I am old and
bent and hideous, but then I was young and they said that I was
beautiful. No, I will not be a hypocrite; I was beautiful. My glass
told me that.
"My father was a missionary in the interior and one day there came
a band of Arabian slave raiders. They took the men and women of
the little native village where my father labored, and they took
me, too. They did not know much about our part of the country so
they were compelled to rely upon the men of our village whom they
had captured to guide them. They told me that they never before
had been so far south and that they had heard there was a country
rich in ivory and slaves west of us. They wanted to go there and
from there they would take us north, where I was to be sold into
the harem of some black sultan.
"They often discussed the price I would bring, and that that price
might not lessen, they guarded me jealously from one another so
the journeys were made as little fatiguing for me as possible. I
was given the best food at their command and I was not harmed.
"But after a short time, when we had reached the confines of the
country with which the men of our village were familiar and had
entered upon a desolate and arid desert waste, the Arabs realized
at last that we were lost. But they still kept on, ever toward
the west, crossing hideous gorges and marching across the face of
a burning land beneath the pitiless sun.
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