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master, the king of my heart and my secret soul. Indeed, wakefulness agitateth me and melancholy increaseth on me and I have no patience to endure thine absence, O thou whose beauty excels the sun and moon! Desire deprives me of rest and passion destroys me; and how should it be otherwise with me, seeing that I am of the number of the perishing? O glory of the world and ornament of life, shall her cup be sweet, whose vital spirits are cut off? For that she is neither with the quick nor with the dead.’ And she added these verses:
Thy letter, O Mesrour, hath stirred affliction up in me; I have no patience for thy loss nor solacement, perdie.
My bowels, when I read the script, yearn and the desert herbs I water with my tears that flow for ever like a sea.
Were I a bird, I’d fly to thee, upon the wings of night: I know not, after thee, if wine or sweet or bitter be.
Forbidden unto me is life, since thy departure hence: I have no power to brook the fire of severance from thee.
Then she sprinkled the letter with powdered musk and ambergris and committed it to a merchant, bidding him deliver it to none save her sister Nesim. When it reached the latter, she sent it to Mesrour, who kissed it and laid it on his eyes and wept till he fainted.
Presently, the Jew heard of their correspondence and began again to travel from place to place with Zein el Mewasif and her damsels, till she said to him, ‘Glory to God! How long wilt thou journey with us and carry us afar from our homes?’ Quoth he, ‘I will fare on with you a year’s journey, so no more letters may reach you from Mesrour. I see how you take all my good and give it to him; so all that I miss I shall take from you: and I shall see if Mesrour will profit you or avail to deliver you from my hand.’ Then he stripped her and her damsels of their silken apparel and clad them in raiment of hair-cloth; after which he repaired to a blacksmith and
