I wondered: does a woman when fondled never experience anything nicer than this? Surely not, I told myself. Then maybe a fat woman never experiences anything? I had yet to fondle a really fat woman, but I doubted that. Anyway, in my new womanly incarnation, was I a fat woman? I sat up to see.

Well, I still had that grossly swollen abdomen, and now I could see that it was made even uglier by a discoloration marring the taut ivory skin, a brown line that extended from my protuberant navel down to my artichoke. But the belly seemed to be the only fat thing about me. My legs were slim enough, and hairless, and would have been pretty, except that the veins of them were all raised and visible and squirmy-looking, like a net of worm burrows just under the skin. My hands and arms also looked slim enough, and girlishly soft. But they did not feel soft to me; they felt gnarled and painful. Even as I looked at them and flexed them, both of my hands crooked in a cramp that made me groan.

The groan was loud enough to have brought some response from Chiv, but she did not materialize out of the blue smoke around me, even when I several times called her name. What had the philter made of her? I would have supposed, just on the principle of turnabout, that if I had become female, Chiv would have become male. But the hakim had said that Majnun and Laila sometimes disported themselves as both of the same sex. And sometimes one or both of them had availed themselves of invisibility. Still, the philter’s main purpose was to enhance the partners’ lovemaking, and in that I judged this trial philter to be a failure. No kind of partner—male, female, invisible—was likely to want to couple with a creature as grotesque as what I had turned into. Nevertheless, what had become of Chiv? I called her again and again … and then I screamed.

I screamed because another sensation had shaken my body, a sensation more gruesome than mere pain. Something had moved, something that was not me, but it had moved inside me, inside that monstrous bloat that was my belly. I knew it was not just unsettled food in my stomach, for it happened somewhere below my stomach. And it was not ill-digested food making wind in my lower gut, for I had known that sensation before. That can be unpleasant enough, and sometimes startling, even when it is not noisy or noisome. But this was something different, something I had never experienced before. It felt as if I might have swallowed some small sleeping animal, and it had been digested well down into my bowels, and there it had suddenly awakened and stretched and yawned. My God, I thought, suppose it tries to fight its way out!

Just then it moved again, and I shrieked again, for it seemed about to do exactly that. But it did not. The movement quickly abated, making me ashamed of having shrieked. The animal might only have turned about a bit in its snuggery, as if to judge how inextricaby it was held there. I felt renewed wetness between my legs, and thought I had once more soiled myself in my fright. But when I put a hand down there I felt something awfuller than urine. I brought my hand up into my view, and my fingers were webbed with a viscous substance that clung in strings between hand and groin, moistly stretching and sagging and soggily breaking. The substance was wet but not liquid; it was a gray slime, like nose-blown mucus, and it was streaked with blood. I began to curse the Hakim Mimdad and his unholy philter. Not only had he and it given me an ugly woman’s body, and evidently one with defective female parts, there was also something ailing this body and causing a nauseous discharge from those parts.

If my new integument was indeed ill or injured, I thought, I had better not risk standing it up and taking it to look for Chiv. I had better remain lying where I was. So I called for her some more, still without result. I even began calling for Shimon, though I could imagine how the Jew would sneer and snicker, seeing me in a woman’s form. He did not come, either, and now I regretted having paid him in advance for a long stay. Whatever noises or cries he might hear from in here, he would probably take for boisterous lovemaking, and not intrude.

For a long time, I lay supine there, and nothing further happened except that the room got more and more hot, and I got sweatier, and my need to urinate became also a need to defecate. It might have been that the imagined small animal inside me was pressing its weight against my bladder and my bowels and squeezing them intolerably. I had to make a determined effort not to let go, but I did resist, not wanting to spew between my legs and all over the bed. Then suddenly, as if a door had been opened to the thawing snows outside, I was blasted by a chill. The film of sweat on my body became icy, I shook in every limb, my teeth chattered, my skin turned all to gooseflesh, my already prominent nipples stood up like sentries. There was nothing for me to cover myself with; if my discarded clothes were still on the floor, they were out of my sight and reach, and I was afraid to get up and look for them. But then the chill was as suddenly gone again, and the room was as muggy as before and my sweat started out afresh and I panted for breath.

Not having much else to meditate on, I tried to take stock of my feelings. They were numerous and various. I felt a measure of excitement: the philter had worked, at least partway. I felt a measure of anticipation: the philter was bound to do something more, and it might be interesting. But most of my emotions were not at all pleasant. I felt discomfort: my hands kept cramping, and my need to evacuate my bowels was becoming extreme. I felt disgust: there was still a seepage of that puslike stuff from my mihrab. I felt indignation: being put in this situation—and I felt self-pity: being left all alone to endure this situation. I felt guilt: by rights, I should be at the karwansarai, helping my companions pack and prepare to take the trail again, not here indulging my demon curiosity. I felt fear: not really knowing what the philter might have yet in store for me—and I felt apprehension: whatever happened next might be no improvement on what already had.

Then, in one paralyzing instant, all other feelings went away, abolished, demolished by the one feeling that takes precedence over everything else, and that is pain. It was a tearing pain that tore through my lower vitals, and I might have thought I heard the sound of it, like the ripping of sturdy cloth, except that I could hear only my agonized cry. I would have clawed at my betrayer belly, but I was so shaken by the pain that I had to clutch the sides of the swaying hindora to keep from pitching out of it.

In any access of agony, one instinctively tries to move, hoping that some movement might alleviate it, and the only movement I could make was to draw up my legs. That abruptness broke my control of my more intimate muscles, and my urine gushed out in a sudden wet warmth, down and about my buttocks. Instead of quickly abating, the pain made a leisurely departure, merging into an alternation of heat and chill. I jolted as each flush of fever gave way to a clamp of cold and that to heat once more. When those pulses finally, gradually subsided, leaving me awash in sweat and urine, I lay weak and flaccid and gasping as if I had been scourged, and now that I could make words I cried aloud, “What is happening to me?”

And then I knew. Look: here on this pallet lies a woman, flat on her back, and most of her body is flat, too, only curved and shaped as a woman’s body ought to be, except for that horrendous bulge of distended abdomen. She lies with her legs drawn up and apart, exposing a mihrab that is tight and numb with tension. Something is up in there, inside her. It is what makes the belly big, and it is alive, and she has felt it move in there, and she has felt the first pangs of its wanting to get out of there, and where shall it come out except through that mihrab canal between her legs? This is obviously a woman in advanced pregnancy and about to give birth.