Once inside the courtyard of the palace the eunuchs split into small groups of three and four. I attached myself to one of these groups and at the same time tried to remain inconspicuous. One large fellow who seemed to have some sort of authority strode over to us and ordered us to follow him.
A few moments later I found myself in a tiled, enormous hall. At one end of it there were steaming cauldrons behind roughly defined cubicles, which I could guess were used for shower stalls. In the center was a shallow pool in the shape of an oval about twenty feet by thirty feet. On the other side of the pool, closest to me, were a series of upholstered benches somewhat like massage tables. Smaller utility tables fringed these benches and on these stood many jars of oils and perfumes flanked by stacks of snowy white towels.
Some twenty eunuchs had distributed themselves around the hall, taking up various stations. Not knowing what else to do, I stood beside one of the padded benches and waited. After a few moments, exquisitely beautiful Arabian girls began drifting into the hall by ones and twos. I realized then that I was in the bathing quarters used by the members of the Emir’s harim.
Chatting and laughing, the girls waited in an area just to the rear of the steaming cauldrons. They fell into a sort of loose line. Two eunuchs, moving with great efficiency and no wasted motion, traveled down the line and divested each girl of her clothing. With each of the last thing to be removed was the veil covering the lower part of her face. When all but the last few girls were completely naked, the head of the line began moving slowly into the shower cubicles.
It was quite a procession. I was impressed by both the similarities and differences among the girls. Body hair had been shaved from each and every torso. All the girls were brunettes. All - despite variations - had excellent figures. All carried their nudity proudly and with no self-consciousness under the eyes of the eunuchs.
The colors of their skins varied from olive tinted with pink to a brown so deep it verged on black. There were tall, majestic beauties with large round breasts and long legs and heavy, sensual hips. There were petite nymphs with the up-tilted breast buds of early adolescence, cherry-red nipples, firm, high bottoms and narrow waists. There were plump girls—not fat—but round of breast and hip and buttock and possessed of a butter-soft sensuality. There were slender, catlike girls who looked Egyptian, shiny skinned with a lean, hungry eroticism expressed in sharp, pointy breasts and long scarlet nipples. There were sex kittens and voluptuously womanly cats, girls with pronounced mounds of womanhood carried high and hungry and others whose femininity remained a mystery lost at the juncture of velvety thighs, sirens who undulated their bodies as they walked and others who swung more blatantly. All in all, it was one helluva display of pulchritude.
The eunuchs, however, seemed not to notice. They went about their work in the most businesslike way, seemingly oblivious to the flesh rippling around them. They performed their tasks with the impersonal efficiency of factory workers. Indeed, the whole scene began to take on the aspect of a well-organized assembly line.
At the start of the line were the eunuchs stripping the harem girls. Each girl would then pass into one of the shower cubicles where two eunuchs would pour a mixture of steaming liquid from the cauldrons and cold water over them. As each beauty was wetted down, she would step in front of the shower stall and two more eunuchs would cover her body with suds from large, soapy sponges and scrub her with large, hairy brushes. Then the girl would step back into another shower stall to be rinsed. It was timed with the precision of a Saturday afternoon car wash.
From the showers, the girls would proceed to the pool where they would dunk themselves. Here they were evidently allowed to remain as long as they liked. It was quite a sight. There were ten or twelve naked beauties splashing each other and cavorting in an atmosphere of complete relaxation with the scenery changing every few moments as one group would drift off to be replaced by another.
As each girl left the pool, she was met by a eunuch holding a large towel. She would be enveloped in this and dried with light pats. There was no rubbing. I guessed this was to protect the shapely merchandise from damage.
Once she had been patted dry, a girl would stretch herself out on one of the padded tables and a eunuch would anoint every inch of her body with oil. Then she would proceed to a second table where the oil would be patted dry and perfumes applied to her most strategic bodily parts.
Without having planned it, I was an oiler. It was my job to give each body that stretched out on my table a grease job. Fortunately, I had a chance to watch some of the eunuchs assigned to the same task before my first client presented herself.
It was easy. I simply poured a mixture of the oils into the palm of my hand and applied it to the surface of my first customer’s naked body. Then I gently rubbed the entire surface, adding more oil as the need arose. Still, it put a strain on me that the other actual eunuchs didn’t have.
I managed to keep this under control until my fifth subject. She was a particularly curvaceous lass with high breasts so firmly uptilted that they seemed almost to graze the tip of her chin as she stretched out face up on the table. She had one of those lazily sensual faces found in the Near East: dark eyes, deepset and heavy lidded with long lashes, a high-planed facial structure with delicate features and a bronze-gold flush which lightened smoothly as it descended from her neck down the lines of her lithe body. Her hair was ebony and quite straight—- Cleopatra style. Her waist was narrow, her hips wide, her womanhood a cleft mound of shimmering gold.
At the first touch of my fingers on her flesh, she sighed and bent one of her legs at the knee so that it swayed rhythmically. Her legs were long and shapely, a trifle heavy at the thighs, but that only added to their sensual appeal. Her eyes met mine and she caught me admiring them. One of her eyebrows rose questioningly, but she said nothing.
My fingertips spread the balm from the curve of her shoulders to the hollow of her armpits. She giggled. “You tickle me, eunuch,” she said.
I muttered an apology. Then I cupped her breasts, leaning over her and working the oil between them, rubbing it into the large red aureoles around her straining nipples. She stretched one leg straight out, moving it up and down so that her thighs rubbed together.
“You have a nice, firm touch, eunuch,” she told me.
I grunted, poured a bit more oil, and worked my way down her belly. It was soft as velvet. Her hips writhed slightly as my hands moved from side to side. She was decidedly reacting to the massage. Afraid that I would respond to her reaction and betray my non-eunuch status, I quickly skipped over her mons veneris and started oiling her legs. But the lady wasn’t about to let me get away with the omission.
“You missed the most important spot,” she complained. Her thighs parted and her gesture was an imperious command that I correct the omission.
Aching, I pressed close against the table to hide the evidence of my manhood. The fulcrum of her body telegraphed demands and held my hands prisoner at the juncture of her legs. The sentinel guarding the flesh gates of her love tunnel sprang forth to duel with my fingertips. The duel was willingly lost and the entry widened amazingly to receive the ointments and turn their delivery into a prolonged caress. The caress ended in squeals of Arabian delight on her part, in the increased strain of frustration on mine.
Now the Syrian siren turned over on the table. I anointed her back and my hands massaged their way down the spine to the smooth-jutting roundness of her quivering gold nether cheeks. Again her thighs parted as I reached the valley separating them. Again my hand was clasped and, despite its slipperiness from the oil, urged deep into the hidden recesses of her body. It was in the mounting excitement of this moment that the harem Circe detected the evidence proving I was no eunuch.