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the hunchback was left sitting alone, looking like an ape; for as often as they lighted a candle for him, it went out and he abode in darkness, speechless and confounded and grumbling to himself. When Bedreddin saw the bridegroom sitting moping alone and all the lights and people collected round himself, he was confounded and marvelled; but when he looked at his cousin, the Vizier’s daughter, he rejoiced and was glad, for indeed her face was radiant with light and brilliancy. Then the tire-women took off the veil and displayed the bride in her first dress of red satin, and she moved to and fro with a languorous grace, till the heads of all the men and women were turned by her loveliness, for she was even as says the excellent poet:
Like a sun at the end of a cane in a hill of sand, She shines in a dress of the hue of pomegranate-flower.
She gives me to drink of her cheeks and her honeyed lips, And quenches the flaming fires that my heart devour.
Then they changed her dress and displayed her in a robe of blue; and she reappeared like the moon when it bursts through the clouds, with her coal-black hair and her smiling teeth, her delicate cheeks and her swelling bosom, even as says the sublime poet:
She comes in a robe the colour of ultramarine, Blue as the stainless sky unflecked with white.
I view her with yearning eyes, and she seems to me A moon of the summer set in a winter’s night.
Then they clad her in a third dress and letting down her long black ringlets, veiled her face to her eyes with the superabundance of her hair, which vied with the murkiest night in length and blackness; and she smote all hearts with the enchanted arrows of her glances. As says the poet:
With hair that hides her rosy cheeks ev’n to her speaking eyes, She comes; and I her locks compare unto a sable cloud
And say to her, “Thou curtainest the morning with the night.” But she, “Not so; it is the moon that with the dark I shroud.”
