The Khan of Kohkand, in his turquoise palace in the Fergana, beyond Bokhara, cannot have had much time for the pursuit of true love, for it is said there were three thousand or more concubines chattering, parakeet-shrill about the roof-top terraces which overlooked the wastes of Central Asia. Here man’s life was composed of hunting sorties and battle. Like many other Orientalist overlords, the Khan regarded his harem in the light of an oasis- somewhere he found refreshment (though scarcely rest) after the violent tempo of these territories.
-Pavilions of the Heart, Lesley Blanch
I doubt that three thousand chattering concubines can rest or refresh any man, even if he were the Khan of Kohkand. We were twelve men with only four hundred naaqas to mind, and we were dead tired whenever we made camp and set about hobbling them in the Wadi al-Milk, as close to an oasis as you can find in Dar al-Kababish. Driving camels on the darb al-arbai’in is every bit as tiring as hunting sorties and battle, although its tempo is certainly less violent than it is virulently monotonous.
Lesley Blanch wrote about famous trysting places- “the four walls of love” she called them- including a few in the seraglio, in Pavilions of the Heart. Her joint biography The Wilder Shores of Love, about Western women who defied the boredom of convention at home by heading East and going native in dress and/or in bed, is perhaps more on point.
I gave my copy (not the edition shown here with cover art certain to prompt much spirited critique of the male gaze) to the library of the women’s university in Omdurman to be read as an anti-orientalist deconstruction of Western sexual stereotypes. Let’s see if by reading it, any co-eds there are inspired to sail along the Wadi’s even wilder shores. There they might find a camp of camel drovers, all of them too beat to chatter back, but glad to have a woman stir their aseeda.
