“I am confused, Princess Moth. You distinctly said you would sneak me into your chamber … .”

“And so I shall. And I shall remain with you there to assist you in zina with my sister.”

“With your sister?!”

“Hush! The old grandmother is deaf, but sometimes she can read simple words from the lips. Now keep silent and listen. My father has many wives, so I have many sisters. One of them is amenable to zina. In fact, she can never get enough of it. And it is she who will be your birthday gift.”

“But if she is also a royal Princess, why is her virginity not equally—?”

“I said keep silent. Yes, she is as royal as I, but there is a reason why she does not treasure maidenhood as I do. You will know everything tonight. But until tonight I will say no more, and if you pester me with questions I will rescind the gift. Now, Marco, let us enjoy the day. Let me command a coachman to take us for a ride about the city.”

The coach, when it came for us, was really only a dainty cart on two high wheels, drawn by a single midget Persian horse. Its driver helped me hoist the infirm old grandmother up to sit beside him at the front, and the Princess and I sat on the inside seat. As the cart rolled down the garden drive and out through the palace gates into Baghdad, Moth remarked that she had not yet had anything of breakfast to eat, opened a cloth bag, took from it some greenish-yellow fruits, and bit into one and offered another to me.

“Banyan,” she called it. “A variety of fig.”

I winced at the word fig, and politely declined, not bothering to mention my Acre misadventure that had made figs repulsive to me. Moth looked sulky when I refused, and I asked her why.

“Do you know,” she said, leaning close and whispering so the coachman would not hear, “that this is the forbidden fruit with which Eve seduced Adam?”

I whispered back, “I prefer the seduction without the fruit. And speaking of which—”

“I told you not to speak of it. Not until tonight.”

Several other times during the morning’s ride, I tried to broach that subject, but every time she ignored me, speaking only to call my attention to this or that point of interest and to tell me informative things about it.

She said, “Here we are in the bazàr, which you have already visited, but perhaps you do not recognize it now, all empty and deserted and silent. That is because today is Jumè—Friday, as you call it—which Allah appointed to be the day of rest, and there is no doing of trade or business or labor.”

And she said, “That grassy parkland which you see yonder is a graveyard, which we call a City of the Silent.”

And she said, “That large building is the House of Delusion, a charitable institution founded by my father the Shah. In it are confined and cared for all the persons who go insane, as many persons do in the hot summertime. They are regularly examined by a hakim, and if they ever regain their reason, they are set free again.”

In the outer skirts of the city, we crossed a bridge over a small stream, and I was struck by the color of that water, which was a most unusually deep blue for mere water. Then we crossed another stream, and it was a most unwaterly vivid green. But not until we had crossed yet another, and it was as red as blood, did I make any comment.

The Princess explained, “The waters of all the streams out here are colored by the dyes of the makers of qali. You have never seen a qali made? You must see.” And she gave directions to the coachman.

I would have expected to be taken back into Baghdad, and to some city workshop, but the cart went farther still into the countryside, and came to a stop beside a hill that had a low cave entrance halfway up it. Moth and I got down from the cart, climbed the hill and ducked our heads to go into the hole.

We had to go crouching through a short, dark tunnel, but then we came out inside the hill, and into a vastly wide and high rock cavern, full of people, its floor cluttered with work tables and benches and dye vats. The cavern was dark until my eyes got accustomed to its half-light, cast by innumerable candles and lamps and torches. The lamps were set on the various pieces of furniture, the torches were ensconced at intervals around the rock walls, some of the candles were stuck to the rocks by their own drip, and other candles were carried about in the hands of the multitude of workers.

I said to the Princess, “I thought this was a day of rest.”

“For Muslims,” she said. “These are all slaves, Christian Russniaks and Lezghians and such. They are allowed their due sabbath on Sundays.”

Only a few of the slaves were grown men and women, and they worked at various tasks, like the stirring of the dye vats, on the floor of the cavern. All the rest were children, and they worked while floating high in the air. That may sound like one of the Shahryar Zahd’s stories of magic, but it was a fact. From the high dome of the cavern hung a giant comb of strings, hundreds of strings, parallel and close together, a vertical web as high and as wide as the entire cavern’s height and width. It was obviously the weft for a qali which, when finished, would carpet some immense palace chamber or ballroom. High up against that wall of weft, hung in loops of rope that depended from somewhere even higher in the roof darkness, dangled a crowd of children.

The little boys and girls were all naked—because of the heat of the air up there, Princess Moth told me—and they were suspended across the width of the work, but at various levels, some higher and some lower. Up there, the qali was partially completed, from its hem at the top of the weft down to those levels where the children worked, and I could see that it was, even at that early stage of progress, a qali of a most intricate and varicolored flower-garden design. Each of the dangling children had a candle stuck on its head with the wax, and all were busily engaged, but at what I could not discern; they seemed to be plucking with their little fingers at the unfinished lower edge of the qali.

The Princess said, “They are weaving the warp threads through the weft. Each slave holds a shuttle and a hank of thread of a single color. He or she weaves it through and makes it tight, in the order required by the design.”

“How in the world,” I asked, “can one child know when and where to contribute his bit, among so many other slaves and threads, and in such a complex work?”

“The qali master sings to them,” she said. “Our arrival interrupted him. There, he begins again.”

It was a wonderful thing. The man called the qali master sat before a table on which was spread a tremendous sheet of paper. It was ruled in countless neat little squares, over which was superimposed a drawing of the qali’s entire intended design, with the innumerable different colors indicated. The qali master read aloud from that design, singing something on this order:

“One, red! … Thirteen, blue! … Forty-five, brown! …”

Except that what he chanted was far more complicated than that. It had to be audible away up there near the cavern roof, and it had to be unmistakably understood by each boy and girl it called upon, and it had to have a cadence that kept them all working in rhythm. While the words addressed one slave child after another, out of the great many of them, and told each one when to bring in his individual shuttle, the singing of the words either in a high tone or a low tone told that slave how far across the weft to warp his thread and when to knot it. In that marvelous manner of working, the slaves would bring the qali, thread by thread, line by line, all the way down to the cavern floor, and when it was finished it would be as perfect in execution as if it had been painted by a single artist.

“Just that one qali can eventually cost many slaves,” said the Princess, as we turned to leave the cavern. “The weavers must be as young as possible, so they are light of weight and have tiny, agile fingers. But it is not easy to teach such demanding work to such young boys and girls. Also, they frequently swoon from the heat up yonder, and fall and break and die. Or, if they live long enough, they are almost sure to go blind from the close work and poor light. And for every one lost, another slave child must be already trained and standing by.”