The remainder of the year 1814 and a good part of 1815 were the happiest I had spent in slavery. The colt El Stedoro had been foaled in 1812; in this period he grew from a gangling colt to a wondrous chip off the old block of El Shermoot. An uglier three-year-old the Bedouins swore they had never seen—that beautiful Farishti had given him birth remained beyond their comprehension—but they could not keep their eyes from shining when they saw him run. He had neither the soaring motion of his mother nor the headlong charge of his sire: he appeared to progress in a series of tremendous bounds. He loved to jump—no common thing in horses—and no wall of thorns we had yet built, some of them close on six feet, could keep safe the women's store of corn. Running with the other youngsters, he cleared rock piles and dry watercourses as though taking wing.
My duties toward him were light—watering him when his wadi pools went dry, pampering him with camel milk and bread flaps, and tickling his sharp, leaf-shaped ears, almost the only mark of the Arab that he bore. All this was to keep him gentle and in hand. Suliman had forbade that he bear halter, saddle, or rider until he was four. Thereby he should develop strength and fleetness before going into servitude to man.
But there was a far greater wonder in these years than that of an Anglo-Arab colt bidding fair to become the best hunting and steeplechasing stallion the Beni Kabir had yet to see, and that was a foundling maiden of moving but immature beauty growing to be the most beautiful daughter of the desert they had ever seen. At fourteen she was breathtaking; as she neared fifteen she surpassed, in my fellows' sober opinion, any queen or concubine in Yussuf Pasha's harem, and was fit for a gift from Suliman to the Grand Porte of Constantinople, Defender of the Faith.
I did not measure her by these standards. I saw a tall, slender girl, whose skin was a light reddish-brown, and who was somehow the central and compelling figure in every scene in which she had a part. She took the eye of everyone; it was always with an effort that I took my eyes off her. I felt queerly, even mystically about her. Ordinarily quiet, not constantly singing like the Arab women, occasionally given to outbursts of strange eloquence, she made me daydream that she had come here from some other age or unknown continent, wherein people were happier than in these scenes, and more graced.
She moved so lightly that I could not for a long time believe what Timor told me—that she was remarkably strong. I began to perceive it by the easy way she lifted heavy bales and boxes, or swung pails of water in her long brown naked arms. She seemed to enjoy movement of any kind. It was a common thing to see happiness on the faces of children as they played or went about their affairs, and in this respect she was childlike. The promise of a smile was on her lips almost all the time—it broke and beamed on the least provocation—and although her eyes were beautiful before then, deeply dark and lustrous, then they became magnetic and mysterious as though they gave forth light.
Unlike a child, she was never bashful or timid. Partly this was an effect of her upbringing in a society wherein femaleness was a glory instead of a disadvantage or mild disgrace, and where she was born to high place; partly though, it was self-confidence derived from physical strength and beauty. She paid not the least attention to the Bedouin's taboo against women riding horses—she was forever taking the pet mares for wild gallops around the camps, unbridled and unsaddled and often unhaltered. She made herself at home in Suliman's mukaad, ordinarily forbidden to all except the elders and male guests.
She waxed more womanly with every moon. This development would have suited a far more voluptuous form than hers; and seen in relation to her slender body with its taut waist, lithe hips, long, tapering legs and arms, long neck, and countenance carved with a sword, it was at once startling and thrilling. I could not help but beam when kinsmen from the oasis visited the Bedouins, saw her, cried out on Allah, quoted verses by Jamil, but never asked if she were for sale. Sometimes I grinned to see Suliman watching her, stroking his beard and sighing, but the grin died in a chill wave of ill omen, for the sighs meant that the sheik's sixty and more years lay heavily upon him, weakened as he was by capture and torture not long before I met him in Calypso's cave, and he might not have long to live.
What right had I, Omar the slave, to be proud of this tall, dark princess of the Tuareg who graced our camps? I had found her only through the chance that Timor gave me; and I had no real claim on her. But she had made one on me as her protector and companion. She was never very far from me for very long. If I invited her to accompany the old hostler and me on our varied jaunts, she came in joy, not even asking how many nights we must sleep under the stars. If I did not invite her, we had only to ride a few miles to see her loping along behind us on one of Suliman's pet mares. When she overtook us, she would ride into the wind, kick up dust in our faces, then return with her eyes agleam.
"You might as well have asked me in the first place," she would say. "For I intend to stay with you as long as I'm a virgin."
So long inured to celibacy, my body and mind adjusted to it, I was not greatly taxed by the presence of this vivid, vital girl, entering into marriageable age, in our lonely bivouacs. Vividness and vitality are essential components of female beauty—the thing itself is bound round with male desire—yet I remained intensely conscious of Isabel's beauty without being tormented to possess it in its full. Partly the answer lay in my profound acceptance—a different thing from reconciliation—of slavehood. I did not feel eligible for a free-born woman's favor. I could not offer her the refuge of my arms because they were chained; I could not endow her with my worldly goods—such as the strength of my body and brain, my prowess, even my whole manhood—because they belonged to another. They did not do so in any law I would recognize, but they did in fact.
However, my attitude toward her was delicately balanced, caused by counteracting pressure, and although it held throughout the year 1815, the third since her coming, it could quickly change.
Just before dawn of a cool and dewy January morning, when Timor and I and our entrancing camp follower were bivouacked on the foothills of the Tibesti, the old hostler rode off to investigate some khors that might hold water. As the Sahara daylight broke, Isabel Gazelle made quite a display of waking up—she had been covertly watching me clean my rifle for the past ten minutes—then an even greater show of modesty as she dressed. However, she had managed to give me a view of a long thigh of superb molding as she donned her skirt.
I paid her no obvious attention, and presently she came and squatted beside me.
"What are we going to have to eat today?" she asked.
"Why, doesn't the fare suit you?"
"Bread flaps—camel cheese—dates. I'm getting sick of them."
"It will be different today, because all the dates have been eaten."
"Why don't you spend the day hunting? I'll go with you, and you can shoot a bustard or maybe an oryx. But you mustn't shoot any gazelles because I can't eat them."
"I didn't know that."
"You should know it. It was you who named me Gazelle."
"You've eaten plenty of them before now, and sucked the bones for marrow, and got the grease all over your face. Why have you changed?"
"I haven't changed. I'll eat them other times, but not today. If you're not a good enough shot to get any meat, maybe you can rob an ostrich nest. You ought to find some wild honey, too, so tonight we can have a feast."