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holding an ounce of benzoin ointment, thighs like bolsters stuffed with ostrich down, and between them what the tongue fails to describe and at mention whereof the tears pour forth. Indeed it seemed as it were she to whom the poet alludes in the following verses:
Her hair is night, her forehead day, her cheeks a blossomed rose And wine the honeyed dews wherewith her mouth for ever flows.
Heaven in her favours is and hell in her disdain; her teeth Are very pearls and in her face the moon at full doth glow.
And how excellent is another’s saying:
She shineth forth, a moon, and bends, a willow-wand, And breathes out ambergris and gazes, a gazelle.
Meseems as if grief loved my heart and when from her Estrangement I abide, possession to it fell.
She hath a face outshines the very Pleiades And brows whose lustre doth the crescent moon excel.
And quoth a third:
Unveiled, new moons they shine, and all displayed, like moons at full, They burn: like boughs they sway, and eke like antelopes they turn:
And in their midst’s a black-eyed maid, for whose sweet beauty’s sake, To be the earth whereon she treads the Pleiades would yearn.
So he turned to her and pressing her to his bosom, sucked first her under lip and then her upper lip and slid his tongue into her mouth. Then he rose to her and found her an unpierced pearl and a filly that none but he had mounted. So he did away her maidenhead and had of her the amorous delight and there was contracted between them love that might never know breach nor severance. He rained down kisses upon her cheeks, like the falling of pebbles into water, and beset her with stroke upon stroke, like the thrusting of spears in the mellay; for that Noureddin still yearned after clipping of necks and sucking of lips and letting down of tresses and pressing of waists and biting of cheeks and pinching of breasts,
