“Follow me!” bin Zaki shouted, snaring a torch. We did, uncertainly, as if he were a crimp, and we were press-ganged into unconsenting service. From under the trees, a band struck up a creaky rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” then with equal dubiety, “Anchors Aweigh,” Assama lacking an anthem of its own. The instrumentalists whacked away with sticks, stones, and tambourines, and snorted extravagantly into nose flutes. Chatterton was enthralled.

Beyond the square was a clearing of tramped-down grass, altogether like the coat of a dog with the mange. A path meandered through a courtyard, where a raggedy-lettered sign, barely visible in the torchlight, warned:

THERE IS A FINE OF TWO CHICKENS
FOR BOTH OFFENCES
PLEASE NOT TO SPIT
AND LITTERING!!

Beyond it was the palace.

That so insignificant a path could lead to such an imposing structure lacked congruity. But there it was, a whimsical pile looming, dominating the land as an iceberg crowns the surrounding sea. It soared up and up, surreal, audacious, like some enormous, irregularly rounded candle dripping tallow, its wick lost in the mist beyond the gleam of the torches.

We entered a long rectangular room lit by saucer lamps.

“The Hall of Great Fragrance!” bin Zaki announced. “Guaranteed to produce subduing atmosphere for your endearment.” All the surfaces of the chamber—floor, walls, ceiling—seemed to be made of a blistered, lavalike stone. It was of course not stone at all, but the amazing masonry of Grady’s quest.

On one side of the room a row of twelve sausage-fat pillars, about ten paces apart, was carved in the round: squat effigies of men on one side, facing on the other a parallel row of women.

Neither group was tall enough to support the ceiling. No matter, for from each male figure protruded a penis, thick as a phone pole, sinuous as a hose, that curved upward, rose to become a beam as it stretched horizontally across the hall, snaked downward to a compliant woman, to embrace her in its corkscrew grasp, and then lodge in the snuggery of her pudendum.

The group comprised an unintentional parody of licentiousness—those engorged penes in frozen transit across the oblong hall—in a display of misbehavior that was anything but erotic. The orgiasts wore uniform expressions of numbness, their round eyes grim and vacant, all their faculties resigned to satyriasis. It was perhaps the lack of enthusiasm in their revelry that confused Daphne, and then prompted her to say, “What’re they doing my God.”

Under a phallic arch a table held a variety of food. Some of the dishes were hot and some were cold and none of them were recognizable.

“As we always say,” bin Zaki bellowed jovially, “a hungry man is an angry man. So take a lot of these sumptuous delicacies prepared in your honor and you will soon discover that our cooking is an art.”

I bit into a cheesy spread that might have been bat shit.