The Dancer

HE LEFT ME PANTING, tingling from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, my

rump burning, my rear slicked in his sweet jism.

I thought of Umah and smiled.

It didn't matter. Nothing matters. It was the sheikh who made my body sing.

A digit slipped instinctively between my wet cleft and the pad of that moistened

fingertip ran in circles around my clitoris, the feeling making me drowsy, and I

thought the shape of my distended clit was the same as the dome above my head,

that magnified a million million times the two would make a perfect fit.

My eyes closed. I must have slept and, when I awoke, the room with its

twelve arched windows was silvery with starlight that bathed my body in fairy

dust. I showered beneath the water jet and dressed in my suit of clothes.

When I reached the door from which we had entered the walkway around the

battlements, I was surprised to find it locked. I pushed at one side, then the other.

I ran my palms over the woodwork; it was smooth, buffed by wind and sand, the

surface furnished with a brass ring coated in verdigris and a row of studs spaced

along the cross spars. The key hole was framed in a decorative brass plate. I bent

to look, ran my fingers over the design, and realised it was the shape of a spider.

I tapped tentatively with the brass ring, the sound muted in all that empty space,

and stopped myself knocking again. It was more dignified to wait, to allow

events to unfold.

The night was warm, clean, pure, the sky like velvet, the light pale as a ghost.

I wandered along the battlements watching shooting stars, the death display of

exploding planets, the music rising from the compound slow, lyrical, hypnotic. I

was a prisoner of the universe and wondered for a moment if I would be able to

fly should I leap from the fortress walls. I was locked behind a studded door but

felt totally free.

On board the boat I had found myself, the inner me, masked in the subtle

manipulations and influences of our times, the me hidden by the very clothes I

chose, or rather had been chosen for me by designers and photographers, the editors of magazines, by the consumer machine. Little girls are dressing like

adults, their hobby now is shopping not playing, their dream to grow breasts so

they can flaunt them in the high street. Long before boys awaken from the long

sleep of childhood, girls are aware of their sexual selves, the erotic potential

school and society and mothers combine to crush.

I thought about Mummy with her straw hat and leather gloves, a hostage to

the garden with its busy trellises hung with wisteria and roses, its old olive jars

bursting with rhododendrons, the plastic paddling pool folded away in the shed

like a guilty secret. Mother had always done the right thing, said the right thing,

dressed and thought and behaved the way she had been told to dress and think

and behave. Once we moved back to England from Geneva, Daddy started doing

whatever it is he does in Whitehall, and Mummy became a shadow; a woman

who had lost herself because she had never found herself. She had always done

the right thing, and I had a feeling that the right thing is always going to be the

wrong thing, that you find yourself by stepping out of yourself.

Mother was tall and slender. She could have been a dancer, an actress, a

something, and she chose to be a garden ornament, a foot soldier in the war

against the weeds inside the garden walls and the chaos outside in the big bad

world.

Time slips by like the wind.

I waited. It is the way of the desert. When the lock finally turned and the door

opened, it was Umah who had come to get me. He looked nervous, and I stroked

his cheek as you may stroke a spooked pony to reassure him. He beckoned,

drawing me behind him as you tease a fish from the sea on the end of a line. I

followed barefoot down the narrow flights of dark stairs to the courtyard.

During the day, the fort had the shabby look of a grand ruin from the Middle

Ages. At night, a celestial display above our heads, the space lit by oil lamps and

flaming torches, the compound was vibrant with music, dancing flames from an

open fire, the smell of frankincense, hashish, cooking oil, the spiced and

seasoned foods arranged on wooden platters and in silver dishes under the arches

along one side of the courtyard, the women moving like whispers in their long

flimsy djellabas, the bells about their ankles softly ringing.

Musicians played flutes cut from gourds, lutes of the sort troubadours played

at the time of Shakespeare, timbrels, finger cymbals, drums covered in stretched

animal skins. The drummers maintained a complex, contradictory beat in an

atonal rhythm different from anything I had ever heard before. It was music that

didn't merely awaken the senses, but impregnated them with lush sensuality.

As I moved beyond the musicians I saw the girl who had vanished earlier in

the grip of Azar's big hand. She was dancing, framed by the firelight, her movements captivating, mesmerising, so astonishing it took my breath away. I

gasped. My heart beat faster. Sweat prickled my underarms. Samir was sitting

cross-legged on a mat among a group of men. He turned, aware of my presence.

Our eyes met and he flashed a look I had never seen before. As he focused once

more on the girl, I did the same, my toes moving involuntarily in the red dust

beneath my feet.

The girl was performing a belly dance, leisurely, to the rhythm of the slow

drum, as if she were making love, her gestures snakelike, her hands above her

head plaiting a rope from the sky, her hips, sharp as knives, cutting a poem from

the sultry night. I was moved by the sheer immodesty of the display, but also the

immodesty of her costume that didn't so much conceal her nakedness, her

sexuality, but enhanced it. She wasn't dancing, she was masturbating, she was

performing fellatio and cunnilingus with herself and everyone who saw her. Me

included.

The girl's head was covered in a beaded, tight-fitting cap which extended over

her face in a veil made from the same pearly-white beads. Her fiery eyes looked

out from two diamond-shaped slits and the pearls hung in strings that jiggled

over the lower part of her face. The same pattern of loosely-threaded beads

stretched across her breasts and, as she moved, so one breast was briefly

uncovered and then the other, her timing so precise that she was both continually

covered and naked at the same time, the effect like a shimmer, a flicker, a

mirage, her restrained movements accompanied by the jangle of the bracelets

slithering up and down her arms and the bells about her hennaed feet.

The dancer wasn't fat, she was thin with gracefully carved limbs, but she had

a belly, a small, round perfectly formed dome of gyrating flesh that made my

eyes water and my mouth go dry. Her belly button was adorned with a green

gemstone and, below her belly, just above the pubic line, she wore a skirt of

chiffon strips like those in the cabin on the boat, each tucked into a beaded belt,

the transparent veils shifting in such a way that you could see glimpses of her

pudenda, her round bottom when she turned; these hints of her sex coupled with

the fact that her face was hidden by the beaded veil all the more alluring.

I had never been attracted to girls. I had experimented, of course. All girls do.

But that night in the desert, my vagina throbbed with yearning, ached with

desire. I wanted to feel that little round belly pressed against mine, her tongue in

my cleft, my tongue sucking her sweet juices. I desired her as I had never

desired any man. Not even the sheikh.

It was at first a shock that such an erotic performance would exist here among

primitive people, but I realised instantly that this was the prejudice of my old

world coming back to haunt me. We assume we have conquered the market in all things sexual with our tabloid newspapers, celebrity gossip, the reality shows

that capture a world that is unreal; silicone breasts, lap dancing, speed dating.

We imagine the girls in magazines and the hunks that guide them into

limousines are having better sex, more sex, tantric sex, erotic sex, threesomes,

orgies.

We ask ourselves why our own sex lives are empty without stopping to think

that the flawless breasts and square jaws decorating the covers of magazines

have been doctored, air-brushed, back-lit, that half-starved girls and pumped up

men on steroids aren't having better sex, they aren't having sex at all. Our world

is a fantasy, a sleight of hand, a trick of the eye. Even the money in our banks is

an illusion. Perhaps Mother knows that. Perhaps that's why she has escaped

from the world and vanished into the garden.

The men and women in that compound on the edge of the desert, an unmarked

and unmapped oasis in Africa, didn't have these thoughts, these doubts. They

were living the life we imagined, the life we dreamed existed, a life guided by

the senses; the forces of nature. These people were real and, as I stood there with

my long skinny body hidden by the white tunic and pantaloons, I felt invisible,

mind without matter, the light left from a shooting star that died long, long ago.

The dance went on and on, the girl's shadow magnified by the firelight and

repeated around the walls like a vast mural. The music quickened, the girl

moved faster without losing grace, that quintessential object of desire becoming

more desirable, a reminder that if there is a God he placed us here on this earth

to mate, to love, to find joy and happiness in everything we do and where else

but in our sexual nature can we find complete and utter bliss? We are not made

to work, to save, to achieve, to appear on reality TV. We were designed for sex.

This thought had been approaching me every since I sailed away on the sheikh's

boat, and the girl's erotic performance had finally embraced my mind like a

revelation.

The dance ended. The string players and cymbals stopped suddenly and, to the

slow beat of a single drum, the girl vanished like a will-o'-the-wisp, her feet

barely touching the ground as she slipped into the shadows and was gone. There

was no applause. The men remained where they were sitting while the women

floated from the arches with bowls of baked fish, roast chicken dipped in red

sauce, green peppers, onions, falafel, rice, unleavened bread hot from the oven.

The men dug in with their fingers, working the rice and peppers and fish

together into precise balls they popped into their mouths, and it occurred to me

that even in the way the people took their food there was a spontaneity, a

naturalness we had reduced to ritual with our knives and forks, our manners and

conventions. We had formalised eating to a level where all joy had gone, replacing the taste sense with alcohol, a glass of white at lunch, a beer after

work, a good Rioja at dinner, but not too much. Even our needy little greed for

the grape we diminish counting units, drinking, while regretting every glass;

eating, while trying to stay thin; seeking friends who endorse our own opinions.

People like us. I suddenly didn't want be people like us. I wanted to be people

like them. I wanted to be me and, standing there in the moonlight knowing no

one, without a name, in mortal danger, I felt more like me and more alive than I

had ever felt in my twenty-two and a half years.

I watched until Samir beckoned and sat where he indicated, at his side but just

behind him, in the circle but not a part of the circle. I noticed Hanif, out of blue

jeans and wearing a white djellaba, the same as Samir, his white turban held in

place by golden braids. He was one of several men who were clearly chieftains

of some sort, while Azar, Mohammed and Umah were part of a secondary group

of a dozen or so men who completed the ring in the shadows beyond the

firelight.

The two older men who disapproved of my presence wore the same sour

expressions and one of them spat as the sheikh slowly unwound the turban I was

wearing, unveiling me like a painting. I shook my head and my sun-bleached

curls spilled about my shoulders. He was showing me off as people show

holiday snaps after their two weeks in Tenerife; as in the days of exploration

travellers returned to Europe with rare birds and tobacco and natives with bones

through their noses.

The men continued eating, nodding meditatively as they studied my hair, my

eyes, their dark gaze following my fingers as I went to unpin the spider brooch at

my breast. In those weeks on the boat, I had grown accustomed to nudity.

Without clothes I was the version of me that fitted my vision of me, the alter that

was real, organic, pagan. Perhaps I may have felt a need to compete with the

beauty who had danced in those diaphanous veils; that in this world of the senses

I was validated by my sensuality, by revealing what is normally kept hidden.

Samir covered my hand with his to stop me and I looked up into his eyes. He

squeezed my waist, digging into the spare flesh, demonstrating that the gold

standard for beauty here in Africa where people went hungry, wasn't skeletal

sacks of skin and bone but the well fed belly of the dancing girl. He sent me off

to join the women, gesturing to his mouth that had swallowed his own semen

that afternoon to indicate that I should go and eat.

Like the men, the women were neither welcoming nor unfriendly. I was

flotsam brought in on the tide. I would remain or I would depart, and both

eventualities they treated with equanimity. The woman whom I had assumed

was Mo's wife waved her small hands over the bowls and platters. I ate standing up. I was suddenly ravenous, and the food was delicious, fresh, strange, exotic,

tastes that touched my senses and made my fingertips tingle. I moved from one

bowl to another, filling my belly, testing everything, the turmeric and red sauce

burning my cheeks.

The girl appeared, still practically naked, the veil gone, a cape about her

shoulders, the bracelets motionless. I could see in the light of the oil lamps lines

of henna radiating over her features. A black beauty spot rested above the curl of

her top lip and, from just below her bottom lip, a finely-etched tattoo ran down

her chin, over her throat and continued in a thin blue line between her breasts,

over her seductive belly and disappeared below the low slung belt of beads, the

line following the same course the sheikh had taken with his finger down my

body that afternoon.

I looked into the girl's eyes, two balls of black fire floating on lakes of the

whitest white; eyes full of vivacity and mischief. Her long lashes and heavy

eyebrows were darkened in kohl. Around her eyes and curving down her cheeks

were two arcs of pale green and dark green sequins, the same shades as the

stitching on my tunic; a sign, it seemed, that everything is connected. She

smiled. I smiled. She moved closer, close enough for our bellies to touch, and

licked the turmeric stains from my cheeks.

My breath caught in my throat and a shiver zipped up my spine. My entire

body was a touch paper on a firework and suddenly I was fizzing. I was about to

explode, atomise and reform with new ideas, new opinions, new desires.

Everything I had ever known was forgotten.

I had gone into a daze and came out of it as the older woman made a cackling

noise in the back of her throat. As I glanced at her, I realised how similar she

was to the girl, an older version. Perhaps the girl was eighteen and she was her

mother, a woman of less than forty but aged and worn, and I thought that this

time of being young was so fleeting you had to grab it before it passed, that in

life we get one opportunity to indulge our fantasies, and this was mine. Perhaps

one day in the distant future I would spend my hours pruning roses below the

shade of a straw hat and I would smile and be happy as I thought back to that

summer when all inhibitions disappeared.

The woman gave me a beaker filled with icy water and I wondered how they

managed to keep it so cold without refrigeration. I drank the water down in one

gulp and she filled the beaker again from a gun metal-coloured urn.

'Shukran,' I said.

When I gave the beaker back to her, she touched my hair, running it through

her fingers. She said something to the girl and they both laughed.

'It's like straw,' I said, and they shrugged on hearing these meaningless words, and I thought I'd give anything for a bottle of conditioner. 'Maysoon,' the girl said, pointing at herself, and she repeated her name.

'Maysoon.'

'Chengi,' I replied, and the women laughed once more.

The musicians began to play again and I was astonished when Azar got up to

dance. His movements were harmonious but awkward, his long loose hair flying

about like a cloud of smoke. Where the men in the circle had sat spellbound and

silent when the girl danced, they now clapped and laughed, and the more they

laughed the more exaggerated Azar's dance became.

Maysoon pushed me forward and we moved closer as Mo stood to join in the

display. He placed his hand on his heart and bowed. He appeared to ask Azar to

dance, and Azar curtsied in a feminine way that made the men roll back and

forth in peals of laughter. The dance was like a tango or a salsa, a dance from my

world but bizarre, and I wondered if it were me they were mocking and, if it

was, I didn't mind. We deserved to be mocked.

The two men finally fell over and Azar leapt on Mo and appeared to be

kissing and biting his neck. The men in the circle rolled about and slapped each

other on the back.

The musicians packed up their instruments and went to eat. I followed with

Maysoon and joined Samir as the men came to their feet. We strolled through

the open gates, Samir and Hanif with some other the younger men, and I noticed

that Azar was close by with a Kalashnikov over his shoulder.

Along the near wall, closest to town, the caravanserai that had appeared

lifeless during the day was thronged with little camp fires and gatherings of men

without women amusing themselves with primitive games and chatter. I watched

an older man with a white beard fleecing a younger man with the three shell

trick, moving the shells in arcane patterns over a lacquered tray, and no matter

how many coins the young man slapped down on the ground, never once did he

find the pea beneath the right shell.

Samir had a go and lost. Then Hanif. Then another man.

The sheikh had another go and, when he was about to choose, I put my hand

over his to stop him. The night grew silent. All motion ceased. Even the snake

charmer blowing his flute paused mid note. I pointed to another shell. I don't

know why I knew, I just knew. I felt it.

The man with the beard looked up into my eyes, then back at Samir. The

sheikh nodded and the pea was revealed beneath the shell I had indicated.

The men around Samir shuffled their feet and seemed relieved when he turned

to me with the tolerant smile a parent may show a clever child. He collected the few coins he had won. He then squeezed my cheeks with more affection than

was necessary and I thought: if you are going to bring a native with a bone

through her nose back to the obdurate people at home you must expect the

unexpected.

The snake charmer started playing again. A dusty-looking cobra curled

lethargically from the basket and I thought of actors forced to say the same lines

night after night on the successful run of a play. Some of the men tossed coins

into his upturned fez and we continued. Men smoked hashish through a hubbly-

bubbly that gurgled like indigestion. I loved the pungent smell and thought of

night clubs, dancing, Bobby below me painted like girl. He was tempted to be

himself but held back. It's what we do. What we all do. The secret is to go

beyond your own limits and then go further. That's what I had done swimming

from La Gomera to the island. That's what had brought me here to Mauritania.

A woman in black was heating a foul-smelling, glutinous substance in an iron

pot, while a man using a brush made from the crushed end of a piece of cane

smeared the solution along the seeping green gash on a camel's leg, the camel

half rising as the scalding stuff touched the sore, then dropping its head

philosophically back down again into the dust.

We continued beyond the caravanserai and circled the fort. The men were

talking, their words like lines of poetry, rhythmic as music. We made our way

through the date palms and banana plants. The oasis was cut in sections by

shallow gullies protected by ridges of sand, the trees and plants like pieces on a

chessboard. The land was irrigated from a well with a metal lid bolted shut with

iron stays and a padlock. Water was precious, the stone shower a luxury I would

remember as I journeyed on into the dark hell of secret Africa.

Maysoon laced her fingers through mine as we entered the fort and tightened

her grip as we crossed the courtyard. It was quiet now, the people gone, just the

hint of roasted meat and hot bread lingering on the air. We giggled like girls at

boarding school as we climbed the narrow flights of stone stairs. She ran on her

toes along the walkway and threw off her cape as we entered the tower. She lit

the brass lamps with a plastic cigarette lighter of the sort I had seen men in town

selling in the streets, her movements making the flames shiver, the shadows

chasing her about the walls.

What is your wish?

Ask and it shall be given.

As she skipped around the room, the chiffon veils were teased from her body

as if by the invisible hand of a conjurer until she was naked but for the beaded

belt. She moved closer, her bracelets shimmering, her long fingers swirling,

hypnotic, drawing me to her as if by the pull of gravity. I slipped from Samir's clothes, my limbs seduced by the rhythm, and felt as

light as a bird on the warm air, our dance a sensuously charged flamenco with

clapping hands, thrusting breasts, stamping feet, solemn expressions. My gaze

transfixed on the girl's gorgeous belly, her pudenda a heart-shaped fruit, her

pubic bone, which at first appeared to have been shaved in a pattern, was, I

realised, scalped bare of pubic hair and polished in a sheen of perspiration.

The pattern I could see wasn't hair, but a spider hanging by the silken thread

dissecting her body. When she raised her chin, the blue line rose from that point

just below her bottom lip and the creature appeared to be crawling over her

treacle-coloured flesh. It was the most surreal and sensuous thing I had ever

seen, more erotic than I could have conceived in my wildest dreams, a seal of

sexuality. Maysoon like me belonged to the sheikh. Like me, she had forsaken

everything to live out her erotic nature. We moved closer, the bowl of her

abdomen fitting in the concave of my hollowed stomach.

We danced until the sweat poured from us and collapsed on the thick pile of

carpets below the domed roof, our tongues fighting to get into each other's

throats, the tang of her saliva sweeter than honey. We kissed until we were

breathless and though I adored kissing Samir, there's nothing like the lips of

girls, the taste of girls, the taste of Maysoon. Men have that cute accessory, that

magic wand, that grub that grows into a butterfly. But girls have soft pink lips

that describe shamelessly on our faces the ripe fruit between our legs, the

outward sign of our inner desires. We are shaped the way we are shaped for a

reason. We are shaped for fucking. I didn't know this and now I did know. It

was like learning a marvellous secret.

Maysoon licked my face, she nibbled my ears and chin, her tongue like a

brush jabbing into the well of my collar bones. She took my breasts in her palms

and squeezed hard, drawing out the flaming buds and biting down on each one,

biting until a shudder of agonised pleasure took me in its embrace. She gnawed

at my hip bones and raised her head to gaze at the silky nest of my pubic hair.

She ran her fingers through the curls, slipped them inside me, removing them

slicked in juice that she sucked from her fingertips, the perfect cherry-red bow of

her lips bloated and wet.

She twisted her body in one agile movement, scissoring my head between her

legs and dipping down into my groin, her tongue reaching into the soggy swamp

of my aching sex. We were dancers dancing once more, rocking back and forth,

her oils slipping down my throat in a stream; girl champagne, an Oriental elixir

that made my taste buds rejoice. As I drank from the cup of her delicious sex,

little spasms ran in pins and needles down my legs and up my spine. My knees

rose and I pushed down with my feet, arching my back and drawing her lingua deeper into my cunni and, like a ballerina before a mirror, repeating the

movement, sliding my tongue further into the canal of her gorgeous cunt.

With faultless timing, I felt her body stiffen as my own body stiffened.

Through the gurgling slurps of our ecstasy we screamed in orgasm, gasping and

panting, breasts aquiver, our slippery skin like sea creatures sliding over each

other, limbs tangled, pussies like vibrating anemones with bleating lips slowly

opening and closing. When I had experimented with girls before I had been

afraid that I might be a lesbian. Now, the very notion seemed silly and clearing it

from my mind was like growing from a half person to a full person. I had

sprouted wings. I felt like an angel. In passion, anything is possible, the love of

men, the love of women, the ending of taboos, the subtle, ambiguous joy of

discipline, the ingenious transformation of pain into pleasure. In the orgy we lose

our individualism and approach the divine.

Maysoon rose from her ministrations and as I opened my eyes I was at first

surprised, but then not really surprised to find the sheikh sitting cross-legged

beside our little dais of carpets, the light from the moon a pale glow on his

sensitive features, his eyes on mine. At his side there was a carpet beater, a

short-handled implement with a paddle made of bent cane. I didn't notice it until

the precisely curved loops of the cane crossed my flesh.

I shrieked in pain.

As he stood, Samir scooped the thing into his hand and tossed it next to where

we lay. Quick as the sunrise over the desert, the girl had the cane in her hand and

fire streaked across my bottom. I was so shocked by the speed, by the audacity, I

remained stock still as the wicked device took another taste of my astonished

flesh.

There wasn't a third. As the cane came down once more, I rolled to one side

and sprang to my feet. I hadn't spent five years attending judo and gymnastics

for nothing. I slipped my leg between Maysoon's ankles, bent her over my right

hip and dropped her down on to the mat. Her eyes opened wide and so did her

long fingers, the cane slipping from her grasp. I snatched it up, held her down,

my left arm around her waist, and beat that pert little bottom again and again.

One, two, three, four, five times.

She shrieked and blubbed.

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

In passion and pain we speak the same language.

She wriggled free, crawling as fast as she could across the room, that

reddened bottom like a siren calling, like a beacon guiding me through the

shadows until I brought the cane down once more for luck.

'Six,' I screamed, like I'd scored a goal in hockey. She squealed like a beaten puppy, reared up and charged me, throwing herself

across the room and knocking me off my feet, slapping and biting, her firm belly

and meaty breasts holding me down. We turned over and over, kicking, lunging,

licking, pulling hair. The bites turned into kisses. I heard the sound of the carpet

beater coming down again, this time in the hand of the sheikh, and she cried in

agony before rolling over, pulling me on top so that I would take the next blow

on my burning ass.

We continued wrestling, kissing, licking and screaming as the sheikh chose

his target and beat us relentlessly, bottoms, thighs, sides, breasts, the concentric

rings of the carpet beater creating a pattern of swirling arabesques that matched

the pattern on the carpets.

My body was a lake. Tears of pain and pleasure fell from my eyes, juice rolled

from my wet pussy, and I didn't even notice Samir shedding his robes until I felt

his cock slip into my moistened backside and all the air escaped from my lungs

in one long gasp of sheer rapture. There is nothing like having your pussy

rimmed by a dancing girl, your bum beaten by a handsome sheikh and his long

perfect prick piercing your back passage. I went up on my hands and knees and

we fucked like dogs.

I was panting, roaring, holding him tight with my vaginal muscles, taking

more, wanting more. My entire body was a giant clitoris as big as the dome

above our heads. Maysoon had wriggled bum first between my stretched arms

and I slid my tongue through her inflamed cheeks into the winking black eye of

her pretty anus.

With superhuman self control, Samir withdrew his cock and parting was such

sweet pain and pleasure. I carried on rimming Maysoon's ass while he presented

his cock to her greedy gullet. She swallowed it down and I had the feeling that I

was part of some fabulous machine, the pressure of my tongue pushing into the

girl as she opened her gullet deeper for Samir, drawing his cock further down

into her throat. I thought if we kept going in time the tip of my tongue would

touch the split head of his penis, and I thought breathlessly, girlishly,

immaturely: my God, this is a threesome, this is a first, another first, and I love

it, I want it, I want more of it, all night, tomorrow, every day, that time spent

doing anything but fucking was time wasted until you open your body to start

fucking again. I was born to be doing just this. It was shocking and amazing and

shameful and a relief to know.

The moment of stillness. He paused. He was a diver on the end of a diving

board about to leap into the blue void. An astronaut counting down: ten, nine,

eight, seven … a reluctant bride a moment before she says I do. And he did. As

he slipped his cock from Maysoon's mouth, I slid my tongue from her ass and watched as he pumped his beautiful seed spurt after spurt over her hennaed

features, the white stuff reminding me for some reason of the sticky goo I'd seen

bubbling in the iron pot at the caravanserai, but the smell was as pure as baby's

breath, as innocent as sin, musky, earthy, an aphrodisiac.

I remained on hands and knees and crawled forward so that I could lick the

nectar from Maysoon's face.

If erotic has a taste, this was the taste, the sperm of your lover on the hot

cheeks of the girl whose anal juices coat your tongue. I could see above me the

starlight through the twelve arched windows and wanted the heavens to slow

down, for this night never to end.

The sheikh folded like a fallen warrior at the Battle of Thermopylae, a naked

Spartan who has given his all to save civilization. In ancient times, as we had

learned in classics, while the Spartans ran around naked, they were pure,

aesthete, minimal, while their cousins across the Aegean in Athens had fallen for

the indulgence of the orgy. Those pagans drank their wines, they wrote their

poems, they carved nudes from white marble and fucked their brains out.

Threesomes. Foursomes. Scoresomes. There need be no limit to the number of

partners, positions, possibilities. I had discovered my atavistic self in that round

tower below the golden dome, that astonishing phallus poking into the universe.

Samir had closed his eyes. I licked his cock, gently, as gentle as a kitten

lapping milk from a saucer, slowly, innocently, lick, lick, lick. The little sheikh

bobbed with renewed life and, as Maysoon engulfed the pearly head in her pretty

mouth, I thought how wise those Athenians were, that in the orgy, who puts

what into whom is immaterial, that it is the act of sex that matters, not that

imprisoning sense of love, possession, devotion. Fucking the boy, Umah, had

come naturally because it was the most natural thing in the world.

While Maysoon continued pumping up the little sheikh, I straddled the big

sheikh's head. I balanced on my knees and dropped my fruit into his open

mouth. Sex after sex is unhurried, tender, a vintage wine those Athenians would

have appreciated. As I raised and lowered my body, flexing my thighs, I gazed

down at the whirlpool of dark hair on Maysoon's head. She stopped sucking off

the sheikh when he was hard again and, as she looked up, our eyes met and I

could see myself in her features. Through the power of mind over matter, we

build a tolerance to all sensation, even pain, even pleasure, and I could tell by

her look that Maysoon lived for the ultimate joy her body brings to others and

the bodies of others provide in exchange.

The lips of my sex were engorged, slicked with Samir's saliva and the sticky

sweet threads of my own juices. I was moving faster and faster. Like an athlete

in a race, I threw myself forward as the winning tape approached and took the sheikh's hard cock into my greedy mouth. We were on the edge of the desert and

I was thirsty for his sperm. I was an addict. His cock was a hypodermic syringe

and I needed another fix. My clitoris had pushed its way from its protective hood

and Samir relieved its demanding throbs with the tip of his clever tongue.

A gush of silky liquids slid down the canal of my vagina like thawing ice

down a mountainside. My vaginal muscles were clenching and releasing with

contractions. As I went into spasm, Samir withdrew his tongue, swung himself

round on top of me and sank into my body like a torpedo slipping through the

sea, pushing, pushing himself up to the neck of my womb, filling my impatient

cunt to the brim. Time was suspended, the heavens had finally stilled, and when

the torpedo ignited I exploded in a vast, shuddering climax which left me glazed

and exhausted. I quivered and trembled. I wondered how many times I could

fuck and be fucked, and in how many ways and positions and combinations.

Was there a limit? A line that you crossed when it became ennui and repetition?

Satisfaction, they say, is the death of desire. I don't agree. I was deeply,

profoundly satisfied. I was glad to lay there and recover my energy. But I knew

already that I would soon be wanting more. He rolled from me and the girl

kissed my eyes. Her lips were soft as petals and seemed to fit exactly into the

sockets of my closed eyes. Across my body were pulsating little swirls of

tenderness left by the carpet beater and the tower room had filled with the heady,

pungent odours of orgasm. It was my first night in the red fort and I felt at peace.

I remembered the sheikh pronouncing the single word Sahara as his home came

into view from the deck of the ship. Now I, too, felt as if I had arrived home.