While his ears were dinned by virulent speeches which, could he have comprehended them, would have told him how much he was despised for being an infidel, and not a follower of the true Prophet; while his eyes were well-nigh put out by dust thrown in his face, accompanied by spiteful expectorations, his body was belaboured by sticks, his skin scratched and pricked with sharp thorns, his whiskers lugged almost to the dislocation of his jaws, and the hair of his head uprooted in fistfuls from his pericranium.
All this, too, amid screams and fiendish laughter that resembled an orgie of furies.
These women—she-devils they better deserved to be called—were simply following out the teachings of their inhuman faith among religions, even that of Rome not excepted, the most inhuman that has ever cursed mankind. Had Old Bill been a believer in their “Prophet,” that false seer of the blood-stained sword, their treatment of him would have been directly the reverse. Instead of kicks and cuffs, hustlings and scratchings, he would have been made welcome to a share in such hospitality as they could have bestowed upon him. It was religion, not nature, made them act as they did. Their hardness of heart came not from God, but the Prophet. They were only carrying out the edicts of their “priests of a bloody faith.”
In vain did the old man-o’-war’s-man cry out “belay” and “avast”. In vain did he “shiver his timbers”, and appeal against their scurvy treatment by looks, words, and gesture.
These seemed only to augment the mirth and spitefulness of his tormentors.
In this scene of cruelty there was one woman conspicuous among the rest. By her companions she was called Fatima. The old sailor, ignorant of Arabic feminine names, thought it a “misnomer”, for of all his she-persecutors she was the leanest and scraggiest. Notwithstanding the poetical notions which the readers of Oriental romance might associate with her name, there was not much poetry about the personage who so assiduously assaulted Sailor Bill, pulling his whiskers, slapping his cheeks, and every now and then spitting in his face.
She was something more than middle-aged, short squat, and meagre, with the eye-teeth projecting on both sides so as to hold up the upper lip and exhibit all the others in their ivory whiteness, with an expression resembling that of the hyena. This is considered beauty, a fashion in full vogue among her country-women who cultivate it with great care, though to the eyes of the old sailor it rendered the hag all the more hideous.
But the skinning of the eye-teeth was not the only attempt at ornament made by this belle of the desert. Strings of black beads hung over her wrinkled bosom, circlets of white bone were set in her hair, armlets and bangles adorned her wrists and ankles, and altogether did her costume and behaviour betoken one distinguished among the crowd of his persecutors, in short, their sultana or queen.
And such did she prove; for on the black sheik appropriating the old sailor as a stake fairly won in the game, and rescuing his newly acquired property from the danger of being damaged, Fatima followed him to his tent with such demonstrations as showed her to be if not the “favourite”, certainly the head of the harem.