“The shadow of the great locust storm has fallen upon Zarah the Beautiful!” whispered Bowlegs to Yussuf’s Eyes as they watched the sports with all the enthusiasm and delight of the Arab’s heart, which upon occasion can be so childlike. The dumb youth nodded his head and smiled and tapped a description of Zarah’s face upon his blind friend’s arm, whereupon Yussuf laughed loudly and long and rubbed his slender hands together at the thought of the Arabian girl’s discontent.
She reclined in her litter this late afternoon, swung upon the shoulders of four prisoners, her face as black as thunder; she flung herself irritably from side to side, and used her whip smartly upon the backs of the men—who had stood in the sun for an hour or so—when, by shifting the litter, they tried to alleviate the pain of the wounds it made in their shoulders.
It was her favourite form of punishment for trivial offences, and she kept Al-Asad, the muscular half-caste, close at hand, so that he should be in readiness to take the place of the first one of the four who should collapse under the combined torture of the heat and the weight of the jewel-encrusted ivory litter. She had no reason to use the whip upon his back. His mighty muscle made nothing of the weight; his negroid blood withstood the heat of the sun; his abnormal love caused him to find joy in the task, blinding him to the smiles, rendering him deaf to the titter which the humiliation of his task invariably drew from his friends, who loved the mighty man and grieved over his insensate passion.
She was surrounded by slaves who cast terrified glances at her wrathful countenance as they performed their various tasks. At her head two Abyssinian maidens, nude save for the scarlet sashes which girt them about the middle, stood upon low pedestals like glistening black statues of Venus, fanning her with fans of snow-white ostrich feathers; boys, slim, dark-eyed, with slender hands and feet, offered her cool drinks, sweetmeats and fruits upon trays of beaten silver; girls, slim, dark-eyed, with slender hands and feet, threw perfumed water into the air.
Helen sat some way off upon a pile of cushions in the shade of a rock, making a sharp contrast in her dilapidated but well-built Shantung breeches and knee-length coat with the Arabian’s almost barbaric splendour; and many a glance was cast at her from the serried ranks of men, who looked with interest upon the beautiful white prisoner, about whom Namlah had, most unwisely, ecstatically and so unceasingly talked.
That morning had come the invitation to witness the sports, to which she had responded with alacrity, to find herself, of a sudden, the object of interest to many hundreds of men, and a prey to uneasiness at the sight of Zarah’s mocking smile and the memory of Yussuf’s whispered warning.
Her hair shone like gold against the dark rock background. She laughed at the men’s encounters in the “Jerzed,” and clapped her hands at their marvellous dexterity with spear and rifle and revolver; but she kept her eyes away from the spot where the four bare-headed men underwent torture in the terrific heat of the sun.
She had begged Zarah to spare them; she had entreated with clasped hands, and with pitying eyes had lain her handkerchief upon the nearest wounded shoulder, which is a foolish thing for a beautiful girl to do when she is the prisoner of a beautiful woman famed for her cruelty throughout a land which is not exactly noted for the gentleness of its methods. She had retired to the pile of cushions and had sat down with eyes averted from the terrible picture of the beautiful, insolent woman who had imperiously bidden her to mind her own business, and had brought her whip down sharply upon the backs of the two front, undersized, under-nourished Armenians.