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perfected but by swiving the camel!”[1] Then he wrapped the net about him and taking the staff in one hand and the basket in the other, went trotting about like a camel in heat, running right and left and backward and forward, dishevelled and covered with dust, as he were a refractory Afrit let loose from Solomon’s prison.[2]
Now the Khalif Haroun er Reshid had a friend, a jeweller called Ibn el Kirnas, and all the merchants and brokers and middle-men and other the folk knew him for the Khalif’s merchant, wherefore there was nought sold in Baghdad, by way of rarities and things of price or slaves, male or female, but was first shown to him. As he sat one day in his shop, there came up to him the chief of the brokers, with a slave-girl, whose like eyes never saw, for she was of the utmost beauty and grace and symmetry, and among her excellences was that she knew all arts and sciences and could make verses and play upon all manner of instruments of music. So he bought her for five thousand dinars and clothed her with other thousand; after which he carried her to the Khalif, with whom she lay the night and who made trial of her in every kind of knowledge and accomplishment and found her versed in all manner arts and sciences, having no equal in her time. Her name was Cout el Culoub and she was even as saith the poet:
I gaze on her, when she unveils, again and yet again: In her refusal of herself to sight are woes and bane.
She doth the slender-necked gazelle resemble, when she turns; And to gazelles, ’tis said, doth grace of movements appertain.
- ↑ i.e. “O vilest of sinners!” meaning the thief. Pilgrimage wipes away all sins and the ignorant Muslim regards the completion of the rite and the consequent possession of a clean bill of moral health as an excuse for beginning again without delay. Hence the saying.
- ↑ i.e. from one of the vessels of brass wherein Solomon was fabled to have confined those of the Jinn who refused to obey him. See supra, Vol. I. The Fisherman and the Genie; also Vol. V. The City of Brass.
