Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/94

614 him. I took one of his narrow high-veined hands in mine and raised it to my brow in proper Moslem fashion. It was flaccid as a newly-dead man's. Only his low, stertorous breathing and the feeble throbbing of his pulse told me that he was still alive. Paralysis had left him nothing but the minimum equipment of survival, and any moment that might cease to function.

I knew I had to think fast. Almost five years' as an inmate of the haremlik had brought me to the verge of madness. It had been close confinement more rigorous than a prison's, cut off from any contact with the world I'd known, without a single book or newspaper to tell me what went on beyond the harem's boundaries, with no one to talk to but a lot of ignorant and vapid women and an old man who regarded me as Westerners might regard a pet animal. For a year or more I'd racked my brain for some scheme to escape; now Allah put my prison's key into my hands. The whole plan—perfect to the last small detail—came to me in a flash of inspiration, and I began to put it into execution instantly.

Unconsciously I had been weeping, for Foulik had been kind to me according to his lights, and I was genuinely sorry for him. But it was art and not grief that made me give a sudden scream so piercing that it drowned the other women's lamentations out. "Allah hadiq, ya sidi, ya abu!—God guide thy footsteps, my lord, my father!" I shrilled, and with the nails of my left hand I raked my face from hair to chin, screaming all the whole.

Everybody in the overcrowded room looked at me with approval. By this demonstration of wifely devotion I had acquired merit, and their admiration increased steadily as I continued shrieking. Though I'd had it for live years, I had not plumbed the possibilities of my girl's-body, and did not realize how delicate and finely balanced its nervous system was. The first few screams I gave were conscious efforts, but in less than five minutes I was in hysterics, and when the European-trained doctor came to minister to Foulik Bey he had another patient on his hands. But underneath it all my mind was working perfectly.

Like most of the big houses of the ancien régime, Foulik Bey maintained a staff of servants large enough for a hotel. Most of these were slaves, but some of them were hired, and among the latter were the more important eunuchs. One of these, a young man named Reshad, I had picked as my most likely helper. He was Armenian by birth and had been captured by a band of raiding Turks when just an infant. By them he had been fitted for his calling and inducted into it, but when Mustapha Kemal reformed the Turkish social order he found himself at liberty and without employment, and had come to Egypt where there was a market for his services. There was some doubt about his orthodox Mohammedanism, but none at all about his love of money.

All the clothes and jewelry I'd had at Yousouf Pasha's had come with me to Foulik's as part of my dowry. Actually and legally they were no more mine than the costumes furnished to a chorus girl are hers, but I felt I'd bought them fairly with the sacrifice of manhood. The hanum-effendi readily granted my petition to be allowed to go daily to the mosque to pray for our lord's recovery, and for several days I went there, working myself into hysterics and acquiring a great reputation for piety. Then I began to extend my excursions.

No hanum might go out alone. A