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

[FN#59] See note, vol. i. 84, for notices of the large navel; much appreciated by Easterns.

[FN#60] Arab. "Sha'ir Al-Walahan" = the love-distraught poet; Lane has "a distracted poet." My learned friend Professor Aloys Sprenger has consulted, upon the subject of Al-Walahan the well-known Professor of Arabic at Halle, Dr. Thorbeck, who remarks that the word (here as further on) must be an adjective, mad, love-distraught, not a "lakab" or poetical cognomen. He generally finds it written Al-Sha'ir al-Walahan (the love-demented poet) not Al-Walahan al-Sha'ir = Walahan the Poet.

Note this burst of song after the sweet youth falls in love: it explains the cause of verse-quotation in The Nights, poetry being the natural language of love and battle.

[FN#61] "Them" as usual for "her."

[FN#62] Here Lane proposes a transposition, for "Wa-huwa (and he) fi'l-hubbi," to read "Fi 'l-hubbi wa huwa (wa-hwa);" but the latter is given in the Mac. Edit.

[FN#63] For the pun in "Sabr"=aloe or patience. See vol. i.

138. In Herr Landberg (i. 93) we find a misunderstanding of the couplet--

"Aw'akibu s-sabri (Kala ba'azuhum) Mahmudah: Kultu, 'khs.h.i.+ an takhirrini.'"

"The effects of patience" (or aloes) quoth one "are praiseworthy!" Quoth I, "Much I fear lest it make me stool."

Mahmudah is not only un laxatif, but a slang name for a confection of aloes.

[FN#64] Arab. "Akuna fida-ka." Fida = ransom, self-sacrifice and Fida'an = instead of. The phrase, which everywhere occurs in The Nights, means, "I would give my life to save thine "

[FN#65] Thus accounting for his sickness, improbably enough but in flattering way. Like a good friend (feminine) she does not hesitate a moment in prescribing a fib.

[FN#66] i.e. the 25,000 Amazons who in the Bresl. Edit. (ii.

308) are all made to be the King's Banat" = daughters or protegees. The Amazons of Dahome (see my "Mission") who may now number 5,000 are all officially wives of the King and are called by the lieges "our mothers."

[FN#67] The tale-teller has made up his mind about the damsel; although in this part of the story she is the chief and eldest sister and subsequently she appears as the youngest daughter of the supreme Jinn King. The mystification is artfully explained by the extraordinary likeness of the two sisters. (See Night dcccxi.)

[FN#68] This is a reminiscence of the old-fas.h.i.+oned "marriage by capture," of which many traces survive, even among the civilised who wholly ignore their origin.

[FN#69] Meaning her companions and suite.

[FN#70] Arab. "'Abaah" vulg. "'Abayah." See vol. ii. 133.

[FN#71] Feet in the East lack that development of sebaceous glands which afflicts Europeans.

[FN#72] i.e. cutting the animals' throats after Moslem law.

[FN#73] In Night dcclxxviii. supra p.5, we find the orthodox Moslem doctrine that "a single mortal is better in Allah's sight than a thousand Jinns." For, I repeat, Al-Islam systematically exalts human nature which Christianity takes infinite trouble to degrade and debase. The results of its ign.o.ble teaching are only too evident in the East: the Christians of the so-called (and miscalled) "Holy Land" are a disgrace to the faith and the idiomatic Persian term for a Nazarene is "Tarsa" = funker, coward.

[FN#74] Arab. "Sakaba Kuraha;" the forge in which children are hammered out?

[FN#75] Arab. "Ma al-Malahat" = water (brilliancy) of beauty.

[FN#76] The fourth of the Seven Heavens, the "Garden of Eternity," made of yellow coral.

[FN#77] How strange this must sound to the Young Woman of London in the nineteenth century.

[FN#78] "Forty days" is a quasi-religious period amongst Moslem for praying, fasting and religious exercises: here it represents our "honey-moon." See vol. v. p. 62.

[FN#79] Ya layta, still popular. Herr Carlo Landberg (Proverbes et Dictons du Peuple Arabe, vol. i. of Syria, Leyden, E. J.

Brill, 1883) explains layta for rayta (=raayta) by permutation of liquids and argues that the contraction is ancient (p. 42). But the Herr is no Arabist: "Layta" means "would to Heaven," or, simply "I wish," "I pray" (for something possible or impossible); whilst "La'alla" (perhaps, it may be) prays only for the possible: and both are simply particles governing the noun in the oblique or accusative case.

[FN#80] "His" for "her," i.e. herself, making somewhat of confusion between her state and that of her son.

[FN#81] i.e. his mother; the words are not in the Mac. Edit.

[FN#82] Baghdad is called House of Peace, amongst other reasons, from the Dijlah (Tigris) River and Valley "of Peace." The word was variously written Baghdad, Baghdad, (our old Bughdaud and Bagdat), Baghzaz, Baghzan, Baghdan, Baghzam and Maghdad as Makkah and Bakkah (Koran iii. 90). Religious Moslems held Bagh (idol) and Dad (gift) an ill-omened conjunction, and the Greeks changed it to Eirenopolis. (See Ouseley's Oriental Collcctions, vol. i.

pp. 18-20.)

[FN#83] This is a popular saying but hardly a "vulgar proverb."

(Lane iii. 522.) It reminds rather of Shakespear's:

"So loving to my mother, That he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly."

[FN#84] i.e. G.o.d forbid that I should oppose thee!

[FN#85] Here the writer again forgets apparently, that Shahrazad is speaking: she may, however, use the plural for the singular when speaking of herself.

[FN#86] i.e. She would have pleaded ill-treatment and lawfully demanded to be sold.

[FN#87] The Hindus speak of "the only bond that woman knows--her heart."

[FN#88] i.e. a rarity, a present (especially in Persian).

[FN#89] Arab. "Al-bisat" wa'l-masnad lit. the carpet and the cus.h.i.+on.

[FN#90] For "Bab al-bahr" and "Bab al-Barr" see vol. iii. 281.

[FN#91] She was the daughter of Ja'afar bin Mansur; but, as will be seen, The Nights again and again called her father Al-Kasim.

[FN#92] This is an error for the fifth which occurs in the popular saying, "Is he the fifth of the sons of Al-Abbas!" i.e.

Harun al-Ras.h.i.+d. Lane (note, in loco) thus accounts for the frequent mention of the Caliph, the greatest of the Abbasides in The Nights. But this is a causa non causa.

[FN#93] i.e. I find thy beauty all-sufficient. So the proverb "The son of the quarter (young neighbour) filleth not the eye,"

which prefers a stranger.

[FN#94] They are mere doggerel, like most of the pieces de circonstance.

[FN#95] Afterwards called Wak Wak, and in the Bresl. Edit. Wak al-Wak. See Lane's notes upon these Islands. Arab Geographers evidently speak of two Wak Waks. Ibn al-Fakih and Al-Mas'udi (Fr. Transl., vol. iii. 6-7) locate one of them in East Africa beyond Zanzibar and Sofala. "Le territoire des Zendjes (Zanzibar-Negroids) commence au ca.n.a.l (Al-Khalij) derive du haut Nil (the Juln River?) et se prolonge jusqu'au pays de Sofalah et des Wak-Wak." It is simply the peninsula of Guardafui (Jard Hafun) occupied by the Gallas, pagans and Christians, before these were ousted by the Moslem Somal; and the former perpetually e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed "Wak" (G.o.d) as Moslems cry upon Allah. This identification explains a host of other myths such as the Amazons, who as Marco Polo tells us held the "Female Island"

Socotra (Yule ii. 396). The fruit which resembled a woman's head (whence the puelloe Wakwakienses hanging by the hair from trees), and which when ripe called out "Wak Wak" and "Allah al-Khallak"

(the Creator) refers to the Calabash-tree (Adausonia digitata), that grotesque growth, a vegetable elephant, whose gourds, something larger than a man's head, hang by a slender filament.

Similarly the "cocoa" got its name, in Port. = Goblin, from the fancied face at one end. The other Wak Wak has been identified in turns with the Seych.e.l.les, Madagascar, Malacca, Sunda or Java (this by Langles), China and j.a.pan. The learned Prof. de Goeje (Arabishe Berichten over j.a.pan, Amsterdam, Muller, 1880) informs us that in Canton the name of j.a.pan is Wo-Kwok, possibly a corruption of Koku-tan, the ebony-tree (Diospyros ebenum) which Ibn Khor-dabah and others find together with gold in an island 4,500 parasangs from Suez and East of China. And we must remember that Basrah was the chief starting-place for the Celestial Empire during the rule of the Tang dynasty (seventh and ninth centuries). Colonel J. W. Watson of Bombay suggests New Guinea or the adjacent islands where the Bird of Paradise is said to cry "Wak Wak!" Mr. W. F. Kirby in the Preface (p. ix.) to his neat little book "The New Arabian Nights," says: "The Islands of Wak-Wak, seven years' journey from Bagdad, in the story of Hasan, have receded to a distance of a hundred and fifty years' journey in that of Majin (of Khorasan). There is no doubt(?) that the Cora Islands, near New Guinea, are intended; for the wonderful fruits which grow there are Birds of Paradise, which settle in flocks on the trees at sunset and sunrise, uttering this very cry." Thus, like Ophir, Wak Wak has wandered all over the world and has been found even in Peru by the Turkish work Tarikh al-Hind al-Gharbi = History of the West Indies (Orient. Coll. iii 189).

[FN#96] I accept the emendation of Lane's Shaykh, "Nasim "

(Zephyr) for "Nadim " (cup-companion).

[FN#97] "Jannat al-Na'im" = Garden of Delights is No. V Heaven, made of white diamond.

[FN#98] This appears to her very prettily put.