When my beard, now long, scraggy, and grey, was yet soft as silk upon my
youthful chin, I was sent as spy into Agadez, the mysterious City of the
Black Sultan. At that time it was the richest, most zealously guarded,
and most strongly fortified town in the whole Sahara, and surrounded, as
it constantly was, by marauding tribes and enemies of all sorts, a
vigilant watch was kept day and night, and woe betide any stranger found
within its colossal walls, for the most fiendish of tortures that the
mind of man could devise was certain to be practised upon him, and his
body eventually given to the hungry dogs at the city gate.
In order, however, to ascertain its true strength and the number of its
garrison, I, as one of the younger and more adventurous of our clansmen,
was chosen by Tamahu, our Sheikh, to enter and bring back report to our
encampment in the rocky fastness of the Tignoutin. Therefore I removed
my big black veil, assumed the white haik and burnouse of the
Beni-Mansour, a peaceful tribe further north, and contrived to be
captured as slave by a party of raiding Ennitra who were encamped by the
well of Tafidet, five miles from the capital of Ahir. As I had
anticipated, I was soon taken to the City of the Black Sultan, and there
sold in the slave-market, first becoming the property of a Jew merchant,
then of Hanaza, the Grand Vizier of the Sultan. As personal slave of
this high official I was lodged within the palace, or Fada, that
veritable city within a city, containing as it did nearly three thousand
inhabitants, over one thousand of whom were inmates of his Majesty's
harem.
In the whole of Africa, no monarch, not even the Moorish Lord of the
Land of the Maghrib, was housed so luxuriously as this half-negro
conqueror of the Asben. When first I entered the Fada as slave, I was
struck by the magnificence of the wonderful domain. As I crossed court
after court, each more beautiful than the one before, and each devoted
to a separate department of the royal household, the guards, the
janissaries, the treasurer, the armourers, and the eunuchs, I was amazed
at every turn by their magnificence and beauty. At last we came to the
court of the Grand Vizier, a smaller but prettier place, with a cool,
plashing fountain tiled in blue and white, and shaded by figs, myrtles,
and trailing vines. Beyond, I could see an arched gateway in the black
wall, before which stood two giant negro guards in bright blue, their
drawn swords flashing in the sun. Of my conductor I enquired whither
that gate led, and was told it was impassable to all save the Sultan
himself, for it was the gate of the Courts of Love, the entrance to the
royal harem.
Through the many months during which I served my capricious master, that
closed, iron-studded door, zealously guarded night and day by its mute
janissaries with their curved scimitars, was a constant source of
mystery to me. Often I sat in the courtyard and dreamed of the thousand
terrible dramas which that ponderous door hid from those outside that
world of love, hatred, and all the fiercest passions of the human heart.
The Sultan was fickle and capricious. The favourite of to-day was the
discarded of to-morrow. The bright-eyed houri who, loaded with jewels,
could twist her master round her finger one day, was the next the merest
harem slave, compelled to wash the feet of the woman who had succeeded
her in her royal master's favour. Truly the harem of the Sultan of the
Ahir was a veritable hotbed of intrigue, where ofttimes the innocent
victims of jealousy were cast alive to the wild beasts, or compelled to
partake of the Cup of Death--coffee wherein chopped hair had been
placed--a draught that was inevitably fatal.
One brilliant night, when the silver moonbeams whitened the court
wherein I lived, I sat in the deep shadow of the oleanders, sad and
lonely. Through six long dreary months had I been held slave by the
Grand Vizier, yet it was Allah's will that I should have no opportunity
to return to my people. So I possessed myself in patience. Through
those months mine eyes and ears had been ever on the alert, and long ago
I had completed my investigations. Suddenly my reflections were
interrupted, for I saw standing before me a veritable vision of beauty,
a pale-faced girl in the gorgeous costume of the harem, covered with
glittering jewels, and wearing the tiny fez, pearl-embroidered zouave,
and filmy _serroual_ of the Sultan's favourites. Not more than
eighteen, her unveiled countenance was white as any Englishwoman's; her
startled eyes were bright as the moonbeams above, and as she stood mute
and trembling before me, her bare, panting bosom, half-covered by her
long, dark tresses, rose and fell quickly. I raised my eyes, and saw
that the negro guards were sleeping. She had escaped from the Courts of
Love.
"Quick!" she gasped, terrified. "Hide me, while there is yet time."
At her bidding I rose instantly, for her wondrous beauty held me as
beneath some witch's spell. And at the same time I led the way to my
tiny den, a mere hole in the gigantic wall that separated the royal
harem from the outer courts of the palace.
"My name is Zohra," she explained, when she had entered; "and thine?"--
she paused for an instant, looking me straight in the face. "Of a
verity," she added at length, "thine is Ahamadou, the spy of the dreaded
Azjar, the Veiled Men."