The Women of Cairo: Volume I (Routledge Revivals) by Gerard De Nerval

Author:Gerard De Nerval [Nerval, Gerard De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138826793
Google: TZsJkAEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-07T01:31:59+00:00

VII

THE VICEROY'S HAREM

Soon afterwards, we continued our walk, and paid a visit to a delightful palace with much scroll-work ornamentation, where the Viceroy's wives sometimes come and spend the summer. Little flowerbeds in the Turkish style, representing the designs of a carpet, surround this residence, into which we were freely allowed to go. The birds were not in the cage, and in all the rooms there was nothing more alive than the musical timepieces which announced each quarter of an hour by a musical-box tune from some French opera. The arrangement of a harem is the same in all Turkish palaces, and I had already seen several. There are always a number of little rooms surrounding the large halls. There are divans everywhere, and the only furniture consists of little tortoiseshell tables. Little arches cut into the wainscoting hold narghiles, vases of flowers, and coffee cups. Three or four rooms, decorated in the European Style, contain a few trumpery bits of furniture which would do honour to a porter's lodge; but they are only sacrifices to progress, the whim perhaps of some favourite, and none of these things is put to any serious use.

The one thing which these harems, even the most princely of them, seem to lack, is a bed.

" Where do they sleep, these women and their slaves?" I asked the sheik.

" On the divans."

" But have they no coverlets?"

" They sleep fully dressed. But there are woollen or silken covers for the winter-time."

" That is all very well, but where is the husband's place?"

"Oh, the husband sleeps in his room and the women in theirs, and the slaves (odaleuk) on the divans in the larger rooms. If the divans and the cushions do not make a comfortable bed, mattresses are put down in the middle of the room, and they sleep there."

" Fully dressed?"

" Always, but only in the most simple of clothes, trousers, vest, and robe. The law forbids men as well as women to uncover themselves before the other sex, anywhere below the neck. It is a husband's privilege to look freely upon his wives' faces, but if curiosity should take him any further, his eyes are accursed: there is a very definite text upon the subject."

" I can understand," I said, that the husband does not greatly care to pass the night in a room filled with women fully dressed, and that he is ready enough to sleep in his own; but if he takes two or three of these ladies with him . . ."

" Two or three!" cried the sheik indignantly, "what dogs do you imagine would act in any such way? God alive! is there a woman in the world, even an infidel, who would consent to share her husband's honourable couch with another? Is that how they behave in Europe?"

" In Europe, I replied, "certainly not; but the Christians have only one wife, and they imagine that the Turks, who have several, live with them as with one only."

" If

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