331.  A servile name, Delicacy, Elegance.

332.  These verses have occurred twice: (Night ix. etc.) so I give Lane’s version (ii. 482).

333.  A Badawi tribe to which belonged the generous Ma’an bin Za’idah, often mentioned in The Nights.

334.  Wealthy harems, I have said, are hot-beds of Sapphism and Tribadism. Every woman past her first youth has a girl whom she calls her “Myrtle” (in Damascus). At Agbome, capital of Dahome, I found that a troop of women was kept for the use of the “Amazons” (Mission to Gelele, ii. 73). Amongst the wild Arabs, who ignore Socratic and Sapphic perversions, the lover is always more jealous of his beloved’s girl-friends than of men rivals. In England we content ourselves with saying that women corrupt women more than men do.

335.  The Hebrew Pentateuch; Roll of the Law.

336.  I need hardly notice the brass trays, platters and table-covers with inscriptions which are familiar to every reader: those made in the East for foreign markets mostly carry imitation inscriptions lest infidel eyes fall upon Holy Writ.

337.  These six distichs are in Night xiii. I borrow Torrens (p. 125) to show his peculiar treatment of spinning out 12 lines to 38.

338.  Arab. “Musámirah” = chatting at night. Easterns are inordinately fond of the practice and the wild Arabs often sit up till dawn, talking over the affairs of the tribe, indeed a Shaykh is expected to do so. “Early to bed and early to rise” is a civilised not a savage or a barbarous saying. Samír is a companion in night talk; Rafík of the road; Rahíb in riding horse or camel; Ká’id in sitting; Sharíb and Rafís at drink, and Nadím at table: Ahíd is an ally, and Sharík a partner—all on the model of “Fa’íl.”

339.  In both lover and beloved the excess of love gave them this clairvoyance.

340.  The prayer will be granted for the excess (not the purity) of her love.

341.  This wailing over the Past is one of the common-places of Badawi poetry. The traveller cannot fail, I repeat, to notice the chronic melancholy of peoples dwelling under the brightest skies.

342.  Moons = Budúr: in Paradise as a martyr.

343.  i.e. to intercede for me in Heaven; as if the young woman were the Prophet.

344.  The comparison is admirable as the two letters are thus written or لا. It occurs in Al-Hariri (Ass. of Ramlah)

So I embraced him close as Lám cleaves to Alif;

And again:—

She laid aside reluctance and I embraced her close
As if I were Lám and my love Alif.

The Lomad-Olaph in Syraic is similarly colligated.

345.  Here is a double entendre “and the infirm letters (viz. a, w and y) not subject to accidence, left him.” The three make up the root “Awi” = pitying, condoling.

346.  Showing that consummation had taken place. It was a sign of good breeding to avoid all “indecent hurry” when going to bed. In some Moslem countries the bridegroom does not consummate the marriage for seven nights; out of respect for (1) father (2) mother (3) brother and so forth. If he hurry matters he will be hooted as an “impatient man” and the wise will quote, “Man is created of precipitation” (Koran chapt. xxi. 38), meaning hasty and inconsiderate. I remark with pleasure that the whole of this tale is told with commendable delicacy. O si sic omnia!

347.  Pers. Nauroz (= nau roz, new day): here used in the Arab. plur. “Nawáriz” as it lasted six days. There are only four universal festivals; the solstices and the equinoxes; and every successive religion takes them from the sun and perverts them to its own private purposes. Lane (ii. 496) derives the venerable Nauroz whose birth is hid in the outer glooms of antiquity from “the Jewish Passover” (!)