The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night Volume IV Part 27

"There is a pleasure sure in being mad Which none but madmen know."

[FN#293] Lane (ii. 449) gives a tradition of the Prophet, "Whoso is in love, and acteth chastely, and concealeth (his pa.s.sion) and dieth, dieth a martyr." Sakar is No. 5 h.e.l.l for Magi Guebres, Parsis, etc., it is used in the comic Persian curse, "Fi'n-nari wa Sakar al-jadd w'al-pidar"=ln h.e.l.l and Sakar his grandfather and his father.

[FN#294] Arab. "Sifr": I have warned readers that whistling is considered a kind of devilish speech by the Arabs, especially the Badawin, and that the traveller must avoid it. It savours of idolatry: in the Koran we find (chaps. viii. 35), "Their prayer at the House of G.o.d (Ka'abah) is none other than whistling and hand-clapping;" and tradition says that they whistled through their fingers. Besides many of the Jinn have only round holes by way of mouths and their speech is whistling a kind of bird language like sibilant English.

[FN#295] Arab. 'Kil wa kal"=lit. "it was said and he said;" a popular phrase for chit chat, t.i.ttle-tattle, prattle and prate, etc.

[FN#296] Arab. "Hadis." comparing it with a tradition of the Prophet.

[FN#297] Arab. "Mikashshah," the thick part of a midrib of a palm-frond soaked for some days in water and beaten out till the fibres separate. It makes an exceedingly hard, although not a lasting broom.

[FN#298] Persian, "the youth, the brave;" Sansk. Yuvan: and Lat.

Juvenis. The Kurd, in tales, is generally a st.u.r.dy thief; and in real-life is little better.

[FN#299] Arab. "Ya Shatir ;" lit. O clever one (in a bad sense).

[FN#300] Lane (ii. 453) has it. "that I may dress thy hair'" etc.

This is Bowdlerising with a witness.

[FN#301] The sign of respect when a personage dismounts.

(Pilgrimage i. 77.)

[FN#302] So the Hindus speak of "the defilement of separation" as if it were an impurity.

[FN#303] Lane (i. 605) gives a long and instructive note on these public royal-banquets which were expected from the lieges by Moslem subjects. The hanging-penalty is, perhaps, a tattle exaggerated; but we find the same excess in the priestly Gesta Romanorum.

[FN#304] Had he eaten it he would have become her guest. Amongst the older Badawin it was sufficient to spit upon a man (in entreaty) to claim his protection: so the horse-thieves when caught were placed in a hole in the ground covered over with matting to prevent this happening. Similarly Saladin (Salah al-Din) the chivalrous would not order a cup of water for the robber, Reynald de Chatillon, before putting him to death

[FN#305] Arab. "Kishk" properly "Kashk"=wheat-meal-coa.r.s.ely ground and eaten with milk or broth. It is de rigueur with the Egyptian Copts on the "Friday of Sorrow" (Good Friday): and Lane gives the recipe for making it (M. E. chaps. xxvi.)

[FN#306] In those days distinctive of Moslems.

[FN#307] The euphemism has before been noticed: the Moslem reader would not like to p.r.o.nounce the words "I am a Nazarene." The same formula occurs a little lower down to save the reciter or reader from saying "Be my wife divorced," etc.

[FN#308] Arab, "Hajj," a favourite Egyptianism. We are wrong to write Hajji which an Eastern would p.r.o.nounce Haj-ji.

[FN#309] This is Cairene "chaff."

[FN#310] Whose sh.e.l.l fits very tight.

[FN#311] His hand was like a raven's because he ate with thumb and two fingers and it came up with the rice about it like a camel's hoof in dirty ground. This refers to the proverb (Burckhardt, 756), "He comes down a crow-claw (small) and comes up a camel-hoof (huge and round)."

[FN#312] Easterns have a superst.i.tious belief in the powers of food: I knew a learned man who never sat down to eat without a ceremonious salam to his meat.

[FN#313] Lane (ii. 464), uses the vile Turkish corruption "Rustum," which, like its fellow "Rustem," would make a Persian shudder.

[FN#314] Arab. "Darrij" i.e. let them slide (Americanice).

[FN#315] This tetrastich has occurred before: so I quote Mr. Payne (in loco).

[FN#316] Shaykh of Al-Butnah and Jabiyah, therefore a Syrian of the Hauran near Damascus and grandson to Isu (Esau). Arab mystics (unlike the vulgar who see only his patience) recognise that inflexible integrity which refuses to utter "words of wind" and which would not, against his conscience, confess to wrong-doing merely to pacify the Lord who was stronger than himself. The Cla.s.sics taught this n.o.ble lesson in the case of Prometheus versus Zeus. Many articles are called after Job e.g. Ra'ara' Ayyub or Ghubayra (inula Arabica and undulata), a creeper with which he rubbed himself and got well: the Copts do the same on "Job's Wednesday," i.e. that before Whit Sunday O.S. Job's father is a nickname of the camel, etc. etc.

[FN#317] Lane (in loco) renders "I am of their number." But "fi al-siyak" means popularly "(driven) to the point of death."

[FN#318] Lit. = "pathway, road"; hence the bridge well known as "finer than a hair and sharper than a sword," over which all (except Khadijah and a chosen few) must pa.s.s on the Day of Doom; a Persian apparatus bodily annexed by Al-Islam. The old Guebres called it Puli Chinavar or Chinavad and the Jews borrowed it from them as they did all their fancies of a future life against which Moses had so gallantly fought. It is said that a bridge over the grisly "brook Kedron" was called Sirat (the road) and hence the idea, as that of h.e.l.l-fire from Ge-Hinnom (Gehenna) where children were pa.s.sed through the fire to Moloch. A doubtful Hadis says, "The Prophet declared Al-Sirat to be the name of a bridge over h.e.l.l- fire, dividing h.e.l.l from Paradise" (pp. 17, 122, Reynold's trans.

of Al-Siyuti's Traditions, etc.). In Koran i. 5, "Sirat" is simply a path, from sarata, he swallowed, even as the way devours (makes a lakam or mouthful of) those who travel it. The word was orig.

written with Sin but changed for easier articulation to Sad, one of the four Huruf al-Mutabbakat, "the flattened," formed by the broadened tongue in contact with the palate. This Sad also by the figure Ishmam (=conversion) turns slightly to a Za, the intermediate between Sin and Sad.

[FN#319] The rule in Turkey where catamites rise to the highest rank: C'est un homme de bonne famille (said a Turkish officer in Egypt) il a ete achete. Hence "Alfi" (one who costs a thousand) is a well-known cognomen. The Pasha of the Syrian caravan, with which I travelled' had been the slave of a slave and he was not a solitary instance. (Pilgrimage i. 90.)

[FN#320] The device of the banquet is dainty enough for any old Italian novella; all that now comes is pure Egyptian polissonnerie speaking to the gallery and being answered by roars of laughter.

[FN#321] i.e. "art thou ceremonially pure and therefore fit for handling by a great man like myself?"

[FN#322] In past days before Egypt was "frankified" many overlanders used to wash away the traces of travel by a Turkish bath which mostly ended in the appearance of a rump wriggling little lad who offered to shampoo them. Many accepted his offices without dreaming of his usual-use or misuse.

[FN#323] Arab. "Imam." This is (to a Moslem) a most offensive comparison between prayer and car. cop.

[FN#324] Arab. "Fi zaman-hi," alluding to a peculiarity highly prized by Egyptians; the use of the constrictor v.a.g.i.n.ae muscles, the sphincter for which Abyssinian women are famous. The "Kabbazah" ( = holder), as she is called, can sit astraddle upon a man and can provoke the venereal-o.r.g.a.s.m, not by wriggling and moving but by tightening and loosing the male member with the muscles of her privities, milking it as it were. Consequently the ca.s.senoisette costs treble the money of other concubines. (Arranga-Ranga, p.

127.)

[FN#325] The little eunuchs had evidently studied the Harem.

[FN#326] Lane (ii. 494) relates from Al-Makrizi, that when Khamarawayh, Governor of Egypt (ninth century), suffered from insomnia, his physician ordered a pool of quicksilver 50 by 50 cubits, to be laid out in front of his palace, now the Rumaylah square. "At the corners of the pool were silver pegs, to which were attached by silver rings strong bands of silk, and a bed of skins, inflated with air, being thrown upon the pool and secured by the bands remained in a continual-state of agreeable vacillation." We are not told that the Prince was thereby salivated like the late Colonel Sykes when boiling his mercury for thermometric experiments,

[FN#327] The name seems now unknown. "Al-Khahi'a" is somewhat stronger than "Wag," meaning at least a "wicked wit." Properly it is the Span. "perdido," a youth cast off (Khala') by his friends; though not so strong a term as "Harfush"=a blackguard.

[FN#328] Arab. "Farsakh"=parasang.

[FN#329] Arab. "Nahas asfar"=yellow copper, bra.s.s as opposed to Nahas ahmar=copper The reader who cares to study the subject will find much about it in my "Book of The Sword," chaps. iv.

[FN#330] Lane (ii. 479) translates one stanza of this mukhammas (pentastich) and speaks of "five more," which would make six.

[FN#331] A servile name. Delicacy, Elegance.

[FN#332] These verses have occurred twice (Night ix. etc.): so I give Lane's version (ii. 482).

[FN#333] A Badawi tribe to which belonged the generous Ma'an bin Za'idab, often mentioned The Nights.

[FN#334] Wealthy harems, I have said, are hot-beds of Sapphism and Tribadism. Every woman past her first youth has a girl whom she calls her "Myrtle" (in Damascus). At Agbome, capital-of Dahome, I found that a troop of women was kept for the use of the "Amazons"

(Mission to Gelele, ii. 73). Amongst the wild Arabs, who ignore Socratic and Sapphic perversions, the lover is always more jealous of his beloved's girl-friends than of men rivals. In England we content ourselves with saying that women corrupt women more than men do.

[FN#335] The Hebrew Pentateuch; Roll of the Law.

[FN#336] I need hardly notice the bra.s.s trays, platters and table-covers with inscriptions which are familiar to every reader: those made in the East for foreign markets mostly carry imitation inscriptions lest infidel eyes fall upon Holy Writ.

[FN#337] These six distichs are in Night xiii. I borrow Torrens (p. 125) to show his peculiar treatment of spinning out 12 lines to 38.