The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 8 by Sir Richard Francis Burton (great books for teens TXT) 📕

[FN#37] Arab. “Al-Alw�n,” plur. of laun (colour). The latter in Egyptian Arabic means a “dish of meat.” See Burckhardt No.

279. I repeat that the great traveller’s “Arabic Proverbs” wants republishing for two reasons. First he had not sufficient command of English to translate with the necessary laconism and assonance: secondly in his day British Philistinism was too rampant to permit a literal translation. Consequently the book falls short of what the Oriental student requires; and I have prepared it for my friend Mr. Quaritch.

[FN#38] i.e. Lofty, high-builded. See Night dcclxviii. vol. vii.

p. 347. In the Bresl. Edit. Al-Mas�d (as in Al-Kazw�ni): in the Mac. Edit. Al-Mashid

[FN#39] Arab. “Munkati” here = cut off from the rest of the world. Applied to a man, and a popular term of abuse in Al-Hij�z, it means one cut off from the blessings of Allah and the benefits of mankind; a pauvre sire. (Pilgrimage ii. 22.) [FN#40] Arab. “Baras au Juz�m,” the two common forms of leprosy.

See vol. iv. 51. Popular superstition in Syria holds that coition during the menses breeds the Juz�m, D�a al-Kab�r (Great Evil) or D�a al-F�l (Elephantine Evil), i.e. Elephantiasis and that the days between the beginning of the flow (Sab�l) to that of coition shows the age when the progeny will be attacked; for instance if it take place on the first day, the disease will appear in the tenth year, on the fourth the fortieth and so on. The only diseases really dreaded by the Badawin are leprosy and small-pox.

Coition during the menses is forbidden by all Eastern faiths under the severest penalties. Al-Mas’�di relates how a man thus begotten became a determined enemy of Ali; and the ancient Jews attributed the magical powers of Joshua Nazarenus to this accident of his birth, the popular idea being that sorcerers are thus impurely engendered.

[FN#41] By adoption - See vol. iii. 151. This sudden affection (not love) suggests the “Come to my arms, my slight acquaintance!” of the Anti-Jacobin. But it is true to Eastern nature; and nothing can be more charming than this fast friendship between the Princess and Hasan.

[FN#42] En tout bien et en tout honneur, be it understood.

[FN#43] He had done nothing of the kind; but the feminine mind is prone to exaggeration. Also Hasan had told them a fib, to prejudice them against the Persian.

[FN#44] These nervous movements have been reduced to a system in the Turk. “Ihtil�jn�meh” = Book of palpitations, prognosticating from the subsultus tendinum and other involuntary movements of the body from head to foot; according to Ja’afar the Just, Daniel the Prophet, Alexander the Great; the Sages of Persia and the Wise Men of Greece. In England we attend chiefly to the eye and ear.

[FN#45] Revenge, amongst the Arabs, is a sacred duty; and, in their state of civilization, society could not be kept together without it. So the slaughter of a villain is held to be a sacrifice to Allah, who amongst Christians claims for Himself the monopoly of vengeance.

[FN#46] Arab. “Zind�k.” See vol. v. 230.

[FN#47] Lane translates this “put for him the remaining food and water;” but Ai-Akhar (Mac. Edit.) evidently refers to the Naj�b (dromedary).

[FN#48] We can hardly see the heroism of the deed, but it must be remembered that Bahram was a wicked sorcerer, whom it was every good Moslem’s bounden duty to slay. Compare the treatment of witches in England two centuries ago.

[FN#49] The mother in Arab tales is ma m�re, now becoming somewhat ridiculous in France on account of the over use of that venerable personage.

[FN#50] The forbidden closet occurs also in Sayf Z� al-Yazan, who enters it and finds the bird-girls. Tr�butien ii, 208 says, “Il est assez remarquable qu’il existe en Allemagne une tradition � peu pr�s semblable, et qui a fourni le sujet d’un des contes de Musaeus, entitul�, le voile enlev�.” Here Hasan is artfully left alone in a large palace without other companions but his thoughts and the reader is left to divine the train of ideas which drove him to open the door.

[FN#51] Arab. “Buhayrah” (Bresl. Edit. “Bahrah”), the tank or cistern in the Hosh (court-yard) of an Eastern house. Here, however, it is a rain-cistern on the flat roof of the palace (See Night dcccviii).

[FN#52] This description of the view is one of the most gorgeous in The Nights.

[FN#53] Here again are the “Swan-maidens” (See vol. v. 346) “one of the primitive myths, the common heritage of the whole Aryan (Iranian) race.” In Persia Bahram-i-G�r when carried off by the D�v Sap�d seizes the Peri’s dove-coat: in Santh�li folk-lore Torica, the Goatherd, steals the garment doffed by one of the daughters of the sun; and hence the twelve birds of Russian Story. To the same cycle belong the Seal-tales of the Faroe Islands (Thorpe’s Northern Mythology) and the wise women or mermaids of Shetland (Hibbert). Wayland the smith captures a wife by seizing a mermaid’s raiment and so did Sir Hag�n by annexing the wardrobe of a Danubian water-nymph. Lettsom, the translator, mixes up this swan-raiment with that of the Valkyries or Choosers of the Slain. In real life stealing women’s clothes is an old trick and has often induced them, after having been seen naked, to offer their persons spontaneously. Of this I knew two cases in India, where the theft is justified by divine example. The blue god Krishna, a barbarous and grotesque Hindu Apollo, robbed the raiment of the pretty Gop�l�s (cowherdesses) who were bathing in the Arjun River and carried them to the top of a Kunduna tree; nor would he restore them till he had reviewed the naked girls and taken one of them to wife. See also Imr al-Kays (of the Mu’allakah) with “Onaiza” at the port of Daratjuljul (Clouston’s Arabian Poetry, p.4). A critic has complained of my tracing the origin of the Swan-maiden legend to the physical resemblance between the bird and a high-bred girl (vol. v. 346). I should have explained my theory which is shortly, that we must seek a material basis for all so-called supernaturalisms, and that anthropomorphism satisfactorily explains the Swan-maiden, as it does the angel and the devil.

There is much to say on the subject; but this is not the place for long discussion.

[FN#54] Arab. “Nafs Amm�rah,” corresponding with our canting term “The Flesh.” Nafs al-N�t�kah is the intellectual soul or function; Nafs al-Ghazab�yah = the animal function and Nafs al Shahw�n�yah = the vegetative property.

[FN#55] The lines occur in vol. ii. 331: I have quoted Mr.

Payne. Here they are singularly out of place.

[FN#56] Not the “green gown” of Anglo-India i.e. a white ball-dress with blades of grass sticking to it in consequence of a “fall backwards.”

[FN#57] These lines occur in vol. i. 219: I have borrowed from Torrens (p. 219).

[FN#58] The appearance of which ends the fast and begins the Lesser Festival. See vol. i. 84.

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

[FN#60] Arab. “Sh�‘ir Al-Walah�n” = the love-distraught poet; Lane has “a distracted poet.” My learned friend Professor Aloys Sprenger has consulted, upon the subject of Al-Walah�n 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-Sh�‘ir al-Walah�n (the love-demented poet) not Al-Walah�n al-Sh�‘ir = Walah�n 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-huw� (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’�kibu s-sabri (K�la ba’azuhum) Mahm�dah: Kultu, ‘khshi an takhirrin�.’”

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

Mahm�dah is not only un laxatif, but a slang name for a confection of aloes.

[FN#64] Arab. “Ak�na fid�-ka.” Fid� = ransom, self-sacrifice and Fid�‘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 Ban�t” = daughters or prot�g�es. 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-fashioned “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. “‘Ab�ah” vulg. “‘Ab�yah.” 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 ignoble 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 “Tars�” = funker, coward.

[FN#74] Arab. “Sakaba K�rah�;” the forge in which children are hammered out?

[FN#75] Arab. “M� al-Mal�hat” = 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] Y� 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 Baghd�d, B�ghd�d, (our old Bughdaud and Bagdat), Baghz�z, Baghz�n, Baghd�n, Baghz�m and Maghd�d as Makkah and Bakkah (Koran iii. 90). Religious Moslems held B�gh (idol) and