She put the book aside and turned to a copy of a letter Burton had sent to a supporter in London. He had described a slave market in Zanzibar and a line of African captives, strapping young men, chained together, under the fold of a slave trader's tent. The slaves were naked, the better to display their strength. One young man boasted a penis filling out the space between his thighs, hanging half way to his knees. Burton described its qualities and charms- grey-brown in colour, zigged zagged with heroically big veins, a glans like a half moon emerging from its prepuce. In the shadow hung "elephantine testicles, in a voluminous scrotum."
"All his private parts had been carefully shaved," he wrote.
"Nothing prepared me for the interest taken by a party of Arab women, maybe the wives and daughters of slave traders, certainly of merchants, arriving for an inspection. They were wearing head to toe Arab dress, decorated with jewellery and they were clearly from the property-owning elite, however, decorum vanished when they sighted the naked negroes.
"They bent close as if to memorise every wrinkle and inch of the males' endowments all the while talking excitedly about the size of the organs. I heard them making unabashedly comparison with their own husbands- and, interestingly, sons-in-law! Several speculated about how much stouter and longer the organs would become when aroused and at that point they closed in on the young man who had caught my eye. He was the one with the grandest engine of generation.
"I recall there were six females. Two were no older than the boy. They were all still gabbling about the gorgeous endowment between his legs - they little dreamt that I, a foreigner, could understand every word. Then several began to touch it. One stroked it like a pet, another gingerly fingered the foreskin as if an expensive textile, another attempted to lift the penis with thumb and finger but had to use her whole hand such was its heft. All the while the boy, who I guessed to be no older than 18, looked aghast. His big eyes darted.
"One lady - older than the others, perhaps a granny- undertook to weigh his Arbor Vitae in her palm as if assessing meat: first the mighty penis, then the heavy ballsac, inviting others to join her. I remember one of the girls with fire in her eyes reaching out. Her face flushed as she lifted her palm with the apparatus sitting in it.
"To the obvious distress of the buck his organ began to respond. His glans emerged from its prepuce and the whole stem stretched and, veins filling, hardened. Unable to abort this embarrassment he seemed close to tears. I imagined that making his tackle rise was the objective of the more mature women. One began gripping and releasing the stem as if to test its hardness. The boy's mighty engine now jerked skywards. A stupendous artery was on view, running along the belly of his upraised stem.
"That this was a transformative demonstration for the females seemed to be confirmed by their reluctance to remove their eyes from the boy's root and take their leave. Then, later, confirmed as well by their lustful inspection of other slaves, making them twist and turn with shame, as their penile endowments were touched and compared. One tall, lean, handsome slave drew much attention because of the well-defined bullocks in their loose-hanging sack. What effect this drawn-out exercise had on the womens' subsequent assessment of their own husbands or future husbands- or, indeed, sons in law- is impossible to know..."
Sarah released the letter and sunk into her pillow.
Her imagination wandered. Wandered to the old dream. The dream of a school for Negro boys in the Caribbean, the sons of the tiny class of educated blacks. Boys like the slave that Burton had so evocatively described, with that hefty apparatus between his thighs, lowering himself over her knees, for example, the paddle in her hand ready to be applied with stinging effect to a bottom as black as shoe polish. As a car bonnet. The obsidian shine of those orbs thrilled her imagination.
Oh, so many examples to think on. Of black boys being introduced to the laws of hygiene bathed by white nurses - lonely young women from Wales or Scotland- the boys being daintily patted with wet sponges all over, tenderly soaked and sluiced by those girls with their blushing but fevered expressions, including with devoted attention to private parts so responsive to their touch.
Of corridor punishments with a platoon of black cocks standing to attention. With white mothers and their daughters being invited for school inspections on days when, say, 20 boys were lined up, not unlike the slave market that Burton had witnessed...and the girls growing giggly and faint at the sight, even aroma, of all those rigid inches stretching out from crinkly pubic hair.
Even the possibility that a young Negro teacher- oh, say in his early 20s- might challenge her authority and be punished by having to surrender every item of clothing...oh, leave him his mortarboard...and be made to teach a class of white lasses. Standing before the blackboard teaching algebra with chalk dust in his wiry pubic bush. Walking between the desks with his cock swinging. Making the young females tremble when he had to lean in close and check their calculations, his weighty penis and scrotum inches from their faces. Oh, to think of the under-the-cover fantasies and dreams that would agitate those feminine psyches for life!
Sarah grew sleepy, as the images crowded on one another...repeated themselves...and overlapped and merged...
Eyes drooping she found her mind yielding other suggestive possibilities.
Of something resembling that line of slaves, yes- even here at this school. The Indian lads stripped and lined up, along the corridors, one every few yards or so. A special occasion, a kind of school fete, raising money from the English women stranded here with their husbands at sea or in the trenches- money to be despatched for war charities. Few of the English ladies she knew would be unlikely to gainsay such a proposal. Sarah could anticipate their lively, prurient interest. They all- in her observations- responded to Indian physiques. And skin tone.
The girls, too, would relish the prospect of a long diverting afternoon with every boy able to be inspected and teased at leisure. One could equip them with sketch pads and note books, even tape measures, to make a scientific occasion of it. Biology, Sarah thought, a practical lesson, a field day.
She was beginning to doze, her fantasies becoming more gauzy.
For the artistic girls and mothers, there would be brushes and water colours and crayons. What an assemblage of male models! More than their peers at Home could even dream of, studying at the art academies. And what fetching aquatints these embarrassed 18 year old males might inspire, even if being exposed standing to attention before females with notepads intent on recording their charms were distressing in the extreme.
Yet if they chose to turn it into a more playful event, say a "penis inspection" - these girls and their mothers- then so be it. There is a saying about omelettes and eggs. And from the whole school population, what a variety to sate their curiosity: from the most petite to the most ample, from the most lily white to the most deep-died black, from the most streamlined circumcised rods to those with the most shaggy overhangs, there would be a lot of comparisons to be made and contrasts to be drawn and a great deal to be learnt.
To relieve the monotony Sarah could envisage an afternoon tea with small orchestra and dancing, with the mature women visitors to the school able to waltz with who among the male students had caught their eyes. Standing in the corridors the boys would be numbered, the women therefore able to lodge competitive bids. How the boys, steered onto the dance floor, would cope with the women's touch on their back or buttocks, or their scent, or the press of their silks and cottons, would be most interesting to observe. Likely they would require iron control. Were there any such boys? Not in her experience.
Her hand reached beyond the mosquito net to extinguish the bedside lamp. In the darkness she reached under her pillow. Yes, the shape was always a comfort. So decisive a firmness. Such an audacious curve. Her elephant tusk was no substitute for the warmth and flexibility of Nicholas Elliot's seven inches and the ecstasy it brought. Rather a necessary comfort after the stimulus brought to her mind by the writings of her soul mate Burton, explorer and sensualist, and such a chronicler of all things African.
Nicholas Elliot stood in his spartan bedroom over a washbasin, sluicing from his privates the last aromas of his lover, school principal and sexual visionary, Sarah Maitland. He was lissome and muscular. His body discipline was extreme, cultivated from his study of the ancients and emulating his erstwhile commander, Laurence of Arabia. He exercised at the Gymkhana Club in its exercise room with lathe-turned wooden dumbbells, Spaulding equipment and a canvas punching bag. To inspire the boys in his Physical Culture class he had once completed 200 pushups, under tropical sun. He was sought after for inter-regimental polo tournaments and for pig-sticking hunts on the plains, the most dangerous of British India sports.
Tonight, back in his room after love making and dinner with his principal, he had trimmed and shaved his pubic bush. On the floor lay leather sandals crafted by the finest cobbler in Bombay who, at Nicholas' direction, had followed sketches from Athenian vase paintings: leather, with gilded wings as heels. On his bed lay a round helmet, woven with merino wool by a Sikh tailor, and dyed gold.
When he slipped out tonight, on his excursion through dark streets to the bungalow with the female teachers, they were all- the sandals, the woven helmet- Nicholas would be wearing. Apart from helmet and sandals, he would be buck naked.
Like Hermes.
Hermes, the son of Zeus.
Famous for moving freely
Hermes, the god of border crossings. Of border transgressions.
Hermes, as sculpted by Praxiteles, the life-sized work found at Olympia in 1877, the young god curly haired, graceful and naked.
The god of athletes. The guide to the underworld.
