One Thousand and One Nights

by Richard Burton

  401 Arab. “Musáfahah” -. see vol. vi. 287.

  402 In the text, “To the palace of the king’s daughter.”

  403 Arab. “Marj Salí’” = cleft meadow (here and below). Mr. Payne suggests that this may be a mistranscription for Marj Salí’ (with a Sád) = a treeless champaign. It appears to me a careless blunder for the Marj akhzar (green meadow) before mentioned.

  404 The palace, even without especial and personal reasons, not being the place for a religious and scrupulous woman.

  405 “i.e. those of El Aziz, who had apparently entered the city or passed through it on their way to the camp of El Abbas.” This is Mr. Payne’s suggestion.

  406 Arab “Hatif”; gen. = an ally.

  407 Not wishing to touch the hand of a strange woman.

  408 i.e. a mere passer-by, a stranger; alluding to her taunt.

  409 The Bactrian or double-humped dromedary. See vol. iii. 67. Al-Mas’udi (vii. 169) calls it “Jamal fálij,” lit. = the palsy-camel.

  410 i.e. Stars and planets.

  411 i.e. Sang in tenor tones which are always in falsetto.

  412 Arab. Tahzíb = reforming morals, amending conduct, chastening style.

  413 i.e. so as to show only the whites, as happens to the “mesmerised.”

  414 i.e. for love of and longing for thy youth.

  415 i.e. leather from Al-Táif: see vol. viii. 303. The text has by mistake Tálifí.

  416 i.e. she was at her last breath, when cured by the magic of love.

  417 i.e. violateth my private apartment.

  418 The voice (Sházz) is left doubtful: it may be girl’s, nightingale’s, or dove’s.

  419 Arab. “Hibá” partly induced by the rhyme. In desert countries the comparison will be appreciated: in Sind the fine dust penetrates into a closed book.

  420 i.e. he smuggled it in under his ‘Abá-cloak: perhaps it was a better brand than that made in the monastery.

  421 i.e. the delights of Paradise promised by the Prophet.

  422 Again, “he” for “she,” making the lover’s address more courtly and delicate.

  423 i.e. take refuge with Allah from the evil eye of her charms.

  424 i.e. an thou prank or adorn thyself: I have translated literally, but the couplet strongly suggests “nonsense verses.”

  425 Arab. “Santír:” Lane (M.E., chapt. xviii.) describes it as resembling the Kanún (dulcimer or zither) but with two oblique peg-pieces instead of one and double chords of wire (not treble strings of lamb’s gut) and played upon with two sticks instead of the little plectra. Dozy also gives Santir from {psaltérion}, the Fsaltrún of Daniel.

  426 i.e. That which is ours shall be thine, and that which is incumbent on thee shall be incumbent on us = we will assume thy debts and responsibilities.

  427 This passage is sadly disjointed in the text: I have followed Mr. Payne’s ordering.

  428 The Arab of noble tribe is always the first to mount his own mare: he also greatly fears her being put out to full speed by a stranger, holding that this should be reserved for occasions of life and death; and that it can be done to perfection only once during the animal’s life.

  429 The red (Ahmar) dromedary like the white-red (Sabah) were most valued because they are supposed best to bear the heats of noon; and thus “red camels” is proverbially used for wealth. When the head of Abu Jahl was brought in after the Battle of Bedr, Mahommed exclaimed, “’Tis more acceptable to me than a red camel!”

  430 i.e. Couriers on dromedaries, the only animals used for sending messages over long distances.

  431 These guest-fires are famous in Arab poetry. So

  Al-Harírí (Ass. of Banu Haram) sings: —

  A beacon fire I ever kindled high;

  i.e. on the hill-tops near the camp, to guide benighted travellers. Also the Lamíyat al-Ajam says: —

  The fire of hospitality is ever lit on the high

  stations.

  This natural telegraph was used in a host of ways by the Arabs of The Ignorance; for instance, when a hated guest left the camp they lighted the “Fire of Rejection,” and cried, “Allah, bear him far from us!” Nothing was more ignoble than to quench such fire: hence in obloquy of the Fazár tribe it was said: —

  Ne’er trust Fazár with an ass, for they

  Once roasted ass-pizzle, the rabble rout:

  And, when sight they guest, to their dams they say,

  “Piss quick on the guest-fire and put it out!”

  (Al-Mas”udi vi. 140.)

  432 i.e. of rare wood, set with rubies.

  433 i.e. whose absence pained us.

  434 Mr. Payne and I have long puzzled over these enigmatical and possibly corrupt lines: he wrote to me in 1884, “This is the first piece that has beaten me.” In the couplet above (vol. xii. 230) “Rayhání” may mean “my basil-plant” or “my food” (the latter Koranic), “my compassion,” etc.; and Súsání is equally ancipitous “My lilies” or “my sleep”: see Bard al-Susan = les douceurs du sommeil in Al-Mas’údi vii. 168.

  435 The “Niká” or sand hill is the swell of the throat: the Ghaur or lowland is the fall of the waist: the flower is the breast anent which Mr. Payne appropriately quotes the well-known lines of Fletcher:

  “Hide, O hide those hills of snow,

  That thy frozen bosom bears,

  On whose tops the pinks that grow

  Are of those that April wears.”

  436 Easterns are right in regarding a sleepy languorous look as one of the charms of women, and an incitement to love because suggestive only of bed. Some men also find the same pleasure in a lacrymose expression of countenance, seeming always to call for consolation: one of the most successful women I know owes her exceptional good fortune to this charm.

  437 Arab. “Hájib,”eyebrow or chamberlain; see vol. iii. 233.

  The pun is classical used by a host of poets including Al-Harírí.

  438 Arab. “Tarfah.” There is a Tarfia Island in the Guadalquivir and in Gibraltar a “Tarfah Alto” opposed to “Tarfah bajo.” But it must not be confounded with Tarf = a side, found in the Maroccan term for “The Rock” Jabal al-Tarf = Mountain of the Point (of Europe).

  439 For Solomon and his flying carpet see vol. iii. 267.

  440 Arab. “Bilád al-Maghrib (al-Aksa,” in full) = the Farthest Land of the setting Sun, shortly called Al-Maghrib and the people “Maghribi.” The earliest occurrence of our name Morocco or Marocco I find in the “Marákiyah” of Al-Mas’udi (iii. 241), who apparently applies it to a district whither the Berbers migrated.

  441 The necklace-pearls are the cup-bearer’s teeth.

  442 In these unregenerate days they would often be summoned to the houses of the royal family; but now they had “got religion” and, becoming freed women, were resolved to be “respectable.” In not a few Moslem countries men of wealth and rank marry professional singers who, however loose may have been their artistic lives, mostly distinguish themselves by decency of behaviour often pushed to the extreme of rigour. Also jeune coquette, vieille dévote is a rule of the world, Eastern and Western.

  443 Bresl. Edit., vol. xii (Night mi). The king is called as usual “Shahrbán,” which is nearly synonymous with

  Shahryár.

  444 i.e. the old Sindibad-Námeh (see vol. vi. 122), or “The Malice of Women” which the Bresl. Edit. entitles, “Tale of the King and his Son and his Wife and the Seven Wazirs.” Here it immediately follows the Tale of Al-Abbas and Mariyah and occupies p-383 of vol. xii. (Nights dcccclxxix-m).

  445 i.e. Those who commit it.

  446 The connection between this pompous introduction and the story which follows is not apparent. The “Tale of the Two Kings and the Wazir’s Daughters” is that of Shahrazad told in the third person, in fact a rechauffé of the Introduction. But as some three years have passed since the marriage, and the dénoűement of the plot is at hand, the Princess is made, with some art I think, to lay the whole affair before her husband in her own words, the better to br
ing him to a “sense of his duty.”

  447 Bresl. Edit., vol. xii. p-412.

  448 This clause is taken from the sequence, where the elder brother’s kingdom is placed in China.

  449 For the Tobbas = “Successors” or the Himyaritic kings, see vol. i. 216.

  450 Kayásirah, opp. to Akásirah, here and in many other places.

  451 See vol. ii. 77. King Kulayb (“little dog”) al-Wá’il, a powerful chief of the Banu Ma’ad in the Kasín district of Najd, who was connected with the war of Al-Basús. He is so called because he lamed a pup (kulayb) and tied it up in the midst of his Himŕ (domain, place of pasture and water), forbidding men to camp within sound of its bark or sight of his fire. Hence “more masterful than Kulayb,” A.P. ii. 145, and Al-Hariri Ass. xxvi. (Chenery, ). This angry person came by his death for wounding in the udder a trespassing camel (Sorab) whose owner was a woman named Basús. Her friend (Jasús) slew him; and thus arose the famous long war between the tribes Wá’il Bakr and Taghlib. It gave origin to the saying, “Die thou and be an expiation for the shoe-latchet of Kulayb.”

  452 Arab. “Mukhaddarát,” maidens concealed behind curtains and veiled in the Harem.

  453 i.e. the professional Ráwis or tale-reciters who learned stories by heart from books like “The Arabian Nights.” See my Terminal Essay, vol. x. 163.

  454 Arab. “Bid’ah,” lit. = an innovation, a new thing, an invention, any change from the custom of the Prophet and the universal practice of the Faith, whether it be in the cut of the beard or a question of state policy. Popularly the word = heterodoxy, heresy; but theologically it is not necessarily used in a bad sense. See vol. v. 167.

  455 About three parts of this sentence have been supplied by

  Mr. Payne, the careless scribe having evidently omitted it.

  456 Here, as in the Introduction (vol. i. 24), the king consummates his marriage in presence of his virgin sister-in-law, a process which decency forbids amongst Moslems.

  457 Al-Mas’udi (vol. iv. 213) uses this term to signify viceroy in “Shahryár Sajastán.”

  458 i.e. his indifference to the principles of right and wrong, which is a manner of moral intoxication.

  459 i.e. hath mentioned the office of Wazir (in Koran xx. 30).

  460 i.e. Moslems, who practice the Religion of Resignation.

  461 Koran xxxiii. 35. This is a proemium to the “revelation” concerning Zayd and Zaynab.

  462 i.e. I have an embarras de richesse in my repertory.

  463 The title is from the Bresl. Edit. (vol. xii. p-402). Mr. Payne calls it “The Favourite and her Lover.”

  464 The practice of fumigating gugglets is universal in

  Egypt (Lane, M. E., chapt. v.); but I never heard of musk being so used.

  465 Arab. “Laysa fi ‘l-diyári dayyár” — a favourite jingle.

  466 Arab. “Khayr Kathir” (pron. Katír) which also means “abundant kindness.”

  467 Dozy says of “Hunayní” (Haíní), Il semble ętre le nom d’un vętement. On which we may remark, Connu!

  468 Arab. Harísah: see vol. i. 131. Westerns make a sad mess of this dish when they describe it as une sorte d’olla podrida (the hotch-pot), une pâtée de viandes, de froment et de légumes secs (Al-Mas’udi viii. 438). Whenever I have eaten it, it was always a meat-pudding, for which see vol. i. 131.

  469 Evidently one escaped because she was sleeping with the Caliph, and a second because she had kept her assignation.

  470 Mr. Payne entitles it, “The Merchant of Cairo and the

  Favourite of the Khalif el Mamoun el Hakim bi Amrillah.”

  471 See my Pilgrimage (i. 100): the seat would be on the same bit of boarding where the master sits or on a stool or bench in the street.

  472 This is true Cairene chaff, give and take; and the stranger must accustom himself to it before he can be at home with the people.

  473 i.e. In Rauzah-Island: see vol. v. 169.

  474 There is no historical person who answers to these name, “The Secure, the Ruler by Commandment of Allah.” The cognomen applies to two soldans of Egypt, of whom the later Abu al-Abbas Ahmad the Abbaside (A.D. 1261-1301) has already been mentioned in The Nights (vol. v. 86). The tale suggests the earlier Al-Hakim (Abu Ali al-Mansúr, the Fatimite, A.D. 995-1021), the God of the Druze “persuasion;” and the tale-teller may have purposely blundered in changing Mansúr to Maamún for fear of offending a sect which has been most dangerous in the matter of assassination and which is capable of becoming so again.

  475 Arab. “‘Alŕ kulli hál” = “whatever may betide,” or “willy-nilly.” The phrase is still popular.

  476 The dulce desipere of young lovers, he making a buffoon of himself to amuse her.

  477 “The convent of Clay,” a Coptic monastery near Cairo.

  478 i.e. this is the time to show thyself a man.

  479 The Eastern succedaneum for swimming corks and other “life-preservers.” The practice is very ancient; we find these gourds upon the monuments of Egypt and Babylonia.

  480 Arab. “Al-Khalíj,” the name, still popular, of the Grand Canal of Cairo, whose banks, by-the-by, are quaint and picturesque as anything of the kind in Holland.

  480a] A few lines higher up it was “her neck”; but the jar may have slipped down.

  481 We say more laconically “A friend in need.”

  482 Arab. “Názir al-Mawárís,” the employé charged with the disposal of legacies and seizing escheats to the Crown when Moslems die intestate. He is usually a prodigious rascal as in the text. The office was long kept up in Southern Europe, and Camoens was sent to Macao as “Provedor dos defuntos e ausentes.”

  483 Sir R. F. Burton has since found two more of “Galland’s” tales in an Arabic text of The Nights, namely, Aladdin and Zeyn al-Asnam.

  484 i.e. wondering; thus Lady Macbeth says:

  “You have displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting,

  With most admired disorder.” — Macbeth, iii. 4

  485 Ludovicus Vives, one of the most learned of Spanish authors, was born at Valentia in 1492 and died in 1540.

  486 There was an older “Tútí Náma,” which Nakhshabí modernised, made from a Sanskrit story-book, now lost, but its modern representative is the “Suka Saptatí,” or Seventy (Tales) of a Parrot in which most of Nakhshabi’s tales are found.

  487 According to Lescallier’s French translation of the “Bakhtyár Náma,” made from two MSS. = “She had previously had a lover, with whom, unknown to her father, she had intimate relations, and had given birth to a beautiful boy, whose education she secretly confided to some trusty servants.”

  488 There is a slight mistake in the passage in supplied from the story in vol. vi. It is not King Shah Bakht, but the other king, who assures his chamberlain that “the lion” has done him no injury.

  489 Such was formerly the barbarous manner of treating the insane.

  490 From “Tarlton’s Newes out of Purgatorie.”

  491 A basket

  492 In the fabliau “De la Dame qui atrappa un Prętre, un

  Prévôt, et un Forestier” (or Constant du Hamel), the lady, on the pretext that her husband is at the door, stuffs her lovers, as they arrive successively, unknown to each other, into a large tub full of feathers and afterwards exposes them to public ridicule.

  493 Until.

  494 Requite.

  495 Accidents.

  496 A boarding.

  497 The letter I is very commonly substituted for “ay” in 16th century English books.

  498 Oesterley mentions a Sanskrit redaction of the Vampyre Tales attributed to Sivadása, and another comprised in the “Kathárnava.”

  499 And well might his sapient majesty “wonder”! The humour of this passage is exquisite.

  500 In the Tamil version (Babington’s translation of the “Vedála Kadai”) there are but two brothers, one of whom is fastidious in his food, the other in beds: the latter lies on a bed stuffed with flowers, deprived of their stalks. In the morni
ng he complains of pains all over his body, and on examining the bed one hair is found amongst the flowers. In the Hindí version, the king asks him in the morning whether he had slept comfortably. “O great King,” he replied; “I did not sleep all night.” “How so?” quoth he. “O great King, in the seventh fold of the bedding there is a hair, which pricked me in the back, therefore I could not sleep.” The youth who was fastidious about the fair sex had a lovely damsel laid beside him, and he was on the point of kissing her, but on smelling her breath he turned away his face, and went to sleep. Early in the morning the king (who had observed through a lattice what passed) asked him, “Did you pass the night pleasantly?” He replied that he did not, because the smell of a goat proceeded from the girl’s mouth, which made him very uneasy. The king then sent for the procuress and ascertained that the girl had been brought up on goat’s milk.

  501 Mélusine: Revue de Mythologie, Littérature Populaire,

  Traditions, et Usages. Dirigée par H. Gaidoz et E. Rolland. —

  Paris.

  502 The trick of the clever Magyar in marking all the other sleepers as the king’s mother had marked himself occurs in the folk-tales of most countries, especially in the numerous versions of the Robbery of the King’s Treasury, which are brought together in my work on the Migrations of Popular Tales and Fictions (Blackwood), vol. ii., p-165.

  503 A mythical saint, or prophet, who, according to the

  Muslim legend, was despatched by one of the ancient kings of

  Persia to procure him some of the Water of Life. After a tedious journey, Khizr reached the Fountain of Immortality, but having drank of its waters, it suddenly vanished. Muslims believe that Khizr still lives, and sometimes appears to favoured individuals, always clothed in green, and acts as their guide in difficult enterprises.

  504 “Spake these words to the king” — certainly not those immediately preceding! but that, if the king would provide for him during three years, at the end of that period he would show Khizr to the king.

  505 Mr. Gibb compares with this the following passage from Boethius, “De Consolatione Philosophić,” as translated by

  Chaucer: “All thynges seken ayen to hir propre course, and all thynges rejoysen on hir retourninge agayne to hir nature.”