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Updated: June 19, 2025
Add to this that, with the aid of love, my houris have learnt French, with all the marvellous facility and linguistic instinct of the Asiatic races. You will not be astonished to learn, then, that I can now share with them all the pleasures of conversation; a happy result which will permit me henceforth to furnish a more complete description of their different characters.
Our lot, in this sense, may improve; but we do not ask much of it if we are inwardly rich: on the other hand, a fool remains a fool, a dull blockhead, to his last hour, even though he were surrounded by houris in paradise.
The canoes, which they call houris, are hollowed out of a tree trunk, double-prowed, and with matting at the bottom. They are not very stable and make one think unpleasantly of sharks. You pass the Fahl, or Stallion Rock, in the harbour, a name constantly given by Arabs to anything large and uncanny looking, and turning sharp round a rocky corner you see before you El Matra.
The paint-brush struck him as being an instrument light to handle, and he fancied success easy. His dream was a life of cheap sensuality, a beautiful existence full of houris, of repose on divans, of victuals and intoxication. The dream lasted so long as daddy Laurent sent the crown pieces. But when the young man, who was already thirty, perceived the wolf at the door, he began to reflect.
More close at hand certain roofs in the dancers' street revealed luxurious sofas on which painted houris were lolling in sinuous attitudes, or were posed with a stiffness of idols, little tables set with coffee cups, others round which were gathered Zouaves intent on card games, but ever ready to pause for a caress or for some jesting absurdity with the women who squatted beside them.
They did not issue, like the followers of Mahomet, with the sword in one hand and the "Koran" in the other, to convert by subduing mankind, and win the houris of Paradise by imbruing their hands in the blood of the unbelievers. The ordinary motives which rouse the ambition, or awaken the passions of men, were to them unknown.
She seemed as it were the full moon, when it shines out on the fourteenth night, or one of the houris of Paradise, glory be to Him who made her so splendidly fair! The women encompassed her as they were stars, and she in their midst as the moon breaking through the clouds.
When in the course of his education he read of nymphs and satyrs, and was startled by what seemed a highly elaborated version of his own crude imaginings, he had already, through the influence of Mavis, attained to states of mind that rendered such suggestions powerless to stir his pulses or warm his blood; and now, as he recognized with proud satisfaction, he had reached a stage of development wherein the improper advances of a thousand houris would evoke merely indignation and repugnance.
It was Von Blitz who told the leading men of the island that their wives the Persians, the Circassians, the Egyptians and the Turkish houris were in love with the tall stranger. It was he who advised them to observe the actions, to study the moods of their women. If he spoke to one of the women, beautiful or plain, the whole male population knew of it, and smiled derisively upon the husband.
Now, as a few days of sunshine had favoured us with very mild weather, my houris did not fail to go and stroll about the lawns. Naturally enough they attracted the attention of some indiscreet persons whose curiosity had been quickened by the apparent mystery of this closed house, and by all the gossip in the neighbourhood about "the Turk."
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