I managed to tread hard on one foot, and to squeeze two more women as they shoved me through a door into a vast audience hall, and the half-suppressed screams were music in my ears.

I don't see why a woman who uses pins on a prisoner should be any more immune than a man from violent retaliation.
When they had shut the door they stripped the silk bag off over my head and holding me by the arms, four on either side, dragged me to the middle of a hall that was at least as large as Carnegie Hall in New York, and two or three thousand times as sumptuous.
I stood on a strip of carpet six feet wide, facing a throne that faced the door I had entered by.

The throne was under a canopy, and formed the center of a horseshoe ring of gilded chairs, on every one of which sat a heavily veiled woman.

Except that they were marvelously dressed in all the colors of the rainbow and so heavily jeweled that they flashed like the morning dew, there was nothing to identify any of the women except one.

She was Yasmini.