One Thousand and One Nights
Page 943
(Lane); but, “a curious chance befel him.”
207 Arab. “Harбmi,” lit. = one who lives on unlawful gains; popularly a thief.
208 i.e. he turned on the water, hot and cold.
209 Men are often seen doing this in the Hammam. The idea is that the skin when free from sebaceous exudation sounds louder under the clapping. Easterns judge much by the state of the perspiration, especially in horse-training, which consists of hand-gallops for many successive miles. The sweat must not taste over salt and when held between thumb and forefinger and the two are drawn apart must not adhere in filaments.
210 Lit. “Aloes for making Nadd;” see vol. i. 310. “Eagle-wood” (the Malay Aigla and Agallochum the Sansk. Agura) gave rise to many corruptions as lignum aloes, the Portuguese Pбo d’ Aguila etc. “Calamba” or “Calambak” was the finest kind. See Colonel Yule in the “Voyage of Linschoten” (vol. i. 120 and 150). Edited for the Hakluyt Soc. (1885) by my learned and most amiable friend, the late Arthur Cooke Burnell.
211 The Hammam is one of those unpleasant things which are left “Alа jъdi-k” = to thy generosity; and the higher the bather’s rank the more he or she is expected to pay. See Pilgrimage i. 103. In 1853 I paid at Cairo 3 piastres and twenty paras, something more than sixpence, but now five shillings would be asked.
212 This is something like the mythical duchess in England who could not believe that the poor were starving when sponge-cakes were so cheap.
213 This magnificent “Bakhshish” must bring water into the mouths of all the bath-men in the coffee-house assembly.
214 i.e. the treasurer did not, as is the custom of such gentry, demand and receive a large “Bakhshish” on the occasion.
215 A fair specimen of clever Fellah chaff.
216 In the first room of the Hammam, called the Maslakh or stripping-place, the keeper sits by a large chest in which he deposits the purses and valuables of his customers and also makes it the caisse for the pay. Something of the kind is now done in the absurdly called “Turkish Baths” of London.
217 This is the rule in Egypt and Syria and a clout hung over the door shows that women are bathing. I have heard, but only heard, that in times and places when eunuchs went in with the women youths managed by long practice to retract the testicles so as to pass for castratos. It is hard to say what perseverance may not effect in this line; witness Orsini and his abnormal development of hearing, by exercising muscles which are usually left idle.
218 This reference to Allah shows that Abu Sir did not believe his dyer-friend.
219 Arab. “Dawб” (lit. remedy, medicine) the vulgar term: see vol. iv. 256: also called Rasmah, Nъrah and many other names.
220 Arab. “Mб Kahara-nн” = or none hath overcome me.
221 Bresl. Edit. “The King of Isbбniya.” For the “Ishbбn” (Spaniards) an ancient people descended from Japhet son of Noah and who now are no more, see Al-Mas’udi (Fr. Transl. I. 361). The “Herodotus of the Arabs” recognises only the “Jalбlikah” or Gallicians, thus bearing witness to the antiquity and importance of the Gallego race.
222 Arab. “Sha’r,” properly, hair of body, pile, especially the pecten. See Burckhardt (Prov. No. 202), “grieving for lack of a cow she made a whip of her bush,” said of those who console themselves by building Castles in Spain. The “parts below the waist” is the decent Turkish term for the privities.
223 The drowning is a martyr’s death, the burning is a foretaste of Hell-fire.
224 Meaning that if the trick had been discovered the Captain would have taken the barber’s place. We have seen (vol. i. 63) the Prime Minister superintending the royal kitchen and here the Admiral fishes for the King’s table. It is even more naпve than the Court of Alcinцus.
225 Bresl. Edit. xi. 32: i.e. save me from disgrace.
226 Arab. “Khinsir” or “Khinsar,” the little finger or the middle finger. In Arabic each has its own name or names which is also that of the corresponding toe, e.g. Ibhбm (thumb); Sabbбbah, Musabbah or Da’бah (fore-finger); Wastб (medius); Binsir (annularis ring-finger) and Khinsar (minimus). There are also names for the several spaces between the fingers. See the English Arabic Dictionary (London, Kegan Paul and Co., 1881) by the Revd. Dr. Badger, a work of immense labour and research but which I fear has been to the learned author a labour of love not of profit.
227 Meaning of course that the King signed towards the sack in which he supposed the victim to be, but the ring fell off before it could take effect. The Eastern story-teller often balances his multiplicity of words and needless details by a conciseness and an elliptical style which make his meaning a matter of divination.
228 See vol. v. 111.
229 This couplet was quoted to me by my friend the Rev. Dr. Badger when he heard that I was translating “The Nights”: needless to say that it is utterly inappropriate.
230 For a similar figure see vol i. 25.
231 Arab. “Hanzal”: see vol. v. 19.
232 The tale begins upon the model of “Jъdar and his Brethren,” vi. 213. Its hero’s full name is Abdu’llбhi=Slave of Allah, which vulgar Egyptians pronounce Abdallah and purer speakers, Badawin and others, Abdullah: either form is therefore admissible. It is more common among Moslems but not unknown to Christians especially Syrians who borrow it from the Syriac Alloh. Mohammed is said to have said, “The names most approved by Allah are Abdu’llah, Abd al-Rahmбn (Slave of the Compassionate) and such like” (Pilgrimage i. 20).
233 Arab. “Sнrah” here probably used of the Nile-sprat (Clupea Sprattus Linn.) or Sardine of which Forsk says, “Sardinn in Al-Yaman is applied to a Red Sea fish of the same name.” Hasselquist the Swede notes that Egyptians stuff the Sardine with marjoram and eat it fried even when half putrid.
234 i.e. by declaring in the Koran (lxvii. 14; lxxiv. 39; lxxviii. 69; lxxxviii. 17), that each creature hath its appointed term and lot; especially “Thinketh man that he shall be left uncared for?” (xl. 36).
235 Arab. “Nusf,” see vol. ii. 37.
236 Arab. “Allah Karim” (which Turks pronounce Kyerнm) a consecrated formula used especially when a man would show himself resigned to “small mercies.” The fisherman’s wife was evidently pious as she was poor; and the description of the pauper household is simple and effective.
237 This is repeated in the Mac. Edit. p-97; an instance amongst many of most careless editing.
238 Arab. “Alа mahlak” (vulg.), a popular phrase, often corresponding with our “Take it coolly.”
239 For “He did not keep him waiting, as he did the rest of the folk.” Lane prefers “nor neglected him as men generally would have done.” But we are told supra that the baker “paid no heed to the folk by reason of the dense crowd.”
240 Arab. “Ruh!” the most abrupt form, whose sound is coarse and offensive as the Turkish yell, “Gyel!”=come here.
241 Bresl. Edit. xi. 50-51.
242 Arab. “Бdami”=an Adamite, one descended from the mythical and typical Adam for whom see Philo Judжus. We are told in one place a few lines further on that the merman is of humankind; and in another that he is a kind of fish (Night dccccxlv). This belief in mermen, possible originating with the caricatures of the human face in the intelligent seal and stupid manatee, is universal. Al-Kazwini declares that a waterman with a tail was dried and exhibited, and that in Syria one of them was married to a woman and had by her a son “who understood the languages of both his parents.” The fable was refined to perfect beauty by the Greeks: the mer-folk of the Arabs, Hindus and Northerners (Scandinavians, etc) are mere grotesques with green hair, etc. Art in its highest expression never left the shores of the Mediterranean, and there is no sign that it ever will.
243 Here Lane translates “Wajh” lit. “the desire of seeing the face of God,” and explains in a note that a “Muslim holds this to be the greatest happiness that can be enjoyed in Paradise.” But I have noted that the tenet of seeing the countenance of the Creator, except by the eyes of spirit, is a much disputed p
oint amongst Moslems.
244 Artful enough is this contrast between the squalid condition of the starving fisherman and the gorgeous belongings of the Merman.
245 Lit. “Verily he laughed at me so that I set him free.”
This is a fair specimen of obscure conciseness.
246 Arab. “Mishannah,” which Lane and Payne translate basket: I have always heard it used of an old gunny-bag or bag of plaited palm-leaves.
247 Arab. “Kaff Shurayk” applied to a single bun. The Shurayk is a bunn, an oblong cake about the size of a man’s hand (hence the term “Kaff”=palm) with two long cuts and sundry oblique crosscuts, made of leavened dough, glazed with egg and Samn (clarified butter) and flavoured with spices (cinnamon, curcuma, artemisia and prunes mahalab) and with aromatic seeds, (Rihat al-’ajin) of which Lane (iii. 641) specifies aniseed, nigella, absinthium, (Artemisia arborescens) and Kбfъrah (A. camphorata Monspeliensis) etc. The Shurayk is given to the poor when visiting the tombs and on certain fкtes.
248 “Mother of Prosperities.”
249 Tribes of pre-historic Arabs who were sent to Hell for bad behaviour to Prophets Sбlih and Hъd. See vol. iii. 294.
250 “Too much for him to come by lawfully.”
251 To protect it. The Arab. is “Jбh”=high station, dignity.
252 The European reader, especially feminine, will think this a hard fate for the pious first wife but the idea would not occur to the Moslem mind. After bearing ten children a woman becomes “Umm al-banбti w’al-banнn”=a mother of daughters and sons, and should hold herself unfit for love-disport. The seven ages of womankind are thus described by the Arabs and I translate the lines after a well-known (Irish) model: —
From ten years to twenty —
Of beauty there’s plenty.
From twenty to thirty —
Fat, fair and alert t’ye.
From thirty to forty —
Lads and lasses she bore t’ye.
From forty to fifty —
An old’un and shifty.
From fifty to sixty —
A sorrow that sticks t’ye.
From sixty to seventy —
A curse of God sent t’ye.
For these and other sentiments upon the subject of women and marriage see Pilgrimage ii. 285-87.
253 Abdullah, as has been said, means “servant or rather slave of Allah.”
254 Again the “Come to my arms, my slight acquaintance,” of the Anti-Jacobin.
255 Arab. “Nukl,” e.g. the quatre mendiants as opposed to “Fбkihah”=fresh fruit. The Persians, a people who delight in gross practical jokes, get the confectioner to coat with sugar the droppings of sheep and goats and hand them to the bulk of the party. This pleasant confection is called “Nukl-i-peshkil” — dung-dragйes.
256 The older name of Madнnat al-Nabi, the city of the Prophet; vulg. called Al-Medinah per excellentiam. See vol. iv. 114. In the Mac. and Bul. texts we have “Tayyibah”=the goodly, one of the many titles of that Holy City: see Pilgrimage ii. 119.
257 Not “visiting the tomb of,” etc. but visiting the Prophet himself, who is said to have declared that “Ziyбrah” (visitation) of his tomb was in religion the equivalent of a personal call upon himself.
258 Arab. “Nafakah”; for its conditions see Pigrimage iii. 224. I have again and again insisted upon the Anglo-Indian Government enforcing the regulations of the Faith upon pauper Hindi pilgrims who go to the Moslem Holy Land as beggars and die of hunger in the streets. To an “Empire of Opinion” this is an unmitigated evil (Pilgrimage iii. 256); and now, after some thirty-four years, there are signs that the suggestions of common sense are to be adopted. England has heard of the extraordinary recklessness and inconsequence of the British-Indian “fellow- subject.”
259 The Ka’abah of Meccah.
260 When Moslems apply “Nabн!” to Mohammed it is in the peculiar sense of “prophet” ({prophйtes})=one who speaks before the people, not one who predicts, as such foresight was adjured by the Apostle. Dr. A. Neubauer (The Athenжum No. 3031) finds the root of “Nabн!” in the Assyrian Nabu and Heb. Noob (occurring in Exod. vii. 1. “Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet.” i.e. orator, speaker before the people), and holds it to be a Canaanite term which supplanted “Roeh” (the Seer) e.g. 1 Samuel ix. 9. The learned Hebraist traces the cult of Nebo, a secondary deity in Assyria to Palestine and Phњnicia, Palmyra, Edessa (in the Nebok of Abgar) and Hierapolis in Syria or Mabug (Nabog?).
261 I cannot find “Dandбn” even in Lib. Quintus de Aquaticis Animalibus of the learned Sam. Bochart’s “Hierozoпcon” (London, 1663) and must conjecture that as “Dandбn” in Persian means a tooth (vol. ii. 83) the writer applied it to a sun-fish or some such well-fanged monster of the deep.
262 A favourite proverb with the Fellah, when he alludes to the Pasha and to himself.
263 An euphemistic answer, unberufen as the Germans say.
264 It is a temptation to derive this word from bВњuf а l’eau, but I fear that the theory will not hold water. The “buffaloes” of Alexandria laughted it to scorn.
265 Here the writer’s zoological knowledge is at fault. Animals, which never or very rarely see man, have no fear of him whatever. This is well-known to those who visit the Gull-fairs at Ascension Island, Santos and many other isolated rocks; the hen birds will peck at the intruder’s ankles but they do not rise from off their eggs. For details concerning the “Gull-fair” of the Summer Islands consult “The History of the Bermudas,” edited by Sir J. H. Lefroy for the Hakluyt Society, 1882. I have seen birds on Fernando Po peak quietly await a second shot; and herds of antelopes, the most timed of animals, in the plains of Somali-land only stared but were not startled by the report of the gun. But Arabs are not the only moralists who write zoological nonsense: witness the notable verse,
“Birds in their little nests agree,”
when the feathered tribes are the most pugnacious of breathing beings.
266 Lane finds these details “silly and tiresome or otherwise objectionable,” and omits them.
267 Meaning, “Thou hast as yet seen little or nothing.” In most Eastern tongues a question often expresses an emphatic assertion. See vol. i. 37.
268 Easterns wear as a rule little clothing but it suffices for the essential purposes of decency and travellers will live amongst them for years without once seeing an accidental “exposure of the person.” In some cases, as with the Nubian thong-apron, this demand of modesty requires not a little practice of the muscles; and we all know the difference in a Scotch kilt worn by a Highlander and a cockney sportsman.
269 Arab. “Shнraj”=oil extracted from rape seed but especially from sesame. The Persians pronounce it “Sнraj” (apparently unaware that it is their own word “Shнrah”=juice in Arabic garb) and have coined a participle “Musayrij” e.g., Bъ-i- musayrij, taint of sesame-oil applied especially to the Jews who very wisely prefer, in Persia and elsewhere, oil which is wholesome to butter which is not. The Moslems, however, declare that its immoderate use in cooking taints the exudations of the skin.
270 Arab. “Nakkбrъn” probably congeners of the redoubtable
“Dandбn.”
271 Bresl. Edit. xi. 78. The Mac. says “They are all fish”
(Kullu-hum) and the Bul. “Their food (aklu-hum) is fish.”
272 Arab. “Az’ar,” usually=having thin hair. The general term for tailless is “abtar.” See Koran cviii. 3, when it means childless.
273 A common formula of politeness.
274 Bresl. Edit. xi. 82; meaning, “You will probably keep it for yourself.” Abdullah of the Sea is perfectly logical; but grief is not. We weep over the deaths of friends mostly for our own sake: theoretically we should rejoice that they are at rest; but practically we are afflicted by the thought that we shall never again see their pleasant faces.
275 i.e. about rejoicing over the newborns and mourning over the dead.
276 i.e. Ishak of Mosul, for whom see vol. iv. 119. The
277 Abu Dalaf al-Ijili, a well-known soldier equally famed for liberality and culture.
278 Arab. “Takhmнsh,” alluding to the familiar practice of tearing face and hair in grief for a loss, a death, etc.
279 i.e. When he is in the very prime of life and able to administer fiers coups de canif.
“For ladies e’en of most uneasy virtue
Prefer a spouse whose age is short of thirty.”
Don Juan 1. 62.
280 Arab. “Lбzuward”: see vol. iii. 33.
281 Arab. “Sidillah.” The Bresl. Edit. (v. 99), has, “a couch of ivory and ebony, whereon was that which befitted it of mattresses and cushions * * * * and on it five damsels.”
282 i.e. As she untunes the lute by “pinching” the strings over-excitedly with her right, her other hand retunes it by turning the pegs.
283 i.e. The slim cupbearer (Zephyr) and fair-faced girl
(Moon) handed round the bubbling bowl (star).
284 Arab. “Al-Sath” whence the Span. Azotea. The lines that follow are from the Bresl. Edit. v. 110.
285 This “‘Ar’ar” is probably the Callitris quadrivalvis whose resin (“Sandarac”) is imported as varnish from African Mogador to England. Also called the Thuja, it is of cypress shape, slow growing and finely veined in the lower part of the base. Most travellers are agreed that it is the Citrus-tree of Roman Mauritania, concerning which Pliny (xiii. 29) gives curious details, a single table costing from a million sesterces (ВЈ900) to 1,400,000. For other details see , “Morocco and the Moors,” by my late friend Dr. Leared (London: Sampson Low, 1876).
286 i.e. Kings might sigh for her in vain.
287 These lines are in vol. viii. 279. I quote Mr. Payne.
288 A most unsavoury comparison to a Persian who always connects camphor with the idea of a corpse.
289 Arab. “Ilа mб shбa’ llбh” i.e. as long as you like.
290 i.e. of gramarye.
291 Arab. “Ta’wнz”=the Arab Tilasm, our Talisman, a charm, an amulet; and in India mostly a magic square. The subject is complicated and occupies in Herklots some sixty pages, 222-284.