"Harem" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... four-boat ship—he had an interview with Nanakin, the chief of the Jakoit's district, and returned on board with five or six young girls, to whom he gave permanent quarters on board, selling from time to time his sails, whaling gear, and trade to keep his harem in luxury. At the end of a year the brig was pretty well stripped of all of any value; and ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... Sometimes Lulu would come in, with a bird on each hand, and sit at our feet. She then never mingled in the conversation, but just smoothed the birds' plumage, or fed them with crumbs from her own lips, like a child, or a princess trifling in the harem. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... guardians. Many a Moslem eye was on those girls, as the results of a religious education appeared in their manners, their dress, and personal beauty. In one instance, an officer of government attempted to take one of them to his harem, but God thwarted his purpose through the interference of the English consul. Similar dangers threatened from other sources, and eternity alone will reveal the burden of care and watchfulness they involved. If only one ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... consequence of private property. The primitive swag-monger could think of no better method of keeping his swag together after his death than by making the child of a particular slave-wife his heir. The chief pre-eminence of the Sultana of the harem lay in the fact that she acted, so to speak, as the conveyancer of the estate."[902] The spokesmen of the Social-Democratic Federation say: "What is the position of Socialism towards the question of marriage as at present constituted? The existing monogamic ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... happiness? Not inapposite in this connection is that terrible story that Diderot tells of a eunuch who desired to take lessons in esthetics from a native of Marseilles in order that he might be better qualified to select the slaves destined for the harem of the Sultan, his master. At the end of the first lesson, a physiological lesson, brutally and carnally physiological, the eunuch exclaimed bitterly, "It is evident that I shall never know esthetics!" Even so, and just as eunuchs will never know ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... the utmost, with a cestus or zone: by way of bed-clothes, however, it must be observed, that they swathed their person in the folds of a robe or shawl. Up to the time of Solomon, this practice obtained through all ranks; and so long the universal household dress of a Hebrew lady in her harem, was the tunic as here described; and in this she dressed herself the very moment that she rose from bed. Indeed, so long as the Hebrew women were content with a single tunic, it flowed loose in liberal folds about the body; ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... of the sort to attract women of her spirit and intelligence were scarce—and she was out looking for her own Sir Galahad, as he went up and down the earth searching for the Holy Grail. The war to her, we knew, was a great opportunity to enjoy the new freedom of her sex, to lose her harem veil, to breathe free air as an achieving human creature—but, alas! one's forties are too wise. Pretty as she was, innocent as she was, and eager as her soul was in high emprise of the conflict of world ideals into which she was plunging, we felt that, after all, ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... yet, as the next page shows the youth's education was complete in his twelfth year. But as all three texts agree, I do not venture upon changing the number to six or seven, the age at which royal education outside the Harem usually begins. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... who was descended from a noble Roman family, was on most intimate terms with Jumbel Agha, the Sultan's chief eunuch, who sometimes gave him strange commissions. Among other instructions which the merchant received from the chief of the imperial harem, was an order to procure privately the prettiest girl he could find in the slave marts of Stamboul, where at this time pretty girls were by no means rare. Jumbel Agha intended this damsel as an adornment ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... beards, and outstretched venerable arms, century after century: al ready old when Montezuma was a boy, and still vigorous in the days of Bustamante! There has the last of the Aztec emperors wandered with his dark-eyed harem. Under the shade of these gigantic trees he has rested, perhaps smoked his "tobacco mingled with amber," and fallen to sleep, his dreams unhaunted by visions of the stern traveller from the far-east, whose sails even then might be within sight of the shore. In these tanks he has bathed. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... subjects to become Christians under pain of death. And, being aware that polygamy would not be tolerated by Mr. Deighton, he went a step further, and ordered all those of these forced converts who had more than one wife to send them to his own harem. This addition to his family duties, was, however, amply compensated for by the labour of the surplus wives proving useful to him on his ...
— The Tapu Of Banderah - 1901 • Louis Becke
... Pine street neighborhood. Life had grown opulent. They fared better physically, materially, and spiritually; and all this was reflected in their features, in the carriage of their bodies. She knew Billy had never been handsomer nor in more splendid bodily condition. He swore he had a harem, and that she was his second wife—twice as beautiful as the first one he had married. And she demurely confessed to him that Mrs. Hall and several others of the matrons had enthusiastically admired her form one day when in for a ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... wheeled. There was a pattering of scurrying hoofs and the herd was gone; but Numa, the lion, moved not. He was familiar with the ways of Pacco, the zebra. He knew that he would return, though many times he might wheel and fly before he summoned the courage to lead his harem and his offspring to the water. There was the chance that Pacco might be frightened off entirely. Numa had seen this happen before, and so he became almost rigid lest he be the one to send them galloping, waterless, ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... HAREM, the apartment or suite of apartments in a Mohammedan's house for the female inmates and their attendants, and the name given to the collective ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... are a fool. If you don't he will cut the throats of every one of them and stick your girl into the emposeni" (that is harem), "while you will become ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... harem, and quaffing date syrup mixed with ginger out of the silver cups looted from the church of the Christians. But that imposing figure had only to show itself ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... brought before the Emir Musa, who, noting her beauty, proposed to make her his slave. At her prayer, however, being, as the prisoner said, a merciful man, he gave her a week to mourn her father before she entered his harem. Still, the worst," he went on hurriedly, "did not happen. Before that week was done, as the Moslem force was marching down the Nile, she stabbed the eunuch who was in charge ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... by the delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it were, a mere lateral form of natural selection—a ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... the Sybarite within the dusty halls of learning?" ejaculated a scholar of Lemoine. "What doth the jealous-pated slayer of his wife and unborn child within the reach of free-spoken voices, and mayhap of well-directed blades? Methinks it were more prudent to tarry within the bowers of his harem, than to hazard ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... several months I was disabled by the gout from holding a pen; and you must know, Madam, that one can't write when one cannot write. Then, how write to la Fianc'ee du Roi de Garbe? You had been in the tent of the Cham of Tartary, and in the harem of the Captain Pacha, and, during your navigation of the AEgean, were possibly fallen into the terrible power of a corsair. How could I suppose that so many despotic infidels would part with your charms? I never expected you again on Christian ground. I ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... massive walls, and defended by fifty pieces of cannon, and some mortars, so placed as equally to awe the city and country. The apartments set apart for the habitation of the Dey and the ladies of his harem, are described as extremely magnificent, and abundantly supplied with marble pillars, fountains, mirrors, carpets, ottomans, cushions, and other articles of oriental luxury; but there are others no less valuable ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... Jewess, jewel! I have thinned my harem out! Must every flirting of your fan Presage ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... of Mrs. Tabor's phrases, Harriet recognized. She moved easily about the room, picking up other handsome, superbly illustrated volumes: "An American Woman in the Sultan's Harem," "A ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... made!" irascibly responded Mr. Galloway. "Pittances, that folks go out with, are lost, when they are such as he. That's what it is. Harem-scarem chaps, who won't work, can do no good at Port Natal. Great fortunes made, indeed! I wonder that you can be led away by notions so ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... take their places; nothing discourages them, neither cold nor heat, nor even hunger. They hurry on, but they never arrive. Among them D'Argenton, better clothed and better fed, resembled a rich Hadji with his harem, his pipes, and his riches; on this evening he was especially radiant, for ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... minds old Jack. I shall let them all know you were as safe as a Turk's wife in a harem, and maybe old Crabbe will hear reason if we get him down here alone, without a viper at each ear, as he ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... other brilliant and enduring colors. Above an inner porch is a balcony which communicated with the women's apartment. The latticed balconies still remain, from whence the dark-eyed beauties of the harem might gaze unseen upon the entertainments of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... often enough that Mr. Lewis hates literary women! I am not goose enough to expect him to sympathize with any intellectual pursuits of mine. No. Fatima in the harem, or Nourmahal thrumming her lute under a palm-tree, is his belle-ideale; failing that, a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... master of manners or aught but discreet * In the household of Kings no trust could he take: And then for the Harem! what Eunuch [FN458] is he * Whom angels would serve for his ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... your opinion after the first week in a harem," said Herbert. And then there was a burst of laughter, in which Aunt Letty herself joined. "I would sooner go there than go to confession," she whispered to Mary, as they all ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... difficult tongue, simple and much akin to Greek, and unlike most of the uncouth tongues the Oriental traders chattered in Sardis. The two women were constantly with him. Few men were admitted to a Persian harem, but Mardonius never grudged the Greek the company of ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... toes. Jewels glittered about her waist and neck and arms, her wrists jangled with heavy bangles, in her ears two great pendants swayed—her eyelids were darkened and her lips reddened. She was a ravishing houri of the harem, and I gasped a little ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... parents, their lovers perhaps; yet they smiled through their tears, for the power of beauty is boundless, strangeness gives birth to caprice, and perhaps the royal favour awaited some of these barbaric captives in the secret depths of the harem. Soldiers accompanied them and kept the multitude ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... however, to be countenanced by the manners of the people, and by the extraordinary duration of his reign, we must admire not only the fortune, but the genius, of Sapor. In the soft, sequestered education of a Persian harem, the royal youth could discover the importance of exercising the vigor of his mind and body; and, by his personal merit, deserved a throne, on which he had been seated, while he was yet unconscious of the duties and temptations of absolute power. His minority ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... He will survive you for rather more than forty years; in the full enjoyment of your harem, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... remembrance of the poet under his trees, breaks my narrative, but gives me the opportunity of paying a debt of gratitude. For I have owned many beautiful trees, and loved many more outside of my own leafy harem. Those who write verses have no special claim to be lovers of trees, but so far as one is of the poetical temperament he is likely to be a tree-lover. Poets have, as a rule, more than the average nervous sensibility and irritability. Trees have no nerves. They live and die without ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... all[a]hu la l[a] ilaha il[a]ha el-Khalili el-Khal[i]li Allah All[a]h masharabeyeh masharab[e]yeh barku bark[u] U'a U'[a] harem har[e]m Suk-en-Nahlesin S[u]k-en-Nahl[e]s[i]n shahin sh[a]h[i]n Hahmed Hahm[e]d ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... a considerable force of cavalry, then mules and barbarous carriages with the harem, all the riders and inmates enveloped in what appeared to be winding-sheets, white and shapeless; about them eunuchs and servants. The staff of the pachas followed, preceding the grandees who closed the march, ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... the impregnability of his town, the Bey of Constantine had left his harem there and the ladies of it were shut up in the palace, which had been turned into head-quarters, and where I was living with Nemours. As may be imagined, this harem gave me subjects for many sketches, which disappeared, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... wondered if this were not a case in point,—if it were, after all, the color, and not the sex, that weighed. That aroused her indignation, aroused also a feeling of race: she would not have changed color that moment with the fairest Circassian of a harem, could the white slave have appeared in all the dazzle of her beauty.—Mas'r Henry had called that man, of whom he read aloud to-day, her ancestor. She knew what that was, for she had heard Miss Emma boast of her progenitors. But he was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Her customs long retained many details peculiar to the East. The people observed a custom for choosing and dowering brides, which was of Asia. The national treatment of women was akin to that of an Oriental State; Venetian women lived in a retirement which recalled the life of the harem, only appearing on great occasions to display their brocades and jewels. Girls were closely veiled when they passed through the streets. The attachment of men to women had no intellectual bias, scarcely any sentiment, but "went straight to the mark: the enjoyment of physical ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... "Miss Newcome! my dear Clive," says the confidant, "do you know what you are aspiring to? For the last three months Miss Newcome has been the greatest lioness in London: the reigning beauty winning the horse: the first favourite out of the whole Belgravian harem. No young woman of this year has come near her: those of past seasons she has distanced and utterly put to shame. Miss Blackcap, Lady Blanch Blackcap's daughter, was (as perhaps you are not aware) ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... heels on the desk. "Adam had it. So did Solomon, only he had it in so many places he got so he didn't mind it. Think of them guys that have harems. Think of Brigham Young. Why, kid, you don't know the first thing about love pains. Think of the guy with the harem and his guesswork! He's got something to worry about, he has. It's awful when you've got to love a couple of hundred of 'em at once, and them all hatin' you like poison. And old Brigham—think of him settin' up all hours of the night, ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Sultan had just completed the butchery of many Armenians. His garments were red with blood, his hands dripped with gore. His house was a harem; his hand held a dagger. The sea-wall behind his palace rose out of the ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... being informed that there were two or three very charming English ladies at Dacca, was strongly tempted to adorn his harem ...
— Three Frenchmen in Bengal - The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 • S.C. Hill
... my history since Monday has been unadulterated DAVID BALFOUR. In season and out of season, night and day, David and his innocent harem - let me be just, he never has more than the two - are on my mind. Think of David Balfour with a pair of fair ladies - very nice ones too - hanging round him. I really believe David is as a good character as anybody has a right to ask for in a novel. ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... various adventures together, including the capture of an eighteen foot crocodile. However, the British people in the settlement fall out with the Rajah, who has his eye on a 21-year-old British girl, and wishes to add her to his harem. This is ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... number of this Magazine, together with the story associated with it, told me by the late Mr. Henry Graves, who sat by the side of Parris when he made the sketch. Lewis is responsible for "Interior of a Harem." ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... He only comes to Apia occasionally—when there is no British man-of-war about—and paints the town red, for although he is merely a loafing beachcomber, he is liberally supplied with money by his chief, and possesses an extensive harem as well. He simply terrorises the town when he breaks out, and insults every timid European, male and female, ...
— The Flemmings And "Flash Harry" Of Savait - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... fears, which were but too well founded, and doubtful of his instincts, which he should have trusted, the gander turned again to the little eddy of sea-wrack amid which, with soft guttural love-calls, he summoned his harem to many ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... boxes, caskets, closets, and stoves correspond to the female part. The symbolism of lock and key has been very gracefully employed by Uhland in his song about the "Grafen Eberstein," to make a common smutty joke. The dream of walking through a row of rooms is a brothel or harem dream. Staircases, ladders, and flights of stairs, or climbing on these, either upwards or downwards, are symbolic representations of the sexual act. Smooth walls over which one is climbing, facades of houses upon which one ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... Crawford said glumly, "I can see that this is going to be one tight knit organization. Six men in love with the one dame ... ah, that is, lady. Kind of a reverse harem deal. Oh, this is going to lead ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... to myself Narses, living till his grey hairs in the effeminate intrigues of the harem, and then springing forth a general; the Warrior Eunuch; the misanthrope avenging his great wrong upon all mankind in bloody battle-fields; dark of counsel, and terrible of execution; him to whom ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... necessarily emotional and intimate, an ambiguous proposal and a handful of affectionate letters will not persuade us that he ever cared more seriously for her than for scores of others. Though some letters must have been written when he was courting the sister of Odysseus or keeping a harem at Athens, and others when his heart was disengaged, can any one decide which are sincere and which are not? Or, rather, are they not all equally sincere? The following extract may help us ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... serves to keep it alert, though not to gratify it. A like result is achieved by another modern development—photography. The undergraduate may, and usually does, surround himself with photographs of pretty ladies known to the public. A phantom harem! Yet the houris have an effect on their sultan. Surrounded both by plain women of flesh and blood and by beauteous women on pasteboard, the undergraduate is the easiest victim of living loveliness—is as a fire ever well ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... come into Frances' room to do her hair, and employ her busy tongue while she plied the brush. She was a pretty bit of a figure in her fancily-worked Japanese kimono and red Turkish slippers—harem slippers, she called them, and thought it deliciously wicked to wear them—as she sat shaking back her bright hair like ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... can, and not come to no end, with the boat bottom uppards and me sucked down by things in the horrid whirlypools out there. Why, what would your mars and pars say to me if I took you into dangers 'orrible and full o' woe? Nay, nay, I arn't a young harem-scarem-brained chap, and I shan't do it: my boat's too good. So look here, if you two likes to come for a bit o' fishing, I'll take the big scrarping spoon with me, and go to a bank I know after we've done, and try and fish you up a basket o' oysters. If you comes you ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... not met since he was a boy. Maxwell Davison had gone to the East originally as agent for some big firm, and had spent there nearly twenty years. He was an accomplished Persian and Arabic scholar, and gossip related that he had run off with a fair Persian from a Constantinople harem and lived with her in Persia until her death. But that was ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... powers. We reached the barn with merry din, And roused the prisoned brutes within. The old horse thrust his long head out, And grave with wonder gazed about; The cock his lusty greeting said, And forth his speckled harem led; The oxen lashed their tails, and hooked, And mild reproach of hunger looked; The horned patriarch of the sheep, Like Egypt's Amun roused from sleep, Shook his sage head with gesture mute, And emphasized with stamp ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... admission into the homes of Indian gentlemen, whether Hindu or Mahomedan. Intercourse between Indian and English ladies is in the same way almost entirely confined to formal visits paid by the latter to the zenana and the harem, and to so-called Purdah parties, given in English houses, in which Indian ladies are entertained as far as possible under the same conditions that prevail in their own homes—i.e., to the total ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... kissed by the sun and made to laugh rainbows. The country of the Fertile Plain of Sweet Flags was transformed. It suddenly became the land wherein gods grew not singly but in whole forests. Like the Shulamite, when introduced among the jewelled ladies of Solomon's harem, so stood the boor amid the sheen and gold ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... remote part of the palace was an apartment devoted to the queen. It was like an eastern harem, shut up from the foot of man, and where the king himself but rarely entered. It had its own courts, and gardens, and fountains, where the queen was wont to recreate herself with her damsels, ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... not stop till he reached Tepelen, where he had a warm reception from Kamco, whose thirst for vengeance had been disappointed by his defeat. "Go!" said she, "go, coward! go spin with the women in the harem! The distaff is a better weapon for you than the scimitar!" The young man answered not a word, but, deeply wounded by these reproaches, retired to hide his humiliation in the bosom of his old friend the mountain. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... great father. Absorbed in effeminate pleasures, he paid little attention to the internal administration of his empire or to the welfare of his people. Yet he was not insensible to martial fame; and he accordingly showed no indisposition to forsake his harem for the field. After quelling two inconsiderable rebellions, he prepared to punish the audacity of Alfonso of Castile, who made destructive inroads into Andalusia. Much as the world had been astounded at the preparations of his grandfather Yussef, they were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... think of so much as big black bats as they sit man-fashion on their donkeys, wrapped in black silk cloaks; men in gorgeous silks, also on donkeys, ride along, while laden camels and asses carrying large panniers of clover slowly pick their way through the crowd. Harem ladies, too (there is the weight which pulls Egypt down), roll slowly by in their covered carriages, preceded by the running Lyces. I never saw such a miscellaneous throng ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... revolution proceeding in Turkey; my turn was coming. Not that I was a conspirator, but the treasury wanted my money and the seraglio my daughter. Death is easy for me, but I will not let my daughter go into the harem nor myself be made a beggar. Therefore I hired your vessel, and loaded it with grain. The owner, Athanas Brazovics, is a connection of mine; I have often shown him kindness, he can return it now. By a miracle we got safely through the rocks and whirlpools of the river, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... easy in the execution. He was informed by his spies of the weakness and anarchy of Hindustan: the subahs of the provinces had erected the standard of rebellion; and the perpetual infancy of Sultan Mahmud was despised even in the harem of Delhi. The Mongol army moved in three great divisions, and Timur observes with pleasure that the ninety-two squadrons of a thousand horse most fortunately corresponded with the ninety-two names or epithets ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and so did another shot that she fired, but the waters by Constantinople Arsenal are not healthy to linger in after one has scared up the whole sea-front, so "turned to go out." Matters were a little better below, and E11 in her perilous passage might have been a lady of the harem tied up in a sack and thrown into the Bosporus. She grounded heavily; she bounced up 30 feet, was headed down again by a manoeuvre easier to shudder over than to describe, and when she came to rest on the bottom found herself being swivelled ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... right!" Aggie sniffed. "A great, mustached, dirty, palavering foreigner, who's probably got a harem at home and no respect ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... incessant quarrels among themselves. The life of the Turkish empire was composed of bloody insurrections at home, and still more bloody wars abroad. Mahomet IV. was now sultan. He was but twenty years of age. A quarrel for ascendency among the beauties of his harem had involved the empire in a civil war. The sultan, after a long conflict, crushed the insurrection with a blood-red hand. Having restored internal tranquillity, he prepared as usual for foreign war. By intrigue and the force of arms they took possession of most of the ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... find the ivory, without being beholden to him for help. Wily old scaramouch! But I had a better card up my sleeve. He has taken to discarding ancient prejudices—doesn't drink or anything like that, but treats his harem almost humanly. Lets 'em have anything that costs him nothing. Even sends for a medico when they're sick! Getting lax in his old age! Sent for me a while ago to attend his favorite wife—sixty years old if she's a day, and as proud of him as if he were the ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... Germany or France rather than the Mediterraneans of Spain and Italy." In Tunis the open sale of slaves is pretty well suppressed, but in a modified form the trade continues. Vivian says: "By resorting to fictitious marriages, and other subterfuges, the owner of a harem may procure as many slaves as he pleases, and, once he has got them into his house, no one can possibly interfere to release them. Slaves can, of course, escape and claim protection from the Consulates, but, as a matter of fact, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Offerings of food and drink were constantly supplied to them, in Egypt laid upon the altars, in other lands burnt for a sweet savour. At Thebes the divine wife of the god, or high priestess, was the head of the harem of concubines of the god; and similarly in Babylonia the chamber of the god with the golden couch could only be visited by the priestess who slept there for oracular responses. The Egyptian gods could not be cognisant of what passed on ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... regular slave-market at Constantinople. The fair Circassians and Georgians reside in the houses of the merchants, to whom many of them are regularly consigned by their friends, and of these it is impossible for a Frank to obtain a glimpse, for the usual privacy of the harem is granted to them. The chief depot of the blacks is in a large court-yard attached to the Mosque of Suleyman. In a street immediately outside the wall was a row of coffee-houses, where opium, was also ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... her purity pleased her; the harem idea is, at bottom, pleasing to women; they may resent it with their intellect, but they all of them like to feel they are too precious for the wind of evil realities to blow upon. So, honestly enough, and with the childlike ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... of Canon Farrar give the probable clew to the interpretation of the book. It is a dramatic poem, celebrating the story of a beautiful peasant girl, a native of the northern village of Shunem, who was carried away by Solomon's officers and confined in his harem at Jerusalem. But in the midst of all this splendor her heart is true to the peasant lover whom she has left behind, nor can any blandishments of the king disturb her constancy; her honor remains unstained, and she is carried ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... said Mrs. Shiffney, when they came into the "harem," as she persisted in calling the drawing-room. "We are just back from our little run, and now we must be off to Monte Carlo. By the way, we came across your husband ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... aloft into the star-studded, cloudless sky. Nothing could be more placid, nothing less prophetic of peril or ambush than this exquisite summer night. Somewhere within the forbidden region of Moreno's harem a guitar was beginning to tinkle softly. That was all very well, but then a woman's voice, anything but soft, took up a strange, monotonous refrain. Line after line, verse after verse it ran, harsh, changeless. He could not distinguish the words,—he did ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... word at once recalls the harem, the zenana, but nothing of that kind would do. The wives would have to live separately, as the Mormons do, each in her own home, with her own circle of interests and duties, her own lifework. No one ought to live in idleness, which is the ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... To make it, two floors at least of the respectable Kensington house must have been sacrificed. The walls were decorated with Egyptian frescoes and Chinese embroideries, and silk divans which might have figured in a cinema producer's idea of a Turkish harem were set haphazard on the mosaic floor. In the centre a stone fountain of the modern-primitive school and banked with flowers splashed noisily. Somehow it offered Kensington the final insult. But she had wanted it, just as she ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... the mastership of Rachel, daughter of Maai the Israelite, to thy fan-bearer, Har-hat. By the lips of his own servants, I am informed that he would have put her in his harem. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... the women to use an artificial penis and other abnormal methods of sexual gratification. Among the Balinese, according to Jacobs (as quoted by Ploss and Bartels), masturbation is general; in the boudoir of many a Bali beauty, he adds, and certainly in every harem, may be found a wax penis to which many hours of solitude are devoted. Throughout the East, as Eram, speaking from a long medical experience, has declared, masturbation is very prevalent, especially among young girls. In Egypt, according to Sonnini, it is ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... his Mr. Dougherty repaired each night when the hour was so late as to promise no further diversion in the arch domains of sport. By that time the occupant of the monogamistic harem would be in dreamland, the bulbul silenced and the hour propitious ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... began, O chastiser of foes, to take counsel of one another for crossing the ocean! And when none dared to cross it, I, having recourse to my father, crossed the great ocean which is a hundred Yojanas in width. And having slain the Rakshasis on the waters, I saw the chaste Sita within Ravana's harem, observing ascetic austerities, eager to behold her lord, with matted locks on head, and body besmeared with filth, and lean, and melancholy and helpless. Recognising her as Sita by those unusual signs, and approaching that worshipful lady while alone, I said, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of a group of oriental beauties who, in the second act of the comic opera, were paraded by the vizier before the new potentate as the treasures of his harem. There was no word assigned to any of them, but on the evening when Hurstwood was housing himself in the loft of the street-car barn, the leading comedian and star, feeling exceedingly facetious, said in a profound voice, which created a ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... several soldiers, with one or two others, went in and searched for the Khalifa. A few minutes previously he had slipped out by a back door with the more important part of his personal treasures. His harem had been sent away earlier in the day. Mr Hubert Howard, correspondent of the New York Herald and the London Times, was near the headquarters staff. He came over to where I was and chatted. To a companion who had joined me he offered some cigarettes. He ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... though she has every comfort, and is deeply attached to her lord, grows restless in her luxurious solitude; she pines for the excitement and triumphs of singing and dancing before an assembly. So, in the Nawab's absence, she takes professional disguise, and sings with a lute in the harem before his wife. To those who would like to see a Mohammedan lady of high rank in full dress, the following description of costume ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... breakfast table with her hair down her back, she was dispatched to the block. A couple of queens got ahead of him. Was nearly as successful in obtaining divorces as Napoleon, of France, and American millionaires. In his later years he competed against the Pope in England. Ambition: A harem. Recreation: Spooning. Dreams: ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... received $100,000 worth of gifts; her wedding dress was a $5000 creation. At Greenwich he built a country estate where the stables were framed of choice mahogany. Sweeny hobnobbed with Jim Fiske of the Erie, the Tweed of Wall Street, who went about town dressed in loud checks and lived with his harem in his Opera ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... asks contemptuously if Faust has had enough of heroines and all such ideal folly. He cannot understand why Faust is still dissatisfied with life. Surely he has seen enough of its pleasures. He advises him, if he is weary of court life, to build himself a Sultan's palace and harem and live in retirement—as Tiberius did on the island of Capri. 'Not so,' answers Faust. 'This world of earthly soil Still gives me room for greater action. I feel new strength for nobler toil—Toil that at length shall bring ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... to do better than this. There is much ability displayed in her "Court of France"; and she has written a very clever story, entitled "The Romance of the Harem." But this book is thoroughly feeble and commonplace. The customary rich and whimsical nabob, whom we all know so well, has returned to England, and is deliberating upon the claims to his wealth of his several relations. His decision ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... helpless position in the midst of lawless men to comprehend the necessity of diplomatic conciliation. He mastered his impulses, and spoke politely and coldly, saying the girl was young and as the apple of his eye. Tuan Reshid, a Faithful and a Hadji, would not want an infidel woman in his harem; and, seeing Abdulla smile sceptically at that last objection, he remained silent, not trusting himself to speak more, not daring to refuse point- blank, nor yet to say anything compromising. Abdulla understood the meaning of that silence, and rose to take leave with ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... was filled with joy, and set no bounds to his gratitude. Democedes had come before him in iron chains. As a first reward the king presented him with two sets of chains of solid gold. He next sent him to receive the thanks of his wives. Being introduced into the harem, Democedes was presented to the sultanas as the man who had saved the king's life, and whom their lord and master delighted to honor. Each of the fair and grateful women, in reward for his great deed, gave him a saucer-full of golden coins, which were so many, and heaped ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... mind playing upon the weaker, baser sides of men's natures; they don't mind appealing, for their own ends, to the pity and generosity of others; they don't mind swallowing indignity and smiling abjectly, like any woman of the harem at her lord, so that they gain their object. That is the sort of 'woman's nature' that our conditions are busy selecting. Let us cultivate it. We live in a scientific age; the fittest ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... wearing the curiously withdrawn expression of a conscious memory recall. "Fifty years ago; the time that gang kidnaped some girls from Second Level Triplanetary Empire Sector and sold them into the harem of some Fourth ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... of the blood, instead of being condemned, as in Turkey, to waste their youth in the seclusion of the harem, were intrusted to the care of learned men, to be instructed in the duties befitting their station. They were encouraged to visit the academies, which were particularly celebrated in Cordova, where they mingled in disputation, and frequently carried away the prizes of poetry and eloquence. ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... a night in the grand hotel at the top of Mount Olympus, to say that they have been there; and the journey is continued to the Bosphorus, to rest there a few hours, and see the place where Byzantium lay; and where the legend tells that the harem stood in the time of the Turks, poor fishermen are now ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... not how long this season of expectation would have lasted for Iris, but for Arnold's conversation with his cousin, which persuaded him to speak and bring matters to a final issue. To this girl, living as secluded as if she was in an Oriental harem, who had never thought of love as a thing possible for herself, the consciousness that Arnold loved her was bewildering and astonishing, and she waited, knowing that sooner or later something would be said, but trembling for fear that it ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... mean little in India; I know high-caste Brahmins who have given their children low-caste names to make them less an object of temptation to the gods of destruction. Also, the Gulab may have been stolen from the harem of some Nawab by ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... age of Saint Louis, the crusader who conversed with Moslem sages on the threshold of the Holy Sepulchre, the Sultan of Lucera[1] who persecuted Paterini while he respected the superstition of Saracens, the anointed successor of Charlemagne, who carried his harem with him to the battlefields of Lombardy, and turned Infidels loose upon the provinces of Christ's Vicar—would be inexplicable, were it not that Palermo still reveals in all her monuments the genius loci which ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... emperor of Germany, nearly his whole life was spent in Sicily. Though ruler of a Christian realm, he lived surrounded by Saracens, studying diligently the Arabian learning, dwelling in what was almost a harem of Arabian beauties, and hesitating not to give expression to the most infidel sentiments. The leader of a crusade, he converted what was ordinarily a tragedy into a comedy, obtained possession of Jerusalem without striking a blow or shedding ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... carried his scrupulous precaution into the arrangements of the locality where his pupils studied. The entrance to the attic above his apartments was walled up. To reach this retreat, as sacred as a harem, it was necessary to go up a small spiral staircase made within his own rooms. The studio, occupying nearly the whole attic floor under the roof, presented to the eye those vast proportions which surprise inquirers when, after attaining sixty feet ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... In the guarded harem prison, Where they smother under veils, And all echoes of the world are walled away; Though the sun has not yet risen, Yet the ancient darkness pales, And the sleepers, in ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... into terror by their sudden approach. The audacity of their methods is illustrated by the raid on Fundi in 1534, when Barbarossa swooped down on that town simply to seize Giulia Gonzaga—reputed the loveliest woman in Italy—for the Sultan's harem: the fair Duchess of Trajetto hardly escaped in ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen
... husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself." Margaret had winced, but she was influencing Henry now, and though pleased at her little victory, she knew that she had won it by the methods of the harem. ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... was not quite so credulous, but what chance has a man alone against his united harem! He was so far influenced by the earnest entreaties of his disconsolate wife, that it was determined in three days he should with a strong cavalcade accompany his darling invalid to the charmed waters of Bamee[a]n. ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... defence of religion; and, in his distant realm of Persia, the Christians were strangers to the name and the arms of Sangiar, the last hero of his race. [37] While the sultans were involved in the silken web of the harem, the pious task was undertaken by their slaves, the Atabeks, [38] a Turkish name, which, like the Byzantine patricians, may be translated by Father of the Prince. Ascansar, a valiant Turk, had been the favorite of Malek Shaw, from whom he ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... July 24, Mormondom threw up its first trenches in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, as that saline body was then known and recorded. In this salubrious region was planted the analogy of the harem of Mohammed, and the seraglio of Brigham became the center of the sensual system of the Latter-Day Saints. So blatant was the apostle Heber Kimball that he said he himself had enough wives to whip the ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... her garments. But her garments were real enough. I looked long into her great innocent eyes. Yes, she was telling me the truth. She babbled on for a little. I gathered that her step-father, Hamdi Effendi, was a Turkish official. She had spent all her life in the harem from which she had eloped with ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... eunuchs, whose duty it was to wait on the sultan, to guard the sultanas, and to superintend the harem.—Habesci, State ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... over it; on the edge there are generally thin round plates of metal, which also make some noise when this instrument is held up in one hand and struck with the fingers of the other hand. Probably no musical instrument is so common in Turkey as this; for when the women dance in the harem the time is always beat on this instrument. We find the same instrument on all the monuments in the hands of the Bacchante. It is also common among the negroes of the Gold Coast and Slave ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... with the contempt she has earned. No, Reist, there will be no intervention. Your brave Thetians will be cut to pieces, your country will be pillaged and burned, your women will become the consorts of the Turkish soldiery, your ladies will go to grace a Turkish harem. These things must be unless you have the courage to hold out your hand. You call yourself a patriot. Prove it! The issue is ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... district khan, with whom we managed to converse in the Turkish language, which, strange to say, we found available in all the countries that lay in our transcontinental pathway as far as the great wall of China. Toward evening we rode in the garden of the harem of the khan, and at daybreak the next morning were again in the saddle. By a very early start we hoped to escape the burden of excessive hospitality; in other words, to get rid of an escort that was an expensive nuisance. At the next village we were confronted ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... thickness, of a kind of flat, red brick like the modern tile. When laid up well in good mortar such walls are as solid as though built of stone. What added to the safety of the building was the great underground apartments, built originally for summer quarters for the old Moslem's harem, but used during the siege as a retreat for the women and children. So well protected were these rooms that only one shell ever penetrated them and this shot did no damage. The building reveals traces of the heavy fire to ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... find her facing men of all classes—ignorant and wise, saints and sinners. I do not know anywhere that woman is not. It is too late now to say that she can not go to the ballot-box. Go back to Turkey, and shut her up in a harem; go back to Greece, and shut her up in the private apartments of women; go back to the old Oriental phases of civilization, that never allowed woman's eyes to light a man's pathway, unless he owned her, and you ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... is strange that it should be the Pope and the Sultan, who are the chief encouragers of this branch of trade—women being prohibited as singers at St. Peter's, and not deemed trustworthy as guardians of the harem. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... his word. I am wearing the fantaisie as I write. For a fantaisie, it is fairly quiet, except that it has three pockets on each side outside, and a rolled back collar suitable for the throat of an opera singer, and as many buttons as a harem skirt. Beyond that, it's a first-class, steady, reliable, quiet, religious fantaisie, such as any retired French ballet master ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... of an Eastern despot. Chivalric deference to woman, and a disposition to protect and honor her, is a necessary element of a manly character in our Western civilization; but young Haldane was as truly an Oriental as if he had been permitted to bluster around a Turkish harem; and those whom he should have learned to wait upon with delicacy and tact became subservient to his varying moods, developing that essential brutality which mars the nature of every man who looks upon woman as an inferior ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... persons of opposites sexes rarely, if ever, met before marriage. They had a perfect idea of the mutual affection which arises after marriage; the tenderness of Hector and Andromache never has been surpassed in any tongue. With the passions of the harem they were perfectly familiar, and the dreadful pangs of jealousy never have been painted with more consummate ability, or more thorough knowledge of human nature. Euripides, in particular, has delineated the terrible effects of that passion ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... parted; but I did not think my prophecy would come true so soon. I have long since given up speculating how marriages will turn out, for it is quite impossible to tell. If women could be shut up in a harem, as in the East, a man who was ashamed of his wife might go into society without her; but for a refined and well-educated gentleman, as Edward Layton certainly is, to be united to the widow of a sugar-boiler!—yes, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various |
