She painted her eyes and smiled coy greetings at marketgoers. But in the evenings, she cried for hours in her bath. On the fifth day after Mehmet left, she was so weak she couldn’t leave her bed. (It was unclear whether her infirmity was caused by the loss of her devoted slave or by syphilis.) In the throes of her high fever, she thought of many things – of how she would have posed if Maxime had agreed to photograph her; of what Gustave would say to the Parisians about her bedbugs; of how Gustave’s mistress would react to tales of her hips; of who would look at their photographs and read their accounts; of eloquent tongues; of a mute rabab player. This was no delirium. Everything was lucid. Then, one dry night, she decided to end her mourning. She had an idea about keepsakes, one that her jealous lover could never have imagined.

For the next decade, every time a foreigner expressed his desire for her shawl as a souvenir, Kuchuk Hanem would refuse.

‘Then what can I give you for it?’ the visitor would ask.

She would give an enigmatic smile and say, ‘I don’t confuse my heart and my cunt.’

Thinking she was demanding an exorbitant price, the gentleman would mention an amount of money. She would respond with a little laugh. Then, she would rise from the bed and, with that serpentine sway of her hips, she would stride to the cupboard in the corner of the room and return with a bottle of murky liquid.

‘Long ago, I gave my shawl to a man from Cairo named Mehmet. In return, he gave me this souvenir.’

In the bottle, the visitor would behold not a genie, but something altogether less mystical.

The sight was so repulsive and humiliating that it silenced them. None of those who came later – tourists, archaeologists, writers, politicians – recorded this event. Because Kuchuk Hanem’s souvenir, unlike a sweat-stained shawl or an embalmed crocodile, mocked them. Because it held up a mirror, and that mirror revealed a hideous face. Because it revived the memories of a thousand other tongues they didn’t comprehend, of guttural sounds from the back of the throat, savage and mischievous. And a language as beautiful as the devil’s had no place in this world. Such a language was meant to dissolve with the sound of the desert wind, to be buried with the ruins of ancient tyrants.

In Maxime Du Camp’s photographs of statues, pyramids and temples, a dark figure is often visible, a small and lovely ornament, like a tattoo inked onto the colossal shoulder of Ramses. Had those figures ever made a sound?

Scream in a Bottle

‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’