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.