“Praise to Allah,” one exclaimed with fervour, “we escape for an hour from that Gehennum there below. Never have I seen the lady Fitnah so enraged. Her wrath is not so much because her son desires the English governess, as because the Pasha sees no hindrance to the match. I tremble every time I have to go to her, lest in her fury she should damage my desirability.”
“Praise be to Allah, I am not her property,” replied another, “but that of her durrah, the great lady. Yet I know her for a good and pious creature, not likely to be so enraged without rare cause. They say this foreign teacher has bewitched the young man. He is mad. He flung himself before her in the passage as she came from driving. She spurned him, and they bore him, senseless, to his chamber, where for two days he weeps and moans, refusing nourishment. It is enchantment, evidently, for the girl is ugly.”
“Nay, by Allah, she is white and nicely rounded. But shameless! But an infidel!”
“She can change her faith.”
“As easily as dung can change its odour!”
“Gulbeyzah here is whiter and more appetizing.”
“Well, God alone knows what she is or is not. This is sure: I have no itching to go down into the house while Fitnah Khânum rages.”
“Nor I!” “Nor I!” exclaimed the rest with feeling.
The morning clamour of the city came up to them as a soothing murmur. Minarets dreamed round them in the sun-haze which was rosy at its heart but in the distance pearly with a tinge of brown. On one hand open country might be seen, green fields and palm trees crowding to the desert wave on which three pyramids stood out, minute as ciphers; on the other, ending the long ridge of the Mucattam Hill, arose the Citadel in smoky shadow, its Turkish dome and minarets, its towers and ramparts, appearing like a city of the sky. Here and there among the housetops a small cloud of doves went up, fluttered a moment and subsided peacefully. Kites hovered, crows were circling, in the upper air. Gulbeyzah watched their evolutions dreamily.
“Allah defend us from the liberty of Frankish women!” she remarked at length. “I could not bear it. To meet the stare of all men were too dreadful. My maidenhood would flush my brain and kill me. O pure shame! And yet they choose what men they like, the fact is known. In sh´Allah, the great favour, when the crow does bring it, will not destroy our blessed privacy.”