Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/139

 traveling sari of gray- and green-striped muslin, the soft flower of her face “veiled against the inquisitive glances of this stinking Southland,” to quote Mehmet Iddrissy Khan who had bid them good-by on the threshold of his house in the Colootallah.

They were followed by another roomy carriage that held a dozen of the princess' chattering, giggling, betel chewing servants under the command of Mahsud Hakki, a huge, crimson-turbaned Nubian eunuch who performed his office with a great deal of pompous dignity and without the slightest sense of humor—which latter failing had no effect whatsoever on the servants, who talked to each other and, when the carriage pulled up at the railway station, to their mistress, with all the startling, democratic familiarity of the Orient; too, with all the primitive indelicacy in regard to matters physical of that same Orient.

Talking loudly and pointing shameless and decidedly grimy fingers, they mentioned, in Hector's plain hearing, that he—“Al Nakia” they called him and the Englishman hunted in vain through his Persian and Behari vocabulary to find what the word meant—would be a fairly good-looking man, only:

“Thy nose is too thin, like the rawhide whips the Tajik caravan men use to spank their lean camels' lean buttocks, and thy belly is like a flattened purse!” remarked a toothless, withered hag who had the princess' jewels in her care; while a grizzled, gnarled old Persian woman, who was entrusted with Aziza Nurmahal's compact silver-and-enamel traveling water pipe, said, passionlessly, as one stating a fact known to all the world: