“Is it not a tale that I am telling you? is not the room I have just described to you but a creature of the imagination?—­In the centre of this saloon, then, was a large fountain, whence fragrant rose-water ascended into the air sporting with the golden balls.  Along the whole length of the walls were immense Venetian mirrors, in which splendid odalisks admired their own shapely limbs.  Hundreds and hundreds of lamps shone upon the pillars which supported the room—­lamps of manifold colours—­which gave to the vast chamber the magic hues of a fairy palace, and in the midst thereof seemed to float a transparent blue cloud—­it was the light smoke of ambergris and spices which the damsels blew forth from their long narghilis.  But what impressed Irene far more than all this magnificence, was the figure of the Sultana Asseki, to whom she was now conducted.  A tall, muscular lady was sitting at the end of the room on a raised divan.  Her figure was slender round the waist but broad and round about the shoulders.  Her snow-white arms and neck were encircled by rows of real pearls with diamond clasps.  A lofty heron’s plume nodded on her bejewelled turban, and lent a still haughtier aspect to that majestic form.  With her large black eyes she seemed to be in the habit of ruling the whole world.”

“Yes, yes!” exclaimed Janaki, “you describe it all so vividly, that I am half afraid of sitting down here and listening to you.  You might at least have let a little bit of a veil hang in front of her face.”

“But this happened long, long ago, remember!  Who can even say under what Sultan it took place?...  So they led the slave-girl into the presence of the Sultana, who was surrounded by two hundred other slave-girls, and was playing with a tiny dwarf.  They were singing and dancing all around her and swinging censers.  Above her head was a large fruit-tree made entirely of sugar, and covered with sugar-fruit of every shape and hue, and from time to time the Sultana would pluck off one of these fruits and taste a little bit of it and give the remainder to the tiny dwarf, who ate up everything greedily.  Here Irene was seized by a black eunuch—­a horrid, pockmarked man, whose upper lip was split right down so that all his teeth could be seen.”

“Just like the present Kizlar-Aga!” cried Musli laughing, “I fancy I can see him standing before me now!”

“The Moor commanded Irene to fall on her face before the Sultana.  Irene fell on her face accordingly, and while her forehead beat the ground before the Sultana she muttered to herself the words:  ’Holy Mother of God! protectress of virgins, thou seest me in this place, when I call upon thee, deliver me!’ The Sultana, meanwhile, had commanded her handmaidens to let down Irene’s tresses, and as she stood before her there covered by her own hair from head to heel, she bade them paint her face red because it was so pale, and her eyelashes brown.  She commanded them also to salve her hair with fragrant unguents,