Meanwhile, Mamduh, traveled from city to city in search of new beauty. My harem became famous throughout Arabia.

I built an enormous wall around my estate, and within it my mistresses wandered, displaying their charms, and chattering endlessly. Sixty giant eunuchs, with drawn swords, walked among them, settling disputes, punishing or admonishing like judges, and calling out at my approach: “Our master! Kneel! Kneel! Our master!”

Kotikokura became my chief steward, and relegated to himself a small number of women, black and yellow-skinned. He seemed to relish mistresses in whom the attributes of femininity were enormously emphasized.

“What lost love do you seek among them, Kotikokura?”

He grinned.

“Even in our first amours, Kotikokura, we seek something that came before them perhaps in some dimly remembered dream, or in some dimly remembered life…”

He scratched his nose, and rearranged his turban.

I distributed my harem, like a strange and complicated chess. Sooner or later, I hoped, by divers moves, to capture the King of Love—Perfection. I tried the ways of Flower-of-the-Evening, but before long her devices began to pall. They left the board in disarray, without checkmating the King. I invented new and fantastic moves by applying the law of permutation, which I had just learned from my wise teacher.

I achieved an infinity of variations.

I built many pavilions, the pavilion of color, the pavilion of perfume, the pavilion of touch, the pavilion of size. Pleasure was a thousand-stringed harp. Each note, each shade, melted almost imperceptibly into the next. Eyes, tiny and brilliant as beads, softened until I met the tender glance of the wounded gazelle. Blackest skin turned to brown, brown to yellow, yellow to white. There were breasts like hillocks rising upward; breasts like enormous grapes hanging from a vine; breasts like fists of rock; breasts like hazel-nuts whose sharp points were dotted scarlet.

Love assumed numberless hues and numberless shapes. Hair short and stiff like quills, melting into masses of gold, flowing about the ankles; hips round and wide as hoops, dwindling until they became straight vertical lines; perfumes pungent as the taste of green apples upon the edges of teeth, luxuriant as of roses full-blown, delicate as the air at dawn; lips thin as a line drawn with the point of an artist’s brush, thickening, broadening, until they filled the mouth like ripe fire-colored pomegranates, whose honey overruns.

I was the master harpist, playing string after string. The sound was often pleasurable, but the tune lacked perfection. I combined pavilion with pavilion; mingled incongruities, uniting the grotesque and the abnormal, the monstrous and the normal.

Always the King of Love eluded me, playing hide-and-seek, mocking, laughing…

I consulted with Mamduh. His advice was intelligent and the result of much experience, but always in the end futile.

“I shall devise a tune that will bring all strings into play at once… Do you think I can thus ensnare Pleasure?”

Mamduh combed his beard leisurely with his fingers. Evading somewhat my question, he answered: “Who shall play the tune more perfectly than Cartaphilus?”

Petals of flowers covered the garden with a heavy carpet. The resources of the entire harem were enlisted for the Bath of Beauty.

I was a rock in the midst of a vast sea of flesh, perfumed with a thousand scents, moving and undulating above and below me… Billows rising and falling, accompanied by stifled murmurs and groans—waves caressing and laving, like soft tongues, or beating against me like open palms—my body ablaze in an ocean of concupiscence, delighted and tortured…an amorous delirium—a nightmare and a gorgeous dream—an orgy of lust… Jets of love, quivering and hot, splashing back into the flames—billows rising and beating the rock—obstinate, determined… Breasts and buttocks and mouths and hands and bellies—a fury of passion, laughing, weeping, groaning…

A muscular rock, still inexorable, still unyielding—a thousand tongues of flame surrounding it, seeking to melt it—beating against it like hammers, scorching, tearing, lapping…

A sea stiffened by the furious caress of the tempest. Then a sea without motion. The rock crumbled into the billows. Hot ashes smothered the flames, but left still unextinguished, the volcano beneath.

Where was the King of Love? My hand sought, but captured only shadows… My eyes glared, but discovered nothing… My ears heard, in the distance…laughter…like the laughter of Salome…

“Do you believe that a thousand women equal one Salome, Kotikokura?”

He walked off, suddenly remembering something which needed his immediate attention.

“My excellent friends,” I said to Ali and Mamduh, “is it possible to achieve unity through diversity?”

Ali shrugged his shoulders and replied with a long string of incomprehensible equations.

Mamduh, more practical, however, replied. “There is always some virgin, harboring some unsuspected delight.”

“No, no, Mamduh, my harem is already more numerous than King Solomon’s, who also sought—and in vain—the one perfect queen. The multiplication table cannot help me solve the problem of love. No, Mamduh, seek no more. Your exquisite taste has already accomplished miracles. But, alas, however many zeroes we add to a number, infinity remains distant and unapproachable…

“Beauty, my friends, is a magnificent vase, broken into a thousand parts. However expert we may be at piecing them together again, some chip is missing, or is wrongly united, and if, by some supreme good fortune, we restore the vessel to its original form, we cannot hide from the touch, the cicatrice, the scar where we have joined them together.”

My friends tried to console me.

“Perhaps man should not seek to remember, but rather to forget…” I suggested.

I ordered festivities, such as Nero and Heliogabalus had never dreamt of. I invited the Rajahs and the Princes of many cities. The most famous cooks of Arabia prepared dishes of so many varieties that names could no longer be invented for them. Wines of fifty nations flowed incessantly into golden goblets. My harem danced before us to the music of all races, and at night procured us tortures that delighted, and pleasures that agonized.

Some guests, unable to endure the torments of delight, left. Many, persisting, succumbed. Among these were my two dear masters, Ali and Mamduh. At last, only Kotikokura and myself remained,—perennial survivors of the cataclysm of joy.

“Are we owls, Kotikokura, perching forever upon ruins?”

He grinned.

My women, woefully decimated, wandered in the garden, like strange peacocks, endeavoring to entice me. I saw merely the ugly feet. I heard only disagreeable voices.

“What shall I do with these creatures, Kotikokura? I can neither take them with me, should I desire to continue my wanderings, nor can I leave them here, to starve. After all, there was something of beauty in them, something that reminded me of the unforgettable past. Should Ca-ta-pha imitate other gods, who send floods and earthquakes when they can no longer endure the sight of their creatures?”

He shook his head.

“Should not Ca-ta-pha be more reasonable and more kindly?”

He nodded.

“Very well, then, Kotikokura, since we have so much time at our disposal, we shall be merciful and just. We shall wait patiently until these creatures die, one by one, and when the last is gone, we can continue our journey… Meanwhile, there are many problems that my late master, Ali—may he be happy in Paradise—has left unfinished; problems that merit solution.”