Conviction that the portion of the human race from which she sprang beheld her son as little better than a monkey, tortured Barakah. She had looked upon him as a mediator, but now sought revenge. Hot, feverish dreams of hate disturbed her rest; and when a spell of khamsîn weather robbed the world of energy she grew as weak and fretful as her thoughts were wild.
Already Barakah had kept her bed a fortnight longer than any Eastern woman would have dreamt of doing after childbirth. The lady Fitnah, seeing she did not gain strength, believed that some debilitating vile afrît was in her. The Frankish doctor said there was no cause for fear. She called him fool and worse, in her own circle; since by his disregard or ignorance of pious formulas he had left the door ajar for evil spirits. Resolved to stop the mischief, when no man was by she hung a plant of garlic in the room, burnt potent odours till its air grew suffocating, and dosed the patient with a paste compounded of the dust of mummies mixed with human milk. When these means failed to drive away the enemy, she sat down in despair among her cronies, and braced herself to try the last resort of all.
This was the “zâr”—a very awful ceremony, of which she was exceedingly afraid. Her wish to hold it in the house—risking the Pasha’s favour, and her life through terror—was proof of her devoted love for Barakah. The dear one must be healed at any price.
Accordingly, she summoned negresses of those who hold familiar intercourse with demons, bought a kid and several fowls alive, and made arrangements to secure the sickroom to herself and her confederates for two good hours upon a certain afternoon.
Barakah was roused out of a troubled sleep by women moving out the furniture from both bedchamber and salon, and covering the floor with worn-out linen and the cheapest matting. They went, and she lay wondering, when Fitnah Khânum came and bade her have no fear. The ceremony she was going to witness was a potent medicine, well calculated to restore her health completely. Many servants, female children, and familiars of the household trooped in with noiseless feet and squatted down along the wall. Then came a group of half a dozen negresses, fantastically dressed in rags of finery, with ringing anklets; one of whom embraced a struggling little goat, while the others bore live chickens by the feet. Bold-eyed and with a swaggering gait, they marched up to the bed, and seemed to offer up the fowls and kid to Barakah, who could not understand the words they uttered in a screeching chant. They then danced back to the adjoining room, of which the door stood open. Upon the threshold madness seemed to seize them. They fell upon the kid with cries of glee. The creature, bleating piteously, was flung into an earthen bowl placed there in readiness. Amid mad laughter knives were brandished and brought down, hands helping to extract the creature’s life. The fowls were likewise gashed and torn asunder; the matting round grew foul with steaming entrails. Another minute and the slayers reappeared, their black arms purpled to the elbow, dripping blood, their faces and their lips defiled with it; and then began a devilish dance of self-abandonment, all the more horrible for its approach to beauty. The sleek skin of the dancers caught blue lights; their fixed eyes gleamed enormous, like those painted on the lids of mummies. Barakah believed herself in hell, forever lost; it was as if an iron hand compressed her throat. Her heart beat wildly. One of the women, the most shameless, lurched towards her, stretching out a bloodstained hand. Her heart gave one tremendous beat and then stood still.
When she recovered consciousness it was to find the lady Fitnah bending over her. The negresses had gone, the room was cleansed, the furniture replaced exactly as before. She might have thought she had been dreaming had not Yûsuf’s mother whispered eagerly:
“Breathe not a word to Yûsuf or our lord the Pasha. Deny by Allah that thou sawest anything. If not, the afrît which we have with pains extracted will return and kill thee.”
In her weak state of mind, oppressed with dreadful and disgusting images, Barakah believed the words and shuddered. She was ill for weeks.
XX
During the heat of summer, part of the harem, consisting of the ladies Barakah and Fitnah, with their children and attendants, stayed at a farm belonging to the Pasha, on the banks of the Nile, near Benha. The journey thither was performed on donkeys in a long procession with a eunuch at its head and tail, a eunuch boy leading the donkey of each lady, that she might have freedom to hold up her sunshade and munch nuts and sweetstuff. The slave-girls, some of them, rode two together; they waxed hilarious, exchanging jests with all who passed them on the dyke. Their going raised a goodly cloud of dust. The house to which they went was large and formal, none too clean, though very sparsely furnished. Behind it was a filthy yard hemmed in by hovels, where dwelt the fellahin who worked the farm. Before it was a garden of fruit trees, and beyond that a plantation of young date-palms. There was also a big tree beside a waterwheel, where the ladies took their pleasure in the shade. The land was absolutely flat in all directions, but diversified in hue by divers crops, broken here and there by clumps of trees and squat mud villages.
Here manners were relaxed; for all the peasant women went unveiled, and their example made the slaves less strict than in the city. The lady Fitnah, being of the country, took delight in talking with the villagers, both men and women, and thus, though most correct in her apparel, set the fashion of unbending. Yûsuf, who had now a Government
