Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/88

608 resembled me. In the eyes, the nose, the small, firm chin, there was a hint of similarity, but the very points of likeness made it more unlike me. It was as if I'd been transmuted from a base to a fine metal, idealized and etherealized. The woman in the mirror was not I—oh, no!—but if I'd had a lovely sister who bore a faint family semblance to her none-too-handsome brother this might have been she. Physically, I felt no difference, save that I seemed to move more easily and lightly. Neither was there any mental difference—then.

All at once I burst out raging. "Magic or no magic, they can't do this to me!" I yelled.

Yelled? No, screamed. The voice which said the words my mind formed was high and clear and bell-like. Even in my rage I realized it was musical.

But just then I was in no mood to test the implements with which my personality had been furnished. I was outraged, fairly wild with anger. It was as if I'd wakened from a night's debauch to find that my companions had made off with my clothes and left me in some remote place with a woman's dress on me. Just as I should have sought my masculine attire in such circumstances, so I was looking for my proper body now.

pell-mell at the doorway, tore the curtain from my path and pattered down the corridor, the little henna-painted feet on which I ran making angry, slapping impacts on the tiles. Presently I reached a door and seized its antique silver handle in both fists. But turn and twist it as I might, I could not make it spring the lock.

The noise I made aroused the porter, and he swung the panels back, stepping through the opening and looking at me questioningly. He was big and very black and almost as naked as I was. His costume was composed of three articles: a turban, a breech-clout and a scimitar which had a blade as wide as a meat-cleaver.

"Allah yeseemliq, ya Lella!—God's blessing on thee, Lady!" he salaamed.

"Get out o' my way!" I returned. "D'ye think that you can get away with this"

His amiable grin turned to a puzzled frown. From the rolls of fat that billowed down his stomach till they half obscured his girdle-top, as well as the high voice in which he spoke, I knew him for a kapusi aghast, or eunuch harem-guard, and probably in all his years of service in the seraglio he had never before seen a lella who came pounding at the exit of the haremlik and motioned him to stand aside. "Make way!" I cried again, and tried to brush past him.

He turned his mountainously obese stomach broadside to me, barring the door effectually as if he'd backed a coal-truck into it.

I drew back my fist and let him have an uppercut, and for the first time realized the handicap of the body I was wearing. Something seemed wrong with my shoulder muscles, I couldn't draw my arm back properly, couldn't seem to aim the blow correctly; worse, I could put no force behind it. The little fist I swung struck harmlessly on his black chin, and a dreadful pain ran up my hand and wrist and arm where I bruised my knuckles on his jawbone.

I tried a second blow with even less success. Then he picked me up as if I were a half-grown child and bore me screaming down the corridor and back into the room I'd quit a moment earlier. There he dropped me on the rug and left me. It must have been ten minutes later that I realized I was crying like a