The poor ladies in the royal harems are only so much stock, from which their Lord and tyrant picks and chooses.

'How dare you bring that vile charge against the dead?' 'There are men living in India who know the truth of that charge: men who were at Bisnagar when my father, sick and heartbroken, was shut up in his deserted harem, hemmed in by spies and traitors, men with murder in their faces.

Toomuch, summon hither from the inner harem Fatima and Falloola; they shall sit beside me and sing to me at the last hour, for I love them well, and later they too shall voyage with me to paradise.

Grim nudged me sharply in one shadowy place, where the street went down in twenty-foot-long steps between the high walls of windowless harems.