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"Well, she told me that she was the daughter of a Caidi of the Ouled Sidi Cheik, and of a woman whom he had carried off in a raid against the Touaregs. The woman must have been a black slave, or, at any rate, have sprung from a first cross of Arab and negro blood. It is well known that negro women are in great request for harems, where they act as aphrodisiacs.
"Just how?" asked Colin curiously. "In the first place, the sexes of the hair or common seal are the same size, not like the fur seal, where the sea-catch is four or five times bigger than the female. Then they don't breed in harems and the male hair seal does not stay on shore. A fur seal swims with his fore flippers, a true seal with his hind flippers.
She never would believe that in serving Aimée she would not be ruining her; and even if assured of Aimée's safety, she could never be brought to betray her own reputation for truthworthiness among the harems of Cairo.... As well appeal to the rocks of the Mokattam hills. The carriage stopped.
The seigneurs, themselves no less brutified than their serfs by ignorance and by the fear of the devil, and hoping to be able to conjure away the vengeance of the Eternal, assigned to the clergy by means of authentic documents, executed in all the forms of terrestrial law, lands, houses, castles, serfs, their harems, their herds of cattle, their valuable plate, their rich armors, their pictures, their statues, their sumptuous robes.
Christian maidens, shrieking with terror, were dragged to the Moslem harems. Christian boys were compelled to adopt the Mohammedan faith, and then, crowded into the army, were compelled to fight the Mohammedan battles. For centuries the Christians, thus trampled beneath the heel of oppression, have suffered every conceivable indignity from their cruel oppressors.
To have a balance on the right side of the public ledger was a feat less easily accomplished in those days even than in our own. Could the duke have restrained his sovereign's reckless extravagance in buildings, parks, hunting establishments, and harems, he might have accomplished even greater miracles.
At open doors, across whose thresholds no woman of position ever sets a foot, wealth stands on guard. Silence seals the portals. The vassals of gold wait in velvet slippers. The laws of possession are enforced by the dangers of any trespass on these Western harems. While the queen city of the West rises rapidly it is only a modern Babylon on the hills of the bay. The influx augments all classes.
Dad told the sultan he was authorized by the American people to inquire into the industries of Turkey, and what he particularly desired was an insight into the harems, as a national institution, because many American people were gradually adopting the customs of the orient, and he desired to report to congress as to whether we should adopt the customs of Turkey with her dried prunes and dates with worms in, and her attar of roses made of pig's lard; her fez, to cure baldness, and her outlandish pants and peaked red Morocco shoes, and her harems.
It intensified the thrill of enchantment he had begun to feel. It seemed to him that it might be possible for a man to forget things in a country where even the sky was of another blue. Why should the East be more mysterious than the West, or North, or South, except that women were shut up in harems and wore veils if they stirred out of doors?
This new life is nothing but a succession of delights to my almées; and I have really now attained the ideal in the way of harems, through the absence of that monotony which is the inevitable result of the system of rigid seclusion. Under the influence of our civilized surroundings, the ideas of my houris are undergoing a gradual transformation.
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