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"And this side is the haremlik," she murmured, glancing up at the windows upon the third floor which she felt were those of that rose and white room. Much of the rest of the wing, she saw, extending down to the high wall at right angles to it, was in a ruinous and dilapidated condition. "What is there?" she asked. "The rooms the Khedive Ismail left unfinished. They are of no use."
Some one, the doorkeeper, she thought, from his vivid robes and yellow shoes, came running across the court, shouting something at the girl which sent her flying to the house, her jar forgotten, and another man, an enormous Nubian with blue Turkish bloomers, short red jacket and a red fez, hurried across the court toward the haremlik.
Again he had entered a Rajput haremlik as a woman, and eventually escaped with the fabulous rug which hung in the salon. Adventure, adventure, and death always at his elbow! There was nothing of the braggart in the man; he recounted his tales after the manner of a boy relating some college escapades, deprecatingly. Often Jane stole a glance at one or the other of the Cleighs.
Like a little white wraith Arlee fled through the room and turned the handle of the door at the head of the haremlik stairs. The door was locked. She shook the handle, first cautiously, then with increasing violence, then she ran back into the room to the nearest window, staring down through the screen.
Not looking about him he went grimly on, "The night of the wedding a fire started in the haremlik.... It was a bad business, a very bad business, Jack. For the girl the girl Hamdi had just married " He was conscious of Jack's look upon him but he did not turn to meet it. "She died," he said heavily. "He buried her yesterday." He thought that Jack was never going to speak.
Though the villa appeared to be comparatively new, it was built according to Turkish, not European ideas, as it might have been were the owner a Copt instead of a Mohammedan. The building was in two parts, entirely separating the selamlik from the haremlik.
"Does the desert traveller burn and sigh after water, and then do the springs of Damascus not find favour in his eyes?" she asked, and laughed again as she approached Dilama, and began to undress her. In a few minutes the whole of the haremlik was in a state of pleasant excitement.
For you must know, O Father of the Defenceless, that our women go there unveiled even as the women of the people that you see on our streets, and that on the stage, singers of both sexes indulge in open exaltation of that thing called love, which your prophet has confined within the walls of the haremlik." Abu Nozeyr laughed.
From beneath the veil came a little sound of soft derision. "But there are always bars, even in the garden windows of the haremlik!... No, I stole down by an old stair.... That wing, there, on the right."
Thinking all these brightly revengeful thoughts she had been oblivious to the many turnings of the motor, though it had occurred to her that they were taking more time than the car had needed to appear, and now she looked out the window and saw that they were in a narrow street lined with narrow houses, whose upper stories, slightly projecting in little bays, all presented the elaborately grilled façades of mashrubiyeh work which announced the barred quarters of the women, the haremlik.
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