Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/216

 had hardly ever seen, and with whom, prior to her wedding, she would not for her life have been guilty of the indecency of speaking a syllable. On the day appointed for the ceremony she had been decked out in all the finery and gold ornaments that her people had been able to borrow from their neighbours for many miles around, and had been led forth to take her seat upon a dais, side by side with the stranger into whose keeping she was about to be given. For hours she had squatted there in an agony of cramped limbs that she dared not relieve by the slightest movement, and in a torture of embarrassment, while the village folk- who composed the whole of her world ate their fill of the rich food provided for them, and thereafter chanted endless verses from the Kúran in sadly mispronounced Arabic. This ap- palling publicity had almost deprived the dazed little girl of her faculties, for hitherto she had been kept in complete scclusion, and latterly had spent most of her time on the para, or shelf-like upper apartment of her father's house. She had been too abjectly terrified even to cry, far less to raise her eyes from her fingertips which, scarlet with henna, rested immovably upon her knees.

Then, the wedding ceremonies having at last con- cluded, she had been utterly miserable for many days. She was not yet in her "teens," and to her a man was much what the ogre of the fairy-tales is to the imagination of other little girls of about the same age in our nurseries at home-a creature of immense strength and cruelty, filled with strange devouring