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Within my heart’s recesses ye have your dwelling-place; My tears are ever running and lids with blood berayed.
For ever will I ransom the absent with my soul; Indeed, for them my yearnings are patent and displayed.
I have an eye, whose pupil, for love of them, rejects Sleep and whose tears flow ever, unceasing and unstayed.
My foes would have me patient for him; but God forbid That ever of my hearing should heed to them be paid!
I baulked their expectation. Of Kemerezzeman Sometime I did accomplish the joys for which I prayed.
He doth, as none before him, perfections all unite; No king of bygone ages was in the like arrayed.
His clemency and bounty Ben Zaïdeh’s[1] largesse And Muawiyeh’s[2] mildness have cast into the shade.
But that it would be tedious and verse sufficeth not To picture forth his beauties, I’d leave no rhyme unmade.
Then she wiped away her tears and making the ablution, stood up to pray; nor did she give over praying, till drowsiness overcame Heyat en Nufous and she slept, whereupon Budour came and lay beside her till the morning. At daybreak, she arose and prayed the morning-prayer; then, going forth, seated herself on the throne and passed the day in ordering and forbidding and administering justice. Meanwhile, King Armanous went in to his daughter and asked her how she did; so she told him all that had passed and repeated to him the verses that Budour had recited, adding, ‘O my father, never saw I one more abounding in sense and modesty than my husband, save that he doth nothing but weep and sigh.’ ‘O my daughter,’ answered her father, ‘have patience with him yet this third night, and if he go not in to thee and do away thy maidenhead, Night ccx.we will take order with him and oust him from the throne and banish him the country.’ When the night came, the
- ↑ See post p. 317.
- ↑ The mansuetude of the Khalif Muawiyeh, the founder of the Ommiade dynasty, is a proverb among the Arabs, though hardly to be reconciled with the accredited records of his life and actions.
