I drew my chair nearer and listened.

“Yuleima,” began Joe, “is one womans like no other womans in all—­”

But I shall not attempt the dragoman’s halting, broken jargon interspersed with Italian and German words—­it will grate on you as it grated on me.  I will assume for the moment—­and Joe would be most thankful to have me do so—­that the learned Hornstog, the friend of kings and princes, is as fluent in English as he is in Turkish, Arabic, and Greek.

It all began in a caique—­or rather in two caiques.  One was on its way to a little white house that nestles among the firs at the foot of the bare brown hill overlooking the village of Beicos.  The other was bound for the Fountain Beautiful, where the women and their slaves take the air in the soft summer mornings.

In the first caique, rowed by two caique-jis gorgeously dressed in fluffy trousers and blouses embroidered in gold, sat the daughter of the rich Bagdad merchant.

In the second caique, cigarette in hand, lounged the nephew of the Khedive, Mahmoud Bey; scarce twenty, slight, oval face with full lips, hair black as sealskin and as soft, and eyes that smouldered under heavy lids.  Four rowers in blue and silver attended his Highness, the amber-colored boat skimming the waters as a tropical bird skims a lagoon.

The two had passed each other the week before on the day of the Selamlik (the Turkish holiday) while paddling up the Sweet Waters of Asia—­a little brook running into the Bosphorus and deep enough for caiques to float, and every day since that blissful moment my lady had spent the morning under the wide-spreading plane-trees shading the Fountain Beautiful—­the Chesmegazell—­attended by her faithful slave Multif, her beautiful body stretched on a Damascus rug of priceless value, her eager eyes searching the blue waters of the Bosphorus.

On this particular morning—­my lady had just stepped into her boat—­the young man was seen to raise himself on his elbow, lift his eyelids, and a slight flush suffused his swarthy cheeks.  Then came an order in a low voice, and the caique swerved in its course and headed for the dot of white and gold in which sat Multif and my lady.  The Spanish caballero haunts the sidewalk and watches all day beneath his Dulcinea’s balcony; or he talks to her across the opera-house or bull-ring with cigarette, fingers, and cane, she replying with studied movements of her fan.  In the empire of Mohammed, with a hundred eyes on watch—­eyes of eunuchs, spies, and parents—­ love-making is reduced to a passing glance, brief as a flash of light, and sometimes as blinding.

That was all that took place when the two caiques passed—­just a thinning of the silken veil, with only one fold of the yashmak slipped over the eyes, softening the fire of their beauty; then a quick, all-enfolding, all-absorbing look, as if she would drink into her very soul the man she loved, and the two tiny boats kept each on its way.