EPILOGUE And so, in the span of a little more than a week, the entire Yaros archeological expedition had been transformed into women. Yet Circe and her entourage could not yet rest peacefully. A final price still had to be paid. For another ten days, the girls on the island whiled away their time playing dress-up with their fine new clothes, learning how to tend to their hair and their nails, experimenting with their cosmetics. Martin and Justin finished their periods. Steven started hers. No storms came up, so no ships were wrecked. No Greek paratroopers descended from the sky. No smoke signals were sent to passing ships. On the morning of the eleventh day a rusty freighter dropped anchor in the island's eastern cove. It sent two boats ashore with a party of about twenty men. They came bearing shackles and chains. By day's end, they had rounded up the ten girls, chained them together at the waist in groups of five, and trundled them, weeping hysterically, into the boats. Like so much merchandise, they were loaded onto the freighter, which steamed off to Izmir on the Turkish coast. In Izmir the girls were forced to dress in harem pants and revealing halter tops. They were transported in a windowless bread truck to Istanbul, where they were turned over to the notorious Mme. Zeynep Erkip, ex-madam turned whoremonger, who bought and sold fair-skinned girls throughout the Mideast, Greece, Asia Minor and the Indian subcontinent. Mme. Erkip, it seems, had been contacted by Stavros and Dimitrios; she paid the two Greek transmutes 10,000 dinars to learn where she could acquire ten young women (most of them white), lacking identity documents and therefore unprotected by any state, whom she could sell at a tidy profit on the white slave exchanges in Anatolia. Thus, Stavros and Dimitrios not only were to obtain ultimate vengeance, but were well-paid in the process. Over the ensuing months, the ill-starred transmutes were sold off as harem slaves, concubines and domestics to various wealthy businessmen and minor potentates in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and India. Brad, who was the fairest, went first, to a corrupt army general from Erzurum; she fetched a good price.The old general insisted that she always wear a long blue satin sheath dress, silk stockings and keep her hair styled like Jean Harlow's. Neal, who had the broadest hips, a highly desireable attribute among Indian connoisseurs of marketable females, was bought next, also at a hefty price, by a banker from Madras. She was fed on a diet of medjool dates and goat milk to keep her skin smooth and pale. Martin and Steven went for less: they ended up in a Baghdad brothel together, where they had their brains fucked out several times a night for the next twenty years. They were never permitted to be in the sun, lest it spoil their fair skin. Justin was bought by a distant cousin to the Shah of Iran who believed that women should be fucked but not heard: all his concubines had had their vocal cords severed by the palace physician. Justin was no exception: she never spoke again. A year later she was delivered of twins after twelve hours of mute labor. Colin's red hair proved a valuable asset for Mme. Erkip, who sold her for an outlandish sum to an Arabian sheik from Jubbah, to whom she ultimately bore six children, the first of which (a boy), had an uncanny resemblance to the untransmuted Peter Draper. When she was not being fucked, she spent most of her time reclining on Persian rugs in a tent. The four little Greeks were quickly determined to be unsuitable as concubines - they were snapped up as menials by the same whoremaster who bought Martin and Steven. He payed a trifling sum for them. They were taught to be hairdressers and manicurists and also did all the laundry for the bordello. As for Draper, Mme. Erkip considered her the pick of the litter, well worth an investment of several months' training. Assisted by the lash, Draper was an apt pupil and soon knew how to pleasure a man in each and every position of the Kama Sutra. Draper also received expert instruction in exotic dancing, flower arranging, singing, poetry recital, stringing beads.... and, of course, in fellatio, at which she truly excelled. Commanding the highest price of all the transmutes, Draper was purchased by the young and virile Maharaja of Jaipur after only one night's "free sample." Though she was thrown in with sixty-eight other concubines, she proved so adept in the arts of sexual congress that she quickly became the maharaja's favorite. Draper not only bore him five sons, but eventually attained the rank of consort, wielding considerable influence at court. She occasionally suffered from nightmares that she had been de-sexed and transformed into a man. Such dreams made her all the more responsive to the maharaja the next time he took her to bed and served only to preserve her primacy in the harem. What became of Stavros and Dimitrios? Because they had served Circe so well, they were restored to their masculine selves and returned to their families on Andros. They never told their wives why they had been gone for so long, nor what had happened to them. They became more attentive lovers and never took part in any new archeological digs. Both, however, took to wearing panties in secret, a compulsion neither could resist, though it disgusted them, as did their recurring fantasies about becoming women again. And the temple? When the authorities finally sent a party to Yaros to find out what had happened to the expedition, they found a heap of rubble on the site of the old prison. As no recent earthquakes had been registered in the region, all assumed that an an undetonated explosive had been set off by a pick or a shovel, burying the whole work crew. Within a year, a new prison was built on the site, the rubble never having been further disturbed. THE END