“How can you say such a thing! I am perfectly clean, my clothes are in holes through being washed on the stones, my hair....” To her own undoing and yet, if she had but known it, as an answer to her prayers for help, she undid the great golden plaits and shook the rippling mass out over her shoulders, holding long strands at arm’s length until even the negresses exclaimed at the glory of its sheen. “My hair is combed and brushed every day and washed once a week; it is perfectly clean!”
Zarah laughed as she puffed at her hubble-bubble, inhaling the fumes of the tobacco of Oman, which is calculated to absolutely stun the uninitiated in its gunpowder strength.
“Anyway, I do not like these tales of uncleanliness to be spread amongst my women, Helen R-r-aynor-r,” she said curtly at last. “I therefore have decided to keep you beneath my eyes. You will sleep in my room, on a mat, you will bathe under the supervision of this slave here, who will now cut your hair off so that you are clean.”
“I’ll kill her if she touches me!” Helen cried sharply, and, gathering the glory of her hair round about her, ran to a table upon which lay an ornamented but most workmanlike dagger. She loved her glorious, naturally curling hair, looking upon it, with her beautiful teeth, as the greatest asset with which nature had endowed her. Her lover loved it, and had often told her that she had ensnared his heart in its golden mesh. Forgetting her impossible position as prisoner and the utter futility of any effort at resistance, determined to fight for the glorious mantle which covered her to her knees, she picked up the dagger as the two gigantic women approached her.
“I’ll kill the first one of you who touches me!”
Zarah laughed and raised her hand.
“Go and find Al-Asad and bid him bind the white man and bring him here. Stop!”
Helen had thrown out her hands in surrender.
Even her hair would she willingly sacrifice in her great love, everything she would sacrifice except her honour, and that she knew was safe in a place abounding with deep precipices and paths where the foothold was precarious.
Save for her tightly locked hands, she made no sign when the beautiful mass lay about her feet; in fact, with an almost superhuman effort of courage, she refrained from touching her shorn head, and leant down instead and picked up a handful of hair, which looked like a great skein of golden silk.