The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night Volume XI Part 16

Jo jako paryo subhao jae na jio-sun; Nim na mitho hoe sichh gur ghio sun.

Ne'er shall his nature fall a man whate'er that nature be, The Nim-tree bitter shall remain though drenched with Gur and Ghi.

The Nim (Melia Azadirachta) is the "Persian lilac" whose leaves, intensely bitter, are used as a preventive to poison: Gur is the Anglo-Indian Jaggeri=raw sugar and Ghi clarified b.u.t.ter. Roebuck gives the same proverb in Hindostani.

[FN#149] In Chavis and Cazotte "Story of Kaskas; or the Obstinate Man." For ill-luck, see Miss Frere's "Old Deccan Days"

(p. 171), and Giles's "Strange Stories," &c. (p. 430), where the young lady says to Ma, "You often asked me for money; but on account of your weak luck I hitherto refrained from giving it."

[FN#150] True to life in the present day, as many a standing hay-rick has shown.

[FN#151] The "Munajjim" is a recognised authority in Egyptian townlets, and in the village republics of Southern India the "Jyoshi" is one of the paid officials.

[FN#152] Arab. "Amin" sub. and adj. In India it means a Government employe who collects revenue; in Marocco a commissioner sent by His Sharifian Majesty.

[FN#153] Our older word for divers=Arab "Ghawwasun": a single pearl (in the text Jauhar=the Port. AIjofar) is called "habbah"=grain or seed.

[FN#154] The kindly and generous deed of one Moslem to another, and by no means rare in real life.

[FN#155] "Eunuch," etymologically meaning chamberlain ( + ), a bed-chamber-servant or slave, was presently confined to castrated men found useful for special purposes, like gelded horses, hounds, and c.o.c.kerels turned to capons. Some writers hold that the creation of the semivir or apocopus began as a punishment in Egypt and elsewhere; and so under the Romans amputation of the "peccant part" was frequent: others trace the Greek "invalid," i.e., impotent man, to marital jealousy, and not a few to the wife who wished to use the s.e.xless for hard work in the house without danger to the slave-girls. The origin of the mutilation is referred by Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus (lib. iv. chap.

17), and the Cla.s.sics generally, to Semiramis, an "ancient queen"

of decidedly doubtful epoch, who thus prevented the propagation of weaklings. But in Genesis (x.x.xvii. 36; x.x.xix. 1, margin) we find Potiphar termed a "Sarim" (castrato), an "extenuating circ.u.mstance" for Mrs. P. Herodotus (iii. chap. 48) tells us that Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent three hundred Corcyrean boys to Alyattes for castration , and that Panionios of Chios sold caponised lads for high prices (viii. 105): he notices (viii. 104 and other places) that eunuchs "of the Sun, of Heaven, of the hand of G.o.d," were looked upon as honourable men amongst the Persians whom Stepha.n.u.s and Brissonius charge with having invented the name (Dabistan i. 171). Ctesias also declares that the Persian kings were under the influence of eunuchs. In the debauched ages of Rome the women found a new use for these effeminates, who had lost only the testes or testiculi=the witnesses (of generative force): it is noticed by Juvenal (i. 22; ii. 365-379; vi. 366)

--sunt quos imbelles et mollia semper Oscula delectant.

So Martial,

--vult futui Gallia, non parere,

And Mirabeau knew (see Kadisah) "qu'ils mordent les femmes et les liment avec une precieuse continuite." (Compare my vol. ii. 90; v. 46.) The men also used them as catamites (Horace i. Od.

x.x.xvii.).

"Contaminato c.u.m grege turpium, Morbo virorum."

In religion the intestabilis or intestatus was held ill-omened, and not permitted to become a priest (Seneca Controv. ii. 4), a practice perpetuated in the various Christian churches. The manufacture was forbidden, to the satisfaction of Martial, by Domitian, whose edict Nero confirmed; and was restored by the Byzantine empire, which advanced eunuchs, like Eutropius and Na.r.s.es, to the highest dignities of the realm. The cruel custom to the eternal disgrace of mediaeval Christianity was revived in Rome for providing the choirs in the Sistine Chapel and elsewhere with boys' voices. Isaiah mentions the custom (Ivi. 3-6).

Mohammed, who notices in the Koran (xxiv. 31), "such men as attend women and have no need of women," i.e., "have no natural force," expressly forbade (iv. 118), "changing Allah's creatures," referring, say the commentators, to superst.i.tious earcropping of cattle, tattooing, teeth-sharpening, sodomy, tribadism, and slave-gelding. See also the "Hidayah," vol. iv.

121; and the famous divine AI-Siyuti, the last of his school, wrote a tractate Fi 'I-Tahrimi Khidmati 'I-Khisyan=on the illegality of using eunuchs. Yet the Harem perpetuated the practice throughout AI-Islam and African jealousy made a gross abuse of it. To quote no other instance, the Sultan of Dar-For had a thousand eunuchs under a Malik or king, and all the chief offices of the empire, such as Ab (father) and Bab (door), were monopolised by these neutrals. The centre of supply was the Upper Nile, where the operation was found dangerous after the age of fifteen, and when badly performed only one in four survived. For this reason, during the last century the Coptic monks of Girgah and Zawy al-Dayr, near a.s.siout, engaged in this scandalous traffic, and declared that it was philanthropic to operate scientifically (Prof. Panuri and many others). Eunuchs are now made in the Sudan, Nubia, Abyssinia, Kordofan, and Dar-For, especially the Messalmiyah district: one of those towns was called "Tawashah" (eunuchry) from the traffic there conducted by f.u.kaha or religious teachers. Many are supplied by the district between Majarah (Majarash?) and the port Masawwah; there are also depots at Mbadr, near Tajurrah-harbour, where Yusuf Bey, Governor in 1880, caponised some forty boys, including the brother of a hostile African chief: here also the well-known Abu Bakr was scandalously active. It is calculated that not less than eight thousand of these unfortunates are annually exported to Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey. Article IV. of the AngIo-Egyptian Convention punishes the offense with death, and no one would object to hanging the murderer under whose mutilating razor a boy dies. Yet this, like most of our modern "improvements" in Egypt, is a mere brutum fulmen. The crime is committed under our very eyes, but we will not see it.

The Romans numbered three kinds of eunuchs:--1. Castrati, clean-shaved, from Gr. ; 2. Spadones, from , when the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es are torn out, not from "Spada," town of Persia; and, 3.

Thlibii, from , to press, squeeze, when the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es are bruised, &c. In the East also, as I have stated (v. 46), eunuchs are of three kinds:--1. Sandali, or the clean-shaved, the cla.s.sical apocopus. The parts are swept off by a single cut of a razor, a tube (tin or wooden) is set in the urethra, the wound is cauterised with boiling oil, and the patient is planted in a fresh dunghill. His diet is milk; and if under p.u.b.erty, he often survives. This is the eunuque aqueduc, who must pa.s.s his water through a tube. 2. The eunuch whose p.e.n.i.s is removed: he retains all the power of copulation and procreation without the wherewithal; and this, since the discovery of caoutchouc, has often been supplied. 3. The eunuch, or cla.s.sical Thlibias and Semivir, who has been rendered s.e.xless by removing the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es (as the priests of Cybele were castrated with a stone knife), or by bruising (the Greek Thlasias), twisting, searing, or bandaging them. A more humane process has lately been introduced: a horsehair is tied round the neck of the s.c.r.o.t.u.m and tightened by slow degrees till the circulation of the part stops and the bag drops off without pain. This has been adopted in sundry Indian regiments of Irregular Cavalry, and it succeeded admirably: the animals rarely required a day's rest. The practice was known to the ancients. See notes on Kadisah in Mirabeau. The Eunuchata virgo was invented by the Lydians, according to their historian Xanthus. Zachias (Quaest. medico-legal.) declares that the process was one of infibulation or simple sewing up the v.u.l.v.a; but modern experience has suggested an operation like the "spaying" of b.i.t.c.hes, or mutilation of the womb, in modern euphuism "baby-house." Dr. Robert ("Journey from Delhi to Bombay, Muller's Archiv. 1843") speaks of a eunuch'd woman who after ovariotomy had no b.r.e.a.s.t.s, no p.u.b.es, no rotundities, and no desires. The Australians practice exsection of the ovaries systematically to make women barren. Miklucho Maclay learned from the traveller Retsch that about Lake Parapitshurie men's urethras were split, and the girls were spayed: the latter showing two scars in the groin. They have flat bosoms, but feminine forms, and are slightly bearded; they mix with the men, whom they satisfy mechanically, but without enjoyment (?). MacGillivray, of the "Rattlesnake," saw near Cape York a woman with these scars: she was a surdo-mute, and had probably been spayed to prevent increase. The old Scandinavians, from Norway to Iceland, systematically gelded "st.u.r.dy vagrants" in order that they might not beget b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. The Hottentots before marriage used to cut off the left t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e, meaning by such semi-castration to prevent the begetting of twins. This curious custom, mentioned by the Jesuit Tochard, Boeving, and Kolbe, is now apparently obsolete-- at least, the traveller Fritsch did not find it.

[FN#156] Arab. "Haram"="forbidden," sinful.

[FN#157] In Chavis and Cazotte, who out-galland'd Galland in transmogrifying the Arabic, this is the "Story of Illage (AI-Hajj) Mahomet and his sons; or, the Imprudent Man." The tale occurs in many forms and with great modifications. See, for instance, the Gesta Romanorum "Of the miraculous recall of sinners and of the consolation which piety offers to the distressed," the adventures of the knight Placidus, vol. ii. 99.

Charles Swan, London. Rivington, 1824.

[FN#158] i.e. For fear of the "eye"; see vol. i. 123 and pa.s.sim.

In these days the practice is rare; but, whenever you see at Cairo an Egyptian dame daintily dressed and leading by the hand a grimy little boy whose eyes are black with flies and whose dress is torn and unclean, you see what has taken its place. And if you would praise the brat you must not say "Oh, what a pretty boy!"

but "Inshallah!"--the Lord doth as he pleaseth.

[FN#159] The adoption of slave lads and la.s.ses was and is still common among Moslems.

[FN#160] I have elsewhere noted this "pathetic fallacy" which is a lieu commun of Eastern folk-lore and not less frequently used in the mediaeval literature of Europe before statistics were invented.

[FN#161] Arab. "Yaskut min 'Aynayh," lit.=fall from his two eyes, lose favour.

[FN#162] i.e. killing a man.

[FN#163] i.e. we can slay him whenever we will.

[FN#164] In Chavis and Cazotte "Story of Abosaber the Patient."

"Abu-Sabir" would mean "Father of the Patient (one)."

[FN#165] Arab. "Dihkan," in Persian a villager; but here something more, a villageelder or chief. AI-Mas'udi (chap.

xxiv.), and other historians apply the term to a cla.s.s of n.o.ble Persians descended from the ten sons of Wahkert, the first,"Dihkan," the fourth generation from King Kayomars.

[FN#166] Reminding one not a little of certain anecdotes anent Quakers, current in England and English-speaking lands.

[FN#167] Arab. "Karyah," a word with a long history. The root seems to be Karaha, he met; in Chald. Karih and Karia (emphatic Karita)=a town or city; and in Heb. Kirjath, Kiryathayim, etc. We find it in Carthage= Karta hadisah, or New Town as opposed to Utica (Atikah)=Old Town; in Carchemish and in a host of similar compounds. In Syria and Egypt Kariyah, like Kafr, now means a hamlet, a village.

[FN#168] i.e. wandering at a venture.

[FN#169] Arab. "Sakhrah," the old French Corvee, and the "Begar"

of India.

[FN#170] Arab. "Matmurah:" see vol. ii. 39, where it was used as an "underground cell." The word is extensively used in the Maghrib or Western Africa.

[FN#171] Arab. "Ya Aba Sabir." There are five vocative particles in Arabic; "Ya," common to the near and far; "Aya" (ho!) and "Haya" (holla!) addressed to the far, and "Ay" and "A"

(A-'Abda-llahi, O Abdullah), to those near. All govern the accusative of a noun in construction in the literary language only; and the vulgar use none but the first named. The English-speaking races neglect the vocative particle, and I never heard it except in the Southern States of the AngloAmerican Union=Oh, Mr. Smith.

[FN#172] He was not honest enough to undeceive them; a neat Quaker-like touch.

[FN#173] Here the oath is justified; but the reader will have remarked that the name of Allah is often taken in vain. Moslems, however, so far from holding this a profanation deem it an acknowledgment of the Omnipotence and Omnipresence. The Jews from whom the Christians have borrowed had an interest in concealing the name of their tribal divinity; and therefore made it ineffable.

[FN#174] i.e. the grave, the fosse commune of slain men.

[FN#175] A fancy name; "Zawash" in Pers. is = the planet Jupiter, either borrowed from Greece, or both descended from some long forgotten ancestor.

[FN#176] In Chavis and Cazotte "Story of Bhazad (!) the Impatient." The name is Persian, Bih (well, good) Zad (born). In the adj. bih we recognize a positive lost in English and German which retain the comparative (bih-tar = better) and superlative (bih-tarin=best).

[FN#177] i.e. the moiety kept by the bridegroom, a contingent settlement paid at divorce or on the death of the husband.

[FN#178] Arab. "Rumh"=the horseman's lance not the footman's spear.

[FN#179] i.e. became a highwayman (a time-honoured and honourable career) in order to collect money for completing the dowry.

[FN#180] i.e. to the bride, the wedding-day; not to be confounded with "going in unto" etc.

[FN#181] Probably meaning that she saw the eyes espying through the crevice without knowing whose they were.