the village. It was market day and the people of the valleys had gathered with their wares, fruits and vegetables, chickens and sheep, carpets and cloths, and the air was ringing with their cries, their bargaining, their chants. An old man waving a censer perfumed the peasant girls, whose eyes hurt you to be seen with.
Some of even the most tantalizing of them had been laid out on the great inert lap of the sheik and their tender bottoms assailed with his hands, but they had been rejected, thrown ignominiously out of the gates, having not even got a crust of bread for their beating. The poor things felt like leftovers, and their rejection served to make them all the more burning in their desires. Having failed to please the sheik, they overworked to please their lovers, to the despair of their fathers and husbands.
His eye caught a lovely girl of pale blonde, her eyes bluer than the fishing birds of the river, warmer than the belly of a dove. Berber blood in her veins, which made her strong and wild. She was selling three large purple onions, which she held clutched in her lovely pale hand. Coyly she drew the shawl about her butterfly blonde hair and smiled as she held the onions out to him, begging him to buy with soft little whispers, and tugging at his arm, whispering, Onions, onions, onions.
Jafar did not look at her, but did not remove her from his sleeve, and with her clutching and whispering at him, he led her away from the thronged market and into a side alley cool with shade and into a tiny shop of a friend who sold spices. The friend was absent. He sat down in the darkest comer and folded his legs under him . The lovely pale thing had hesitated in the door, and was casting anxious blue looks about the perfumed gloom.
Scornfully glancing up at her, Jafar lit his pipe. "I don't need onions, my sweet," he said.
"Oh, please," she said, coming nearer, shyly.
"You were another one kicked out the door by the sheik, were you not?"
She blushed bright strawberries in her cheeks. She lowered her lids to hide the sad bright blue of her eyes. She nodded and let the shawl fall away from her yellow hair. The king should spit out such a sweet? he thought, but pretended not to look at her.
"Please buy my onions," said she, coming closer, bending and holding them under his nose. "They are sweet, and no one wants me since the sheik threw me out-that is, no one wants me for a wife."
"Hmph, fine wife such would make," snorted Jafar. "Move your onions, they're strong."
The poor girl began to cry, tears rose in her eyes and rushed down her sad, wan face. She hung her head abjectly and let the onions drop on the floor. She stood there a moment and silently wept. "I tried," she murmured.
Jafar put his pipe aside. "Ah, my poor one," he said, in conciliatory tones, "my poor one come sit in my lap and Jafar will tell you what you did wrong." She did not hesitate. She turned and sat down on his lap like a baby might on its uncle's, and Jafar said, "No, pale fawn, not that way, put this leg on this side of me and this on the other, and face me. Ah, is not that better-ah, and this even better," he went on, disguising the catch in his throat, and drawing up her homespun skirts to reveal her bare legs, and then-Glory to the female!-the smooth mound of Venus and the pearl belly. He unraveled the shawls and leaned back against the wall, and revealed before him were her breasts, with nipples bright as cherries, red as cherries-"Ah," said Jafar, "but they do not taste at all like cherries, they're much too sweet. And lean forward, my dear, do not sit so still."
She obeyed. Still the glorious gold of her hair was covering her downcast face, but her waist began to serpent around and her bold fingers searched for secrets under Jafar's robes. She soon found it, he had a secret hard to keep hidden. She brought it forth into the daylight and made a startled sound in her throat. "Now, tell me, poor one, what you did."
She nodded her blonde head and caressed him with greedy fingers, and shook with sobs, her soft bottom quaking against his legs. "I could hardly do anything, he wouldn't let me. I was very surprised when he first began to spank me, but that made me very aroused, for my father used always to spank me so, with my drawers pulled down about my ankles, and I loved my poor dear father, and so when a man thus beats me I become afire, oh, I tremble upon your legs and cannot control the writhing of my shameful body now I think of it-"
"Yes, true, you can't," said Jafar with a little bit of scorn, "Move down, you're too heavy on my legs, no, there, move up, closer, sit with your belly as near to mine as you can and-Ah! ah, my sweet, that is more comfortable-wait-wait, do not be greedy, only a little bit at a time, a tiny morsel-yes-yes, well then, continue your story."
In a voice trembling with remembered pain and present pleasure she dared to lower her body more comfortably a bit, and said, "Aah, Jafar, how I burned, how my thighs and buttocks stung and how I burned within, how I wished for you. My body was on fire and I could not help kicking and lashing, waving my arms like this-"
"Ah, wait," said Jafar rapidly. "Don't thrash your arms so, it makes you press down into my lap deeper than-than you ought."
"I'm sorry," she said, lifting up slowly, slightly, and resting her hands against the wall on either side of his head. "Is this comfortable for you?" she said, leaning forward so her hair tickled about his face and neck and her bracelets tinkled together in his ears.
"Aah, fine, yes, poor little one, continue your story."
"Ah, yes. Aah, and so I was so frantic with this spanking that I at last could no longer restrain myself and began to tear under his robes to reach the only thing in the world I felt would satisfy me, and it was there, but it was unwilling even though I pulled at it, and he kicked me and knocked me right down off his fat mountain of a lap and kicked me here-put your hand back there-yes, there-with all his might Shall I turn around and show you the bruise? It's still there."
"Well, hm, turn half way round and show me," said Jafar, "But not too fast."
Jafar did not say a word as she turned, squirming, half way round to show him. But he made some noises. As she stretched and twisted to give him a view, he said, "Oh, that won't work, twist all the way round the other way."
She did so. "Poor one," he said, leaning up and bending his back to see if he could kiss it. But he just couldn't reach it. So he sighed and laid his back against the wall again, and said, "Can you dance sitting down?"
"I've never tried," she said.
"You must learn," he said, "in order to please the old sheik. So begin."
"Like this...?" she said, doing what she had seen the belly dancers do.
"A little faster," he said. He drummed the rhythm on her thigh. "Ah, there, you're getting it, yes, you're getting it-" and when she'd caught on he said, "Just practice that a while and listen: what you did wrong was to go all dolled up as your father-all the girls' fathers-are won't to send you to him. I will take you there myself, dressed in scant little shawls, decorated with mean bracelets, softly selling onions, and I will claim to him that within this little girl so dejected lies the key to his cure, to his very manliness. I will tell him many things, and you must but look shy and sad, as you looked earlier, and hold your head this way and that, and keep in your blonde head that he might throw you out if you fail again, and that he might also even do something to your poor Jafar so that I could no longer do this to you-"
"Oh no!" she wailed, throwing her body at him so that he felt himself swallowed up in her body and her pity.
"MMMMMmmm," he said, "You see? now, get on with your dance, the tempo increases, this, now," he slapped out the rhythms on her resounding buttocks. She danced the harder and began to toss her blonde hair, and her shoulders and her belly and breasts were pumping so with her effort that her last shawls fell away and Jafar slid half-conscious down the wall. It wasn't long before Jafar was done.
But she kept dancing with everything in her, and pretty soon Jafar felt he was joining in the dance again. But he was wedged down with his head against the wall, and his shoulders on the floor, and so he said, "teach you another dance," and rolled her over on the onions, which she didn't notice, and crushed them beneath her. In his dance he leapt so high his behind bumped a shelf of spices, at just the last moment, and a cloud of ginger, cumin, white pepper, bay, precious saffron, black pepper, cinnamon and such, poured down upon them.
It filled the poor girl's nostrils and she began to sneeze violently, to Jafar's intense delight, and his delight made him kick so hard that down came another shelf and into the hottest but least spiced of places fell a shower of powdered red pepper, so hot she leapt right up like a cat and ran for all her soul right out of the shop forgetting her shawls and her naked blondeness wet with love and reeking of the kitchen shelf.
"Very pretty, but not a very clever girl," said Jafar, rising and dusting the spikes off his body, and adjusting his robes. He thought: Where will we find a girl as voluptuous and clever as Zohra, who's already jailed among his concubines? Wonder what she's doing right now? Probably weeping for me among the other beauties ... oh, look at the legs on that dark one there!
He stopped dead. Stately as a giraffe, black shiny onyx, the stride of a lynx. He followed her, captured by the sinuous motion of her body beneath her brightly patterned clothes. What a breathtaking stride, how those long legs so lightly move, how frankly those marvelous thighs shift, how the supple motions of her strong buttocks scream pleasure, oh, she is the flight of white herons, she is the pounding of the heart.
He leered and mumbled after her all the way to her destination, a vendor of figs. She bent as she bought them, not a kilo or two, but the whole basket, a large round basket of purple figs on their leaves. She cocked up her hip and plumbed for the money in the purse at her waist, all wonderful curves. Then she stood straight again, and cut her dark eyes toward Jafar, making his knees quiver, as she adjusted a pink-flowered cloth around her head. She took her eyes from him, bent from her waist and picked up the whole basket, and balanced it easily upon her head. Pivoting her narrow body she walked away from him, leaving him agog by her one bold and haughty look.
Jafar followed, hypnotized by the swaying length of her. He followed her from the marketplace up the alleyways, up the winding streets, and when she stopped before a small shop, Jafar approached and greeted her, bidding her good morning, no ills?
"No ills, praises to Allah," she answered with her eyes directly upon him, with a vague interest showing through her disdain.
"Tell me," said Jafar, "what are you going to do with so many figs?"
"Make brandy," she said, staring at him evenly, with the basket still motionless upon her head.
"Have you any made already?" he went on, coming closer to her.
"Yes," said she, taking the basket down, "twenty royals a jug." She gathered her skirts so that a length of her shapely dark skin showed, and took out her key.
They entered the dark little shop. Jugs of brandy lined the walls. The air was dark with the perfume of the brandy. Jafar watched her as she bent to put the basket down, and while she was still bent, sorting out figs, he stepped up behind her and put his arms around her middle. She stood up, turning her head slowly to him and glaring at him warningly; but she didn't struggle to get out of his embrace, which he tightened with one arm, and with the other hand he reached down in front of her and rubbed his hand slowly down from her middle, over the mound of her belly, stopping to fiddle briefly with her poke-out navel, and down.
"My brandy is twenty royals a jug, and people travel all the way from Marrakesh, Fes, Maknes, Rabat and Tangier to buy it." Her voice was nasal, sonorous, and firm.
"I'll give you ten for it," he said, dizzied by the hotness of the surface of her skin, and the heady perfumes of her body.
"Ten," she scoffed. "You know where you can put the ten royals." She poked with a finger, and laughed. "The sheik Fawzi of Ain Sebaa himself drinks only my brandy."
"Hmmm?" said Jafar, getting more interested, and lifting her skirts from the rear. She was naked under them. "All right, I'll give you twelve royals."
"Tuzzz," said she with great scorn, and turned her head aside. She reached into the basket and selected a fig. She split the fig in her hand and reached around to place half in his mouth.
"Hmmm, sweet," he said. He was reaching under her skirts with one hand from the bottom, and with the other he went in the top and seized a firm breast, and explored the large nipple that crowned it, he could feel its sweet blackness through his fingertips, and his tongue longed to lick it.
"Eighteen," she said. "I usually get twenty, but since you're my friend . .
"Yes, what is your name?"
"Azlya."
"Aaaaah, Azlya ... Fourteen royals."
"Ha, fourteen! Eighteen, I said." She grumped with aloofness and bent back down to sort her figs. But Jafar did not let go what he had, except for a moment to lift up his own robe.
"Fourteen," he repeated.
"Eighteen," she said.
"The sheik drinks your brandy? Ah, our poor old sheik, ruler of the happiest people in all the Atlas, and he the most miserable of men."
"Mmm, poor man," she murmured, "All right, sixteen."
"Fourteen," he said, fingering the big black nipple into hardness, and pulling up the skirts to reveal her mahogany buttocks. He swooned in the eyes and wobbled in the knees.
"Hmmm," said Jafar.
"Hmmm," said Azlya.
"Fifteen," said they.
And then they did not say much, though they made a good bit of noise, for about three quarters of an hour. When it was done they were covered in figs, fig juice, fig brandy, and their clothes and fig leaves were scattered all over the shop. Jafar's eyes were rolled back in his head as she poured him a little glass of brandy. He toasted her and drank it down.
"The brandy is only less perfectly sweet than you," he said, sighing and lying on his back, and pulling her astride, "and tomorrow, inshAllah, we are going to call upon the sheik. I will disguise myself as an astrologer from an island in the west, and I will say to him, if this woman does not cure your condition, then this brandy will, and if this brandy does not cure your condition, then I have a secret device which will."
"Ha, you're crazy," she said, kneeling over him and swaying her heavy breasts near his nose, just for the fun of it. "I don't want to be a prisoner, even the sheik's-especially the sheik's. Why you couldn't get me into that fat old-"
"Our beloved sheik-"
"No, never in the world! I've seen him through the grille when I took the brandy to him, and I've seen those poor hungry beauties, and I'd rather be a poor wife slaving over her figs than a queen in that harem."
"All right then," said Jafar, "I'll go without you. I'll have to make use of my secret device."
"What secret device?" she said, wiggling her breasts very close and squirming her behind in the air, "hmm? Jafar? What secret device?" She tickled his thighs.
"Well. I cannot tell the secret," he said.
"Aw what-?" she said, and then she went on to beg, plead, cajole, and she got something out of him all right, but it wasn't the secret.
CHAPTER THREE
Jafar never left poor Zohra's mind, but she was not idle, nor was she unloved among the concubines. From the moment the lovely Negress, whose name was Khala, had kissed her bitter tears away, she had known nothing but the consoling of her lonely, curvaceous, man-starved sisters. To a one they swore their unhappiness, they swore to help her escape if she would only help them; they maintained that though great ruler of a lovely land the old sheik might be, he would suffer and so would all his happy tribes if he did not find alleviation to his longings. For all the wives and concubines were privy to what the country people were not-that the old Fawzi was near to demented, and, oh by Allah it is true and truth must be said: he was driven nearly mad by the cunning and the beautiful creatures of the harem of Ain Sebaa. What treachery they have in their hearts! What grace in their limbs! What heat in their torsos.
They intrigued. Each one attempted, by caresses and promises, stolen kisses and inviting whispers. A slender redhead rubbed her fingers over Zohra's skin like yellow butterflies, and drew near her, under the fig tree. "Thinking is the path to unhappiness, poor Zohra," she said philosophically, and ran her hands over Zohra's slender ankles, and played with the purple beads on them. Zohra squirmed and nodded.
The Negress sat beside her and put her ebony, perfumed arms around her. She sighed and shook her head gravely, and then drew Zohra into the warmth and suppleness of her bosom. She ran her hands up and down Zohra's back, comfortingly, and sighed, drawing her ever closer in a fond and sisterly embrace.
They sighed, their bodies rising and falling in unison. Poor Zohra lay her head abjectly on Khala's shoulder, and Khala kissed her ears, very lightly at first, brushing them with her moist lips, then she began to nibble at the earlobes, eliciting a shudder from Zohra. Khala inserted her tongue, ever so lightly, into the recesses of Zohra's ear, until Zohra had at last to constrain her by giggling "No-" very lightly, and pushing her shoulder feebly against Khala's tickling kiss. It was working wonders, and so were the fingers that played with the beads at her ankles, and then with her shins, and her calves. She could but utter a tiny cry which she tried to disguise as a sigh, when the fingers tickled her thigh.
But only a fool sticks to a tactic, and so the redhead stroked with the other hand as well, and bent her head, which caught a golden red glow on her full hair, and kissed the limb of the lovely sad Zohra, just where she had put her fingers, and just as sweetly and lightly. She parted the light coloured veils one by one. Tenderly she tasted the almond.
A shudder of weird delight shot through helpless Zohra, and she grasped Khala closely to her, burying her body so close to hers they both tumbled lightly from the ottoman to the carpet. Now, the fig tree under which they sat, upon their carpet with their ottomans and pillows and a bowl of yellow plums, shielded them not only from the sun but from the prying eyes of the wives and the other concubines. The great leaves made a canopy, a screen of green, and at the gnarled base of the old tree a veritable bower; morning glories trailed through the branches, and dark little carnations grew like weeds.
In this verdant secrecy the redheaded Hamra sighed and wrapped her pale, braceleted arms around Zohra's legs and gave her a girlish hug, and then she parted the veils again with her fingers, and pressed her head against Zohra's thighs, ran her hands over the smooth skin.
Zohra's heart was thundering in her breast, and she felt hot everywhere her clothes touched her. Khala had encircled her with her arms now and was kissing and biting about both ears and her neck, and somehow she had got her hands into the top of Zohra's robes, and her hands were busy grasping first this breast, then that, roughly pulling at the puckering nipples.
Zohra began to bounce on her hips. She was not certain who was where, and she had a dim knowledge of someone else, a clean-limbed girl with periwinkle blue eyes and a tangle of dark curls, with a half-mad look about her, crawling in beside them and joining them.
But Zohra had no time to see, for Khala rolled her over on her back as if she were nothing but a doll, and put her face to hers, and her mouth upon hers and slowly parted her lips in a hot, vigorous kiss. Now, Zohra had never been kissed in such manner by a woman, and involuntarily opened her mouth in surprise, but Khala only dug her tongue more deeply into her mouth, sucking at Zohra's tongue, and caressing the tender erotic tip of it with her own. She rolled her face side to side, sucking at Zohra's tongue, so that Zohra could not control the excited movements of her thighs.
Her thighs were being attended by Hamra, whose delicate kisses became delicate bites, all over her thighs, and even upon her buttocks. Her hands were kneading the flesh, each grasp more ravenous than the last, and her kisses covered Zohra's rapidly rising and falling belly. Zohra was on her back-or rather she was rolling from side to side, drawing her legs up, stretching them out, and Hamra was on her belly before her, her arms under her legs and her hands boldly caressing the buttocks, her face active all around the area of her delight.
Zohra was in such pleasure she could scarcely think, she could hardly breathe from the long and penetrating kiss the black Khala had transfixed upon her lovely little mouth. Vaguely she realized that the third girl, the lithe mad one, was untangling the mass of veils and cloths from them, and with an astonishing sting she felt the heavy cool-hot breasts of the Negress against her own. Whose hands? she wildly wondered, were pulling at her nipples, and which tongue had begun to rush round and round the edge of her small nipple, avoiding the tender tip, to excite her all the more?
And there were fingers at her tender door, gently prying to steal within, and explore the treasure there. Zohra grasped and bit Khala's tongue when the fingers plied the little door open and an inquisitive tongue entered. Zohra's little bite excited Khala all the more, and she began to suck Zohra's sweet lips of all the dew there, and her hands roughly brought the nipples into erection.
The mad girl was unveiling all this, pulling the skirts away, opening the bosom, and in a flash of pleasure Zohra's eyes opened and she saw that Khala, bare to the waist but for her gold necklace, was straddling her, and all she wore were draped white britches, which the mad, dark-haired girl was pulling down, slowly, over her dark belly and her wondrous great buttocks and thighs. Khala drew her head back from the kiss, and the mad girl opened Zohra's robes and took a breast in each hand, and one in her mouth.
For a moment Zohra was afraid-the pleasure was too great. She threw her powerful hips forward, as if she were making love to Jafar, but the caress that Hamra was giving her was not the caress of a man, but a most delicate and knowing exploration, she had found hidden a dainty sweetmeat and was savouring it to all her content, and though Zohra swayed and flailed and kicked her lovely legs like the flapping of a bird's wings she could not dislodge her sister concubine from her place.
And Khala was about something else now, too, sitting lightly on her belly and rubbing the tenderest part of her body over her belly in the vicinity of her navel. The mad Hamca, having stripped the other three, now began to divest herself of her own loose clothing in the most extraordinary manner, by wiggling so much they fell away from her, and Zohra was dazzled by the alabaster beauty of her body, and the subtle curves of her long limbs.
Now, Khala arched her lovely back and pressed her nipples against Zohra's, and renewed her frenzied kisses, and Zohra could feel her trying to bump Hamra from her prize spot with her buttocks. There 'was really very little room on Zohra's hot, luscious and now wet body for all these starved women, who had sweetened their imprisonment with the practice and perfection of any number of strange and secret erotic arts. Zohra was weak with pleasure, and still frightened a little, but unable to move anywhere but back and forward. Though she was amazed, she found her body was responding to their manifold lusts in every comer, for in every comer of her they were playing, with their tongues, their fingers, their skins. The mad Hamca, for instance, though seemingly intent upon driving Zohra to her own craziness through the expert manipulation of her breasts, now nuzzled her face in between the kiss Zohra and Khala were sharing, and nibbled at the edge of her lips. To Zohra's further surprise the greedy Khala withdrew a bit, though she did not interrupt the kiss, and slowly she made her way into Zohra's mouth, her tongue sliding in beside Khala's and her own. The result was a voluptuous three way kiss that was so powerful it almost overcame the distracting pleasure that Hamca was affording her in the nether reaches, so expert and ravening with her tongue and lips upon the tender little spot of flesh that was usually so guarded.
Under the combined assault of the man-hungry girls Zohra was completely beaten. Her moment to object was gone, now, and the caresses were so fiery and numerous that she had no time to be afraid. She was consumed by the hungers in her own ardent body and she was throbbing and rolling in every direction. Her hands beat about wildly, blindly, and then unknowingly seized the soft, shocking white flesh of the mad Hamca, and before Zohra knew what was happening Hamca had put Zohra's hand between her powerful thighs and closed them, and was moving up and down violently caressing herself. Zohra's fingers began to move, to caress and explore the same way they had explored her, and she felt the moist warmth of the mad girl's loving.
Zohra's slight, clumsy embrace sent Hamca into a crazy frenzy, and she began biting, sucking, bouncing, jumping, sighing, and writhing, and getting into position at Zohra's side, she knelt and began to thrust her buttocks up and down so violently that Zohra's fingers entered their length, and then she revolved her hips first from the left then from the right with such speed that Zohra's fingers brushed against, then seized upon, that little part of flesh that in women affords such thrills, and Zohra pulled at it and stroked it the way the lovely Hamra, still stuck grasping her thighs and buttocks, was administering to hers.
Suddenly Khala grabbed Zohra's other hand and put it to herself in the same area, and Zohra's amazement again soared as her fingers opened the door and entered.
Now, Zohra knew little of women though she had many sisters, and though sometimes she was won't to stroll about in the woods with her hands under her skirt in search of a lover, she had never had her hands under the skirts of another female. Thus she was astounded to find that Khala possessed not the tender little piece of flesh that gave her such pleasure, but a formidable one, which seemed to swell and move and rise at the touch of her fingers. The shock of this discovery was blended with the shock of a sudden rush of pleasure that would have knocked her out, she felt, except that she was far too excited and busy.
For a moment she hung suspended, time ended, and then she returned to them, the hands, lips, tongues, and skin so vigorously caressing her. She was a house with many doors and at each door there stood a beautiful woman, ready to come visiting, and she seized that surprising part of Khala and began to pull at it uncontrollably, until Khala began to bounce up and down on Zohra's belly as if upon a mule. She rode so strenuously she bumped poor Hamca's head out of the way, though Hamra was holding on for all she was worth, and Khala wedged her dark hot lap into Zohra's, while undaunted Hamra just wormed around to get at a better spot for herself. The mad Hamca bit and licked, and plunged her face between Zohra's breasts, and made her rapid way about both breasts back to her face and mouth, and Khala, in a wild frenzy, took her place as a man might, and though Zohra knew full well she was no man, she attempted to perform a man's office.
To Zohra's increased astonishment-it was an astonishing time-Khala's female insertion proved to possess a certain but unexpected pleasure, and though what she had made her wish all the more for Jafar, what she was getting was enough to send her head reeling again, and to throw her body into wild thrusts and contortions as if it were a wild young male lover upon her. With expertise and vigor Khala applied herself to her job, squirming and revolving her hips so that their tenderest parts were brought into contact, and then she began to hammer like a man against that most pleasant part.
This afforded Zohra such pleasure she returned every thrust and revolved counterclockwise to every minute of Zohra's powerful hips, and in spite of her scandalized embarrassment began to utter little cries though she was still swallowed by mad Hamca's voluptuous and violent kiss.
Soon again Zohra was driven to greater heights by the three supercharged women, so that she could not tell for certain who was where and what was where and who was doing what. But she knew that she was beyond recovery, lost, in her own pleasure and unable to do more than obey the ebbing and flowing motions of her torso and limbs, and the pulling and stroking of her hands upon whom she knew not, and of the kisses, fiery and quick, that she exchanged first with Khala, then mad Hamca, and sometimes with them both at once. And the pleasure of what Hamra was doing to her obscured the knowledge of what it was that the other was doing, exactly.
The only thing that Zohra was sure of was that she was gaining great and overwhelming pleasure from the administrations of these three lovelies, and that their frenzied states proved them to be enjoying themselves to the same extent. Indeed, Khala was so carried away with her ride that she began to buck with all her energy, and utter the same cries that just shortly before had escaped from Zohra's throat, and soon enough Zohra felt them rising up out of the depths of her own body again, and another rush of pleasure carried her away and she thrust and ground her hips into those of Khala with every ounce of strength in her.
The pleasures of the other two were no less, though of different kinds entirely, for as Zohra slipped from the uttermost peak of her pleasure and floated high as a cloud she noticed the other two girls had forsaken her and Khala, and, lying beside them in a tangle of legs and arms, head to knee, were applying their hottest kisses to each other's hottest parts. The sight of them thus conjoined gave Zohra a weird new pleasure somewhere high inside her body, and she did not constrain herself from twisting her body toward them and grasping at a breast here and a belly there, from applying the best kisses in her cachet to wherever she could reach them.
Though satisfied once, Khala was ever hungry, and did not allow herself to be dislodged from her comfortable seat but rolled over upon the others and tightened her arms around Zohra. She straightened out her legs, and the best way she could, wedged her wide hips between Zohra's, and hanging on to her very tightly and sucking again lustily at her mouth, Khala initiated a new set of movements that proved to produce a new set of mounting pleasures.
And so this time around Zohra was not so afraid, in fact, she was bold enough to make them roll over, and she was on top, and back over, and she was on bottom, and every minute she could do so she was exploring with her hands the bottoms, the breasts, the secrets of the other girls, and her kisses sought for their mouths and breasts and she was a fire consuming flesh, she was water beneath the rocks.
How many years she was kept thus, so wrapped in flesh, her own and that of her three imprisoned sisters, it seemed too short, this great moment of pleasure. But at last even the energies of these healthy young girls began to flag, and they fell, amidst sighs, gasps, giggles, tears, and groans, one by one upon each other in a lovely pile of flesh, of the alabaster of the redheaded Hamra, the onyx of Khala, the amber of the mad Hamca, and Zohra's own glorious gold.
They sighed and giggled, and fed each other plums, and Khala said, "You see, poor little fresh-plucked flower, how the harem of Ain Sebaa yearns for the natural pleasures of the bed with a strong young male? But what are we to do? No man dares try free us, and since such beauties as we cannot awake the old sheik's desire, what can we do but trust to Allah, and in the meanwhile seek what pleasures we can?"
She sighed gravely and leaned to kiss Zohra with sisterly affection on both cheeks.
Then she whispered, "But if you wish, perhaps you can help us try to find an escape from our torture, or find a cure for our poor old sheik. Listen, I have an idea-"
And slyly the clever Khala imparted a secret plot to Zohra's eager ears.
CHAPTER FOUR
On that very same day the old sheik Fawzi sent out a proclamation: A rascal of the lowest order, disguising himself as a djinn, had invaded the qasbah and raped a kitchen slave, and the sheik would pay to whoever should bring forth this vermin a thousand gold coins.
And-the proclamation went on-should the perpetrator of this crime be a djinn, then the sheik would pay the thousand old coins to whoever had power to rid the qasbah of the evil spirit.
And furthermore, the old sheik had the two guards taken out to the Gate of Malefactors and flogged, then decapitated, and soon their surprised, choked faces were staring down from the gate of the qasbah, and the flies were having a feast.
Jafar was sore afraid for his friends, Azlya and little Ali. He sent for messages of them from an old woman, who came back saying that the boy was locked in Zibilli's chamber, and that poor Azlya had been kicked into the kitchen and was weeping over onions, and that the old sheik was beating the girl's behinds in the worst rage yet.
Such sights and stories and rumors brought a hush to the happy valley, and even the butterflies seemed to flit sadly about in the sunlight. And soon came another story, dark and terrible to tell, and it passed in whispers about the cafes, the markets, and the streets. It was said that the old sheik had consulted with his magic woman, the old wolf hag of the mountains, Doubba. It was told they had performed something secret and strange, and that he had paid her with a handful of rubies, and that soon there would be something terrible at the qasbah of Ain Sebaa.
And soon enough there was. No one saw how it came to be there, for the night was the night of the old moon, which gave only feeble light, and the sky was oddly black with clouds. But when the sound of the wolf's howl rose up on the still night, all of the lovers of Ain Sebaa heard it, and it froze the blood of the citizens of that valley.
And as soon as the dawn came, the people very quietly stole from their beds, and in the thin light went to the gate of the qasbah. The gate was wide below the horrifying heads of the interlopers and the lax guards. And the second gate was left standing open, too, but before it, chained with a chain forged of silver, there was a large, black wolf.
The people of Ain Sebaa said nothing, but their eyes were great with wonder, and they stole back to their homes and shops, and went about their business with quieted hearts.
Jafar sat all the day in the shadow of the walls of the qasbah, smoking his pipe and listening to the flies hum. At last the day ended, and when night came on he rose and strolled inside the first gate, gazing at the full shadows. The wolfs eyes glinted in the dark. Jafar stared at the great animal, his mouth dry. The wolf glared at him with its small bright eyes, strained at its leash, walked to and fro, and, most frightening of all, it made no sound.
Jafar sat down against the wall and smoked another pipe. He watched the stars appear above the dark walls of the qasbah. The night was silent but of summer crickets. The soft air was scented of honeysuckle and jasmine from the gardens inside, from the harems. He heard the sounds of girls' voices, small whispers, and sometimes crying, and sometimes laughter. It pained him sore that such beauties should be there within and him not among them.
He gazed at the damned black wolf. Never before had the harem of Ain Sebaa been penetrated. But all knew the danger now. The wronged sheik had sent for Doubba, an old woman of magical powers who lived in the highest mountains, and who was said to know the hearts of all lovers. It was she herself who brought the wolf down, in the secrecy of the night, and chained it before the gate. She had great power, this ugly old woman, and it was said she had a beautiful daughter, who was not like a creature of the earth. The daughter, it was said, would come down each night at the rising of the moon, and bring a feast of meat and bones to the wolf. No one but Jafar dared wait to see her, and let it be said that even Jafar's heart was afraid. Jafar sat and smoked, and watched for the reappearance of the moon. It was tardy that night, but at last it rose, a silver crescent. At the same time he saw it, the form of the wolf stood and gazed at the gate. A figure in white came silently into the court. She appeared like a ghost, holding a basket of bones and meat. Jafar did not dare even speak. Never had he known such beauty. Never had beauty before terrified him so. She fed the wolf, which ate in silence, and then she went out of the courtyard and Jafar followed, very quietly, as she crossed the second courtyard and went out at the gate. He ran up into a rampart inhabited only by sleeping lizards and looked out into the palm grove. It was very still and the thin moonlight made the shadows under the palms black designs incised upon the silver earth, and through it nothing moved but the form of the moon-like daughter of the old hag of the mountains, Doubba.
Jafar pondered upon the girl, and her uncanny beauty. Certainly she was not of this earth. And the wolf-she had approached it and fed it, she had not spoken to it or touched it. It had eaten quietly, and then she had gone. Yes, Jafar mused, this girl holds the secret-he looked at the black wolf which was lying on its side, looking up at him-she knows its secret. This unapproachable, fragile girl holds the key to the harems. From her I must learn a secret.
And so, heavy of heart, Jafar threw away his disguise as a wizard, and walked out of the gates of the qasbah, and into the palm grove, and he sat in the palm grove and smoked his pipe, and gazed at the qasbah which black and forbidding rose against the thick tapestry of stars. Then Jafar sighed, and turned his head toward the black mountains, which rose half way to heaven, where the moon herself was sinking. There was the wild boar, the lion, steep slopes and roadless ways, and deep rivers and rushing waters. There were many wolves there-and this girl's jealous and magical mother. Jafar's heart was leaden when he took his few things, and walked out of the valley of Ain Sebaa.
Where could she have gone? he wondered as he walked up the slopes. Surely there must be magic in her, for a mere man might wander forever in these hills, and yet she comes and goes each night with the meat for the black wolf. He reflected that he was entering in this strange wilderness without weapons, and not even an amulet of protection, nor the kiss and kind goodbye of a girl.
Jafar walked very cautiously, for the way was not marked, and nothing guided him except the curiously shaped peak of the mountain where, it was believed, Doubba and her daughter lived. As he rose up out of the valley the soft summer air turned sharper, as if it were autumn there, and halfway through the night, when there were no sounds at all, he left the last of the trees, and moved over great expanses of rocks and thorn bushes. Dawn came to reveal a windy expanse of rock, and the enormous crystal of the arching sky, clear of all clouds, and far above, two eagles alone in its vastness. The valley of Ain Sebaa was hidden beyond a distant row of purple hills, and the immense peak seemed no nearer than it had when he had gazed up toward it from the peaceful palm groves.
Under the weight of the heat of the day, Jafar sought the shadow of a great rock, and there found a spring. He had with him his pipe, his hasheesh, a little tea, a little sugar, a little teapot, and some dates. He made a pot of tea, ate a date, and smoked his pipe, and rested, and fell asleep under the rock.
He felt someone nudging him, and he rolled over. He was unsure where he was at first, and looked around. It was late afternoon, shadows were filling the rocky world. There was no one around him. Then who was waking me? he thought, and then he quoted some verses from the Koran, and peered about. The vast sky was already darkening into the great night, and the emptiness of the scene weighed upon him. He rose and walked about, looking beyond rocks, and seeking hiding places for who it might be that woke him.
But he found nothing. He smoked another pipe, and set off again for the peak.
For many days he wandered thus, eating a date or two a day, and allowing himself only a few pipes. He always moved in the long hours from the shadows of twilight, through the brief and deep summer night, and through the cool horns of the morning.
Then, in the height of the day, he would seek out some crook or nanny and rest there. Each day he was certain that something-what, he did not know-woke him. Each afternoon late, as he woke, he made the same search, and each day the shadows and crevices of the rocks were empty.
And the great peak still loomed, as distant as ever.
At last there came a day when the bag of dates was empty and he smoked the last of his hasheesh. Long ago he had abandoned the teapot. And the next day when he rested he did not fall asleep with great ease, but was gravely troubled. Now, on this twilight he felt the hand nudge him as it always did, and he woke quickly from his fitful sleep, and caught, just before she vanished behind a boulder, a glimpse of a girl, her lovely brown face unveiled, her sinuous curves in shawls of many colours. She had been smiling at him.
He jumped up and ran, and found in a drift of sand, a print of her small lovely foot, but he did not stop long over it, but ran on in the direction she must have taken. He searched behind boulders where she might have slipped, and squinted at the horizon, and at the tricky shapes that rose about him as the night came on.
One by one, then thousands upon thousands, the stars appeared, first, a solitary planet, Venus, and then two stars to her right, all on a field of pale blue. The colour of the night filled up the earth with shadows, and deepened into purples in the sky, far beyond the stars. Halfway through the night the moon, slender and young, rose among the peaks.
Jafar rested. He had no pipe to smoke and he was very weary. His belly ached as he lay down. Soon, too soon, for he was still tired, he felt the hand nudging at him, and he jumped awake. Again he caught a glimpse of her and started out after her, but he was too tired to run, and he wondered at the day, for it was a twilight, and he did not know if it presaged day or night. He had come, he had been led by this vision of a girl, down into a treeless valley, with ragged ridges high above, and he could no longer guide his way by the great peak of Doubba. He wandered about, looking for water and his eyes aching in the strange and lingering twilight, for the girl.
Am I enchanted? Is this girl of flesh or a being twisted from flames. Is it love or the lack of it that hath brought me into this dark and barren slope? The cold stars and the meandering planets cannot return my kisses, and the homed silver moon makes me remember them.
All night, and into the blazing morning, he wandered, and then he slept again, and awoke in the maddening twilight again, and he did not know if he had been touched by this girl or if it was but a fleeting dream. Had she wakened him? Where was she leading him? He went on, lost in the lengthening shadows of his dreams.
Day and night were a blur, and his movements took place in the dim half lights of the spinning dawns and sunsets. He crawled sometimes and sleep would crawl upon him like the nightmares had begun to crawl upon him in the sleep.
At last he was so weak he could but crawl, and many days had passed since he had found a drop of water. Had she led him an unknown path through the mountains, and on to the great Sahara beyond? Were the endless rocks to stretch away from the great desert, and was he lost beyond sight of the peak of Doubba? How many countless leagues was he from the peak, and how many countless more from the perfumed valley of Ain Sebaa, with its cool waters and warm kisses.
He could not tell the direction any longer, for the sun seemed to rise from any position in the vast landscape, to blind him then from observation, and to descend in the same place. And sleep would come to throw the hours into days, and at night as the stars made their silent traverse they hastened in their nocturnal march until they twirled about the heaven. And so he lay on his right side facing east and in the morning he rose and walked northward.
He came to a small brown river. He refreshed himself there, and went up to follow it to its source. Soon the valley flattened out into a plain, and soon, at a great distance, he could make out the faint haze of green. He walked through even the heat of the day to reach it, and in the late afternoon he found a grove of palm trees, and in it a garden of vegetables and a little encampment of five black goatskin tents. He walked in among them, and called, "Peace be upon you?"
But no one answered. He smelled a stew cooking in a pot.
"Peace be upon you?" he called again, but there was not a sound but the flies buzzing. A flock of sheep, chewing and waggling their tails, watched him placidly.
After Jafar had looked around, and called peace several more times, to the answer of nothing but the flies, he peeked into one of the tents, where the pot was cooking on a brazier. The tent was empty but for a few rugs, sheepskins, and small chests. He longed to creep in, but dared not infringe upon hospitality, and he sniffed at the pot with great agony. At last he went in and lifted the pot, and gazed at the brew of beans within. An aroma like he had never known came to his nostrils, and curled within his brain. He found a big loaf of bread. He gazed back at the hot beans.
Then he heard a voice, yes, a girl's, and he rose and stole from the tent, and there through the palms at sunset came a lovely girl, singing. She wore the simple frock of the shepherd, and her henna hair reached her thighs. Her skin was ivory, and her eyes dark green. Her nose was proud, slightly hooked, and her voice was gay. She stopped with surprise on her lovely face and stared at him with her great innocent eyes.
"Peace be upon you," said Jafar.
"And upon you, Peace," she said quietly, stopping and pulling a purple embroidered shawl about her shoulders. She had come close enough by now for him to see there were pretty little freckles, imperfections to underscore her perfection, upon her shoulders.
She turned slightly aside, so that he could see the outline of her high breasts and her small waist and soaring hips, and the length of her leg beneath her homespun clothes. He explained to her that he had been in search of the daughter of Doubba, the wolf woman, and that he had become lost and enchanted in the mountains, so that the sun did not rise from the east, and that he had wandered down into the desert, and would have perished but that Allah had brought him to her.
She listened to his long story with wide-eyed and simple interest, and then she frowned with compassion. "You have no choice but to endure," she said. "Poor one," she said, "come into the tent with me and I will prepare food and rest for you. All the others are out in the hills gathering the rest of their sheep, for last night a wolf raided the herds and dragged away one, and the others are scattered. They will be back soon."
Now Jafar was thinking about that wolf, and about the pot of beans on the fire, but he could not tear his eyes from the lovely shepherdess.
As she went into the tent, he went in close behind her, and managed to rub her lovely buttocks as she bent to duck through the flap, but she leapt inside quickly, and though she said nothing, she gave him a forbidding look. Then she is not to be had so easily as the girls of the valley, he thought, and laid down and pretended great agony.
"Oh," he wailed, "how I have suffered, oh what horrors and strange sights Allah has put in my path. And you, my lovely fawn, had you not come my way to save me, I might be lying half dead upon the scorching rocks," and he fell to weeping loudly, hiding his face in his arms.
She came and knelt beside him, and comfortingly stroked him, and began to whimper a bit too besides his lying sobs. "No, no, no, poor one, don't cry, don't cry," she kept urging, "no, please do not cry, what can I do to assuage your sorrow-"
Upon hearing this, Jafar muttered, "Oh, so long I have been unsolaced in the wilderness, and have had none of the love and care a man asks of a woman-" and so that she might not misunderstand he ran his hand up her leg-oh, how smooth and shapely it was!-and went on hastily, "and now I am vomited out of the mouth of hell itself and at this palm grove with such a lovely houri as you, that I am not certain I have died, been judged, and found my way into paradise-tell me, lovely swallow, are you of the race of Adam, or a spirit for the delight of the blessed?"
"I am but a mere mortal," was all she said, all Jafar needed to know.
"No, I believe your words, but I do not believe my own eyes. Surely your kiss would grant me a bliss beyond a thousand earthly loves. Please, kiss me, for you would not keep me in such cursed suspense-" and he began to kiss her, and she began to kiss him little kisses. And then he told her how his back hurt, and he laid on his belly, and she rubbed his back. And then he said that perhaps if she removed his jalaba for him she might better effect his cure. She blushed, and said such was shameful, but since he was so near departure from the world she would obey him, and she did so.
In fact, she removed his jalaba and even the robe underneath with more speed and interest than he expected, and soon he was naked as Adam beside her, and she was rubbing his back, and he was rubbing her leg. He played about the thighs a good bit, saying, "Aaah, yes, this way, no, rub in a circle, ah, yes, easy, easy, hmm, yes," and such things. She rubbed him from his neck, down his back, over his buttocks, when he could stand no more and said, "Perhaps you would understand the art of massage better if I demonstrated upon you."
She looked a little hurt, but there was also a wild eagerness showing in her large innocent eyes, and so she obediently lay down on her belly beside him, and he propped her chin on her folded arms, and took a look and a listen about, and then, holding back a sigh, lifted up her skirts. Her legs were long and smooth and curvy. He lifted the skirts a little higher, biting his tongue. Slowly he revealed to his boggling eyes her glorious buttocks, rising like two white domes. He gasped and ran his fingers along that line that separated them and led to her warm young femininity. With both hands on her side he slid his hands, warm and trembling, over her buttocks and up her sides, revealing her smooth back. He reached under with both hands and felt her breasts, each one filled a hand to overflowing with its soft and shocking coolness. He heard her gasp a little when he did so, and her tail waggled a bit.
She was lying very still, and expectant. He removed her shawls and skirts from her, every last stitch, and gasped and almost swooned at the perfection she made. The trust, the innocence, the loveliness lying there waiting, her dark hair tousled, her buttocks faintly quivering with excitement. He took each of her legs and parted them slightly, and knelt between them. "One must be in the right position for a good massage," he told her, as he leaned forward and put his hands under her slender, sloping shoulders, and began to massage. "Mmmm," she said.
He worked his hands over her shoulders, her back, her buttocks, and he slowly inched in and then, little by little, he began to massage from below. She squeaked at first, and rolled a bit side to side, but he massaged more at her buttocks, pulled at them and lifting them, dropping them, and bouncing them back and forth, until he was where he wanted to be and sighed a great sigh, and she joined in it. And then he began to massage more vigorously, and less and less with his hands.
She began to roll her head side to side on her arms, and murmur such things as "Oh, oh, oh, now I see, oh, oh, I didn't know most of the massage was from the bottom, oh, oh, how many hands you seem to have."
But by then Jafar had forgot his hands entirely, and was hanging on to her by the neck, and he murmured, "I'm forgetting, it's been such a long time ... ah! ... since I massaged anybody," and he leaned forward and straightened out his legs and was biting her on the neck, when, too soon, because of his hunger, he ran to the top of the mountain too early and went sailing off it. And he was crying "Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh," while she was still climbing the mountain. And so there was nothing to do but climb the mountain again while what he wanted to do was to lie down and rest beside her lovely little body. However, her ascent was so strong that he didn't have to move, and she was running up the mountain without him, that is, without him completely with her. But she was so eager that she used all her muscles, even those he didn't know she had, and a wild squeeze or two here and there and he was with her again, at least, he found a staff to help him in his second ascent.
She was eager, even frantic, by now, but Jafar was taking it easy. And three times before he conquered the ascent she conquered it herself, and her bucking and flailing each time afforded him a most extraordinary delight.
They reached the peak together, then, amidst great cries and throbs, and then both fell out, and Jafar went to sleep, without moving.
She, however, had not been upon the tiring adventure that he had, and soon woke him. She gave him some beans, which he ate of without moving from where he was, and after the beans she said demurely, though quite naked and chewing beans, "I think I've learned the lesson of massaging, now. So why don't you let me massage you to sleep and you can rest here from your tribulations."
Jafar could not thank her enough for her kindness. "Yes," he said, "I am exhausted. Perhaps you will massage my front this time." And he rolled over on his back on the rug. She took up a stance between his legs, and he gazed at her with a happy sigh. She looked down at him with confused amazement.
"My-" she said. "So that is what you used!"
"None other," said Jafar, proudly.
"Where should I begin?" she asked innocently, inspecting the front of his body. "Does it hurt here?"
"Hmm, yes, rub a little there."
She rubbed a little there, and then a little here, and pretty soon she was massaging his chest, belly, and thighs with her hand.
"Those places are not all that hurt," said he. But she didn't need to be shown where else hurt, and massaged with such vigor that Jafar began to gasp and say, "No, my rabbit, not so hard. Put your hands upon my chest and belly, but do the most massaging-here-like that-"
He showed her exactly what he meant. She watched fascinated, and squealed with child-like delight when he showed her a little what to do.
"Oh! I see!" she exclaimed, and began to throw her buttocks back and forth more quickly, and to inch down closer to him.
She began to throw more, and leaned down on his chest, rubbing at his nipples, and waggling her lovely breasts over his skin. "Oh, oh, yes, I see," she kept saying. "Like this?-or this?" Jafar always answered yes.
"Ah, oh, hmmm, poor one," she cooed, leaning forward to kiss him about his cheeks and the corner of his mouth, "poor thing, how I love to massage you, to make you well," and she kissed and bit his lips.
"I'll massage too," said Jafar dimly, hardly able to make the words leave his throat, so great was his delight. "I'll massage the best I can in this position." And so he massaged her breasts, especially her nipples, and he kissed her sweet lips and sucked at her tongue and she did all the massaging she could do.
They took an easy, long stroll up the mountain, and even rolled about the floor a bit, and after a good half hour of this they'd got each other in such tangles of limbs and kisses and hands that neither could tell who was massaging whom where, but that was all the same.
"No, no, no," Jafar was crying, and she was bouncing and running with such effort that his knees went right out from under him, and his head went round, and the very fluid of life flowed again, and his brain went off.
And this time, Jafar fell into a deep sleep that nothing she could do would wake him.
CHAPTER FIVE
Zohra sighed and laid her head sadly upon the lovely blonde's breast. The blonde girl stroked her easily on her arms and back, and comforted her. "All of us suffer," said the girl philosophically, in her soft, honey-like voice. "You have your favourite, Jafar, and I have mine, Lamrani. He is not the cleverest of lovers, but he is clever enough, and good and strong. He has a fine face, with strange eyes like a chinaman, and full lips, and his kisses are very moist."
She leaned over to Zohra, and put her soft pink lips to hers. "Like this, Lamrani kisses me," she said, and began to kiss softly, her lips still against Zohra's, her tongue tracing a path around the lips, and then inside. The tongue moved along the teeth, and then its tip dallied with the tip of Zohra's, and then the blonde girl began to open her mouth slightly more, and to suck softly at her mouth as her tongue explored within.
Zohra squirmed and let her shoulders relax, and let the kiss work its magic over her. The beautiful blonde girl held the kiss a long while, easily moving her head. She drew her hands slowly up and down Zohra's arms, and squeezed her body softly to her. It was the blonde girl who pulled herself from the kiss.
She kissed her lightly upon her dreamy eyelids, and spoke softly to her as she held her. "We had to be very secret, for my father is a very strict man who goes to the mosque and is determined that his daughters be pure. I was pure when I first laid eyes on Lamrani, but his glance made me forget that immediately, and though I did not know then the pleasure that a man gives a woman, I guessed it by the look in his eyes. My heart was all of a flutter-here, it flutters now to think of him-" and she opened the front of her kaftan and put Zohra's hand upon her breast. It was large and firm, and the nipple was pink as a young rose, and quite big. Zohra ran her fingers around its edge with curiosity, and played gingerly with the nipple until it puckered and rose.
"But my heart is not there," said Rubia into Zohra's ear, kissing it lightly as she spoke. "My heart lies beneath my left breast." Zohra closed her eyes and put her fingers lightly upon Rubia's left breast, and stroked the nipple. "Were Lamrani's kisses always so good?" she inquired dreamily.
"Always," said Rubia, sighing, "Always. And his caresses were equally irresistible."
"What did he do?" asked Zohra, shifting her body, catching her breath a little. She extended her legs and put a pillow under her head, and looked up at the face of lovely Rubia, and the canopy of fig leaves above them. "This is one of his better caresses," whispered Rubia with a little giggle, and then a nibble on Zohra's ear. She put her hands on Zohra's ankles and slowly drew them up her legs, tickling and caressing as she progressed. She lingered around her buttocks only long enough to coax a deep shudder of pleasure from Zohra, then rubbed on upwards, her palms spread flat upon Zohra's tingling skin. For a long while she rubbed over Zohra's belly which Zohra would have enjoyed normally, but which because of the way Rubia was doing it, very tenderly stroking, and sometimes pinching little pinches of flesh, began to drive Zohra wild. But she held herself down, closed her eyes, and let herself be stroked.
Slowly Rubia moved her hands up her body, and caressed about Zohra's breast, pinching slightly at the edges of the nipples, and then at the peak. Zohra began to hum in her throat, and to shift from buttock to buttock.
Rubia spoke. "He would do me this way before he made love to me, for hours, to drive me crazy. 'I want to drive you mad,' he would say to me, and I would beg him to stop his caresses and to give me himself, to make love to me. But he would always hold me off, he would kiss me sometimes, as I have kissed you, and as I kiss you now-"
She leaned down and kissed Zohra again, but this time the kiss was not so gentle, it was more eager, and she bit lightly at Zohra's tongue, and her hands began to play and squeeze about her lower back, her buttocks and her thighs. She held the kiss a long while, digging furiously into Zohra's mouth and Zohra could but lie there limp and yearning, full of sharp expectancy.
"He would make me lie there, just as you are doing, for hours--for days it seemed-and accept his caresses all over my body. He would gaze down upon me as he spoke to me, and when shudders of anticipation rushed through my body he would laugh at me-such shudders as are passing through your body now. Then he would spread and raise my legs like this, to best stroke and see the innermost secrets of my body. He would caress me in my deepest femininity-but only very lightly, like this-and when I sucked in my breath and groaned, the way you are doing now at my slightest tickling, he would laugh, tickle harder-like this-for a moment, and then withdraw his hands."
Zohra could not hide a great sigh of relief when Rubia took her hand away. But in a moment she wanted it back again.
"And then my lover Lamrani would insinuate his body upon mine, to caress my body with his. He would part my legs thus, and as I do, sit here with your legs folded over me-there, Zohra my dear, are you comfortable? Lean back. Yes. And let your leg drape over my hip, like so-Yes. He would then be free-as I am, to lean forward and kiss you lightly on the lips-"
When she did so Zohra fought to return the kiss, but Rubia pulled back.
"And to run his hands over my body, playing with my breasts, lifting them, examining them, and putting little kisses on them, and his free hand would then slide over my sides-yes, and around and under my buttocks, and with his thighs and his chest he would rub against me."
Rubia's soft voice trailed off into her knowing caresses, and her body began to rub easily against Zohra's. At last the touch of her blinded Zohra, and not knowing what she was doing, she groped toward Rubia's loins.
What with the excitement of the caressing, Zohra was almost surprised when she found that what she was reaching for was not there. A little cry, lost in the rapture of her kiss, escaped her sweet lips. But blonde Rubia-alas, she was cunning-took Zohra's hand in a kindly sort of way, and stroked it, as if to console her, and placed it upon her femininity. Zohra didn't know exactly what to do, then. But Rubia knew, and gently urged Zohra's five trembling fingers into just the right places, and, but putting her own hand and fingers in the corresponding places of Zohra's trembling body, made it known the kind of caress that was expected. Zohra obeyed, trembling and suspenseful, and when Rubia squeezed her hand in a certain manner, very lightly but excitingly, Zohra felt her blood run backward in her veins, and automatically, her hand must have responded, for she moved it and a moan of ecstasy came up out of Rubia as if the earth had moved under her.
Rubia continued then, after clearing her throat, "He would do this-don't move so, Zohra!-yes, lie still. Yes, and then this-"
Now, each thing that Rubia did to Zohra sent a shock through Zohra, and after the shock passed, she understood that she was to return the gesture. She did so, best she could. She was a little afraid, it must be admitted, that if she didn't Rubia would not continue this instructive demonstration.
But her fears were groundless, for she soon discovered that the more she did to Rubia the more Rubia did to her. "Continue," said Zohra in a small voice.
"And he would rub his chest against my breasts, as I am doing now to you, sometimes biting them, like this-like this. Or he would lift my arms above my head, and make me lie back, as you are upon the pillow, and put his face between my breasts and move it side to side-"
Zohra allowed her arms to be put back, so that her breasts rose up to meet Rubia's face. But to her amazement Rubia did not demonstrate what she was saying, and Zohra lay there ready, her breath held. She waited. She dared not open her eyes. She began to waggle her breasts slightly, side to side, as she did to please Jafar. But still Rubia did not respond. She waited more. At last, when she felt she could no longer stand it, she squeezed Rubia, and said breathlessly, "Well do it."
Rubia responded to her squeeze by coiling all around and gasping. Then she shook her body, as if she were trying to rid herself of the sensation. She answered then in a voice vaguely taunting, "And then Lamrani would say to me, when I was as you are now, 'No my dear, you are too hot, perhaps you should cool down so you'll give me greater pleasure when I am ready for you.' "
Hearing this, Zohra froze. She lay there perfectly rigid, but she did not remove her hand, nor did Rubia remove hers. Now, as it has been mentioned, Zohra was no fool. She lay there quite stiff, with her eyes shut, and she was careful not to move anything, especially her fingers.
Rubia too lay still there beside her in the soft afternoon shade for a while, not speaking not moving. At last she leaned and kissed Zohra once again, a kiss hotter and more lascivious than the last. At the same time her hand began to squeeze slightly, and she inserted two fingers, which found, and seized upon, that tiny piece of flesh that was so popular here in the harem, representing, as it does, what it did. Rubia rubbed the flesh softly in her fingers, and Zohra's feet started to kick.
Rubia laughed softly in Zohra's ear, and bit at it, and tightened her arm around her and snuggled ever closer, rubbing her belly on her belly, her breasts against her breasts, her legs all over Zohra's legs. She ran her tongue around the curves of Zohra's ear, and whispered strange words in it, and bit at it and sucked at it.
"He would do to me as I am doing to you, kissing, biting, teasing. Oh, Zohra my sweet, how he would tease, and the more fiery my desire grew, the more cold he would be-colder than I can be with you, for we are both women, and once we have begun what we are now doing, nothing can put out the flame that burns in our body but the consummation of the act of love. And often he would turn me about, like this-and stroke me in all places, most carefully and interestedly he would examine the curve of my buttocks ... ah, what lovely buttocks you have, Zohra, my Lamrani would not be able to play so cruelly with you, he would be overcome by your beauty, your deep femininity, and your hot eagerness. He would seize you to him-"
And with shocking passion Rubia grabbed Zohra with her free hand and both her legs, and squeezed her body against her with such voluptuous force that a startled cry came out of Zohra's throat, and at the same time a thrill rushed through her as Rubia plunged her fingers deeper and opened them, and rubbed that little bit of flesh with violence. At the same time her lips came down upon Zohra's and locked her with a kiss that alone might have driven her wild.
Zohra was almost faint with pleasure, yet a keen need was there for a man. Rubia was atop her, covering her with the most delicious and fervid embraces and kisses, and titillating her in her femininity with expertise and cunning. But pleasurable though these administrations were, Zohra could think but of Jafar. In fact, her mind was so full of the need for him, or any male lover at that moment, that she began to pant and sob and flail her arms and legs, and roll back and forth and bounce, and scrape her fingernails along the lovely pale skin of Rubia.
It was Rubia who, after a few full minutes of this complete and tormenting caress, pulled away from it. But she did not pull far, and her lovely breasts rose and fell against Zohra's, and her hands could not keep still. Her eyes were wild with pleasure, and her voice faltered as she whispered.
"See how hot you can get, Zohra? See how hot such things can make a woman?"
Zohra could but nod breathlessly and continue to kiss and caress at the beautiful body beside her. She craved completion, but since it seemed impossible at that moment she could not desist in the wonderful caresses.
"Such hotness will drive a woman to any extremes," Rubia went on, trembling in her savage caresses, "for a woman may take pleasure with another woman, but she wants what only a man can furnish-"
Zohra nodded violently and almost went into a swoon of pleasure and frustration. Then, Rubia suddenly rolled away from her, not touching her at all, and Zohra grabbed at her wildly. Rubia was still full of desire and shaking with it, and her beautiful hair was all awry. "I cannot make myself a man for you, Zohra," she said, "but I have devised something that will afford us the next best pleasure-"
"Yes, yes," pleaded poor Zohra, so hot she would agree to anything.
Rubia produced from the clothes she had discarded a long, slightly curved object, which resembled more a slightly straightened cow's horn than anything else to Zohra. Except Zohra guessed in a second its use, and surprised Rubia by seizing it greedily and putting it to use savagely.
Rubia began to laugh wildly and her blue eyes gleamed with a new pleasure, and she said, "Ah, that's one way to use it, but with two it's better-you see how it is carved so that it may be used at both ends?"
Zohra hardly saw, but she fell back in full ecstasy. Rubia said, "First, I will take the part of the man, for I have made you as hot as you can get, and later you can take part." And she climbed upon Zohra and situated herself carefully, and took the part of a man. Now, Zohra was already so excited that she attained a height of pleasure in the first few moments before the object had been properly fitted.
But Rubia was still crazy with excitement, and in a half-masculine half feminine way began to drive her lovely thighs and buttocks. Zohra began to wriggle and writhe with a newfound ecstasy, and soon was answering Rubia's every thrust with a strong one of her own. She worked half way up to her climax when Rubia reached hers, and in a frenzy of bucking fell over beside her, without dislodging that object.
And so Zohra, still racing, plunged with a renewed force, and soon it was she who was taking the man's role, until her hair was all awry and her lovely little body shining with perspiration, and Rubia was sprawled back, groaning with renewed pleasure, until they obtained their heights again.
And thus, the girls of Ain Sebaa being what they are, they passed the afternoon.
They were still coiled in their embraces, trying lazy new things, when the Negress Khala stole under the fig tree and found them. She kissed them both over their bodies and then she lay down beside them, and stroking them together, whispered excitedly, "At last, it is all set If Allah wills it, this very night we will have our freedom."
CHAPTER SIX
Jafar awoke dreaming of the exquisite, innocent shepherd girl, and finding himself ready for love, he turned on his side to proceed, when he saw that the girl who lay beside him in the tent, though a shepherdess, was not the magnificent creature who had a few hours previously so well solaced him, but a rather corpulent and worn old mountain woman. There were freckles indeed-big blotches, and yesterday, where her hips rose beautifully there was a behind like a-well, all in all, she was a big old Holland cow.
Wondering at how his deprivation had altered his senses, Jafar took his quick pleasure of her; she woke half way through it and joined him with many a grunt and a moo.
Then he rose quickly and washed, while she pre pared tea. And though she begged and pleaded for him to stay, he was adamant. "I must find the daughter of Doubba," he said grimly, "for she alone holds the key to the secret." And though the woman understood little of his quest, and was pulling at him top and bottom for a little more of what he had to offer, he fended her off, and for her kisses took a supply of figs, dates, ewe's milk and hasheesh, and set off again in the direction of the great peak of Doubba.
He climbed up out of the vales, and followed the line of the ridges until he came within view of the peaks again, and set out toward them, walking at a speedy but easy pace.
Now, in the long days and nights of the journey, in the wilds of the mountains, Jafar meditated heavily upon the secret of the harem, upon the mystery of the black wolf, and what the moon-like girl did that allowed her to control it.
He thought: perhaps I would be wiser to find another woman of magic, and pay her to find a solution to the over coming of this beast. But where will I find a woman who possesses power stronger than Doubba's? There is no magic like hers. There is no power that can match hers. And yet I think I can go alone to the mountain, and find this girl, and determine her secret. I have not even an amulet, I do not know where in these wilds is hidden the cave of Doubba and her daughter, and the wolves they breed. All I know is the people never go near that barren place, for fear of the witch.
But, though he was afraid, he was determined. And too, the vision of the beautiful daughter in white, who made the mysterious visit each evening as the moon rose with food for the wolf, would not leave him. Was she not magic herself? Was she more than human, or other than human? Jafar's heart froze to think of it.
Now one day he encountered in the wilds an old woman, sitting morosely at the base of a cork oak, eating a bowl of beans.
"Peace be unto you," said Jafar, surprised to find an old woman such a great distance from places of habitation.
"Unto you, peace," answered the old woman, with a glance at him from her silver eyes. She offered him some beans, but he declined, saying his stomach was too used to dates, but he sat down beside her and smoked a pipe, to have the company of another child of Adam.
Hardly had he lit his pipe than the old woman, in a rasping voice, said, "what business brings you to these heights, my son?"
"I'm seeking the abode of Doubba, the wolf woman," Jafar answered.
Without removing her silver eyes from him, or ceasing to chew her beans, the old woman pointed in the direction of the towering peak, which, though he had walked for many years, had come no closer. "Why?" she said.
"I have a gift for her," said Jafar.
"A gift?" said the old woman. "What gift?"
"I am afraid I cannot say," answered Jafar.
The old woman kept chewing her beans, and fixed him with her silver eyes. "No one takes Doubba gifts," she said. "Why should anyone endanger himself to ascend such a peak and give presents to an old wolf woman? They say she breeds wolves you know."
"I know what they say of her," Jafar answered, "and I know well the dangers of these mountains, and the even greater danger of her cave. But I have my reasons, and I have my gift."
"And where have you come from, bearing the gift?"
"From the happy valley of Ain Sebaa."
"Then you must be indeed mad. No sane man would leave the beauties of Ain Sebaa to climb into this wilderness with gifts for an old woman. Be off! On your way! I have no time for fools such as you must be!"
And so Jafar rose and went on, and did not turn to look back. He went on as far as he could into the night, and by the time the moon was rising he found himself in a treacherous place of cliffs and cracks in the earth, and so he lay down to rest, and smoked a pipe. When he awoke in the thin dawn he saw the old woman sitting down the slope a way, her hands idly in her lap.
He sat up, took out his bag of dates, of which there were only a few left, and went down to her, and sat on the stony ground beside her, and bade her good morning, and offered her a date, which she took and ate, saying nothing.
He ate one date, smoked his pipe, and said, "See, I am no nearer to that peak than I was yesterday.
"Yes, you are a day nearer," answered the old woman, chewing long on the date, and sucking the stone.
"But I have travelled many days," said Jafar.
"And many more," said the old woman.
"Do you know the way to the mountain of Doubba, auntie?" asked Jafar.
She eyed him sharply and spat out the stone. "What will you pay me to take you there?"
"The only thing I have in the world that I might exchange for money."
"And what is that?" she said.
"This silver ring," he said, holding up his finger.
The old woman peered at it a long while, sucking at the two teeth that remained in her lower jaw. She scratched the tattoos on her whiskery chin. "Very well, give it to me," she said.
Jafar took it from his hand, and watched her screw it onto her old knuckle. Then puffing and sighing, she rose, and started up the hill, and he followed.
Now the days stretched on interminably, for the old woman moved at an old woman's pace, and furthermore she would wander zigzagging across the rocky expanses, using up her strength and stopping often to rest. And Jafar, in his impatience, thought often of leaving her and going on alone, and he wondered if she were deceiving him.
But it seemed she was not. For after they had walked the first day, the mountain of Doubba loomed much higher than it had before, and at the end of the second, Jafar was certain that at last he was making some progress toward it.
On the dawn of the third day they awoke at the base of an immense precipice. The world, and half the sky, was dominated by it, and the shadow it cast in the valleys far below left them still in night.
The old woman turned toward Jafar and gave him an odd little chuckle. "Well, my friend, now we are here. There is your mountain, and here is my ring. Peace upon you-" and she turned and scuttled down the slope.
Jafar caught her quickly and said, "But I am at the base of the mountain, and where is the cave?"
She croaked and giggled wickedly, "Ah, but I promised to take you to the mountain of Doubba, not to the cave itself."
Thinking, Jafar had to admit she did. "Then," he went on, "what do I do to go on? I cannot find the cave from here, and I might wander another lifetime at these heights, and the winter is coming on again."
"Yes, you might, and yes, winter is night," said the old woman.
"Then what am I to do?" said Jafar, looking from her to the soaring wall of granite.
"What have you to give me?"
"I have nothing else to give. I have given you my silver ring."
"Then what have you to give that you would not exchange for all the silver rings on earth?"
Jafar immediately knew what that was, and recoiled. "That I cannot part with," he said in grave despair.
"Then give me use of it for only a few minutes, and you may put it back where you keep it," she said, giggling coyly.
Now, Jafar told himself, this is dangerous, for who knows that she might not be a witch, and steal from me my precious life fluids, and enchant me here in the wilds?
And he thought, who knows, that she might take me further and betray me again?
And he thought: But perhaps she will lead me there, and how should I get back alone? And, well, a camel is better than an ass, but an ass is better than nothing.
And so he shut his eyes and dreamed of the girls in the harem of Ain Sebaa, for a quarter of an hour, and gave the old woman what she wanted.
Now, as it generally happens, afterwards Jafar felt like a little rest, but the woman, as generally happens, felt like climbing the mountain. And so Jafar lifted his worn limbs and staggered after her. She struck off to the left, in a confident manner, with a briskness that he wouldn't have believed. In fact, by noon, he was far behind and she was climbing up the sharp slope with the agility of a rock ape, and only his manly pride kept him from calling out after her to rest. And all the rest of the day which was windy, brilliant and raw, he scrambled weakly afterward, and she grew smaller and smaller, farther above him. When at last night fell bringing a darkness such as he had never seen even in dreams, he realized he had lost her. He settled into a ledge, stared out at the blackness, and lighted the pipe, and smoked the last of his hasheesh. He sat for hours, his heart cracking at the memory of the girls of the harem of Ain Sebaa, of the lovelies in the valley, and even of the old cow who herded sheep on the mountainside. At last he fell asleep, cold, hungry, betrayed, on the ledge. His dreams were of the black wolf.
He awoke to an uncanny white light in his eyes. As he shook sleep and exhaustion from himself, he realized the full moon had risen, and was so large that it woke him. In the clear air he could see many new details on it, and after a while, as it rose slowly, illuminating the rocky cliff side, he saw that there was enough light to move by.
He crawled along the ledge, cold and cautious. Soon he came to a crevice, and since it seemed to afford a safer more protected place to rest, he climbed into it. Then he noticed that it widened, and soon he found he could stand, and he walked further into a small canyon, and at its extremity he came upon the entrance to a narrow cave.
He held his breath, and peered within. It was a strange cave, from it did not issue the cold breath the earth usually breathes, but a faint aroma, as if of incense. And as he stepped within the narrow entrance, he noticed that the sounds were not the hollow echoes that one is accustomed to in caves. He stood in the pitch dark inside, his senses straining. After a while he became aware, by some sense he was not certain of, of the presence of another in the cave. He sat down, then, took out his knife, and slit his jalaba into long shreds, each of which he knotted to the other. He tied the end to a small bush he found near the entrance, and entered the cave, holding the strips of cloth of his jalaba. He sat down then, and strained his ears, but still there was no sound. He thought of turning back. But no, he could not.
He stripped off his long shirt, and squatting naked in the dark, slit it and knotted it into a cord. He rose, sighed, and went on. He had gone many paces before he remembered he had forgot to count them.
As he descended he became more and more drugged by the heady perfume, until his head was euphoric as it would have been full of hasheesh, and he did not feel the cold, though he was naked. He was certain, too, that he would find something here. Slowly, he groped on.
When the lengths of cloth at last ran out he squatted down to wait the urge to return or to go forward. At length he rose, and letting go the string, he went on into the darkness, feeling along the wall, and counting each step.
He had gone a hundred when he perceived around a bend, the vague amber light of a far off flame, and the light that obtains in dreams. His heart pounded in the silence of his body like it was drums. He went on more swiftly, until he came to a vaulted chamber, and there burned a small oil lamp, and a brazier with thick clouds of incense. He stepped, cautious and naked, into the chamber.
There was an alcove draped in animal skins, and in it slept the moon-like daughter of Doubba.
He approached the alcove where she slept. Breathless, he gazed upon her incredible beauty. Though she was a fearful sight, wild and strange, with her lovely hair spread out upon the animal skin pillow, her young breast softly rising and falling in her calm sleep, her dark-lashed eyes closed lightly, and her lips faintly parted as if waiting for a lover's kiss, Jafar, gazing down upon her could not help but be seized with desire.
Strange visions rose in his brain as he gazed at her body, which was outlined under the thin white gown she wore. He remembered her-he could see her again, as she walked ghost-like across the court at the qasbah, under the moonlight, with her basket of meat and bones for the wolf. How quickly she had vanished among the shadows of the palms. How had she come here, and returned over the miles of treacherous terrain each night in her weird duty?
Such questions were best left unanswered. Her beauty was drawing him as a magnet. He sat beside her on the bed and gazed down at her, and watched the shadow play over her face as she stirred, licked her lips, and adjusted her lovely body, rolling over on her side. He pulled the loose, thin gown away from her body, to reveal her in her greatest glory. He was stunned. He swallowed. His hands had not touched her, yet she seemed to have been aware in her dreams of an admirer, and a frail smile crossed her bps and she breathed with an unspoken word, and turned her head aside again, and adjusted her body, raising her breasts and stretching her legs in her pleasant sleep. She was dreaming something good.
Desire and amazement mingled in him as he leaned nearer. The fragrance of her hair and body filled his nostrils with heady perfume. He sensed the warmth she emitted as he held his face near hers. He bent his head and kissed her lightly upon the lips, half afraid. She stirred, she smiled again and turned her head on its side toward him, but she did not awake.
The kiss might have been a blow, it made his head reel. He was certain now that though she was strange, perhaps enchanted, perhaps a dream, perhaps a djinn, that he must possess her.
She was lying upon her back now, her head turned slightly aside, her breasts jutting out toward her right and her hips twisted toward the left, and her legs slightly parted.
He knelt between her ankles, then he bent above her, and slowly lowered himself to her warm and cool body. He entered the house as a thief. Quiet, still, holding his breath. Very slowly so no one would wake. She stirred slightly and uttered a tiny moan, as if she dreamt of some beautiful thing, and the smile came again to her face, and then remained there.
He lowered his body more, drew slightly more into her intoxication. He held his body above her, hardly daring to let it down upon her and touch her flesh. He bent his head slowly until a power seemed to emanate from her as a perfume from a jasmine flower and he kissed the soft lips again, not so easily this time, but with purpose and desire. Still she did not wake, though she shifted slightly, and let his tongue slip inside her mouth, and he lowered his body, inch by inch, upon hers, and let his thighs push slowly so that he was slipping into her.
Slowly, each movement seeming to take hours, he slipped into her, down upon her, covering her. The surface of her body was cool, a hotness seemed to rush within her. He lowered his body, kissed her, until he seemed to cover her completely and her body included him, and then in a paroxysm his mouth seized at hers with a violent kiss, his arms laced around her small body and crushed her to him, and his thighs drew back and delivered a savage thrust.
And then another, and another, and another, and his mind broke under the pleasure and at the same time her body seemed to wake and rise toward him, she stirred and her hands groped, and she said something that was lost in the violence of his kiss, and her thighs rose to meet his in a thrust as wild as his.
His body was fire and he was plunging into the earth itself. She was alive beneath him, her mouth was sweet and it sucked at his and returned the kisses with hunger, and her body drained and pulled at his, her legs lifted and coiled at him, and her hands stroked and scratched over his back. An intense fragrance rose up out of her and the fluids of her body flowed and she seized his mouth with a ravenous biting kiss and her hands held his head and pushed it to hers, her fingers toyed with his ears, ran through his hair, stroked at his neck and then dug into his shoulders, raked down the centre of his back, stroked and kneaded the flesh of his sides, and then seized his buttocks and her fingernails dug into them and squeezed and pushed, she seemed to wish to bury him within her.
One arm he had laced under her back, and the other under her buttocks and his hand held as tight as she did to one buttocks and by pushing and gripping it he guided her jumping, swaying, rolling body to give himself and her the greatest depths of pleasure.
As the motions and speed of her body grew she seemed to pull him within her, and muscles within her suddenly gripped him, clamping down midway on his manhood with great force, and he felt he might never dislodge himself. The muscles throbbed to a new rhythm of their own, different from the rhythm of his thighs and hers, and seemed to pull him even deeper into the mystery of her body, and she began to utter sounds of deep joy that came from her center, and she bit violently at his tongue, his lips, his cheeks and chin.
His mind was gone now, his body was flesh and flame, and the throbbing of the muscles within her and the thrusting of her thighs, the pulling, swaying and squirming of her hips had grown to such smothering writhing that he felt she had attained the ultimate, and she rode there for a great while, as he, seeming to split in two, tried to hold back his greatest pleasure and the same moment obtain it.
But the ferocity of her body had overcome him, he was at last conquered and surrendered with a great roar that echoed over and over in the cave, and the fluids of his body spurted in such great gusts and with such unending force that it might have been his life itself rushing from him. They collapsed at last into each other, moaning, kissing, half-sobbing, life, death, rebirth, all in a moment, and then he, suddenly drained of all his strength, raised up on one elbow to look down at her beautiful face and the wild pleasure of her eyes, tried to utter a word, and then collapsed beside her, as if struck down dead.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The girls of the harem of Ain Sebaa called a meeting. Khala, the most conniving, presided. They gathered in a corner where they would be least likely heard by other jealous members of the court and wives and more complacent concubines, and pretended to be embroidering a new robe for the old sheik.
Khala said: "As we all know, and no doubt agree, there is something unnatural in the qasbah of Ain Sebaa. Here we are, the choicest girls of the choice, and none of us has found a way to deliver our poor master the sheik from his impotent gloom. I dare speak for all of us when I say that we entered his presence excited and with the most honorable of intentions, for, to speak truth as well as we can, we, the girls of Ain Sebaa, love to be loved, and the hon our of bringing youth and happiness to our old sheik would be honour for a lifetime.
"But I hardly need say that each of us has failed. We all feel, in our secret hearts, that we were not given proper opportunity, and that had not the old sheik had our britches down about our ankles and been beating the beans out of us before we could so much as wink at him, that he might be a strong and happy man today, and ourselves the most privileged of women. But because of the poor sheik's over eagerness and his penchant for paddling pretty girls' rumps, he has cheated himself-poor one!-of the most delicious of pleasures. Therefore I propose that we-though it prove a dangerous enterprise, for he is a suspicious man-endeavor to alter this deplorable situation. And I have a plan that, perhaps, if you comply, and Allah wills, should lead us all to those realms of pleasure we all so deeply desire."
She glanced about at the girls, the best of the best, who were listening raptly.
She went on: "Now, Cherifa, if you and Latifa would hold up the great emerald coloured robe which we have been embroidering as a gift for our sheik, and which we will use as a ruse to obtain our entrance to his chambers, but which now we will use to shield us from the prying eyes of others-" The girls obeyed, holding up the large robe so that they were screened.
"Now," said Khala confidently. "Now. So that I can determine the tricks and devices that would most likely rouse the sheik from his slumber, I will ask you to perform them here, before me, pretending that I am the sheik. Those whose approach we deem the best we will send foremost into the fray. We will decide together who is most alluring.
"But now, let us begin. You, Rubia, with your lovely blonde body, come and present yourself to me as if I were your sheik, but do not let me seize you until you have performed your best."
Rubia stood, looking about herself in endearing confusion, running her hands through her long blonde hairs. "I should be bold, but teasing," she said. She stepped up to where Khala lay on her side, in imitation of their master. "I should first seize a nipple-for though women grow mad when men play with their nipples, I have known men who go mad when a woman caresses him in this most erotic place-"
"Do not speak," said Khala. "Act. And remember that you must act fast before the old sheik has tumbled you over his lap and begun his frustrated whipping."
Rubia obeyed immediately, reached inside Kahla's kaften and fairly jerking the large dark breast from it and seizing upon it with voracious lips. She sucked vigorously at it while the other hand fumbled for, found, brought forth, and fiddled with the large black nipple of the other. Her approach was so direct that Khala gasped with pleasure, and the other girls watching rolled here and there on their behinds.
But Khala remembered her role as the sheik, and reached out and jerked down Rubia's britches and had her hand drawn back to deliver a vicious slap to the girl's pale and swelling buttocks, but Rubia changed her tactics, abandoned the breasts with one hand and darted it under Khala's skirts and ran it up her legs smoothly and quickly till she reached her crotch. She seized her there, and interrupted her kisses to say, "It is not the scepter itself I would fondle and tickle, but the orbs that decorate it, but since you have no such appendages, I can but pretend, and tickle this part of you."
"Mmmm," said Khala squirming, "that might be a superlative approach," and she lay there on her side allowing herself to be tickled. After a while she said, "But what would you do if the sheik did not respond, and tumbled you-like this-to give you your spanking-"
Rubia dodged the Negress's swift slap and roughly jerked her skirts up and applied her kisses to that place she had been fondling. Khala fell back writhing in pleasure. After a while, though, she managed to pull herself back up, gasping, "Ah, yes, desist, please, ah, yes, Rubia, you must do this to the sheik for no one could resist such an attack."
Just then the redheaded Hamra rose from her squirming hips and said, "But remember, her caresses upon him are not in quite the same place as upon you-" and she rushed upon them wildly, nuzzling her face down beside Rubia's, and used her expert tongue and lips to effect upon Khala the same result as she might upon the sheik if allowed to reach the corresponding part of him. And since she could not speak, so engaged, she lifted up her skirts to expose her voluptuous body, and straddled Khala, who'd again fallen back in an ecstasy, and waved her buttocks around.
The sight of all this drove the mad Hamca even madder, and, with her hair flying, she fairly leapt upon the other three, crying, "And perhaps his tastes could be further whetted like-" and she seized upon Khala's mouth with a swallowing kiss, and grabbed her available breast and pulled and pinched at it.
All this made Khala rock and throb and fling her legs and arms, and Boussa, whose subtlety had lost her games before, though she deserved to be victorious, came forward and rubbed her naked sides upon Khala's, and began to apply the tiniest, most provocative bites all up and down Khala's arms, on the inside and the out, along her hands and in her armpits, at the same time grasping Khala's feet with her own, she entwined their toes and rubbed her legs all around Khala's.
Then beautiful golden Boula came forth rushing, giggling and waving her arms and her slender hips. With her waving hips she bumped Boussa's out of her position as she kissed Khala, crying, "But maybe our sheik must be stimulated into action by kisses on places hotter than mouths," and took up her stance, deliriously waving her round belly like a dancer, and widening her legs as she lowered herself.
Khala was so swamped with pleasure that she became an automatic object, a machine; she grasped Boula's slender, hairless young legs and pulled the girl above her, and began to kiss around them until she worked up to the center, and her kisses there were so fiery that Boula began to writhe and moan, running her hands through her hair, leaning back from her kneeling position so that her pointed breasts rose high, her hands tearing through her hair. She moaned and hummed through her clenched teeth and tossed her head like a dervish.
At this point there were no other girls left to watch except the two who tremblingly held up the emerald robe as a screen, and our poor Zohra, who sat quivering with desire and confusion at the spectacle before her. Her dark gazelle eyes were boggling out of her head, and her tongue kept running round her lips, and her finger was under her skirt. She crept nearer them, looking for a place that she might find pleasure, but there were so many girls, so many waving arms and legs, throbbing shining bellies, thrashing hips and bouncing buttocks that she could not imagine what specialty she might perform upon the sheik. She crept closer, extending a trembling hand, almost intoxicated with the sharp perfume that rose out of the mass of female bodies, so violently lost in their race for pleasure and their performances upon the erotic parts of Khala, as if she were a man.
Ruefully Zohra thought of Jafar, and at the same moment she spotted, midst the clothes that Rubia had shed, that curiously carved and polished object which they used with each other to such complete mutual satisfaction. She seized it, and spit on it, and as she drew it to herself gasped with half pleasure, half pain. She crawled with it wedging its way into her body into the mass of girls, and tried to find that part of Khala to use it upon. But then she reflected that the sheik had no such part of his body. But then she realized that made little difference to men, for they were always using boys as objects of their pleasure; and, further reflecting upon this she pushed bobbing heads and writhing buttocks aside to take a position, she admitted that though the sheik was an old man, some old men took their pleasure in secret ways.
She pushed through the hot, slippery bodies and sought that part of Khala that was left free, and applying her strength, managed to get her arrow set in her bow, and aimed it at her target. When she shot, she was surprised that the arrow flew so straight and true, and that Khala, far from resisting being thus shot, opened up that wound with a great groan of pleasure, and raising her long black legs and bringing them down again and lifting her rump so that not a bit of her should go unloved, and faint with the shock of this new work-for work it was-Zohra began to perform upon Khala the strangest of her tricks.
A weird thrill buzzed in her brain as she knelt and tried to manage a masculine affair, but, as she learned, it was a feminine one too, for the more she plunged the more she was plunged into. Soon the object was as firmly lodged as a branch of pine, and Zohra found that she could take the most maddening pleasures from it by pushing and roiling and rolling. She hung onto-who was it?-who, having reached her first climax, had rolled over on her side and was working up to another one by covering Khala's face and Boula's belly with bites and kisses, and who proffered her lovely behind for the hugs and kisses of whoever might reach it.
One by one, each girl soared up into the heights, cried out, gnashed her teeth and scratched wildly, and for a weakened moment collapsed or rolled out of the way, only for another girl to take her place upon that part, with her hands or her mouth or some other part of her, and the girl was floating in the sea of honey when the winds in her stirred again and her everlasting desire rose up again, sending her into deeper, newer, cleverer pleasures.
Khala, as the cynosure of all this, had been stretched taut upon the torture rack of pleasure, and could but throb and roll and moan, though she gave no signs of giving up.
The girls in a frenzy sought their own pleasures and gave it to Khala and the others, and it was a good many hours before they at last had exhausted their hot and strong young bodies, and lay curled, knotted and coiled in a softly breathing heap. With dim voices they discussed what they had done and how they had done it and what improvements might be made in the case of doing it to, or with, the sheik. They agreed to a girl that the sheik could not resist such an onslaught. And though they giggled and petted one another, they held back their desires for the night, when they should go, all together, clad in their sheerest and most alluring kaftans, to the sheik, to present him the emerald robe they had made and embroidered.
They pledged that they would continue their attentions to the sheik that night even though he should fight and rail and scream, as he so often did, and though he might thrash them with the whip or sting their fannies with his palm, they determined to endure it all, and to force the sheik over with their attentions, to balk his stubbornness, until he had obtained some sort of pleasure. As Khala put it, "There isn't a man alive that wouldn't be wakened by one or two of such tricks, and with them all combined we should be able to wake a dead one."
They laughed, and then they kissed one another and again pledged unity and secrecy. Then they rose and donned their rumpled clothes, and went off to the baths and bathed each other, washing their bodies clean and perfuming themselves with the rarest and most seductive of perfumes. Then in the boudoirs they painted their eyes with Kohl, and braceleted themselves, and some put henna on their fingers and toes.
Then they dined well but lightly, to be most energetic for their attack, and they washed their mouths, and they drank orange water and rose water and ices with crushed almonds. And Khala, who thought of everything, bribed the slave girl who served the sheik his brandy to maneuver it so that he drink neither too much nor too little, and the slave girl, who was in on the secret and had lascivious designs of her own, did so.
Now, though the girls attempted secrecy, the rest of the girls were not altogether fools, and when they saw that the conspirators, who had been hidden in some comer most of the afternoon, had now perfumed themselves and put on their most enticing garments, and were now lazing around in their pastel colours with looks of secret satisfaction on their faces, they felt that something was afoot, and so they, too, bathed, perfumed themselves, and joined the others on the mgs in the court to await the coming of the soft night.
A delicate quiet obtained as the summer evening came on, with the doves purring in the fruit trees and the chorus of serenades from all the other birds. Night jasmine and honey-suckle and the orange trees sent up their scents, and the girls played old songs on drum and flute, and sang them as the stars came out, making the sky trembling silver.
Mingled with the old songs came the cry of ducks and geese from the river, and fireflies decorated the shadows where the flowers had hidden.
A peace came upon the valley of Ain Sebaa. The girls in the conspiracy, happy from their afternoon frolic and secretly excited over their plan for the night, exchanged warm smiles, and their eyes grew fogged, and they remembered their favourites with fondness.
When the enormous white moon appeared they left off their music, and watched it as it rose, silencing the earth, the birds, and leaving only faint sounds to be heard: the trickle of water in the fountains, the stirring of leaves in the fragrant breezes, the occasional utterance of a night bird.
But then a darker silence came, and the earth, everything, seemed to freeze in the cold watery light of the moon. And in the centre of this silence, from very nearby, rose the howl of a wolf. The girls' smiles froze on their faces, then melted. The black wolf was howling at the gate of the harem of Ain Sebaa.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jafar kissed her for the thousandth time and rolled dreamily over on his back. She lit his pipe for him, and kissed his belly as he smoked. She poured him another glass of herbed mint tea, and said in her soft, easy voice, "But Jafar, why do you persist in these questions about the wolf? I have told you all through the winter and spring that I must go down each night as the moon rises and take the animal food because my mother commands me to do so. It is she who holds the secret, she who is a sorceress, not I."
Jafar smiled at her, and then kissed her profoundly on the navel, which he knew she liked especially well. "Then you get the secret from her," he said.
"But, oh, Jafar, why must you know? Why must you know? Why can't you rest here with me, as you have done for a year, why must you ask these questions of my mother's witchcraft? Put such things out of your mind, they are not for you to know." She leaned forward and kissed him on the neck and shoulders and slid her hand down his belly.
And as she began to stroke and caress him, preparing him for another sweet turn, he lay back and smoked another pipe, and reflected. Yes, could be she is right. There are few men on earth who have what I have, the daughter of Doubba, the secret of her love, which is more near enchantment than human. The whole year that I have been with her I have lifted nothing more than my sword, which lifts of its own accord, and I have eaten honey and milk, and slept dreamlessly upon the softest pelts, next to the most beautiful girl beneath the seven heavens. Praise be to Allah! ... But still, there is poor Zohra, and poor Azlya, and all the poor girls, and they haven't any fun, and that damned wolf outside the door.
And so ran his thoughts. He knew that as the moon began to rise, she would rise with it, quietly, without a word, becoming as quiet and ethereal as the moon, and gather her white robes around her, and disappear from the cave. On several occasions he had tried to follow her, but she vanished from it without a trace. There were several entrances, and he thought she took the one that faced west.
Thus, on this night, after she had departed and he pretended to be sleeping, he rose just behind her, and barefooted, naked but for a lion skin, followed her, holding his breath, his eyes as keen as he could make them. He followed the dim whiteness of her through the black corridors of the cave, and to the exit. That was the last he saw of her, as she was framed, illuminated in the silver light, pausing to pick up the basket that was left there. Then she was gone. By the time he reached the opening and looked down into the deep, shadowy valleys, she was gone. There was not even a glimpse of her on the rocky slopes. But this time he did not stop. He ran, knowing that he might be lost, that many years might even transpire before he should reach the serene valley of Ain Sebaa again, but he hurried down. He had not paused even for something to eat, and had nothing but his lion skin and his pipe and his pouch of hasheesh.
Fear and despair dogged him as he made his way over the torturous stones, down into the dark valleys, in the direction of Ain Sebaa. He did not turn to look at the mountain of Doubba, but he could feel it towering behind him, a dark giant watching him. Nor did he turn to look at the swiftly rising moon.
He did not know what drew him, but he let himself be led by a strange sense, and he listened each step and his eyes hurt from staring into the multiplicity of shadows and forms in the pale moonlight. For hours there was no sound at all, only a thunderous silence. The silence weighed upon him, and made his head dizzy with his thoughts and gave his fears horrible shapes. The night wore on slowly, and the moon rose to its zenith. He looked up at it, full and silver, and at the same time a sound from across the stony emptiness sliced into the very center of his heart. It was the long, lonely howl of a wolf.
He felt as if he had turned to stone. Every hair on his body bristled, and his breath was tiny sniffs in his nose. His mouth went dry. He did not dare stop, but pushed on, as fast as he dared go, careful to make no sound. The night was very still, and he prayed the wind would not carry his scent. He did not know from which direction the howl came, for the canyons and cliffs twisted sounds and the echoes bounced curiously. The howl came again-nearer, but it seemed to come from a different direction.
He ran on, looking about, but he could see nothing in the expanse but the curious shaped rocks, and looming, the peak of Doubba. The howl came again, and again. Soon, too soon, it was close by. But each time it came it was from another direction, from high above on the ridge, or far below in the blackness of a canyon, and once it seemed but yards behind him, so close that he found he had shut his eyes and clenched his teeth in very fear. But a few moments later the long, chilling howl came again, from what sounded to be miles before him.
At first he altered his course to avoid the wolf, but then he realized that he did not know where the wolf was, or, for that matter, if there were more than one. If they were howling to one another, then he was in their midst. If there was only one, calling to the moon, he did not know where it was. He went on, pulled in the direction that a strange sense demanded, and he moved with renewed strength each time the howl came, piercing the deathly silence of the night and entering the core of his heart. As the moon slowly set, the wolf, or wolves, hushed and for a while the voices were distant, and he breathed more easily and moved at an easier pace. But just as the moon was beginning to set beyond a ridge of ragged peaks to his left he heard a howl from there, and it echoed five distinct times across the valley. The wolf, or the wolves, are following me, he thought.
He wound on down, across the trackless rocks. Sometimes he found himself in a cul de sac and had to retrace his steps, and sometimes he found himself at the edge of a precipice which offered nothing but blackness below, and he had to turn back. He did not think which way to go, he just followed his instinct.
But soon the moon sank beyond the ridge of peaks, and the black shadows flooded up out of the valleys, and the stones became a nightmare of shapes, and a new coldness came, and the stars crowded the sky. He moved more slowly, deliberately, his ears in an agony of listening.
All through the night he went on, listening for the wolves who howled intermittently, sometimes near, sometimes distant, sometimes above, sometimes below. He marked time by the slow arc of the stars, and as he was gazing up, walking along trying to find a constellation almost lost in their silver thickness, he stepped upon a loose rock and suddenly slipped, and slid down a large slope that was invisible, rolling, tumbling, grasping, until he smashed upon a rock that knocked his breath out of him and left him tying there.
He sat up, his head aching. His foot was in pain and his side was scraped, and his mouth was full of hot blood. It took some moments for him to remember where he was, where he was going, where he had been. And when he remembered he put his face in his hands.
The wolf howled. He did not move his head, but froze. The animal seemed to be only yards away, and the long howl echoed through his body, echoed five times over through the valley, until it vanished into the distance. He still held his face in his hands, and he dared open one eye, and lift it to the side, from whence the sound had come. He saw the silhouette of the wolf through his laced fingers: it was no more than twenty yards distant, above him on a rock, black against the stars.
He did not dare even swallow, he tasted his own warm blood in his mouth. Did the animal know his presence? It stood above him, its nose lifted, sniffing about.
Then it lifted its head, and again its cold howl filled the vast silent world, and its echoes resounded on and on. The echoes were still trembling in the valleys when the animal suddenly lowered his head and vanished over the other side of the rocks.
Eternities seemed to creep by as he sat there, his face in his hands, his eyes hurting as they peered through the cage of his fingers. At length the stars began to go out, the little ones first, and then the others, and the blackness beyond them gradually became a deep indigo, and then in the east beyond the great peak myriad colours began to form in the sky, as the stars, one by one, kept dying. The time between the first light and the rising of the sun was long.
When at last he stood, he could hardly step upon his foot. It hurt, but he walked. The wolves would not vanish in the dark, he knew, but at least he was in his element, not theirs. Slowly, painfully he made his way onward, downward. Just before noon he found a stream and washed and drank there, rested, smoked a pipe, lay back wrapped in his lion skin to rest, but dared not sleep.
But he could not remain long, though he wanted to lie there forever. He rose and went on, winding down through the rocks, by the rushing waters, until he came to the forest of pines.
The forest was thick and dark and oppressively silent, but at least it was not so full of awful imaginings as the heights, and familiar things such as bees and flowers gave him some comfort.
All day he made his slow way along the bank of the stream, knowing it would lead him to the valley of Ain Sebaa. But just before sunset he came to a ragged cliff, and the stream cut its way deep into the earth, and was lost in a complex of cataracts that plunged over a cliff he knew he could never descend. In deep despair he sat and smoked another pipe.
He rested a while, and then walked, carefully, waiting for the moon to rise. The pine forest seemed to grow thinner, and he was uncertain how he had come, and wondered if he weren't climbing again. But he could not think for the pain in his head and he pressed on. And soon as the moon, waxing and yellow, appeared, the wolves began their howling.
They were nearby, and there was a pack. He spotted one upon a ridge, and a few minutes later another darting through the trees on the slope below. They were surrounding him. They were drawing closer, tightening their circle around him.
There was little in his brain, his heart was heavy as he limped onward. Each time one of the wolves howled, he was nearer.
The pines were sparse and wind-twisted here, and the wind was knives. The wolves' voices were loud and clear, and all around him, and the peak of Doubba was no further away than it had ever been, it loomed halfway up the sky, halving the rising moon.
Then he caught out of the corner of his eye the shape of a wolf trotting by, his head low, his pace quick and wary. The wolf had come to investigate him. He fell upon his knees and beseeched Allah's mercy. The wolf circled him widely, and vanished into the twisted shadow of the pines. Jafar did not move. Another wolf appeared and traced the same silent circle. And then another came, stood and watched him, sniffed, and then made the circle, but drew the circle tighter.
Again he placed his face in his hands, and waited. The silence came down upon him. He remembered many things, many beauties, many loves, but he could remember no sounds, no music.
Then suddenly there came the sound of scuffling, some noises in the underbrush. He heard the wolves making noises like dogs, panting and whining, and he dared open his eyes and peek through his fingers. He saw the pack, three or four, no, five of them, running about something, and in the foggy moonlight he saw a white figure among them. The sight brought him to his feet. He felt nothing. He watched the wolves pursue the dim white figure through the trees, and disappear.
He went after them, as fast as he could move. His heart was banging in his body, his mouth was dry, his head was clear and cold. He ran to the side of the ridge, and caught sight of them again below.
And he knew the secret to the black wolf.
Jafar pursued the wolf pack with all his might. As he ran limping after them he devised snares and traps, and racked his brain for ways of catching her. But-as it is so often in his life-it was not his cleverness that caught the prize, but Allah's strange design.
Just before dawn, as he was running along a ridge with the ever circling, intent pack below him, his sore leg gave out and he fell again, rolling and tumbling, down the side of the mountain, directly into the wolves. They immediately saw him, and pricked up their ears and froze. But the sight of him, rolling over and over and yelping in pain, was too much for them, and in a second they broke and ran, just as he tumbled into their midst.
It so happened that there was a pit just below, and Jafar, unable to stop himself, tumbled into the wolves, and into one in particular, and into the pit with her. In the fall he lost his lion skin-but he caught, without even trying, the white wolf bitch that had so excited the pack all the night long.
Cold, naked, limping, worn from the pursuit of the wolves-and all the dogs, for the white bitch was in heat-Jafar struggled into the palm groves of Ain Sebaa, dragging his lion skin with the kicking bitch in it. The moon was high in the sky and the crickets and locusts were singing, and the little red river made melodies in the night.
It was late, and the lovers of Ain Sebaa were bedded, and the lights of the village were few. Above them, the kasbah's sun slit windows glowed amber. As he came near it, he could hear nothing. He went through the first unguarded gate, and into the bare courtyard where the black wolf lay chained. The moment he entered the wolf lifted to its feet and arched its back, more like a cat than a dog.
He locked the outside gate, and let the white bitch loose. He grinned as he watched the black wolf break his bonds and take his pleasure, and Jafar slipped in at the gate.
In Zibilli's spot there was nothing but disarray, and Jafar smiled as he fancied he heard little Ali's giggles of delight.
The interior of the qasbah, though blazing in light, was oddly still and quiet. He sneaked along the corridors, listening, and hearing nothing but the sounds of the night. He made his way along the wall toward the gate of the harem. He felt his heart was pounding so loudly he might be heard, and drew his lion skin up around it. He tiptoed on his sore foot. He was worn out from his trip, though he had made it quickly, it had been strange and dangerous, and holding the white bitch in and fighting off the dogs who sniffed her was not the easiest task he had ever performed.
He listened at every door, and heard nothing. He wondered if part of his brain might have been destroyed, and wondered if he might still be under the bewitching spell of Doubba and her moon-like daughter. When he came in sight of the grilled gateway into the harem, his heart leapt to his throat, and he had to swallow it down again. It was pounding. His fingertips even were chilly.
Though he stood but a few feet away from it, he was stopped dead by the thought of the pleasures that lurked within. There were Zohra, Azlya, and the countless other pretties, and they were all hungry for him. He listened. There was a curious quietness, and the scents of honeysuckle and orange wafted through the gates on gentle breezes.
He stole closer. The oil lamps in the rooms overlooking the gardens were blazing, making great shadows in the trees. There was a blissful seductiveness about the scene that made his skin tingle, and gave rise to a sharp sweetness in his loins. He thought for a moment of how great had been his sufferings to reach this moment, but the thought crumbled and vanished under the weight of the dreamy sense of victory.
With trembling hands and taut body and dry mouth he approached the gate. To his amazement it was unlocked. He pushed it, it made a small creaking noise, and he slipped in. A sense of voluptuous delight flooded him, and lifted his lion skin from below. He tiptoed through the dark, perfumed garden toward the boudoirs of the girls, wary and trembling and ready to collapse for sheer excitement.
He came to the grilled windows of the boudoirs, and blinked to assure himself of his waking before he looked in. He looked in. The boudoirs were empty.
He did not understand at first. He blinked some more and slapped his head to wake himself. Was his beautiful dream to transform itself into a nightmare once more? He stole around the garden, peeking in all the windows. There was no one, no one at all, in any of the rooms, or even concealed by the fig and orange trees of the court.
Five times he made the circuit. Then at last he stood in the center of the court and looked around. He could not believe it, but he could not deny it. The harem of Ain Sebaa was empty.
CHAPTER NINE
Jafar woke with a start. He had fallen asleep in stunned exhaustion in the court of the harem, and now it was midmorning. He heard the ululation of women, and he was on his feet in a second. Drawing his lion skin about his hungry, taut body, he ducked under the trees and crawled to the gate of the harem, listening intently.
Then he heard the sounds of moaning and weeping, and he crouched wonderingly under the fig tree, and gazed out through the grillwork at the outer reception hall where Zibilli usually sat.
The family of the sheik had gathered there, his brother and sisters and nieces and nephews and sons and daughters: there was quite an assembly of them. The women were weeping and the men stone faced, there was little doubt that something extraordinarily grave had transpired recently in Ain Sebaa.
Jafar listened with all his might, but the stories that they were telling were quite confusing. The only thing clear was that the old sheik Fawzi was dead, and to be buried that very day.
But what of his wives and concubines? Where were they? Why had they been taken away? What had become of sweet, hot Zohra, black, aloof Azlya, and all the rest? What terrible thing had transpired while he was away in the wilderness, seeking the secret of admission to the harem?
It was his friend, handsome little Ali, who explained all. Jafar spotted him, sleepily following Zibilli around and he went through the grim affairs he was faced with, and in the confusion and noise of sobbing and the women's wailing cries, Jafar managed to sneak near the grilled window and hiss at Ali. Ali's sleepy green eyes lit with delight as he spotted Jafar, and as soon as he could escape, he came to Jafar, and crawled under the fig tree with him, and kissed him with great joy. Jafar explained briefly and impatiently where he had been so long, then demanded to know where the girls of the harem were.
"Ah," sighed little Ali, lying back on the leaves and putting his hands under his curly head, and gazing up dreamily with his green eyes at the sky beyond the canopy of leaves. "Ahh, Jafar, poor one, why were you gone so long? Oh, Jafar, you would have loved every minute of it."
"But what, little wretch," hissed Jafar, "what has happened? Where is Zohra, Azlya, Rubia, all the rest?"
"By Allah, I don't know," said the boy. "They all went different ways."
"What different ways? What do you mean? How did they get out? Are they safe? Tell, you wicked little bastard, where the girls are!"
"Why if I knew, Jafar, I wouldn't be here. But there is the funeral to be had, and they will most likely come back for it-"
"Tell me, damn! Stop talking riddles."
"Ah, strange are Allah's ways," sighed the boy. "But listen: I will quiet your raging curiosity. It seems the girls were so unhappy in their confinement, with one of the normal pleasures of your girls, and so bored-an idle brain is the devil's workshop-that they at last could stand it no longer, and under the leadership of the beautiful sister of Azlya, one Khala by name, and they formed and executed a plot to escape their slavery."
"They have escaped! All! By themselves! Without me!"
"They have. And the poor old sheik is now in the seven heavens, in the cool gardens where the houris dance, and free from weakness, ignorance, and pain-"
"The sheik, they have murdered the sheik."
"No, no the sheik went on to his reward in the happiest of ways, the happiest of men, praises be to Allah."
"Well what did they do? Tell me, you wicked-"
"Well hush and let me tell you. They banded together, a few of the girls-the very cream of them-and bathed and perfumed themselves and dressed themselves in sheer silks of pastels, like a rainbow but lovelier, were they. They put upon their most alluring voices, they sang love songs, and they went in together to the sheik with a beautiful robe of emerald velvet embroidered in gold, that they with their own hands had laboured to give him. The rest of the wives and concubines, jealous and suspicious, had also made themselves as seductive as they could, and were watching as the girls went in.
"Oh, Jafar, never have I ever seen such a glorious sight as they went in to him, singing love songs. They had pledged secretly that though he should beat them raw and murder their families, they would not leave him until he had experienced those voluptuous pleasures that he had so long hungered for. But they surprised him, for they took the offensive and overcame him before he could start his cruel punishments.
"Now, I was watching from a little peek hole I found, where I often watched the girls in their audiences with him, and at their secret games in the garden. Oh what games they had, O, Allah! The things that a woman will do when she hasn't a man! I watched them with my hands under my robes, or Zibilli's hands under my robes and his body atop me, for Zibilli knew that the sight excited me to do my best. And I did my best for him, Jafar, as you told me, for each day I hoped you would return and free the girls for everyone's pleasure.
"But I did not expect to see the spectacle I saw last night, no one on earth would have dreamt it. The girls, like houris of Paradise, went into the sheik's chamber, presented him the robe, which he accepted with little grace, scowling, and looking for which bottom most appealed to him at that moment to paddle.
"He selected Zohra, your own, sweet hot Zohra, but to his amazement Zohra leapt upon him like a leopard, crying aloud, and tore his robes up, and seized the great slumbering giant. In embarrassment, frustration, and rage he tried to kick her off him, but she was pulling at him with great tugs, and raping him the best she could with the unresponding member, and before he could yell, the crazy Hamca had flown upon him like a wild beast and had silenced his shout to the guard by placing her perfumed femininity where he shouted. Then Rubia dashed in and seized his balls, and began the most provocative sorts of caresses with her hands, her lips, and her legs and breasts all over the poor squirming old man. And Hamra the redhead was in there, tearing his white robes off him and seizing him on the nipples. Soon he was covered with the writhing, half-veiled bodies of those ravenous beauties-and oh, Jafar, something in me rises again when I see it, and I thought last night that it would never rise again. But to go on: I was peeking through my peekhole, and I was so especially excited that Zibilli, who was upon me, stopped biting the back of my neck and looked too. It was a scene that even stirred that old pederast.
"Now the girls were upon him, clawing, kissing, biting, scrambling and they had left no erotic place unattended. They used their hands, their mouths, their breasts, and their femininity upon him, rubbing and stroking and slapping him, he was so covered with their fevered flesh that he could but roll about moaning in half pleasure and half pain.
"The sight of all those female buttocks thrashing at him, whamming, pumping and throwing, almost drove me mad. It was exciting to watch, and frustrating, and my body though separated from them could not help bouncing like theirs did in wondering need of them. Now, my own fire set fire to Zibilli, and soon he was done, and swooned and rolled off, but I was not done and though I knew it might mean my head would be choked and stuck atop the gateway of the qasbah, I fled from him and ran down the stairs, taking his keys, and ran into the sheik's boudoir.
"Now, Jafar, as you know I am a young boy, but I am equipped to handle women, and when they saw what I was offering waving at them, they seized upon it, in a scramble-I am not even sure which of them got to it first, for they seemed to smother me, with their kisses, tears, sweet breaths, hot words, their breasts rubbing over me and their hands, and their tongues into my mouth, and I swear it's true, their tongues wherever they could get them. Mad Hamca was so crazy she seized Rubia, who was in the best position for ail for both her and me, and pulled her off her throne, and threw herself upon me with such a fury that she almost broke it. In their frenzy and my already high state of excitement, I went sailing off to heaven within a minute, but that stopped no one; Rubia rolled Hamca off of me, kicked her with her foot, and grabbed me-I had been on my back, like a poor woman being raped, and wrapped me in her cool slender arms and seized me with her legs, and rolled over on me, and then rolled over again with me on top and said, 'Now you do to me what that trash Zibilli's been doing to you,' so of course I did it, while the other girls were pulling at her and at me.
"And too, they hadn't let off on the old sheik, who was so stunned that he couldn't speak-though his mouth was occupied with kisses of numerous kinds, and could do little more than moan and roll around. I spied, however, amidst all this insane carrying on, that his old sleeping giant, slowly to be sure, but definitely was inching forward, like a snake crawling out of a hole.
"I was being so pounded by Rubia's bottom, however, that I paid little attention, and gave all my strength to imbedding my very being as deeply in her as possible, and I thought I was up to my teeth in her anyway. It was about that time that I began to go blind with our pleasure, and I ceased to observe what was happening outside me, as what was happening inside was far more interesting. That is, a power rose from the centre of my belly, swelled through me, filled me, and then in a series of spasms went out of me, leaving me, several moments later, halfway to heaven, and I was half dead in the head, and somebody was pulling me from my perch over Hamra, I mean Rubia. And the girls paid not a bit of attention to the fact that my strength had ebbed after the height of my pleasure, but were doing everything they could-and any one little thing is good-to revive it for me. It was reviving quite well with the kisses I was getting all over my body-my robes were in shreds under me, when I noticed that Zibilli, who had, it seems, come running down, had been seized by Latifa, and the old pederast, why his whiskers were bristling and was he having fun with the unaccustomed softness and bigness of Cherifa's buttocks.
"And I noticed-as I got on my knees with-who?-doesn't matter, it's all the same-that the old sheik was getting younger by the minute, but still not young enough to be successful. However, the girls had only three men, which they were all busy with, and the sight of the old giant stirred their lusts and kept them working upon him, though they took their rests with Zibilli, me, and each other.
"I forgot to say-I hadn't noticed til then-that the other girls, those who were not in complicity, had broken in upon the scene, and they too were doing their best of tricks.
"Aah, see? It makes me turn to stone again now to remember it, though last night when they were all done, I was so done in that I thought not only it, but I myself, would never be able to rise again. Seven times, Jafar, seven! Then there wasn't another drop left in me, even blood. All those girls, all those buttocks, all that warm flesh, sticky with love, shining with heat, throbbing and grabbing ... aah, Jafar, you should have been there...."
Jafar ground his teeth and thought. He didn't like the thought, and snarled, "And old sheik Fawzi? What of him? Did they finally kill him?"
"Aah, what sweet death," said the boy, stirring, sitting up, and looking about with hungry green eyes. "Yes, they did. It was your own sweet hot Zohra that dealt the death blow, Jafar. Ah, lovely little kitten! What beauty, what hotness, what honor! She applied every secret in her book to arousing the old sheik, but still though it grew, it just wouldn't work right. And all the girls had exhausted us men, and even exhausted themselves, and Zohra-though she had a crack at me, Zibilli too-she's very kind, your Zohra-she was still at it with the sheik when all the rest of the girls were lying about in a worn out heap of flesh.
"Someone's head rested on my belly and my head rested on someone elses, and some sweet thing was stroking my thigh and someone else fiddling my bow, in hopes that I might prove myself a hero of an arch er and shoot again. But I was too frazzled to lift a finger, much less anything heavier, and was feasting my eyes upon Zohra's energetic thighs, which were still rocking atop the old sheik, who was lying back with his eyes rolled back in his head, wheezing pitifully.
"Zohra, looking round at every one else cried, 'Shame! What kind of disloyal sluts are you, that you let your sheik go unpleased and seek nothing but your own pleasure, and now having got it, loll around on your lazy behinds! Shame!' But none of the other girls was capable of rising again, and so Zohra began to ride with all her strength, and then-for she is the cleverest of all-she began to beat his fat old thighs with her hands, and soon she felt a rising, and so she leaned and seized a curious object that Rubia had brought, and used it upon him, and then she, seeing that at last victory was near, seized in her other hand his little camel whip that he so often bruised her with, and riding as if she was off to Holy War, she beat the sheik until at last he rose to his former glory...."
The boy laughed, and lay back again. "Ah, Jafar, it was sad, but it was wonderful, ah strange the ways of the world ... for the old sheik's light went out, but the last thing he uttered were praises to Zohra. The giant delivered its message to her, and his soul flew up to paradise...."
The sounds of the chants of verses came. Jafar looked up, and saw the coffin of the old sheik being shouldered out of the walls. As is the custom, the coffin is not borne by one, but each man moves in to take his place under the coffin, bear it ahead a few steps and another comes to take his place. They were leaving the qasbah now, the sheik's family first, and then the others.
Jafar and Ali rose and followed. Outside the qasbah all of Ain Sebaa had gathered-the strong warriors, the diligent farmers, the alert herdsmen, and-let you all dream upon this, the beautiful wives and daughters of Ain Sebaa. Great howls of sorrow and anguish filled the lovely valley, and each of the men stepped forward to carry the body of the old sheik a few steps further, and the funeral cortege moved swiftly through the palm groves, and all came with it.
Jafar went, and in the sobbing wailing throng he caught sight of a pair of gazelle eyes, sad and lonely, peering about from above a purple veil. He went to them, and saying nothing, put a kiss upon them. They said nothing as they followed the procession to the cemetery, nor did they say anything as the old sheik Fawzi was laid among the eye-blue tombs and the rank wild flowers. Nor did they say anything through the long lovely afternoon on the hillside among the flowers, and they did not comment upon the coming of the soft night or the rising of the golden moon.
They said nothing until the moon was setting beyond the far hills, and the soft breezes of morning began to rustle the palms of the grove. At last, kissing her upon the ear, Jafar said, "Ah, Zohra, you are to me more than all the girls of the harem of Ain Sebaa."
He said this so she would not notice the lovely brown girl who was picking flowers down by the river, and had waved at him in the dawn.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
The tradition of the North African oral tale in Arabic is one still obscure, abstruse, and misconceived in the Western world. It is an ancient form, refined and re-defined through the centuries, employing distinct techniques and ritualized forms of expression. As we all know, Scheherazade told her tales aloud to her king to save her head, and we know too that they were profuse; and it cannot be denied that no small number of the tales of the Thousand and One Nights are boldly erotic in intent.
This tradition still exists in Morocco, as well as in the entire Arab world, and its form, though not different from the classical tale in general, has developed some interesting variations and specializations, and, in particular, a revealing Weltanschauung that stands in total contradistinction to the narratives that either the serious student or the causal reader customarily associate with the 'erotic East."
To recognise the virtue of the present manuscript the structure of the oral tale should be clearly understood. Tales may be told by professionals, or by amateurs; they may be spun out for hours, for the delectation of a circle of rapt listeners gathered in a public square, who, if they have it, give a small coin to the narrator; they may be recited to children as bedtime stories, rather reminiscent of children's serials which are so familiar on television in the United States today; or they may hold spellbound a gathering of men and boys in a tiny Moorish cafe, smoking their pipes of kif, and drinking glasses of tea with mint and lemon verbena; or they may be told at home, to family and friends, with everyone joining in the fun at certain high points, by urging on the teller, or correcting a mistake, but primarily by a profound absorption in the intricacies of the tale.
The present collected tale is unique in its mixture of sexual fantasy of a highly intimate and unusually uninhibited nature with a comic-virtually picaresque-story, and a dip into the supernatural and-a thing quite rare in oral stories of the East-the psychological. It is a fast-moving tale, or rather, a cleverly tied knot of two tales, that of Jafar and his determination to grab the pleasures that all Moors so proudly demand, and that of the plot of the girls in the harem. It is interesting to note that the story of Jafar covers a long period of time, while that of the girls seems to cover only a day, and yet they end at the same moment of time. Time moves at a different rate of speed in Morocco, and both of them are evidenced here, in the tricky intertwining of the plot, which unfolds its secrets only slowly, like the figures upon a fine Berber carpet, which tell their stories only to initiated eyes.
The fabric of this story is written in rosettes of the paradisiacal valley, in the starlit slopes and moonlit heights, and the ominous glare of the great desert. The figures upon this tapestry are geometric-they are archetypes. Yet they are vital, richly clad and presented dominant in their pastel landscapes.
Jafar is roughly correspondent to another stock character-found in Arabic street stories and jokes (many, it must be admitted, off-color ones), a clever clown named Jaha. Jaha's escapades usually concern a comic dilemma that Jaha has made for himself by his laziness and gullibility, and the ingenious way he gets out of it; the difference is that Jaha's stories are short and piquant, actually rising only slightly above the realm of jest, whereas Jafar, the hero of this and other Moroccan erotic stories, is more strongly drawn, and is ruled by his obsession with sex; other motivations are to be found in other stories, but Jafar is monomaniacal in his quest in every tale in which he is encountered.
He is often found juxtaposed with 'hot' Zohra, or her like; often, as in the present manuscript, she all but shows him up. She too is a stock character, rarely varying from her blend of wantonness and innocence, and never from her captivating beauty. She is an ideal, a sort of Moorish Dante's Beatrice, but one considerably less phantasmagoric and more fleshy, and in possession of what passes for the Moor's conception of feminine intelligence. The girls, it must be pointed out, are more clever than Jafar: they at least effect their aim, while Jafar is merely plotting them up and chasing them down. Yet, in the end, it is Ja-far's eye that wanders; he is thinking of yet another better one. He is longing for something always, but Zohra, or Azlya, or Boula, is always very much there in her own present and consuming pleasure.
As the storyteller recites his tale he does not restrain himself from leaning upon this aspect, or the other, of his more or less one dimensional characters, so that the character begins to absorb a certain depth and humanity, according to the storyteller's mood or intent. The teller from whom this was collected has chosen some rather interesting variations, which could give certain alternative-and more interesting-readings. The surface of the story is erotic, beneath it lives a message of another sort.
Amrani, the boy who unfolded this adventure for us, was born about 1954 in Sefrou, some twenty-seven miles from Fes, a white village of about 30,000 inhabitants, including a large Jewish community, in a great cool oasis at the base of the Middle Atlas range, on the Oued Sefrou, at 2,790 feet. The River Sefrou cuts a ravine cruelly through the heart of the ancient town, but many fine, vine-covered old bridges help to stitch the wound, and great arching willows and stands of thirsty bamboo whisper over it; trellises of grape shade the winding little streets, and every building, including the graceful little minaret of the mosque, is a simple old white. It is quiet but chuckling; such a place would readily suggest the paradise illustrated in the manuscript.
At the beginning of the Islamic period, the Abel Sefrou, a Berber tribe converted to Judaism, occupied the banks of the Oued Aggai (River Aggai) and the river known today as the Oued El Youdi (River of the Jews). After the foundation of Fes at the beginning of the ninth century, Moulay Idriss succeeded in inducing the inhabitants of Habounda, a place occupying the site of the present Sefrou, to embrace the Muslim faith. By the twelfth century the town was of substantial size, and was further enlarged in the following by the arrival of a Jewish colony from the Tafilalet beyond the Adas, and from southern Algeria.
From this the complexity of Amrani's background may be perceived: Berber, Jewish, Muslim, (and in latter days, French). But what religion were the Berbers? The answer can only be guessed, since the Berber language no longer exists except as a spoken one, and as tattoos on the chins and foreheads of Berber women. A partial answer to their religion may be ascertained from this.
On a road leading to the small fort that overlooks Sefrou from a hill to the west stands the marabout of Sidi bou Ali Serghin. A marabout is the tomb of a local saint; they are to be found everywhere throughout Morocco, and are often the objects of pilgrimages, and sometimes, to the chagrin of the Muslim oulemma, or high councils, the sites of ancient cults. The marabout of Sidi bou Ali Serghin is small and white; it is simple, a cube symbolizing the temporal surmounted by a dome symbolizing the eternal. Nearby is a spring which witnesses a curious custom among the Muslim inhabitants: every year a black goat and a black hen or a hen of seven colours or a white cock are sacrificed to the genii of the spring, and the blood is scattered over the water.
It is clear that the white goddess has not been forgotten at Sefrou.
A long journey back through the volumes of Frazer and Graves would no doubt reveal to the attentive reader a more than interesting connection between the vernal rites at the saint's tomb, and Jafar's visit to the cave of the Wolf Woman, and his enchantment by her "moon-like" daughter.
A famous medieval traveler, Ibn Batouta of Tangier, on a journey to the Maldive Islands, was assured by several trustworthy natives, whose names he lists, of the prevalence of a custom and the manner in which it appeared to come to an end when the inhabitants were converted to Islam. When the people of the island were idolaters there appeared to them every month an evil spirit from the djinn, who came from across the sea in the likeness of a ship full of burning lamps. The natives, as soon as they had perceived the djinn, took a young virgin, adorned her, and led her to a heathen temple on the shore, with a window looking out to sea. There they left the girl for the night, and when they returned in the morning they found her a maid no more, and dead. Every month they drew lots, and he upon whom the lot fell gave up his daughter to the djinn of the sea.
The last of the offered victims was rescued by a pious Berber, who by reciting verses from the Koran, overcame the dark power of the djinn, and drove him back into the sea.
This type of folk-tale, or apocryphal story, is very familiar, and resembles folk narratives, versions of which have been collected from such far flung comers of the globe as Japan, Senegambia, Scandinavia, and Scotland. Though varying greatly in different times and climes, the tale most commonly runs thus:
The land is held in terror of a serpent of many heads, a dragon, a monster. The serpent warns he will destroy the people lest they offer him up a human victim, a young boy often but generally a virgin gjrl, at a certain time, probably set by the progress of the moon.
Many victims have perished. The people of the land are heavy with fear. The fear can but grow as the daughters and sons disappear, until, at last it has fallen to the lot of the king's own daughter to be sacrificed.
She is taken to the serpent. But just then the hero of the tale, generally a young man of humble origin, interposes in her behalf, slays the monster, and receives the hand of the princess as his reward.
In many of the tales the monster, who is sometimes described as a snake, hides in the water of a sea, a lake, or a spring. In other versions he is a serpent or dragon who takes possession of the springs or water, and only allows the water to flow or the people to make use of it on condition of receiving a human victim. It would probably be a mistake to dismiss all these tales as pure inventions of the storyteller; rather we may suppose that they reflect a real custom of sacrificing girls or women or boys to be consorts of water spirits, who are very often conceived of as snakes or dragons.
To the voice of the tale as a reflection of these Neolithic rituals, there is added the husky voice of Amrani, a young boy, telling his erotic stories.
He is a boy who has probably visited the many caves in the vicinity of Sefrou, notably the Cave El Mou'min, also called Cave El Youdi, a place of pilgrimage visited by both Muslims and Jews, but especially by the latter; the legend of the Seven Sleepers is especially associated with this locality.
Also in the neighborhood, some thirty-five miles or so nearer to the lofty peaks and barren plateaux of the Middle Atlas, there is a depression containing the village of the Ait Khalifa, which was formerly traversed by the caravans from Fes to Sijilmassa in the Tafilalet. Traditionally a stop was made here near the principal spring, Ain Sname, which is referred to by Leo Africanus as Hain Lisnam. Here there stood a town built by Africans in remote times on a plain flanked by mountains and on the route from Sefrou to Numidia. Its name means Spring of the Idols. The story goes that when the Africans were idolaters they had a temple near this town to which men and women resorted at nightfall at a certain time of the year, probably in the spring. When they had performed their sacrifices they extinguished the lights and each man took for himself the woman whom chance had placed next him. When the morning came every woman who had passed the night in the temple was forbidden to approach her husband for the space of a year. The children born to the women during this period were brought up by priests or priestesses of the temple. Inside the temple there was a spring which can still be seen, but temple and town were both destroyed by the Muslims and no trace of them remains. The spring forms a small lake which drains away by such outlets as the marshy surroundings supply. The brilliant interpretation given by Carpocino of this custom proves that it both preceded Rome and survived it; traces of it have been found in Morocco in recent times.
The happy valley of this story is of course the paradise one encounters often in Arabic literature, yet its connections to these customs and attitudes and religions of yore cannot be denied. And to the already complex picture must be added a comment upon El Bhalil, a large village about three miles from Sefrou. The people of the neighboring districts insist that the name of this village is a contraction of 'be-halil', 'the fools', since the natives claim for themselves Christian ancestry and deny all Berber or Arab origin. The village includes many troglodyte dwellings cut in a fault of the Jebel Kandar.
All these religions and backgrounds are in the warp of this story (as well as in Amrani's personality), but the woof of it is Arab, or more precisely, modem Moorish. In its lustiness, its speed, its simplicity, and its craftiness, the story paves the way to a broader understanding of a culture difficult to comprehend to most Westerners. Yet it points to a strange little dichotomy, for Jafar, though usually an archtype, is somewhat atypical in that he, like most Moors, is not content to "Take the cash and let the credit go." He is imaginative, though not exactly clever, and far from practical, and his schemes are wild even to the wild Moor. In all the narratives in which he is central he appears thus, as a slightly foolish though likeably swaggering impostor, so singleminded in his quest of sexual gratification that he will plot the absurd to obtain the impossible; his friend, usually a boy like Ali, will point a disapproving finger and shake a sad head, and tell him to accept the will of Allah, and not go about changing things. But Jafar has his own ideas about what the Divine Will is, and that is that it constitutes action. He never passes up, certainly, the pleasure of the moment, which, indeed, continuously falls into his waiting lap; but he is caught in the imagination, in the sensual fancy, and though what he has in his arms may be complete and blissful, a comer of his greedy brain always impells him to move on, to explore new possibilities, to turn his idee fixe into reality. He is therefore a modem sensualist, a Twentieth Century existential hedonistic lover, who is never satisfied though always in the midst of the act which obtains his satisfaction.
Yet the Jafar of the tale (this same might be said of any young Moor, for Jafar is both archetype and a vehicle for wish fulfillment, as well as a character in his own right) is unlike the picaresque hero of Western literature, unlike, say, Sebastian Dangerfield in Donleavy's The Ginger Man. Jafar does not think. He imagines, he plots, he mourns, but he seldom thinks, and he never articulates. He is simply a mono-maniacal libertine, and content withal; one could scarcely suspect him of being caught in the 'existentialist predicament.' He is simple libido.
This libidinousness could easily be misinterpreted by the casual Western reader as indicative of a certain mindlessness, an undisciplined and unprincipled search for sexual gratification utterly lacking in any of the higher goals and aspirations of life. But it must be held in mind that to the Moor, sensual pleasure is not singled out as it is in Christian and Judaic societies, but is viewed as a precious gift of Allah, something to be enjoyed thoroughly and as often as possible; the pursuit of the pleasures, even if it is as consuming as Jafar's, is not frivolity. Jafar is acting out his destiny-the Moor is a fatalist to the core-and because sexuality is his greatest pleasure, Jafar would not once as most Christian libertines do, question his love of it: he would simply pursue it, as he does, with all his will and might.
A few highly generalized facts must be said about the sexual mores of the world Jafar inhabits, though the world presented here is fictional and idealized, the practices are not, and the attitudes reflected are real. The role of women must be clarified: in Morocco, which is predominately Berber and not Arab, the woman is a freer soul than her sisters in other parts of the Muslim world. The Berber tribes were converted to Islam in the great expansion within about a half century of its founding around 622 A.D. It is worth noting that one of the most formidable of the Berber tribal oppositions was a woman, the queen of a tribe of the Aures (possibly the Zenata, nomad cameleers who had recently arrived from the Sahara), known by the name of Kahina, the Prophetess, who resisted the Arabs and beat them around 697. However, the Arabs finally seized Carthage from the Byzantines in 698 and founded Tunis. Now that the Byzantines had been eliminated there only remained the Berbers to subdue. Queen Kahina was defeated in 702, possibly the victim of dissension among the Berbers, particularly as a result of the traditional hostility between sedentary and nomadic populations; the former were more easily converted.
The Berbers were converted, but not enough to make the women take the veil, nor to make the men give up the drinking of their brandy; nor did the pagan institutions disappear, but were assimilated as all conquering religions assimilate the older religions, into the pagan cults that have been mentioned earlier. And though the tribes of Barbary were converted to Islam and even somewhat Arabised, the process was never entirely completed and even today the tribes retain their independent, republican ways, and as recently as the 1950's Moroccan politics and government were still much a matter of overcoming, or at the least of allying with, the tribes which dominated certain areas, such as the oasis of the pre-Sahara, or the fertile plains of the Haouz.
The result is a certain 'marriage of infidelity' between the native Berbers and the Arabs, and, though its influence has been indisputably profound, Islam and the mystical Sufis have not been able to extinguish altogether the beliefs of earlier days, and the religion of the country shows vestiges of magic, of Judaism, and the paganism or pantheism that formed the core of the beliefs of the ancient Berbers. Belief in supernatural powers is widespread, in djnoun, hostile or benevolent spirits, servants of Allah the Compassionate or instruments of Iblis the Accursed, in the effects of the evil eye, in sorcerers, witches, enchanters, philtres, potions, and fortune-tellers. Particularly superstitious, as one would well expect, are the women of the entire country, and the Berbers of the plains, the mountains, and the desert.
With such a background it is not difficult to understand the 'girls' in the narrative. They have accepted their fates as the will of Allah, but that does not mean they can't endeavor to alter them by action; not to sit back and accept, but to create their own fates through action and accept that. Their lasciviousness and lewdness, however, are qualities not only atypical but extraordinary, and one must assume that their escapades are present only to excite and entertain the hearer, and not in any case to record a real type of Moorish behavior.
In their concupiscence they are rather the Moor's (perhaps Amrani's) idealization of a good bedfellow-not a wife but a lover, a distinction always made by the Moor; indeed, Amrani as he recited, emphasized that though the girls were delicious, they were terrible wives: they more resemble a college of pagan priestesses imprisoned than a languorous harem of wives and concubines. They are presented as innocent and free, and they are without the taint of sin an actual Arab woman would manifest if she were engaged in such venery. Their love of sex matches Jafar's, and even transcends it when one considers that though he spends a great deal of effort and time in getting it, they spend all their effort and time in doing it. There is a quiet comment being made here by the narrator on the difference in behaviour of men and women, and a not altogether false one upon the basic dances of the sexes. That these women are supple, however, must not be taken as an indication that all Moroccan women are; these are indeed the exceptions that prove some rule, and literary devices to keep the listener attentive and involved, and mostly, entertained.
But these girls of the harem, whatever they may be, are not the only women in the story. There are the rather supernatural figures of the daughter of Doubba, and Doubba herself, and the curious pilgrimage Jafar is forced to make to the cave. This journey of his, like Herakles' quest for the golden apples of immortality (which, incidentally, were probably to be found in a sacred grove in the environs of Tangier, or so claim many pagans), is one to be found in many Arab and Moorish stories.
Often the narrative, while having one object in view, is interrupted by the necessity of foregoing that object presently in order to obtain it eventually; thus is Jafar uprooted from his musings in the happy valley and sent out on his strange mission in the inhospitable mountains. In this passage the strong hand of paganism is most palpably felt, and many questions arise: Are these things symbols? Symbols of what? Is there a shrine, or the performance of an illicit ritual implied in his visit to the secret cave and his time spent there? (Though the passage of time is vague, the mention of the season's progress seems to indicate that Jafar spent a year there, probably a year and a day, thus putting him in the company of the sacred king of the old wheat or oak cults, perhaps a weak argument but one that may be supported by the fact of his enchantment by either the daughter or the mother-one is never certain who exerts the magical influence.)
Jafar is, however, clearly a comic figure and not a heroic one, and in this aspect he acts as a parody upon the whole system of secret caves, Circes, and enchanted chambers; and though veiled in the story may be his inflation into a fraternity dominated by a wolf goddess, it is lacking in other requisites: what Jafar suffers that is in common with a heroic figure is always farcical.
His departure from the magical bliss of the cave is his own volition; it is simply effected and does not even require a ruse. He is bored, and, thinking back on the harem, leaves his enchantment, though his departure might prove dangerous to him. The obstacles he encounters then on his escape are no less than those which frustrated his attainment of this state.
Although perhaps embodying these diverse elements which we have here attempted to intimate, the primary purpose of this tale, as any tale, is not to instruct, but to delight. It would be a fruitless task for the translator to protest his inadequacies before the sonorous trumpet of the Arabic language, but he must assert that in its original tongue the narrative assumes a verve and piquancy that is simply not to be rendered in modem English, with its impoverished vocabulary-Arabic has twenty-nine words for 'Love'. To the problems of puns, rhymes, and outrageous sexual language the translator has simply bowed, and chosen to use the most familiar words, though avoiding the clinic pit of Latinisms and Miltonisms and the transitory power of slang. Puns have been employed when there existed the possibility, confessedly often remote, of translating them; and the liberty has been taken of imitating some of them where they do not exist in the original language but might be forced into some imitative semblance of life in English. Rhyme has been kept only in a very few cases, because it enlivens the story or adds the needed savour to an already highly spiced dish. Amrani's version, unlike many others, was furthermore rather crookedly rhymed, and he-wisely, I might claim-often slurred over the parts where the story would tend to break into poetics and having indicated that a live poem was here to be understood, hurried on with the narrative, and went on to the salacious passages, which, as refracted by the prism of his mind, came to be the raison d'etre of the work.
It must be borne in mind that this form of story is popular, that is, ever changing and dynamic, altered to suit the mood of the moment or of the story-teller, and-certainly in the case of this telling-to appeal to the particular tastes of the audience. In other words, the same story at a different moment in a different voice would hardly be recognizable as this one. Too, incidents, anecdotes, situations, and amorphisms from other stories are borrowed, reworked, and blended into this story. There is a repertory of characters, incidents, and twists, a sort of common pot of spices from which any number of tales might be seasoned.
The popular oral tale, then, is a genre quite to itself, far beyond the pale of formal Arabic writing in Morocco. It attests to that reverse of the coin to be guessed by the reviewing of those writings and monuments accessible to the Westerner through the printed page, such as the subtle commentaries that Ibn Rochd, better known as Averroes, made upon Aristotle; the geographers and travellers, such as Ibn BatBatouta; historians who related the events of the different dynasties; hagiographers who recorded the deeds, miraculous and not, of holy men and left precious information about the families of the sheriffs and about the religious confraternities; and finally the poets who produced epigrams, love-songs, elegies, and descriptive poems, and who today especially write casidas, poems in praise of great men, often grandiloquent and wrought with curious imagery. Among these latter the best known is Ibn Kaldoun, who wrote the History of the Berbers, a 14th century monument of literature and an incomparable guide to scholars both Oriental and occidental. Ibn Kaldoun's masterly philosophic document, The Prolegomena, is also argument for the tradition of serious thought to completely unguessable from the perusal of the present work.
When requesting Amrani to relate this tale, I specified nothing. In fact I was not prepared to find anything quite like this story; because I was painfully aware of die pitfalls awaiting the translator who tries to bridge the great gulf between an oral tale in Arabic and a printed one in English, my sole intent was to hear a story for my own delight. The setting was extremely conducive to tale-telling; and I knew young Amrani would not be difficult to persuade, for he loved performing.
We were seven seated about the grass mats of a tiny cafe in the hills above Sefrou, drinking a welcome tea after a hard summer's afternoon spent in the mountains tape-recording music at a Berber wedding feast. There was that exaltation of the pleased and exhausted about us, as we rested in the little cafe, and Amrani, who must have been the worst worn of all, as he has supported on his young back all the day and the previous night the tape-recording equipment, was the most sparkling among us.
After he had played back a few tapes, to the delight of a group of smiling children who had wandered in from somewhere, possibly from some distant planet, we passed out some fruit we had been given at the Berber encampment, and Amrani threw some incense on the charcoal burner, though the others scolded him and preferred to breathe in the purer fragrances of the oncoming summer night. Our bellies were full, praises to Allah, and we were happy to be off our sore feet-except Amrani, who bounced this way and that, doing things, a flame of summer excitement.
The company of travellers from the feast then compared their wishes: Shall we stay here in this cafe and sleep the night, for we are very tired, or shall we proceed on to Sefrou, and sleep in our own beds?
For the duration of dusk we discussed our various wishes, but not hurriedly. Amrani, it was clear, wanted to sleep here, for Amrani loved sleeping under the shelter of the stars.
While the discussion was to whether we should remain the night continued in a minor key, sotto voce, Amrani served a second pot of tea with mint, lemon verbena, and a strange weed he had got in the mountains; he passed the pipe of kif, and made us all comfortable upon some pillows he had got from Allah-only-knows where.
There came at last that time when the last fragile breath of light went out of the western sky, and the birds hushed, and the stars began to come out, one by one then suddenly by the thousands; just then I inquired idly of Amrani, just to involve him in talking, so he would come and sit down. I was afraid he would explode and will us all with his 14-year-old's energy and excitement; he was not misbehaving, but one could perceive that when he ran out of good things to do, he would. Idly, I asked if he would care to put on another pot of tea?
He declared of course he would if the others would drink it with us, and since I had inquired, and was deferred to because of my status as a guest, the others said, "Of course they would have another tea," and all settled in comfortably for the night, gathered the hoods of their jalabas over their heads, as we had all along known we would. All except Amrani, who played the tapes again, and danced.
He danced a great while, and then, as if by signal from the slender young crescent moon, which had just stepped rudely upon the carpet of stairs, and hung above the purple peaks, above the mauve hills and the silvery valley, Amrani suddenly ceased his dance, and looked about. He switched off the tape-recorder. The silence of the night came like a thunderclap, and then in that abyss of silence the symphony of her sounds began. Amrani came to sit beside me in the circle of yellow light, and a night wind stirred.
He leaned forward, his intelligent young face lighted dramatically by the low yellow flame of the kerosene lamp, the only light in the night except the paleness of moon and stars. It was most assuredly a cozier situation than that had by those Italian aristocrats riding out the Plague. And so I inquired if anyone knew a story such as they tell in the Djemaa El Fna of Marrakesh, or in the grand mechuoar of the royal palace in Fes Djedid.
One responded with a joke which would never translate.
Another followed with a joke I prefer not to translate, and Amrani suddenly put an end to this uproarious nonsense by asking, most seriously, with his head cocked, and by a characteristic gesture of his-running his hand over his curls to push the hood of his jalaba from his head when he is about to make a carefully weighed question, which is often-he asked me, "Sahabi, how is love in your country?"
"Which of the twenty-nine ways of love do you mean?" I was able to reply.
He whispered the word in my ear. I responded that I would tell him about that some other time. And, seeing the evening drawing to its starry, dream-hungry height, I asked Amrani to tell a story.
His dark eyes looked directly into mine for a moment, and then he moved them to the others, one by one until he was assured of our spellbound attention, whereupon he quietly declared, "This world is only a mirror reflection of the one that exists."
Everyone nodded and he went on:
"There is another world within us as real to us only as the universe we perceive with these eyes is real in the mirror. In a moment the glass may be shattered. In another moment, the mirror of that world where we are only shadows and reflections, that more real world's mirror may break. At the breaking of the second mirror,' the mirror of the self, a man steps into the world of closeness to others: Love."
The others murmured; it was as if this Sufistic image and attitude was commonplace among them. They were listening with as much rapt attention, though with less astonishment, as I.
I recalled, at this point, that the early popular preachers of the Sufi mystics were called qussas, or 'storytellers'; and too, as everybody knows, the Sufi mystics broadcast their secret doctrine in love and wine poetry. I do not mean to suggest that Amrani is a Sufi, or even that he is aware of the existence of Sufism; but the attitude is, after all, certainly reminiscent of Sufi doctrine; and once spotlighted thus, one may ascertain, if one places one's mystical ear close to the heartbeat of this tale, other attitudes very much the same. (There were, in fact, in the recitation, moments which I was later tempted to try to render as poetry, which they resembled more than prose, but I refrained for the reason that I have already attempted a translation near impossible.)
It must have been while I was thus engaged in thought that Amrani rose and put on a tape of flute music; it was soft, and found its way into the night; it played throughout the night, and as it played it erased itself and recorded Amrani telling his story, with the flute music in the background. But none of us knew this, then.
Amrani brewed yet another pot of tea and passed more pipes of kif, his dark eyes twinkling with his ideas to a story. Then hesitated, "Then you will want to hear a love story."
The company murmured and nodded, and someone told him to get on with it.
"Would you have a love story of laughter, or one of tears?" Amrani asked generally.
"Love stories are of both," said one.
"Surely," said Amrani, leaning on his elbow and addressing his comrade most seriously, "surely there is in this great creation a kind of love that is all laughter?"
His friend pondered; and he had to admit that was so: he acknowledged it with a sigh, and a smile.
At this point we were struck by this most extraordinary occurrence: a young swallow, frightened by some night thing from its perch nearby outside, suddenly darted into the open doorway and flew dizzily around the darkened room, making a great and stunning shadow and then a tinkling crash among the empty tea glasses near the glowing charcoal brazier. Amrani sprang up and had in an instant taken the stunned creature into his hands; he held it as its long, slender, deepest-blue wings gave a few powerless thrashes; but as Amrani was holding its feet lightly, the bird soon surrendered, ended the futile struggling, and drew its small head back to accept its fate.
Amrani held it and stroked it, and brought it for us to admire. Its coming had been a very good omen, for the swallows had not long since returned from their yearly visit to Mecca, and we felt a sense of lightness about us.
He held it in his hand, and then, after it had accepted its gentle imprisonment, he relaxed his hold upon it until it sat in his hands, gazing about at us with dark-eyed wonder. After a while Amrani seated himself cross-legged beside me and said, "In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate," and began his story. The bird seemed to grow hypnotized by his calm, husky, unhurried voice, and its eyelids slowly closed up; it would seemingly doze a while, then wake up again. But it did not try to fly.
And once, somewhere in his story, without interrupting himself, Amrani took the bird and pressed it softly against his breast, and it instinctively clutched at the cloth of his jalaba and held there. There it remained throughout the night and the story, until at the second light of dawn, just as the story ended, it opened its eyes and wings at once, and in a swoop was gone. When our sleepy eyes sought its path, we found the clear indigo morning where many scores of swallows traced out the patterns of the vanished stars.
Apologies must be made for the lengths to which I have gone in this Introduction concerning the hidden meanings and the less-than-apparent sources and elements, and for my all-too-humbly presented at tempt to acquaint the Western Reader with curious charm of the oral erotic tale in Arabic. My most sincere thanks must be extended to those without whose assistance and support the story would never have reached its present form: Sid Mustafa ben Mohamed Rammal of Tangier; Mr. G.A. McNeill of New York; Mr. Terry Flynn of London, and by virtue of her muse-like inspiration, Nicolette of Marrakesh.
And the blessings of Allah upon Amrani, who ends his tales with a wink.
