I became famous before I even got used to my birth name, known as the “Enchantress of Gatherings,” even though I hadn’t yet turned ten years old. My overwhelming beauty— as His Majesty King Fuad I called it the first time my father presented me to his gaze— was a secret behind my early feeling of a strange ecstasy that would invade my soul whenever the eyes around me were captivated by the curves of my body or the twists of my flowing hair.

For years, I thought it was the ecstasy of eternal happiness.

But it was nothing but a dizzy spell from the inevitable death.