The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night Volume I Part 29

[FN#463] It was famous in the middle ages, and even now it is, perhaps, the most interesting to travellers after that "Sentina Gentium," the "Bhendi Bazar" of unromantic Bombay.

[FN#464] "The Gate of the Gardens," in the northern wall, a Roman archway of the usual solid construction shaming not only our modern shams, but our finest masonry.

[FN#465] Arab. "Al-Asr," which may mean either the hour or the prayer. It is also the moment at which the Guardian Angels relieve each other (Sale's Koran, chapt. v.).

[FN#466] Arab. "Ya haza" = O this (one)! a somewhat slighting address equivalent to "Heus tu! O thou, whoever thou art."

Another form is "Ya hu" = O he! Can this have originated Swift's "Yahoo"?

[FN#467] Alluding to the {Greek Letters} ("minor miracles which cause surprise") performed by Saints' tombs, the mildest form of thaumaturgy. One of them gravely recorded in the Dabistan (ii.

226) is that of the holy Jamen, who opened the Samran or bead- bracelet from the arm of the beautiful Chistapa with member erect, "thus evincing his manly strength and his command over himself"(!)

[FN#468] The River of Paradise, a lieu commun of poets (Koran, chapt. cviii.): the water is whiter than milk or silver, sweeter than honey, smoother than cream, more odorous than musk; its banks are of chrysolite and it is drunk out of silver cups set around it thick as stars. Two pipes conduct it to the Prophet's Pond which is an exact square, one month's journey in compa.s.s.

Kausar is spirituous like wine; Salsabil sweet like clarified honey; the Fount of Mildness is like milk and the Fount of Mercy like liquid crystal.

[FN#469] The Moslem does not use the European basin because water which has touched an impure skin becomes impure. Hence it is poured out from a ewer ("ibrik" Pers. Abriz) upon the hands and falls into a basin ("tisht") with an open-worked cover.

[FN#470] Arab. "Wahsh," a word of many meanings; nasty, insipid, savage, etc. The offside of a horse is called Wahs.h.i.+ opposed to Insi, the near side. The Amir Taymur ("Lord Iron") whom Europeans unwittingly call after his Persian enemies' nickname, "Tamerlane," i.e. Taymur-I-lang, or limping Taymur, is still known as "Al-Wahsh" (the wild beast) at Damascus, where his Tartars used to bury men up to their necks and play at bowls with their heads for ninepins.

[FN#471] For "grandson" as being more affectionate. Easterns have not yet learned that clever Western saying:--The enemies of our enemies are our friends.

[FN#472] This was a simple bastinado on the back, not the more ceremonious affair of beating the feet-soles. But it is surprising what the Egyptians can bear; some of the rods used in the time of the Mameluke Beys are nearly as thick as a man's wrist.

[FN#473] The woman-like spite of the eunuch intended to hurt the grandmother's feelings.

[FN#474] The usual Cairene "chaff."

[FN#475] A necessary precaution against poison (Pilgrimage i. 84, and iii. 43).

[FN#476] The Bresl. Edit. (ii. 108) describes the scene at greater length.

[FN#477] The Bul. Edit. gives by mistake of diacritical points, "Zabdaniyah:" Raydaniyah is or rather was a camping ground to the North of Cairo.

[FN#478] Arab. "La'abat" = a plaything, a puppet, a lay figure.

Lane (i. 326) conjectures that the cross is so called because it resembles a man with arms extended. But Moslems never heard of the fanciful ideas of mediaeval Christian divines who saw the cross everywhere and in everything. The former hold that Pharaoh invented the painful and ignominious punishment. (Koran, chapt.

vii.).

[FN#479] Here good blood, driven to bay, speaks out boldly. But, as a rule, the humblest and mildest Eastern when in despair turns round upon his oppressors like a wild cat. Some of the criminals whom Fath Ali Shah of Persia put to death by chopping down the fork, beginning at the s.c.r.o.t.u.m, abused his mother till the knife reached their vitals and they could no longer speak.

[FN#480] These repeated "laughs" prove the trouble of his spirit.

n.o.ble Arabs "show their back-teeth" so rarely that their laughter is held worthy of being recorded by their biographers.

[FN#481] A popular phrase, derived from the Koranic "Truth is come, and falsehood is vanished: for falsehood is of short continuance" (chapt. xvii.). It is an equivalent of our adaptation from 1 Esdras iv. 41, "Magna est veritas et praevalebit." But the great question still remains, What is Truth?

[FN#482] In Night lxxv. these lines will occur with variants.

[FN#483] This is always mentioned: the nearer seat the higher the honour.

[FN#484] Alluding to the phrase "Al-safar zafar" = voyaging is victory (Pilgrimage i., 127).

[FN#485] Arab. "Habb;" alluding to the black drop in the human heart which the Archangel Gabriel removed from Mohammed by opening his breast.

[FN#486] This phrase, I have said, often occurs: it alludes to the horripilation (Arab. Kush'arirah), horror or gooseflesh which, in Arab as in Hindu fables, is a symptom of great joy. So Boccaccio's "pelo arriciato" v., 8: Germ. Gansehaut.

[FN#487] Arab. "Hasanta ya Hasan" = Bene detto, Benedetto! the usual word-play vulgarly called "pun": Hasan (not Ha.s.san, as we will write it) meaning "beautiful."

[FN#488] Arab. "Loghah" also = a vocabulary, a dictionary; the Arabs had them by camel-loads.

[FN#489] The seventh of the sixteen "Bahr" (metres) in Arabic prosody; the easiest because allowing the most license and, consequently, a favourite for didactic, homiletic and gnomic themes. It means literally "agitated" and was originally applied to the rude song of the Cameleer. De Sacy calls this doggrel "the poet's a.s.s" (Torrens, Notes xxvi.). It was the only metre in which Mohammed the Apostle ever spoke: he was no poet (Koran x.x.xvi., 69) but he occasionally recited a verse and recited it wrongly (Dabistan iii., 212). In Persian prosody Rajaz is the seventh of nineteen and has six distinct varieties (pp. 79-81), "Gladwin's Dissertations on Rhetoric," etc. Calcutta, 1801). I shall have more to say about it in the Terminal Essay.

[FN#490] "Her stature tall--I hate a dumpy woman" (Don Juan).

[FN#491] A worthy who was Kazi of Kufah (Cufa) in the seventh century. Al-Najaf, generally ent.i.tled "Najaf al-Ashraf" (the Venerand) is the place where Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed, lies or is supposed to lie buried, and has ever been a holy place to the s.h.i.+'ahs. I am not certain whether to translate "Sa'alab"

by fox or jackal; the Arabs make scant distinction between them.

"Abu Hosayn" (Father of the Fortlet) is certainly the fox, and as certainly "Sha'arhar" is the jackal from the Pehlevi s.h.a.gal or s.h.a.ghal.

[FN#492] Usually by all manner of extortions and robbery, corruption and bribery, the ruler's motto being

Fiat injust.i.tia ruat Coelum.

There is no more honest man than the Turkish peasant or the private soldier; but the process of deterioration begins when he is made a corporal and culminates in the Pasha. Moreover official dishonesty is permitted by public opinion, because it belongs to the condition of society. A man buys a place (as in England two centuries ago) and retains it by presents to the heads of offices. Consequently he must recoup himself in some way, and he mostly does so by grinding the faces of the poor and by spoiling the widow and the orphan. The radical cure is high pay; but that phase of society refuses to afford it.

[FN#493] Arab. "Malik" (King) and "Malak" (angel) the words being written the same when lacking vowels and justifying the jingle.

[FN #494] Arab. "Hurr"; the Latin "ingenuus," lit. freeborn; metaph. n.o.ble as opp. to a slave who is not expected to do great or good deeds. In pop. use it corresponds, like "Fata," with our "gentleman."

[FN#495] This is one of the best tales for humour and movement, and Douce and Madden show what a rich crop of fabliaux, whose leading incident was the disposal of a dead body, it produced.

[FN#496] Other editions read, "at Ba.s.sorah" and the Bresl. (ii.

123) "at Ba.s.sorah and Kajkar" (Kashghar): somewhat like in Dover and Sebastopol. I prefer China because further off and making the improbabilities more notable.

[FN#497] Arab. "Judri," lit. "small stones" from the hard gravelly feeling of the pustules (Rodwell, p. 20). The disease is generally supposed to be the growth of Central Africa where it is still a plague and pa.s.sed over to Arabia about the birth-time of Mohammed. Thus is usually explained the "war of the elephant"

(Koran, chaps. cv.) when the Abyssinian army of Abrahah, the Christian, was destroyed by swallows (Ababil which Major Price makes the plural of Abilah = a vesicle) which dropped upon them "stones of baked clay," like vetches (Pilgrimage ii. 175). See for details Sale (in loco) who seems to accept the miraculous defence of the Ka'abah. For the horrors of small-pox in Central Intertropical Africa the inoculation, known also to the Badawin of Al-Hijaz and other details, readers will consult "The Lake Regions of Central Africa" (ii. 318). The Hindus "take the bull by the horns" and boldly make "Sitla" (small-pox) a G.o.ddess, an incarnation of Bhawani, deess of destruction-reproduction. In China small-pox is believed to date from B.C. 1200; but the chronology of the Middle Kingdom still awaits the sceptic.

[FN#498] In Europe we should add "and all fled, especially the women." But the fatalism inherent in the Eastern mind makes the great difference.

[FN#499] Arab. "Uzayr." Esdras was a manner of Ripp van Winkle.

He was riding over the ruins of Jerusalem when it had been destroyed by the Chaldeans and he doubted by what means Allah would restore it; whereupon he died and at the end of a hundred years he revived. He found his basket of figs and cruse of wine as they were; but of his a.s.s only the bones remained. These were raised to life as Ezra looked on and the a.s.s began at once to bray. Which was a lesson to Esdras. (Koran, chaps. ii.) The oath by the a.s.s's hoofs is to ridicule the Jew. Mohammed seems to have had an idee fixe that "the Jews say, Ezra is the son of G.o.d"

(Koran ix.); it may have arisen from the heterodox Jewish belief that Ezra, when the Law was utterly lost, dictated the whole anew to the scribes of his own memory. His tomb with the huge green dome is still visited by the Jews of Baghdad.

[FN#500] Arab. "Badhanj," the Pers. Bad. (wind) -gir (catcher): a wooden pent-house on the terrace-roof universal in the nearer East.

[FN#501] The hunchback, in Arabia as in Southern Europe, is looked upon by the vulgar with fear and aversion. The reason is that he is usually sharper-witted than his neighbours.

[FN#502]Arab. "Ya Sattar" = Thou who veilest the discreditable secrets of Thy creatures.

[FN#503] Arab. "Nasrani," a follower of Him of Nazareth and an older name than "Christian" which (Acts xi., 26) was first given at Antioch about A.D. 43. The cry in Alexandria used to be "Ya Nasrani, Kalb awani!"=O Nazarene! O dog obscene! (Pilgrimage i., 160).). "Christian" in Arabic can be expressed only by "Masihi" = follower of the Messiah.

[FN#504] Arab. "Tasbih," = Saluting in the Subh (morning).