‘These are the first subjects of contemplation,’ she said. ‘What did Anadil call them?’
‘She called them her moons,’ replied Orkhan.
‘She was right to do so, yet what is the meaning of that?’
Mihrimah knelt as close as she could to him, so that the tips of her breasts brushed against the golden bars of the cage. Even the eyeholes of her veil of black velvet were covered with a fine trellis of threads. Orkhan toyed with the idea that her face might be ravaged by leprosy or otherwise hideously disfigured.
Mihrimah’s melodious voice continued to discourse learnedly about her breasts being the figures of moons in a sexual cosmos and, like all things connected with the moon, subject to change and decay. They had to be loved not only for what they were, but for what they would become — withered dugs. But the breasts were also doves’ eggs and they were pomegranates too. Above all, they were to be reverenced as the Lesser Prayer-Cushions, on which man might find his solace and spiritual salvation — the parts here standing for the whole of a woman’s body which is the Greater Prayer-Cushion. All men, in longing to return to the breast, are actually longing to return to the Divinity. The twin moons were divinely-fashioned navigational aids on this journey of mystical return.
While Mihrimah spoke of domes of alabaster lit by rays of lunar mystery, Orkhan gazed on her breasts as if hypnotised. They were indeed very pretty, but he thought that they more closely resembled blind puppies who were in need of petting than they did mystic moons. He felt something stirring at the base of his spine.
‘Look at my breasts! Really look at them!’ Mihrimah insisted. ‘They seem to offer themselves to you, whether I wish it or not. They are soft and vulnerable and yet they seem to threaten you, do they not? How can this be?’
Seeing that Orkhan made no reply, she pointed at him and continued,
‘Or if you cannot truly see my breasts as they should be seen, then gaze upon yourself — so hard, so tight, so compact, but with that cock you cannot control. You are very strong, a hard man, but yet you are trapped by my weakness. Seduction is nothing but the trick of the weak to capture the strong. The strong always yearns to discharge its strength in softness and become weak. But you must become weaker yet. It is time for the second stage in the discipline of the gaze.’
And, so saying, Mihrimah threw back her hood and stripped off the veil, to reveal a mass of golden hair framing a calm and pleasantly rounded face, which, in the dim candlelight glowed like the pale moon. She smiled at Orkhan as she lectured on herself and especially her face. Her hair’s tresses were a net to trap the lover. He, the lover, was a nightingale trapped in a rose-garden in flames. The nightingale and the rose-garden were both alike doomed to perish and they would achieve union only in the mingling of their ashes. Was it nobler to love beauty or to be beautiful? Which had the finer part — the nightingale or the rose-garden?
Though she went on speaking of the high mysteries of her sex, Orkhan as he contemplated her face, breasts and shoulders, was fantasising about what it would be like to have the woman’s flesh actually under his hands. Desire was building within him. The pain between his legs was so intense that he did not think he would be able to rise again, unless he speedily achieved some relief. He was only startled out of his brooding frustration when she announced,
‘Now I shall show you my other face.’ She turned away and, unclasping the sash, she lowered her trousers, talking all the while.
‘In this way,’ she said ‘I conquer by humbling myself before you, for the way of the lover is self-abnegation without hope of the gratification of desire. This is the penultimate stage in the discipline of the gaze before you shall behold me fully naked. Then look on my bottom and marvel!’
Orkhan did as he was told. She swayed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, so that the heavy cheeks of her bottom rose and fell, gleaming in the brilliant light. Her bottom was, he learned, like the breasts in that it was a figure of the moon and governed by the moon. It was pale and luminous and, like the moon, it could destroy man’s reason.
Orkhan decided that he preferred Mihrimah’s bottom to her breasts, for her bottom had an imperious quality that her more tentative breasts lacked. So, as she sought to instruct him about the sand dunes over which a lover’s hands must travel, about the soft, white clouds which veiled the Divinity from man, and about the astral thrall exerted by the bottom and the bitter mystery of its dark abyss, Orkhan furtively raised his robe and in a quiet fever set to masturbating. He was desperate to come to a climax and, if possible, to do so before Mihrimah should turn to him again, but just as he was ejaculating in hot thick spurts, she turned to him and cried out in dismay. An instant later the door behind her swung open and a strong gust of wind swept through the pit and Orkhan was plunged into darkness. It was as if a vast black-gloved hand had descended, extinguishing the candles.
Another woman’s voice, not Mihrimah’s cried out, fierce and terrible,
‘Unhappy the man who has failed the test of the Dolorous Gaze! Leave him to darkness and shame, the prisoner of his lust.’
Chapter Five
IN THE GIRAFFE HOUSE
The sounds of lamentation increased briefly, then died away. Orkhan did not move, but sat in pitch darkness. Where, after all, should he go? Passionate, brightly-coloured images chased one another about in his head — he had witnessed so many unfamiliar sights, so many curious tableaux, all in the matter of a few hours. Some of the things he had seen he did not even have a name for. Other things were as yet only names. The Rapture was still only a name. At least he had saved himself from that. Eventually his eyelids fluttered and drooped and he slumped back onto the stone floor and slept where he had been sitting. Even while he slept, the viper in his mouth flicked restlessly from side to side.
He was woken by the sounds of rustling, scratching and muttering. He opened his eyes and beheld the daylight streaming in from a lantern in the roof of the pit. He looked into the cage expecting to see Mihrimah, but there, where Mihrimah had stood on the previous evening, was an old woman in a coarse, brown robe. The woman’s head was sunk so low that it hardly rose above her shoulders. On reflection, it was more like a skull than a head, for the thin hair did not cover it, skin stretched over angular bones and the eyes were set deep within the bones. A thin wispy beard sprouted from the woman’s jaw, the jut of which was accentuated by her toothlessness. Orkhan toyed with the notion that he was indeed gazing at Mihrimah, that he had just been asleep for seventy years and that it was to this that the discipline of the Dolorous Gaze had brought him. The woman looked down on him briefly before resuming her work, scattering straw over the floor of the cage.
Then, when she had finished this task, she shuffled out through the door at the back of the cage. There were muffled shouts. Then the door opened again and a panther padded in. The panther was followed by a muscular girl with close-cropped red hair. She was dressed in black leather — skirt, laced bodice and gloves. Her feet were bare and she carried a whip. She did not notice Orkhan, for all her attention was on the panther, which she baited with her whip, lightly flicking at the creature’s nose and muzzle. The panther, like a kitten confronted with a ball of string, snarled, lashed its tail and sought to catch at the thong with its talons. At last the girl tired of this game and cast the whip away. The panther leapt towards her and together they rolled over the straw. Orkhan cried out, but he was ignored, as the girl and the panther tumbled over one another. She was momentarily astride the supple, rippling, velvety back of the beast, before he slipped out from under her and in a moment she was lying under him. Her skirt had ridden up and she was wearing nothing underneath. The creature stood over her, dripping saliva on to her body, seeming to devour her with his stony green eyes, before inclining his head to lash her face with his rough tongue. She reached up to clasp his neck and together they rolled over once more. The panther began to purr as she stroked his stomach.