Pearl of the Desert

By Faye Rossignol

Though not yet twenty, the luscious young American Pearl Keefer is already a veteran in the lists of love. She has taken on the sex-crazed sons of the Sultan in Constantinople and left them exhausted in her wake.
Now she travels to the lands of Southern Araby, where Western women dare not go, her blonde hair dyed black, her magnificent breasts bound tight to her body in her disguise as a ship's cabin boy. She is on the trail of her first love, the handsome Englishman Edward Kinloch-Shand, but it is not only Edward who is destined to enjoy the incomparable artistry of her carnal expertise. Even the ghosts in the fabled Lost City of the Great Arabian Desert are due for an erotic experience they'll never forget.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Faye Rossignol
• Release date: Sep 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311159038

Faye Rossignol

Faye Rossignol - who is (or was) she?Search for Faye Rossignol on Google and three attractive ladies bearing her name are listed (at the time of writing, which is 2014). None of them is "our" Faye Rossignol, which suggests that the name is, in any case, a nom-de-plume. "Rossignol" was French slang in the 19th Century for the female pudendum - and our Faye would most certainly have been aware of that! In fact, little or nothing is known of the life (or possible death) of this female (or was she male?) writer. Her seventeen manuscripts were discovered on Saturday, September 19th, 1988, just after dawn. They lay in a skip filled with builder's rubble in London's fabulously wealthy and upmarket Eaton Square. Despite that, it is clear that they were not simply thrown out at so much junk; they were intended to be discovered and, eventually, to achieve the publication they so richly deserve. How can we assume that? For a start, they were heavily wrapped in a waterproof oilcloth before being completely heat-sealed in two layers of heavy-duty polythene; and the outer layer was of the UV-resistant kind so that they would have survived exposure on a garbage tip, even in direct sunlight, without degradation. And they were carefully placed right on top of a full skip - in plain view of any passer-by of average height. Whoever dumped them was probably still in Eaton Square when they were spotted and rescued. Alas, the luck that any bibliographer might have enjoyed ended right there and then.They contained not a single handwritten word that might have helped trace them to the hand that wrote them. Each manuscript was neatly typed using a daisywheel printer, so we know that the writer had access to the primitive word-processors of the early-to-mid-eighties (and it would surely have taken that many years for "Faye" to have written all seventeen volumes). The paper was in standard A4 sheets of various brands, all widely sold throughout the country. In short, there is little hope of tracing "her" through either the paper or the method of printing.Various names have been suggested for the true author, including the satirist William Donaldson (1935-2005) and the politician the Right Honourable Enoch Powell (1912-98). Donaldson (most famous as the author of The Henry Root Letters) is suspected because he once lived in a brothel run by his girlfriend in the nearby Fulham Road and because of the prankish nature of the manuscripts' discovery. And Enoch Powell because anybody taking a late-afternoon stroll around that part of Belgravia in the 1980s and '90s was almost certain to see the British Warm overcoat and the black Homburg hat that both clad the man and trumpeted his sartorial fanfare; one saw them well before those large, limpid, ice-pale eyes loomed out of the circumambient fog of fashionable London, mesmerizing pedestrians to step off the kerb and lower their gaze until he had floated by. He was the very spirit of the place, and perhaps death itself has been unable to prevent his apparition even today? Of the two, we must lean toward Donaldson or some satirist poured into a similar mould. The addresses given by "Faye" in various Introductions in the books - Bushey Arches ... Bushey Park ... Much Hadham ... Crouch End ... Effingham (all genuine places in England) - point to that sort of humour, which is too playful for old Enoch.But perhaps Faye really is a woman after all. Many of her most ardent fans would dearly love to have it proved. A Scarlet Woman? Here one can paraphrase the doggerel about the Scarlet Pimpernel:They seek her here.They seek him there.Her fans they seek "Faye" everywhere.Has she a hole or has he a pole?That damned elusive Rossignol!When all's said and done, we are left (most fortunately) with the writing. Despite its subject matter, the literary merit of "Faye's" work was soon recognised by, it so happens, a beneficed clergyman in the Church of England. He, however, wishes to remain anonymous. Indeed, everyone connected with the rescue and publication of "her" works, is by choice anonymous. The media feeding-frenzy that would be unleashed were even one of them to be named in public would divert all attention away from the books, whose merits are great enough for them to speak for themselves. If "Faye" herself desired to remain unsung, how could lesser mortals muscle in openly by name and bask in the light that "she" had shunned? It would be unconscionable. In short: Shallow-minded seekers after any sort of "celebrity" link must learn to grow up and content themselves, instead, with these seventeen bright jewels of modern erotic fiction.(Shortly after www.Fayerossignol.org/asm went online an anonymous surfer submitted an image found among items left by his late father, who operated a photo booth on New York's Coney Island. Its attractions included a six-foot image of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, with a hole where the face would be. People would poke their heads through the hole and have their photograph taken. The name, place, and date were then added to the print. ["And," our surfer adds, "Dad made a fortune for supplying pictures with falsified dates to most of the adulterers in New York."] If this is, indeed "our" own dear Faye, it is the only known picture of her to have surfaced so far.)

Book preview

Chapter 1

A man once told Pearl that the swelling of her breasts, even when they were concealed under several layers of clothing, made the palms of his hands itch uncontrollably. Later, when she rewarded him with the sight of them, all unadorned – together with the rest of her body – that uncontrollable itch spread to the rest of his body, too. For Pearl’s was the figure that haunted Saint Anthony during his Temptations in the Desert; had she been there in the flesh, he would have died plain Mister Anthony – and probably a lot happier for it, too. Hers were the eyes that delayed Ulysses on his homeward voyages, though he knew the beautiful and faithful Penelope was pining for him alone; had Pearl been aboard when the sirens sang, there would have been no need for ropes to bind him to the mast nor beeswax to stop the ears of his crew. Nor would they have needed to go ashore for Circe to turn them into swine; Pearl could have done it for them right there on board, one after the other.

That was no idle boast. She could take on her own weight in regiments. That very summer, before she escaped a grisly death at the hands of the Bull, the chief eunuch in the Hareem of His Highness the Pasha Suleih al Raschid in Constantinople, she had lain six times with each of the Pasha’s horniest young sons, twelve in number, exhausted the entire randy dozen, and left them snoring – and all in the space of three hours. She, who had entered that Hareem in June 1904, a virgin of some nineteen summers, fled from it in September of that same year, one of the most experienced and skillful (and tireless) concubines in the entire Orient.

Now, however, she almost wished she were on the Argosy, or whatever Ulysses called that boat of his, making landfall on some temperate Mediterranean shore for a night of wine, song, and carnal bliss. Instead, here she was, trapped in the inferno of the Red Sea on this rotten, stinking little tub bound for Aden. If it was as humid as this in October, what must it have been like in high summer when her darling Edward had passed this way?

Foolish, magnificent, high-minded, and handsome, Edward Kinloch-Shand had tried to rescue her in Vienna from the clutches of the evil Zarkos, pimp, dope merchant, white slaver, and gun runner – a man who tortured slave-girls for his sport and murdered anyone by way of a hobby. Now the dear young idealist had gone on secret business for the British Government to the Hadramaut, that little-known land where the Arabian Peninsula meets the waters of the Indian Ocean – and Pearl was setting out to find him.

As if it were not enough for her to be entombed in the inferno of this wretched tramp steamer, she suffered the added indignity of being disguised as a boy, for a blonde, white, American female could not possibly venture into Southern Araby, no matter how well chaperoned or escorted. So there she was, with her fair hair dyed a glossy black, braided and tied back in the manner of a youth who has not yet been circumcised.

It was Nubar Petrosian, her rescuer and Edward’s friend in Constantinople, who had provided her with the disguise, and all the details of her alias to go with it. Fortunately, though her father was an American merchant who had made his home in Cairo, her mother was Egyptian and she had lived all her life on the fringe of the Sahara and so had grown up among the North African desert peoples; so Pearl’s Arabic was flawless – as, indeed, was her knowledge of the ways and customs of the sands.

The most irksome part of her disguise was the necessity to bind her delightfully firm and voluptuous breasts to her chest. Never mind the itch that the mere sight of them induced in Petrosian’s palms (for it was he who had spoken that flattery to her), the itch they themselves were now enduring, through a combination of her swaddling and the heat, was ... well, it was quite frankly unendurable. She wandered aft, idly, as a young boy might, and, when no one was looking, slipped into the first empty cabin she came across. A moment later she almost burst out laughing, for the place she had chosen was, in fact, the padded cell for lunatics and men who ran amok; if they did this run at the height of summer, it was no doubt filled with heat-crazed passengers from Jiddah to Bombay. At the moment, though, it was wonderfully empty.

Fearful of lice among the padding on the floor, she took a clean sheet from a pile in the corner and shook it vigorously, ridding it of possible livestock before she spread it out over the upholstery underfoot. With a great sigh of relief she lay down upon it, full stretch upon her back, drew off her caftan, and began a lazy struggle to get out of her swaddling.

The moment her breasts were free, she scratched them with her fingernails from her ribs up to her nipples – long, languid, luxuriating strokes – while the liberated flesh sang alleluias at its freedom. Soon she felt her nipples grow hard and the focus of her caresses changed and grew more languid yet. She caught them up gently between thumb and forefinger, squeezed them, rolled them delicately back and forth – all of which sent delightful little tingles of fire through every limb.

For a while she lay in that self-induced stupor, letting the tingles roam this way and that, at random, throughout her body. Then slowly they began to gather, to draw themselves toward the core of her, deep in her belly. There the tingle became a quiver, and the quiver a tremor, which at last held the whole of that region between her knees and her navel in the grip of the most ancient pleasure in all the world.

Tighter and tighter grew the focus until it raged like a fever among the delicate folds of that oysterlike flesh in the fork of her thighs. She could feel the wetness running into the cleft round her bumhole, making sticky little smacking noises with every convulsive move she made. Finally, when she could tantalize herself no more by withholding her slender, skillful fingers, she slid her hand down over the taut skin of her belly to stroke her mossy Mound of Venus. There she found the upper end of that vertical smile whose lips would lead her all-knowing, all-feeling, all-loving finger to the feverish rosebud that now hungered for its touch.

There was a sudden change in the light; for a moment she supposed the ship had gone about, taking the afternoon sun off this quarter. Then she opened her eyes and saw that the window was blocked by a head, a smiling head. And not just any old smiling head, either, but the extremely handsome, smiling head of the First Officer. People said he was the son of an Indian Maharajah. Many a time since she (or, rather, Ali ibn Shadir, as she now called herself) had embarked at Port Suez, she had caught his eyes burning with a dark hunger as he gazed lasciviously at her. Knowing little of the love that men can feel for the girlish charms of uncircumcised young boys, she had begun to fear he had penetrated her disguise. Every night since then she had lain out on deck, courting sleep beneath an old sailcloth, wishing he were there, and penetrating something more substantial than her mere disguise.

And now her prayers were answered. He shed his white ducks as he entered the door and bolted it behind him; every last stitch of his clothing fell to the floor between there and the porthole, where he drew the curtain. However, the sun was so bright that it made little difference to the general level of illumination; he stood above her for a moment, smiling down, one eye each side of the most splendid erection Pearl had seen in many an empty day – even in her randiest imagination.

She sat upright, fearing that, in his impetuous haste, he might plunge it inside her at once. She wished to play with it awhile, learn its little secrets, discover where its thrills were locked away. Her mouth was every bit as avid for the feel of its painfully swollen knob as was that more exquisite and sensitive flesh between her thighs, whose only purpose is to enclose it and receive the tribute of its joyous ejaculations.

But she need not have worried. Hariya, as she knew him to be called, was no proud desert warrior like the Pasha and his sons – greedy and tireless pokers of girl f lesh who rodded and came, rodded and came, rodded and came ... until they fell in a snoring swoon, exhausting anything up to a dozen slave-girls and concubines in a single night. Harija was a devotee of the Kharmah Sutrah, the ancient repository of all the erotic wisdom of the Orient. He knew a girl’s body almost better than she knew it herself; he thought of its blissful centres as shrines of divinity, secret and hallowed temples where the goddess of pleasure keeps her desires burning for the warmth of poor earthly mortals. He already worshipped every particle of her, inside and out; it was to be many hours yet before he would dowse those flames, temporarily but joyously, in the first ecstatic libations of his untiring lance of love.

And it was to his lance that she now reached her fingers, and then her lips, hungry for the feel and taste of that exuberant gristle. His observations at the window had already led him to suspect she was an adept in the arts of Venus; from the moment her long, delicate tongue snaked out and curled around the pulsating knob that crowned his erection, he knew he could as safely surrender himself to her as she to him. With a long, low moan of pleasure he sank to his knees, then to a semi-recumbent position on his side – all without plucking his magical lickerish stick from between her bee-stung lips. She was now lying on her back, he on his side, facing her, his groin level with her face. His member was now poked across her mouth – a veritable mouth-organ one might say; certainly she held it like a seasoned player of that instrument, running her lips up and down the bulging vein on its underside, giving it dainty little nips of her teeth, tormenting it with her tongue – now delighting him with long unhurried licks, now making him gasp as she furled it up and down, vibrating, soft and wet and hot, in the furrow between knob and column.

It puzzled her. She could feel that divine rod throb and twitch with those impulsive spasms that precede the unstoppable jet of the male climax – yet no climax followed. Not for nothing had he risked his skin and his father’s affection when, night after night, he had crept into the fragrant beds of the priestesses, between whose passionate and perfumed thighs he had learned the art of Lakhal-talpina – the almost indefinite postponement of ejaculation.

When she realized that he could engage in the Dance of Old Adam forever, she abandoned herself utterly to the frolics of Eros. Most other men she had to treat very carefully; each was like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger and only one round in its magazine; but Hariya was like a dream come true – a daydream come true, in her case. How often had she wiled away a tedious hour with visions of an automaton – a machine of seeming flesh and blood, warm, slim, muscular, sinewy, handsome, and gentle – infinitely responsive to every shifting nuance of her desire, tireless in its ability to poke her in whatever position and from whatever angle she chose ... and here he was at last – that perfect man-machine! Warm, slim, muscular, sinewy, handsome as the devil ... and tireless!

The sun was well down and the second dog watch mustering when his inexhaustible lingam, as proud and as throbbing still as when he had first entered the room, slipped from between the exquisite lips of her nether smile for the last time before he nosed the tip of it back in, and rammed it with all his might to the very top of her shaft. And there he exploded in a frenzy of spermatorrhœia that shook her very bowels and poured from her in an unstoppable flood, mingling as it did, with so copious a flow of her own ecstatic juices.

Again? Tomorrow? were the first coherent words she whispered when the scattered shards of her senses returned to her.

He ran a tormenting fingernail down the long dimple of her spine. Tomorrow, dear little boy, you will be seeking a dhow in Aden and I shall be on the high seas to Bombay. But – he smiled – we have many long and delightful hours ahead of us yet!

Chapter 2

The dhow was scarcely four hours out of Aden when the wind began to rise. Among the cargo the most valuable items were sacks of mother-of-pearl from Zanzibar, all stacked forrard. When the vessel began to roll alarmingly, the master gave orders for some of them to be restowed along the centre line – and it was during that operation they found the stowaway.

At once they brought him amidships to the master, a grinning young urchin of no more than fifteen or sixteen, with his glossy black hair braided and tied in the manner of the uncircumcised.

Edward Kinloch-Shand (or Ibrahim ibn Abdallah, as he now called himself) had been lounging among his own gear aft; now he sat up and watched with interest. The young Arab boy reminded him of ... some youth he had once known. What would the master do, he wondered? Sometimes they could be lenient, other times unbelievably cruel.

The youth’s voice had not yet broken, though it had a husky edge to it. He gave his name as Ali ibn Shadir – from Djibouti, he said. Both his parents had recently died but he had an aunt who had married a man of the Bait Khor people of the Hadramaut ...

Edward’s ears pricked up at that, for the Bait Khor were the very tribe he was hoping to contact on his arrival at the port of Khuryala!

Meanwhile Ali was explaining that he was just trying to get to Khuryala by the quickest route. He had no money, but he was very willing to work. Despite the sadness of his tale, he had a broad grin for one and all. Every now and then his eye caught Edward’s, who, once again had the strangest feeling of recognition. At Eton he’d had a letch for a young boy in the fourth, not unlike young Ali. Of course, since leaving school, he’d been more inclined toward women ... but still, it was pleasant to recall those happy times.

The master grunted now and then during the recital of Ali’s tale, but when the youth concluded by throwing himself on the man’s mercy, the only reply was, I’ll put you off at Tafraq tomorrow. We arrive just after dawn. The police there will give undoubtedly you a good flogging but they’ll let you go. That’s the best I can do. Meanwhile, you can make yourself useful.

Even that dire judgement did not dim the young fellow’s good cheer and he set about his tasks with a will.

He hopes I’ll change my mind, Ibrahim ibn Abdallah, the master said to Edward as he passed.

And will you?

No, because if I did, word would spread and this boat would sink under the weight of stowaways.

Edward quoted the Kuhran on the need for charity; but the master had not been a coastal trader all his life for nothing. Perhaps, he said, "Allah sent the youngster here to test your charity, Ibrahim ibn Abdallah – not mine!"

At the evening meal Edward called Ali to him and offered him some of his rice and some strips of dried goatsmeat he had brought for the voyage; while the young fellow ate – ravenously, Edward noted – he questioned him closely on the circumstances of his parents’ deaths and how he had travelled from Djibouti to Aden, where he had stowed away on this dhow. Satisfied at the boy’s replies, he decided to test him further. If you truly are from Djibouti, he said, then you’ll certainly know a man called Sarrak, a ship’s chandler down on the waterfront – an enormously fat man.

Ali screwed up his elfin face. He really was quite beautiful; it was most disconcerting – the way young boys could look like girls. Sarrak? he repeated. There was no one called Sarrak there.

If you come from Djib, as you claim, you’ll certainly know him. Everyone from Aden to Zanzibar knows Sarrak.

A thousand apologies for my ignorance, effendi, but I must have forgotten him.

Then, Edward barked severely, you are lying. You do not come from Djibouti.

Ali stood mute, eyes cast down. He gave a little shrug but durst not contradict the powerful merchant, Ibrahim ibn Abdallah.

Edward relented with a laugh and, reaching out a hand, gave the youngster’s ankle a reassuring squeeze. How exquisitely and excitingly feminine even the ankle of young boys of that age could be! All right, Ali, he said. I believe you. There is no one called Sarrak. But if you were only pretending to be from Djib, you’d surely also have pretended to remember him.

Ali laughed with enormous relief and clapped his hands in admiration at the great merchant’s cunning.

Would you like to come on to Khuryala with me? Edward continued. I, too, wish to see some men of the Bait Khor. If I pay your fare, will you help me find them?

Tears of gratitude poured down the youngster’s cheeks; he was too choked with emotion to find words to express it. Edward haggled with the master over the fare for twenty minutes and eventually beat him down to one Maria Theresa dollar.

During this time Ali recovered his composure completely – so much so that his next question almost unseated Edward. Why? he asked loudly, is a rich and powerful merchant like Ibrahim ibn Abdallah going to a little backwater like Khuryala?

There was a general murmur of assent from several eavesdroppers; clearly the merchant’s motives had puzzled more than the astute young boy. Fortunately, Edward had prepared a tale for just such an occasion. He explained that long ago, before the Flood, there had been a wicked and immoral people – not Arabs, thanks be to Allah. They were called the Habasha and had lived in a lush and fertile plain beyond the mountains of the Hadramaut. But God had punished them and driven them out. They had finally come to rest in Africa, where the Habasha had given their name to the land of Abyssinia – the land of the Ethiops. And God had turned their original homeland into a vast desert, which the Europeans call the Empty Quarter of Arabia but which the Beduwiyn simply call the Sands.

Yet, there was one righteous man among the Habasha, Edward added – seeing now that his audience was hanging on every word: the Prophet Syros, who wrote one of the great holy books of the world. Alas, it had been lost. But the city wherein Syros dwelled had been spared destruction. It had simply been swallowed whole by the Sands. Even its name had passed out of memory; nowadays it was simply known as the Lost City of the Sands.

It is my intention, he concluded dramatically, to find that Lost City and unearth the Holy Book of Syros.

A gasp of admiration went up all about him. And now they all felt privileged to be travelling in the company of such a pious and determined man.

As darkness fell the wind began to rise. The master threw a stiffly tarred sailcloth over the the good merchant, saying that if the wind rose any more, they’d all be soaked by the spray. Edward silently blessed the storm and invited Ali to share the dry haven beneath the sail.

The young fellow needed no second bidding. He gave his customary little giggle and wormed his way to Edward’s side. Edward felt his heart begin to race and old Polyphemus, the one-eyed monster between his legs, hoisted himself ... wham! Like a rod of brittle iron! He tried to push it back down and tuck it between his thighs but it was so stiff and eager it would have screamed in agony if it had had a voice. So he clutched it to his belly and pulled his caftan tight behind him, swaddling it where it would be least noticeable. The last thing he wanted was to frighten young Ali away. If he could seduce him gently and lovingly, the boy’s response would repay his gentleness in many a night of bliss during the months they would soon be spending in the desert together.

Slowly, slowly! he warned himself. Above all be gentle!

Meanwhile he noticed that Ali had not stopped squirming. What’s the matter with you? he murmured. Ants in your pants?

Ali giggled softly. What pants, effendi? he whispered and, turning his back toward Edward, stuck out his bottom and wiggled it seductively against the merchant’s groin. Ooh! he exclaimed when he felt the massive bar of gristle clamped firmly against his master’s belly.

Edward pulled himself sharply away – mainly to avoid a sudden death by apoplexy. Slowly ... gently ...! the inner voice urged, determined to be cautious despite the obviously provocative behaviour of the young fellow.

Oh! Ali’s voice was filled with disappointment in the hot confines beneath the thick sail. Perhaps the effendi does not like young boys in that way?

Yes! I mean no! No, I mean yes! Listen, Ali ...

Perhaps the effendi has lost his heart to a young lady?

No! Edward assured him. Then, seeing that the question at least allowed an opening for them to talk, rather than just rush headlong into an act that might finally disgust the youngster, he said, Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I have.

Tell me her name, effendi, Ali pleaded.

It would mean nothing to you, Edward said kindly. She was not even an Arab, though she spoke Arabic and knew the ways of the desert people very well.

If she knew all that and yet was not an Arab, then she was a witch! Ali responded petulantly.

Edward laughed softly. She was bewitching all right. She stole my heart away.

"Have you enjoyed al jima’a with her, effendi, and given her many babies?"

No, I have not. His voice was sad at the admission.

But you wish to?

With all my heart. But listen, Ali – this is what I wish you to understand. Where I am going, into the Sands, it will be impossible to take a woman ...

Why? Ali interrupted. From his tone Edward knew he was pouting. "The Beduwiyn travel