I’m going to interrupt the tawse story for a moment or two.
In my edition of “The Thousand Nights and a Night”, there’s a playful bondage and discipline scene early in “The Adventure of King Omar al-Nenan and his son Sharkhan”.
The young Prince Sharkhan is beside a pool when he sees a group of beautiful girls approaching. So, as you would, he climbs a tree so he can hide and watch them. This is most rewarding, because it is the beautiful Princess Abriza, with a retinue of serving girls almost as beautiful. And they undress and slip into the water, which runs sleekly over their peach-firm, lion-brown breasts, bellies and buttocks, their soft thighs and their sacral dimples.
Sharkhan is a happy man, though not a gentleman.
Then the beautiful and naked Princess, tiring of her beautiful and naked maidens’ silly chatter, threatens to tie them up and spank their bottoms with her belt, one by one. By one, by one. Having delivered the threat, she makes good on it. Let’s say there were a dozen serving girls. It must have taken ages.
"Like this, Princess?" Both paintings by the wonderful Etienne Dinet.
So the scene is one of spanked, mildly flushed servant girls in one heap, and an orderly queue of unspanked girls waiting for the Princess to get to them. The sound is all girlish squealing, the slap of leather on sun-warmed serving-girl buttocks, and an oddly human sighing sound coming from the tree above them. As for the scent … It must have been a nice place to be, though I doubt Prince Sharkhan was feeling comfortable.
That sounds like an Arabian night, doesn’t it?
(Answer tomorrow.)
Curiously, someone once told me of a story they had heard or read of soldiers, during WWII, in the desert somewhere – probably Sahara – who’d
returned to base from a scouting mission and claimed, late that night, that
they’d come across Bedouin women bathing at some oasis, the direction
vaguely indicated with a wave of the arm.
These women, the soldiers would swear, were wearing little more than scraps of wet cloth, and they’d rushed for their clothes when they heard men approaching. And they’d covered up their hair and faces before continuing as semi-naked as before.
At the very least one could say oriental women understand the seduction powers of having veils to use and wet veils even better, no matter what part they are hiding.