That day was a busy, stirring one in Cambyses’ harem.  In order that the women might look their very best, Boges had commanded that they should all be taken to the bath before the banquet.  He therefore went at once to that wing of the palace, which contained the baths for the women.

While he was still at some distance a confused noise of screaming, laughing, chattering and tittering reached his ears.  In the broad porch of the large bathing-room, which had been almost overheated, more than three hundred women were moving about in a dense cloud of steam.

[We read in Diodorus XVII. 77. that the king of Persia had as many wives as there are days in the year.  At the battle of Issus, Alexander the Great took 329 concubines, of the last Darius, captive.]

The half-naked forms floated over the warm pavement like a motley crowd of phantoms.  Their thin silken garments were wet through and clung to their delicate figures, and a warm rain descended upon them from the roof of the bath, rising up again in vapor when it reached the floor.

Groups of handsome women, ten or twenty together, lay gossiping saucily in one part of the room; in another two king’s wives were quarrelling like naughty children.  One beauty was screaming at the top of her voice because she had received a blow from her neighbor’s dainty little slipper, while another was lying in lazy contemplation, still as death, on the damp, warm floor.  Six Armenians were standing together, singing a saucy love-song in their native language with clear-toned voices, and a little knot of fair-haired Persians were slandering Nitetis so fearfully, that a by-stander would have fancied our beautiful Egyptian was some awful monster, like those nurses used to frighten children.

Naked female slaves moved about through the crowd, carrying on their heads well-warmed cloths to throw over their mistresses.  The cries of the eunuchs, who held the office of door-keepers, and were continually urging the women to greater haste,—­the screeching calls of those whose slaves had not yet arrived,—­the penetrating perfumes and the warm vapor combined to produce a motley, strange and stupefying scene.

A quarter of an hour later, however, the king’s wives presented a very different spectacle.

They lay like roses steeped in dew, not asleep, but quite still and dreaming, on soft cushions placed along the walls of an immense room.  The wet perfumes still lay on their undried and flowing hair, and nimble female slaves were busied in carefully wiping away, with little bags made of soft camels’ hair, the slightest outward trace of the moisture which penetrated deep into the pores of the skin.

Silken coverlets were spread over their weary, beautiful limbs, and a troop of eunuchs took good care that the dreamy repose of the entire body should not be disturbed by quarrelsome or petulant individuals.  Their efforts, however, were seldom so successful as to-day, when every one knew that a disturbance of the peace would be punished by exclusion from the banquet.  They had probably been lying a full hour in this dreamy silence, when the sound of a gong produced another transformation.