The Romance of the Harem

by Anna Harriette Leonowens

In the middle of this wall was set a door of polished brass. The shadow of a tall and grotesque façade rested upon the wall and on the narrow deserted street, like an immense black pall. The solitude of the place was strangely calm. With that frightful din and roar of the palace life so near, the silence seemed almost supernatural. It cast a shadow of distrust over me. I almost felt as if that wall, that roof with its towering front, were built of the deaf stones spoken of in Scripture. All at once the wind rattled the dry grass on the top of the wall, making a low, soft, mournful noise. I started from my revery, hardly able to account for the feeling of dread that crept over me. Half ashamed of my idle fears, I pushed at the door with all my might. Slowly, noiselessly, the huge door swung back, and I stepped into a paved court-yard, with a garden on one side and a building suggestive of nocturnal mystery and gloom on the other.

The façade of this building was still more gloomy than that on the outside of the wall. All the windows were closed. On the upper story the shutters were like those used in prisons. No other house could be seen. The high wall ran all round and enclosed the garden. The walks were bordered with diminutive Chinese trees, planted in straight rows; grass covered half of them, and moss the rest.

Nothing could be imagined more wild and more deserted than this house and this garden. But the object that attracted my immediate attention was a woman, the only animate being then visible to me in the apparent solitude. She was seated beside a small pond of water, and I soon discovered that she was not alone, but was nursing a naked child about four years old.

The moment the woman became conscious of my presence, she raised her head with a quick, impetuous movement, clasped her bare arms around the nude form at her breast, and stared at me with fixed and defiant eyes. Her aspect was almost terrifying. She seemed as if hewn out of stone and set there to intimidate intruders. She was large, well made, and swarthy; her features were gaunt and fierce, but looked as if her face might once have been attractive. I relaxed my hold of the door; it swung back with a dull, ominous thud, and I stood half trembling beside the dark, defiant woman, whose eyes only gave any indication of vitality, hoping to prevail upon her to show me my way out of that dismal solitude.

The moment I approached her, however, I was seized with inexpressible dismay; pity and astonishment, mingling with a sense of supreme indignation, held me speechless for a time. She was naked to the waist, and chained,—chained like a wild beast by one leg to a post driven into the ground, and without the least shelter under that burning sky.

The chain was of cast-iron, and heavy, consisting of seven long double-links, attached to a ring, and fitted close to the right leg just above the ankle; it was secured to the post by a rivet. Under her lay a tattered fragment of matting, farther on a block of wood for a pillow, and on the other side were several broken Chinese umbrellas.

Growing more and more bewildered, I sat down and looked at the woman in a sort of helpless despair. The whole scene was startlingly impressive; the apathy, the deadness, and the barbarous cruelty of the palace life, were never more strikingly brought before me face to face. Here there was no doubting, no denying, no questioning the fact that this unhappy creature was suffering under some cruel wrong, which no one cared to redress. Naked to the waist, her long filthy hair bound in dense masses around her brow, she sat calmly, uncomplainingly, under a burning tropical sun, such as we children of a more temperate clime can hardly imagine, fierce, lurid, and scorching, nursing at her breast a child full of health and begrimed with dirt, with a tenderness that would have graced the most high-born gentlewoman.

I remained long and indignantly silent, before I could find voice for the questions that rose to my lips. But at length I inquired her name. "Pye-sia" (begone), was her fierce reply.

"Why art thou thus chained? Wilt thou not tell me?" I pleaded.