Mahtab [“a celebrated lady of pretty name, Moonbeam”]…slowly waving her white arms, she unexpectedly stands close to you, she floats forward so softly, she sinks back, retires, and stands motionless as wax-work…the lady’s sisters are too completely under the spell to feel envious…the pipe is going fast, and extraneous aid is necessary to the drooping form of Nur Jan, Moonbeam’s youngest and prettiest sister. We ought not to have admitted those flasks…say nothing of the scene when you return home…
-Scinde; or, The Unhappy Valley, Richard Burton, describing the nautch dance of Mahtab, sister of his mistress Nur Jan, whom he called the “Venus of Belochistan”
The Indian women Burton lived with during his seven years in the subcontinent furnished him with the material he was to work into his books through introductions, footnotes, commentaries and the elucidations of passages of original texts, where he was trying to make it clear to his European readers…the long sequences of caresses, kisses, scratches, bites, love cries, and various positions…
-Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography, Edward Rice
Burton rarely kissed and told. Although he named Nur Jan in his poem Past Loves, he cited many others only by their trysting places, in a kind of breadcrumb trail laid across the British Empire from the Kalahari to Aden, Muscat, Cashmere, Abyssinia, Nubia, Isfahan, Baghdad, Bokhara, and Gandoppa- wherever that is. The poem ended with the lines “I’ve had my day, I’ve lived my life, and now expect my night” but after he died his widow Isabel changed the last to “and given the debris to a wife.”
I have nothing as interesting to say about the camel trail to Egypt, but it has served me well as source material for more footnotes and commentaries than might seem necessary to the average reader. KhairAllah may still want to rewrite some of my last lines.