know their meaning….’
Orkhan thought of Anadil and her jangling jewellery and daft lessons on the parts of the body. Mihrimah, pale in the shadows, continued to talk on and on about how he had so far learnt only about sex and not about love. Yet sex was a necessary preliminary, a dim adumbration of the Rapture that lay ahead. Sex with stupid people, such as Anadil and her washerwoman, was good spiritual discipline for a man. She was saying that on the following day he should go and seek the pardon of those ladies, for that was the lover’s way of abjection…
Orkhan sat listening quite contentedly as Mihrimah walked about her cage, talking about the mysteries of desire and extinction. Man was born to love the transient and the passing, the flesh that grew raddled and hung slackly. It was only because fleshly beauty was passing that it was truly loveable. Of course, nothing Mihrimah was saying about mystical sex made any sense at all to him, but she had a lovely voice and her vanity was charming — as was the waggle of her hips as she paced about her cage. He was happy to sit and watch this creature forever. All the same, it occurred to him that Mihrimah would have all her occult nonsense about lunar rapture, the exaltation of servitude and whatnot rapidly knocked out of her, if only he could get his cock inside her. He had just decided that Mihrimah was a nice, ordinary young woman and that her mad notions were the natural outcome of not having been with a man — of having spent too long in a Harem which was not being serviced by a proper man — when she began to speak of the Dolorous Gaze,
‘Before the end, you will long for death, if only to free you from the Rapture. For the moment, you behold me dressed, hooded and veiled, lest the splendour of my naked beauty blind you. I have covered myself as an act of mercy to you, lest you die of the Rapture. But now, if you are ready, I will intensify your desire by allowing you to gaze successively on the most dangerously desirable parts of my body.’
Orkhan having nodded, Mihrimah began to fumble with the lacing of her blouse. She knelt to expose her breasts and, supporting them with her hands, she thrust them forwards for Orkhan’s attention. As she did so there was a strange trumpeting sound in the distance.
‘These are the first subjects of contemplation,’ she said. ‘What did Anadil call them?’
‘She called them her moons,’ replied Orkhan.
‘She was right to do so, yet what is the meaning of that?’
Mihrimah knelt as close as she could to him, so that the tips of her breasts brushed against the golden bars of the cage. Even the eyeholes of her veil of black velvet were covered with a fine trellis of threads. Orkhan toyed with the idea that her face might be ravaged by leprosy or otherwise hideously disfigured.
Mihrimah’s melodious voice continued to discourse learnedly about her breasts being the figures of moons in a sexual cosmos and, like all things connected with the moon, subject to change and decay. They had to be loved not only for what they were, but for what they would become — withered dugs. But the breasts were also doves’ eggs and they were pomegranates too. Above all, they were to be reverenced as the Lesser Prayer-Cushions, on which man might find his solace and spiritual salvation — the parts here standing for the whole of a woman’s body which is the Greater Prayer-Cushion. All men, in longing to return to the breast, are actually longing to return to the Divinity. The twin moons were divinely-fashioned navigational aids on this journey of mystical return.
While Mihrimah spoke of domes of alabaster lit by rays of lunar mystery, Orkhan gazed on her breasts as if hypnotised. They were indeed very pretty, but he thought that they more closely resembled blind puppies who were in need of petting than they did mystic moons. He felt something stirring at the base of his spine.
‘Look at my breasts! Really look at them!’ Mihrimah insisted. ‘They seem to offer themselves to you, whether I wish it or not. They are soft and vulnerable and yet they seem to threaten you, do they not? How can this be?’
Seeing that Orkhan made no reply, she pointed at him and continued,
‘Or if you cannot truly see my breasts as they should be seen, then gaze upon yourself — so hard, so tight, so compact, but with that cock you cannot control. You are very strong, a hard man, but yet you are trapped by my weakness. Seduction is nothing but the trick of the weak to capture the strong. The strong always yearns to discharge its strength in softness and become weak. But you must become weaker yet. It is time for the second stage in the discipline of the gaze.’
And, so saying, Mihrimah threw back her hood and stripped off the veil, to reveal a mass of golden hair framing a calm and pleasantly rounded face, which, in the dim candlelight glowed like the pale moon. She smiled at Orkhan as she lectured on herself and especially her face. Her hair’s tresses were a net to trap the lover. He, the lover, was a nightingale trapped in a rose-garden in flames. The nightingale and the rose-garden were both alike doomed to perish and they would achieve union only in the mingling of their ashes. Was it nobler to love beauty or to be beautiful? Which had the finer part — the nightingale or the rose-garden?
Though she went on speaking of the high mysteries of her sex, Orkhan as he contemplated her face, breasts and shoulders, was fantasising about what it would be like to have the woman’s flesh actually under his hands. Desire was building within him. The pain between his legs was so intense that he did not think he would be able to rise again, unless he speedily achieved some relief. He was only startled out of his brooding frustration when she announced,
‘Now I shall show you my other face.’ She turned away and, unclasping the sash, she lowered her trousers, talking all the while.
‘In this way,’ she said ‘I conquer by humbling myself before you, for the way of the lover is self-abnegation without hope of the gratification of desire. This is the penultimate stage in the discipline of the gaze before you shall behold me fully naked. Then look on my bottom and marvel!’
Orkhan did as he was told. She swayed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, so that the heavy cheeks of her bottom rose and fell, gleaming in the brilliant light. Her bottom was, he learned, like the breasts in that it was a figure of the moon and governed by the moon. It was pale and luminous and, like the moon, it could destroy man’s reason.
Orkhan decided that he preferred Mihrimah’s bottom to her breasts, for her bottom had an imperious quality that her more tentative breasts lacked. So, as she sought to instruct him about the sand dunes over which a lover’s hands must travel, about the soft, white clouds which veiled the Divinity from man, and about the astral thrall exerted by the bottom and the bitter mystery of its dark abyss, Orkhan furtively raised his robe and in a quiet fever set to masturbating. He was desperate to come to a climax and, if possible, to do so before Mihrimah should turn to him again, but just as he was ejaculating in hot thick spurts, she turned to him and cried out in dismay. An instant later the door behind her swung open and a strong gust of wind swept through the pit and Orkhan was plunged into darkness. It was as if a vast black-gloved hand had descended, extinguishing the candles.
Another woman’s voice, not Mihrimah’s cried out, fierce and terrible,
‘Unhappy the man who has failed the test of the Dolorous Gaze! Leave him to darkness and shame, the prisoner of his lust.’
Chapter Five
IN THE GIRAFFE HOUSE
The sounds of lamentation increased briefly, then died away. Orkhan did not move, but sat in pitch darkness. Where, after all, should he go? Passionate, brightly-coloured images chased one another about in his head — he had witnessed so many unfamiliar sights, so many curious tableaux, all in the matter of a few hours. Some of the things he had seen he did not even have a name for. Other things were as yet only names. The Rapture was still only a name. At least he had saved himself from that. Eventually his eyelids fluttered and drooped and he slumped back onto the stone floor and slept where he had been sitting. Even while he slept, the viper in his mouth flicked restlessly from side to side.
He was woken by the sounds of rustling, scratching and muttering. He opened his eyes and beheld the daylight streaming in from a lantern in the roof of the pit. He looked into the cage expecting to see Mihrimah, but there, where Mihrimah had stood on the previous evening, was an old woman in a coarse, brown robe. The woman’s head was sunk so low that it hardly rose above her shoulders. On reflection, it was more like a skull than a head, for the thin hair did not cover it, skin stretched over angular bones and the eyes were set deep within the bones. A thin wispy beard sprouted from the woman’s jaw, the jut of which was accentuated by her toothlessness. Orkhan toyed with the notion that he was indeed gazing at Mihrimah, that he had just been asleep for seventy
