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Updated: May 9, 2025
He did not heed another thing, however; which is, that Oriental ladies are at home to but one man in all the world, and that your acquaintance with them must be modified by a mushrabieh screen, a yashmak, a shaded, fast-driving brougham, and a hideous eunuch.
But the Turk has his own fashion of talk and of thought, and there was no time for wrangling. Douglas Stone drew a bistoury from his case, opened it and felt the keen straight edge with his forefinger. Then he held the lamp closer to the bed. Two dark eyes were gazing up at him through the slit in the yashmak. They were all iris, and the pupil was hardly to be seen.
Although Turkish ladies have almost entirely disappeared from Servia since its severance from Turkey, they have left, in a certain degree, an impress upon the women of the country villages; although the Bela Palanka maidens, as I notice on the streets in their Sunday clothes to-day, do not wear the regulation yashmak, but a head-gear that partially obscures the face, their whole demeanor giving one the impression that their one object in life is to appear the pink of propriety in the eyes of the whole world; they walk along the streets at a most circumspect gait, looking neither to the right nor left, neither stopping to converse with each other by the way, nor paying any sort of attention to the men.
Only her 'lord' was ever permitted to look upon her uncovered face; all that the world at large might ever hope to behold of it was the low, broad forehead and the two brilliant eyes that appeared above the close-drawn line of her yashmak.
"No, Major, I don't," he made reply. "I simply mean that he killed her! The body in the mummy-case is the body of Zuilika, the caliph's daughter! This is the creature you have been wasting your pity on see!" With that he laid an intense grip on the concealing yashmak, tore it away, and so revealed the closely shaven, ghastly hued countenance of the cornered criminal. "My God!
Three mornings a week, an hour after dawn, she gave audience to all those who, with grievance or in difficulty, desired her help or advice; for which ceremony, and having the dramatic instinct, she had caused a clearing to be made in the shade of the palms, under the biggest of which she had also had placed a great chair of snow-white marble, in which, clothed always in white, she would seat herself, her passionate mouth smiling happily behind the yashmak whilst over it the great eyes, into which had crept a look of infinite tenderness in the months that had passed, would scrutinise the people standing humbly and astounded before her.
I could not explain myself to them, still less justify, having that miserable veil of reserve close over my mouth, like a yashmak. To my father I could not speak, to my mother I did not; the others, being my juniors all, hardly existed. Who is to declare the motives of a child's mind? What was the nature of this reticence? Was it that my real habit was reverie?
Most of them danced with their heads turned away, but whenever the evolutions of their measured step brought them face to face with us, they would hold up the sarong so that it concealed all but the eyes, evidently a survival of the yashmak, for Moro women do not hide their faces at all times from the gaze of men, as do the women of India.
Before he answered this call, he must drop the curtain he had rigged up against such emergencies as these. He had but to pull a cord and a veil would fall before his treasure, concealing it as effectually as an Eastern bride is concealed behind her yashmak. Stepping to the wall, he drew that cord, then with an impatient sigh, returned to the door. Another quiet but insistent knock greeted him.
Her face, at the time, was covered, as is the Eastern custom, with her yashmak; but just as the spears of the foremost horsemen glittered close to her horse's head, she raised her stately figure in her stirrups, drew aside the yashmak that veiled her majestic countenance, waved her arm slowly and disdainfully, and with a loud voice cried, "Avaunt!"
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