Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/86

606. I could not hear the words the man was singing, but the woman's voice came to me thickly through the mufflings of her imbrued bandage. With her hideous face pressed close to mine she screamed:

"As the sufferings of the damned shall never cease when Allah makes their faces black at the last day, so shalt thou remain henceforth clothed in this form we give thee till thy flesh has crumbled in the grave, ya bent—O daughter!"

Dimly and indistinctly, as we sometimes conjure up resemblance to a living creature in a cloud-formation, it seemed to me the greasy, writhing incense snaking lazily from the charcoal was blending in the semblance of a female form. It was vague and undefined, but I thought I could make out the length of limbs, the swell of hips and breasts, and, above, the hazy outlines of an up-stretched neck.

The burning pain from the blue-glowing dagger was almost more than I could bear, but the nearness of the hideous old witch's face, the stench of blood upon her filthy bandage and the foul odor of her dirt-encrusted hair and ragged clothes were worse. A wave of utterly soul-racking nausea welled through me, and with a gagging, choking cry I wrenched myself upon my side. The smoke that filled the room seemed to have turned from gray to black, and through it I could see the torchlight burning feebly, outlining the half-definite female fog-form like a silhouette cast on a window-blind by a weak light. Then even that was lost to view and I was shrouded in a cloud of pitch-black darkness. Perhaps I fainted then, perhaps it was a little later, but I was so weak and sick and utterly miserable that the borderline between oblivion and consciousness was lost. The last thing I remember was the unvoiced thought: "If this is death, I'm glad of it."

to such a sense of physical well-being as I had not experienced since the crew broke training when the rowing season ended and I'd had a chance to go to bed as late as I desired with a full meal underneath my belt. They'd taken me into another room, much larger than the torture chamber, and as I looked about me lazily I catalogued its furnishings with something like the pleasure I'd have taken in an art gallery. Through marble fretwork set in windows shaped in narrow Saracenic arches, sunbeams slanted and laid arabesques of gold on umber tiles and on the silky rugs and leopard pelts which strewed the floor. Sunk in the pavement was a small pool in which I saw the gleam of swimming goldfish. There were no chairs or sofas, but there were pillows in profusion, peacock-green, maroon and lemon-yellow. Under me there was a mattress stuffed with down and covered with a silk pelisse striped violet and orange. The air was heavy with the scent of musk and ambergris, and silent with the stilled hush of a church when all the worshippers have left, except that somewhere in the house a wooden drum sobbed softly. A one-stringed guitar lay upon the floor; beneath a window stood a wood embroidery frame with a square of tapestry half finished; by the arched door, hung with violet-and-silver curtains was, incongruously, a gilded grand piano. There were no pictures, naturally, but facing me upon the farther wall was a gilt-framed mirror six feet wide and ten feet high.

I could see reflections of the curtains at the door sway lightly as a whiff of breeze came wafting up the outside