CHAPTER XXIII

IN THE HAREM

The traveler will wander far to find more beautiful scenery, quainter houses, stranger customs, and a more peculiar people than in the little city of Brusa, in the valley at the foot of the snow-capped Bithynian Olympus. He who has seen the spot, no longer wonders that Hannibal, the great Carthaginian, chose it as the place of his exile; or that Prusias made it the capital of his kingdom; or that the younger Pliny, its Roman governor, was inspired to write to his countrymen descriptions of its beauty. Indeed, says the Turk, Brusa has a mosque and a pleasant walk for every day of the year. First Pagan, then Christian, and now Mohammedan, it has had a checkered history. The Phrygians, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Seljuks, the Crusaders, the hordes of Tamerlane, the Osmanli Turks, all have made it their field of battle; ruthless fires have devoured it; earthquakes have thrown it down and buried it. Yet it lives. The archæologist searches about its ancient Roman walls and citadel for inscriptions. The architect sketches its Byzantine churches. The pious Moslem makes pilgrimage there to pray at the tombs of the early sultans. The sick of all the empire seek health in its far-famed sulphur baths. And the ever-present tax collector haunts the thrifty peasant to extort from him the produce of his fertile fields.

The town stretches from the valley far up the mountain side, where the upper rows of houses, perched in almost inaccessible places, are reached by steps. Two torrents, rising in the heart of Olympus, have rent deep gorges on the mountain side, the wild shrubbery that fringes them half concealing the rushing, foaming water. Long rows of old Turkish houses, huge wooden structures, line the ravines. To the west of the town an underground mountain stream of boiling, sulphurous water breaks out here and there, sending volumes of steam high into the air, and emptying itself into the baths of the valley below.

The house which the chaoush called home, and to which he had taken Armenouhi, was halfway up the hillside overlooking the eastern slope of the mountain. It was a rambling affair of the old Turkish type, a huge square box with smaller boxes at its sides for wings. The first floor of the main part consisted of one large hall, with a stairway leading to the rooms above. At its two sides were doors opening into narrow passageways that led to the living rooms in the wings. In the days of its owner’s long-past prosperity, the part toward the mountain was the selamlik for the men; the lower wing was the haremlik. But the house, declining as it were from sympathy with the family’s departing fortunes, had become a ruin. The upper story was now abandoned, for the roof had fallen in. The selamlik would long ago have refused to stand, had it not been supported with great wooden props; the hall had been stripped of its divans; its windows were broken, and its present occupants were a few hens, the goat which supplied the family with milk, and the horse that carried the chaoush and Armenouhi. The haremlik, consisting of a few small rooms arranged along the passageway, was the only habitable part of the entire house. Here the family lived; it was now selamlik, haremlik, kitchen, pantry, workshop, all in one.

The occupants of the old house were as near collapse as the building itself. The head of the family was the mother, a corpulent old lady, who had been corpulent even in her earlier days. Her small eyes, half concealed by the greasy folds of skin encasing them, seemed to penetrate whatever came within their vision. What passed for a dress was once of a brilliant red, approximately matching her complexion. For the past few years, since her husband had been fortunate enough to be killed while smuggling tobacco, she had eked out a living for the family by weaving on a crude hand loom Turkish towels. She toiled from morning till night, for it was easier to go on with her labor than to rise from her stool; but while her hours of work were long, the two piasters a day that her industry brought her were scarcely sufficient for the barest necessaries of life; and so, to supplement her scanty earnings, she sold piece by piece the old embroideries, the jewels, and other family heirlooms of more prosperous days.

Shareef, the chaoush’s sister, was a round-faced, buxom girl of fifteen, who gave promise of rivaling her mother in the precious virtue of magnitude. Her pleasant, dimpled face reflected only a mind of ordinary intellect, her dark eyes not yet having acquired such penetrating sharpness. Her fresh, clear skin, clarified by a daily bath in the hot spring, betrayed a glow beneath that in time might develop into the brilliant red of her mother’s complexion. Her plump, soft hands were forbidden to be soiled by labor, and she spent her days hopefully waiting for the mothers of marriageable sons to inspect her charms and select her to grace the harem of some fortunate youth. Prospective mothers-in-law came, inspected, and for some inexplicable reason went; and still she was waiting for one whose insight would recognize in her the germ of the desirable qualities already developed in the person of her industrious mother.

A third member of the family was an aged female servant who had been connected with the house from time immemorial. Compared with her mistress in point of corpulence, she had gone to the other extreme. Beneath the white firadji that concealed her hairless head, two sharp eyes and an aquiline nose protruded as if keeping strict guard over the tightly closed, toothless mouth below. It was the servant’s duty to milk the goat, bring the water, cook the food over the coals in the brasier, and to attend to such other household duties as could not be left undone.

The remaining member of the family was a tall, slim, black eunuch, a relic of better days. Ali was his name. He had been stolen as a child from his African home among the jungles, and taken to Jedda. His cheeks were branded to designate him as a slave, and he was sent to the market to Stamboul, where, more than seventy years before, he had been purchased by the chaoush’s great grandfather at public auction, and brought home to guard his bride. This duty he had performed for four generations; and with his beardless, shiny face, more and more wrinkled and distorted as his age increased, and his high-pitched, squeaky voice, he was the pride of the family, and the envy of the neighbors.

The entrance of the eunuch with a woman in his arms, followed by the chaoush with a horse, occasioned no little excitement in the household. Shareef was the first to reach the scene; behind her hobbled the ancient servant; the mother, having finished the work of the day, and trying to summon sufficient strength to convey her enormous self to bed, laboriously arose and brought up the rear. The eunuch laid Armenouhi down on the ruin of the ancient divan, while the chaoush, leaving the horse to wander about the hall as it would, brought a candle from the harem.

“Look, Ana,” he said to his mother, holding the light to Armenouhi’s face.

“Oh! oh! How beautiful!” cried Shareef, clasping her hands. “Who is she?”

The entire family bent over the prostrate figure of the girl, whose disarranged hair half concealed her pale, sad face.

“Oh, the sweet face!” again cried Shareef, with admiration; and brushing the hair from her forehead, she bent down and kissed her.

Armenouhi, perceiving kindness in the voice and the caress, opened her eyes.

“Her eyes are blue,” exclaimed Shareef, excitedly.

“She is a Frank girl,” interrupted her mother, fixing her gaze on her son and chiding him for the danger it brought the family. “We shall be arrested, and left to die in prison,” she cried, and begged him to take her immediately from the house.

“She is not a Frank girl, Ana,” replied the chaoush. “She is an Armenian. Her people have been killed, and I have saved her for the Sultan.”

The mother stood critically examining Armenouhi’s face, and the sidewise movement of her head indicated her full approval. The eunuch, who enjoyed an unusual reputation as a judge of beauty, felt her arm with an air of an expert, and his old eyes lighted up as he squeaked, “Pek guzel,” to add his approval to that of his mistress. In the meantime Shareef had drawn aside the black cloak, uncovering the stained white dress, and moved to pity, was gently stroking the girl’s forehead.

“Poor child!”

Armenouhi only opened her eyes.

“Why doesn’t she speak?” asked Shareef.

“She has not spoken since her father was killed,” replied the somewhat discouraged chaoush.

“She has been too much frightened,” squeaked the eunuch. “She will soon be all right.”

Shareef wished to take the entire care of her, in her own room. During the seven months before Beiram, she would teach her to forget her sorrows. With kind treatment, her speech would return, and she might even become a Moslem. To Shareef’s delight her brother made no objection, but charged the eunuch to be on the alert, threatening that if harm came to her, or if she escaped, his life would be the penalty. Helping her up from the divan, and placing her arm about her waist to support her, Shareef led her to the little front room at the far corner of the hall. The eunuch, elated that once again in his old age he had been entrusted with a fair young girl, bustled about with self-importance, heated for her bath a jug of sulphur water from the spring, and poured it into the large earthen basin. The bath finished, warm milk, grapes, and fresh figs were brought, and Armenouhi, urged to eat, tasted them. Apparently satisfied with his charge, the eunuch arranged the bed on the floor, and after carefully trying the strength of the iron grating at the window, withdrew from the room, and bolted the door. For more than an hour Shareef sat by Armenouhi’s side, stroking her head to induce sleep, and had nearly succeeded, when the clattering of hoofs was heard in the street. Takvor had arrived in Brusa. Armenouhi listened, for it seemed to her that the late rider might be more than a passing traveler.