The pacha's page was uneasy; M. Bertrand trembled, and the doctor was not in high spirits. A word, a cry, a gesture, and the people who surrounded the escort had only to draw their thick ranks closer, and the travellers would have been delivered to them defenceless. But, deceived by the dazzling costume and the masculine countenance of Lady Hester, some took her for a young bey still beardless; others, believing that they were dreaming, discovered that it was a woman; but before they had recovered from their astonishment, she had already passed. Thus she alighted safe and sound in the Christian quarter.
It is then that her indomitable character asserted itself; she did not rest until her household had been transported into the heart of the Mohammedan quarter. "I intend to take the bull by the horns and to settle down under the minaret of the grand mosque," declared she cavalierly to the doctor, who was very troubled at this new caprice.
Scarcely forty-eight hours after her arrival, furnished with an order from the pacha, she visited, without putting herself to inconvenience, the best residences in the town, and fixed her choice upon a sumptuous habitation near the palace and the bazaars, formerly the residence of a Capugi Bachi (envoy of the Porte for confidential missions, such as strangulations, confiscations and so forth). A narrow passage led to a marble court, where two bronze serpents, coiled around a lemon-tree, diffused water clear as crystal. The apartments were small and sumptuous.
The Christian owner of the empty house, his appetite excited by the sight of Lady Hester's suite, showed long teeth and a bill infinitely longer still. The smallest glass of lemonade was thus marked: "Sherbet for the arrival of the Queen." The doctor was obliged to curb his enthusiasm.
Lady Hester inaugurated very quickly her new Eastern policy, which was to flatter the Turks in order to make allies of them. Thus, the superiors of the Franciscan and Capuchin monasteries came to offer her their services, as they did to all passing travellers. And she caused them to be informed that, living in a Mohammedan quarter, she respected its rules, and begged them not to repeat their visit. The monks complied with this rather cool request.
She received, on the other hand, a French doctor, M. Chaboceau, seventy years of age, deaf as a post, who, entering all the harems, was not a little compromising.
This Chaboceau had known Volney at the time of his residence at Damascus; he had even lodged him. And he energetically asserted that Volney had not been at Palmyra. A snowstorm had prevented him from undertaking his journey. This fact is curious, and renders rather piquant the Méditations sur les mines et les révolutions des empires. Did Volney content himself with the descriptions of Wood and of Dawkins to inspire his emphatic invocations? "The contemplation of solitudes which has aided him to interrogate the universality of people" may then be subject to some caution.
Thus, by radical measures, by discreet praises uttered before those who were able best to propagate them, by backsheesh skilfully distributed, she gained the good graces of the mob and became very quickly popular. When she mounted her horse, there was an assemblage before her door. Accompanied by little Giorgio, her interpreter, and her janissary Mohammed, she placed herself entirely at the discretion of the inhabitants during her rides through the town. At the beginning, the doctor feared a mishap, but he was reassured on beholding the respect which was caused by her proud and dignified bearing and her agreeable, if reserved, manner. Soon the fierce Damascenes felt themselves conquered. They sprinkled coffee under her horse's feet, in accordance with custom, in order to do her honour. Tempted by the piastres which she distributed as her smiles, they lay in wait for her departure and her return to shout as she passed: "Long life to her!... May she live to return to her own country!"
Admiration increased in the mob, which whispered in confidence that, although she was of English birth, she was descended from the Turks and had Mohammedan blood in her veins. Her paleness accredited the legend. Never had the lily whiteness of her skin and the clearness of her complexion been so much vaunted. Already in Egypt her moonlight face had conquered hearts. For the warm rosy carnation plays no part in Eastern beauty. The Turks regard the red faces of Englishwomen as hideous. In which connection an amusing anecdote was related to Lady Hester:
During the evacuation of Egypt in 1805, the English soldiers forgot some women—as if by chance—whom the Turks seized. Their new lovers washed them and rewashed them, in the hope of removing that horrible brick colour which spoiled their cheeks. The result was worse.... The more they rubbed, the more flamboyant the colours became: tomatoes ready to fry. When they saw that there was nothing to be done, they sent them about their business. "We know and we admire white and black women," said they, "but red women up to the present we have not heard them spoken of."