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man named Reshideddin, blue-eyed and foul of face. ‘And ten,’ quoth another. ‘I bid a thousand,’ rejoined Reshideddin; whereupon the other merchants were silent and the broker took counsel with the girl’s owner, who said, ‘I have sworn not to sell her save to whom she shall choose; consult her.’ So the broker went up to Zumurrud and said to her, ‘O mistress of moons, yonder merchant hath a mind to buy thee.’ She looked at Reshideddin and finding him as we have said, replied, ‘I will not be sold to a grey-beard, whom decrepitude hath brought to evil plight.’ ‘Bravo,’ quoth I, ‘for one who saith:
I asked her for a kiss one day, but she my hoary head Saw, though of wealth and worldly good I had great plentihead;
So, with a proud and flouting air, her back she turned on me And, “No, by Him who fashioned men from nothingness!” she said.
“Now, by God’s truth, I never had a mind to hoary hairs, And shall my mouth be stuffed, forsooth, with cotton, ere I’m dead?”’
‘By Allah,’ quoth the broker, ‘thou art excusable, and thy value is ten thousand dinars!’ So he told her owner that she would not accept of Reshideddin, and he said, ‘Ask her of another.’ Thereupon another man came forward and said, ‘I will take her at the same price.’ She looked at him and seeing that his beard was dyed, said, ‘What is this lewd and shameful fashion and blackening of the face of hoariness?’ And she made a great show of amazement and repeated the following verses:
A sight, and what a sight, did such a one present To me! A neck, to beat with shoes, by Allah, meant!
And eke a beard for lie a coursing-ground that was And brows for binding on of ropes all crook’d and bent.[1]
Thou that my cheeks and shape have ravished, with a lie Thou dost disguise thyself and reck’st not, impudent;
- ↑ i.e. As if he were an old Bedouin, with forehead disfigured by the friction of the rope of camel’s hair, which is part of the Bedouin headdress.
