The smells and sights and sounds he encountered were those of a dream city—though the smells were not altogether those of a pretty dream. There were flat-topped houses and veiled women and proud camels and bearded men. There were barred, narrow windows and metal-studded doors, and projecting upper stories to the houses which leaned out above the narrow streets and nearly blotted out the sky.
The two soldiers led Tony, thrilled and satisfied, into a dark doorway. They released him. They stepped back. There was a conclusive clang. And Tony saw that the doorway was completely filled by a grille of very solid and very heavy grim iron bars, through which he and the soldiers blinked at each other. He was in a prison. He was in a partially open-air dungeon. He was, in fact, in the clink.
This was the manner of his arrival in Barkut.
Chapter 4
Three weeks later, in mid-morning, Tony sat comfortably in the shady part of the courtyard and looked more or less dreamily at the slave girl Ghail’s legs. She had nice legs, and rather a lot of them was on display. They were slim, as a girl’s legs ought to be, and they tapered nicely to the knee, and then they flared just the right amount at just the right place below them, and went down to very nice ankles, and below them to small bare feet—very dusty at the moment—one of which tapped ominously on the floor of the courtyard. He was still kept behind a locked iron grate, technically imprisoned, and his conscience had had a swell time pointing out to him how completely irresponsible and harebrained and half-witted all his actions had been. He was, however, unworried except over the reaction that tapping foot might presage.
At first, of course, he’d been totally unable to speak Arabic, and nobody in Barkut seemed to be able to speak English. He’d tried to communicate from his original prison cell with the help of a dog-eared guide book he’d picked up second-hand in Suez. The vocabulary it offered, however, was limited. It gave the phrases for complaining that prices were too high, that the food was overripe, and that the speaker wanted to go back to his hotel. But in Barkut Tony had been charged nothing, the food was good if monotonous—though fresh ripe dates had been a revelation to him—and he was in jail and had no hotel. After two days of this unsatisfactory conversation, he’d been moved to a convenient cell-and-courtyard in the palace. He’d been inspected by various whiskered people he thought were officials, and then the slave girl Ghail had appeared and resolutely set to work to teach him to talk.
That was the way she undoubtedly looked at it. Tony was presumably an adult male, but he babbled only a few Arabic words, and those with a vile accent. The slave girl had settled down to the job with something like a scowl. She had an imperial carriage, which Tony recalled vaguely could be credited to the carriage of burdens on her head as a child. She was long-legged and lissome and had an air of firm competence, and he knew she was a slave girl because married women and the marriageable daughters of citizens walked the streets—if at all—only when swathed in voluminous robes and with veils which complied with the strictest of Moslem traditions. This girl Ghail was not swathed to speak of, and she was not veiled at all, and she was distinctly pretty and very far from shapeless. And she regarded Tony with a scowling disparagement which made him work earnestly to learn to carry on a conversation.
Matters had progressed nicely in three weeks, and Tony found himself possessed of a talent for languages. But now she tapped her foot ominously on the floor of his comfortable prison. She said, in measured calm:
“Now, just what do you mean by that?”
Tony spoke apologetically. But he was pleased with the fluency he displayed in the Arabic she had taught him.