Let us confess to a dreamy, vaporous vail, overspreading, rather suffusing with color, the upper part of the arms and the lower limits of the neck. That rosiness is known as tób to the Arabians—a mystery whereof the merely masculine mind is not cognizant. Beneath the tób, truth allows a beautiful bud-burstiness of bosom; yet I swear, by John Bunyan, nothing so aggravating as the Howadji beholds in saloons unnamable nearer the Hudson than the Nile. This brilliant cloud, whose spirit was Kushuk Arnem, our gay Ghazeeyah, gathered itself upon a divan, and she inhaled vigorously a nargileh. A damsel in tób and shintyan exhaling azure clouds of aromatic smoke, had not been displeasing to that Persian poet, for whose coming I had prayed too late.
But more welcome than he, came the still-eyed Xenobi. She entered timidly like a bird. The Howadji had seen doves less gracefully sitting upon palm-boughs in the sunset, than she nestled upon the lower divan. A very dove of a Ghazeeyah—a quiet child, the last born of Terpsichore. Blow it from Mount Atlas, a modest dancing-girl. She sat near this Howadji, and handed him, O Haroun Alrashid! the tube of his nargileh. Its serpentine sinuosity flowed through her fingers, as if the golden gayety of her costume were gliding from her alive. It was an electric chain of communication, and never until some Xenobi of a houri hands the Howadji the nargileh of Paradise, will the smoke of the weed of Shiraz float so lightly, or so sweetly taste.
Xenobi was a mere bud, of most flexile and graceful form, ripe and round as the spring fruit of the tropics. Kushuk had the air of a woman for whom no surprises survive; Xenobi saw in every new day a surprise, haply in every Howadji a lover.
She was more richly dressed than Kushuk. There were gay gold bands and clasps upon her jacket; various necklaces of stamped gold and metallic charms clustered around her neck, and upon her head a bright silken web, as if a sun-suffused cloud were lingering there, and, dissolving, showered down her neck in a golden rain of pendants. Then, O Venus! more azure still—that delicious gauziness of tób, whereof more than to dream is delirium. Wonderful the witchery of a tób! Nor can the Howadji deem a maiden quite just to nature, who glides through the world unshintyaned and untóbed.
Xenobi was perhaps sixteen years old, and a fully developed woman; Kushuk Arnem, of some half-dozen summers more. Kushuk was unhennaed; but the younger, as younger maidens may, graced herself with the genial gifts of nature. Her delicate filbert nails were rosily tinted on the tips with henna, and those peddler poets meeting her in Paradise would have felt the reason of their chant, "Odors of Paradise, O flowers of the henna!" But she had no kohl upon the eyelashes, nor like Fatima of Damascus, whom the Howadji later saw, were her eyebrows shaved and replaced by thick, black arches of kohl. Yet fascinating are the almond-eyes of Egyptian women, bordered black with the kohl, whose intensity accords with the sumptuous passion that mingles moist and languid with their light. Eastern eyes are full of moonlight—Eastern beauty is a dream of passionate possibility, which the Howadji would fain awaken by the same spell with which the prince of Faery dissolved the enchanted sleep of the princess. Yet kohl and henna are only beautiful for the beautiful. In a coffee-shop at Esne, bold-faced among the men, sat a coarse courtesan sipping coffee and smoking a nargileh, whose kohled eyebrows and eyelashes made her a houri of hell.
"There is no joy but calm," I said, as the moments, brimmed with beauty, melted in the starlight, and the small room became a bower of bloom and a Persian garden of delight. We reclined, breathing fragrant fumes, and interchanging, through the Golden-sleeved, airy nothings. The Howadji and the houris had little in common but looks. Soulless as Undine, and suddenly risen from a laughing life in watery dells of lotus, sat the houris; and, like the mariner, sea-driven upon the enchanted isle of Prospero, sat the Howadji, unknowing the graceful gossip of Faery. But there is a faery always folded away in our souls, like a bright butterfly chrysalized, and sailing eastward, layer after layer of propriety, moderation, deference to public opinion, safety of sentiment, and all the thick crusts of compromise and convention roll away, and bending southward up the Nile, you may feel the faery fairly flutter her wings. And if you pause at Esne, she will fly out, and lead you a will-o'-the-wisp dance across all the trim sharp hedges of accustomed proprieties, and over the barren flats of social decencies. Dumb is that faery, so long has she been secluded, and can not say much to her fellows. But she feels and sees and enjoys all the more exquisitely and profoundly for her long sequestration.
Presently an old woman came in with a tár, a kind of tambourine, and her husband, a grisly old sinner, with a rabáb, or one-stringed fiddle. Old Hecate was a gone Ghazeeyah—a rose-leaf utterly shriveled away from rosiness. No longer a dancer, she made music for dancing. And the husband, who played for her in her youth, now played with her in her age. Like two old votaries who feel when they can no longer see, they devoted all the force of life remaining to the great game of pleasure, whose born thralls they were.
There were two tarabukas and brass castanets, and when the old pair were seated upon the carpet near the door, they all smote their rude instruments, and a wild clang rang through the little chamber. Thereto they sang. Strange sounds—such music as the angular, carved figures upon the temples would make, had they been conversing with us—sounds to the ear like their gracelessness to the eye.
This was Egyptian Polyhymnia preluding Terpsichore.