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she was perfect in beauty and grace and symmetry, even as saith one, describing her:
As she wished, she was created, after such a wise that lo, She in beauty’s mould was fashioned, perfect, neither less nor mo’.
In her cheeks the roses redden for confusion and the fruit[1] On the sapling of her figure makes a fair and stately show.
In her face the full moon glitters and the branch is as her shape: Musk her breath is, nor midst mortals is her equal, high or low.
’Tis as if she had been moulded out of water of pure pearls: In each member of her beauty is a very moon, I trow.
The Persian lighted down from his mule and making the damsel alight also, called the broker and said to him, ‘Take this damsel and cry her for sale in the market.’ So he fetched a stool of ebony, inlaid with ivory, and setting it amiddleward the bazaar, seated her thereon. Then he raised her veil and discovered a face as it were a Median targe[2] or a sparkling star: and indeed she was like the full moon, when it appears on its fourteenth night, accomplished to the utmost in surpassing beauty. As saith the poet:
The full moon ignorantly vied in beauty with her face, But was eclipsed and split in twain for wrath at its disgrace;
And if the willow-wand be fit to even with her shape, Perish her hands who is become o’ the faggot-bearing race![3]
And how well saith another:
Say to the fair in the muffler laced and wrought with gold, ‘Hark ye! What hast thou done with a pious man was like a monk to be?’
The gleam of the veil and the brilliancy of thy visage under it The hosts of the darkness put to rout and cause them turn and flee;
And when my glance cometh to steal a look at thy cheek so fresh and fair, Its guardian sprites with a shooting star still cast at them and me.[4]
- ↑ i.e. her breasts.
- ↑ Presumably of silver.
- ↑ Alluding to the curse denounced by Mohammed against his recalcitrant uncle, Abou Leheb. “May Abou Leheb’s hands perish . . . . and his wife [be] a bearer of faggots!”—Koran cxi. 184.
- ↑ Likening her eyes to the angels who (according to the Muslim legend) are appointed to watch for the Jinn that listen by stealth to what is said in heaven and drive them off with shooting stars.
