The harem girls are paraded naked across Constantinople

All the harem ladies were incredibly smart, and well-versed in both Western and Oriental classics. Yet, somehow, though they disputed and chopped logic and reasoned with Selim all throughout the morning, not one of them was able to come up with a convincing argument as to why such beauties as themselves ought to be concealed behind stone walls.

Having completely demolished them at philosophy, Selim decreed that the harem would henceforth be ruled by Reason. It would greatly benefit the city of Constantinople if the beauty of the harem ladies was shared with all, and benefit nothing but the tender feelings of the harem ladies if it remained concealed. Therefore, according to the utilitarian philosophy of John Stuart Mill, of whom Selim was an avid reader, the girls were ethically obliged to make a presentation of their loveliness to the city, in conditions that set it off to best advantage, i.e. total nudity.

The girls could offer only emotional responses to this, not logical ones, which Selim dismissed as mere feminine frivolousness. Anyway, he was the one with the sword.

So he bade them rise from their bath, their cushions and chess games and sherbet and hookahs, and bid them stride, one by one, through the never-opened door that led to the heavily trafficked street outside the Topkapi Palace. And the girls, though blazing with shame at this intrusion of peasant beastliness into their sacred chamber, had **** but to obey.

One by one, in single file, they strode through the door into the citadel of their humiliation. Led by the hotly blushing and voluptuous Lady Evelyn, her midnight-dark hair cascading over her alabaster back, her scrumptious bottom swaying like a slow-motion pendulum, her heavy, creamy breasts and the dark triangle of her bush exposed to all the raucous denizens of the town.

And it was in single file that they were paraded, slowly, through all the boulevards and byways of merry old Constantinople, known as Istanbul by some, which has seen countless such amusing spectacles over its more than a thousand years of existence, and will no doubt see thousands more. As they marched between minarets and streetcars, astonishing ice-cream sellers and rug vendors and coffee merchants and melon traders alike, the occasional cat darting out of their way, the girls were burningly aware that they were entering into Constantinople’s rich history.

Three hundred naked ladies, faces burning red, breasts and bottoms bare, pussies on full public display as they marched with no clothes on down the long and winding streets, attracting considerable attention from tourists and natives alike. With a guard ahead of them to ring a bell, and a guard behind them to chant “SHAME!”. They already knew, to their chagrin, that everyone in the city would talk of nothing else for months on end.

But iIt would be a solid two weeks of fulfilling Selim’s every mischievous whim, dancing to his commands, implementing every last little detail of his lurid suggestions, before the Sultan finally returned from from his long hunting trip in the Caucasus, and the naked harem ladies finally discovered the full breadth of their humiliation.

Selim, of course, had slipped out of the back door of the harem the night before. And the Sultan, rather than the outrage and vows of **** the girls demanded, simply elected to consider it a very fine joke at their expense. In fact, he commissioned a grand tapestry of the event, and had it hung in the women’s bedchamber to remind them every day of their folly.

And, for a thousand years to come, the denizens of Constantinople would go on telling each other the story of the day a mere errand boy tricked every last woman in the Sultan’s harem into walking naked across the city, using only a second-hand cavalry sabre and a bit of gold paint.