Sunday Dispatch

THE INTERIOR OF A HAREM.

We are familiar with descriptions of the harem in Arabian Nights, and other Oriental tales; we have been told, that it is the abode of love and beauty; we have authority for believing that the written descriptions, though exaggerated and embellished, are yet based on reality, and that it is in these mysterious retreats one is to find collected together, all the wonders of luxury, art, magnificence and pleasure. What a mistaken idea! Imagine blackened and cracked walls, wooden ceilings split in various places, covered with dust and cobwebs, torn and greasy sofas, ragged curtains, everywhere traces of oil and candles. When I first entered one of these delightful bowers it almost sickened me. The mistress of the place, however, did not perceive it. Their persons are harmonious with all this. Mirrors being scarce in the country the women pile on clothes and tinsel, hap-hazard, producing a bizarre effect, of which they have no conception. Common printed cotton handkerchiefs are wound around the head, and fastened with diamond and jewel-headed pins, while nothing can be more slovenly than their hair, the very great ladies who have lived at the capital alone possessing combs.

As to the paint, which they apply immoderately, both in variety of color and in quantity, its distribution can only be regulated by mutual consultation, and as all the women living under one roof are so many rivals, they willingly encourage the most grotesque illumination of their respective faces. They apply vermillion to the lips, red to the cheeks, nose, forehead and chin, white wherever a vacant spot occurs, and blue around the eyes and under the nose. What is yet more strange is their manner of constructing eyebrows. They have doubtless been told that to be beautiful the eyebrow should form a great arch, and from this they conclude that the arch must be the more beautiful according to the width of its span, never inquiring if the place assigned to it had not been irrevocably fixed by nature. Believing this, they allot all the space between the two temples to eyebrows, and paint thereon two immense bows, the root of the nose and the temples on either side serving as piers for their support. Some eccentric young beauties who prefer straight lines to crooked ones trace one single ray direct across the brow but these instances are rare.

That which is undeniable, and at the same time deplorable, is the effect of this taste for painting, combined with the indolence and uncleanness common to oriental females. Every woman's face is a complicated work of art, which is not to be retouched every morning. There is not one, daubed as they are with orange color, even to hands and feet, who does not dread the application of water as an injury to beauty. The crowd of children and servants, especially negresses, who people the harem, and the footing of equality upon which mistresses and domestics live, are likewise aggravating causes of the general filth. I will not speak of children, for everybody knows the manners and customs of these little creatures: but let us imagine what would become of our elegant furniture in Europe should our cooks and chambermaids rest at will on the couches and sofas of our saloons, with their feet on our carpets and their backs against our tapestries. To this must be added the facts that glazed sashes are still a curiosity in Asia, that the windows are stopped with oiled paper, and that when this is not to be found, they supply its place by discarding windows altogether; they seem to be perfectly content with, the light that penetrates down the chimney, a light amply sufficient for smoking, eating, drinking, and flogging too rebellious children, which is about the sole and daily occupation of these mortal houris of faithful Mussulmans.

Let it be understood, however, that it is ever very dark in these windowless apartments. The houses being but one story high, the stack of the chimney never rising higher than the roof, and being very wide, it frequently happens that by bending forward a little one can perceive the sky outside above the aperture. What is utterly lacking in these apartments is air; the ladies, however, are far from complaining of that. Naturally sensitive to cold, and without the resource of creating heat by exercise, they remain squatted on the ground before the fire for hours, wholly ignorant that the fumes of the coal they use sometimes suffocate them. To recall only these artificial caverns, encumbered with tattered women and ill-governed children, almost deprives one of breath. From the bottom of my heart I felt grateful to the excellent Mufti of Tcherkess for his extraordinary delicacy in thus sparing me from a forty-eight hours sojourn in his harem--and so much the more because his was not one of those the most tidily kept.