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bended bows and rosy cheeks and pearly teeth and sugared lips and languishing glances and ivory breasts and slender body, full of folds and dimples, and buttocks like stuffed pillows and thighs like columns of Syrian marble, and between them what was like a sachet [of spices] folded in a wrapper. Quoth the poet of her:
A fair one, to idolaters if she herself should show, They’d leave their idols and her face for only Lord would know.
If in the Eastward she appeared unto a monk, for sure He’d cease from turning to the West[1] and to the East bend low;
And if into the briny sea one day she chanced to spit, Assuredly the salt sea’s floods straight fresh and sweet would grow.
And quoth another:
More brilliant than the moon at full, with liquid languorous eyes, She seems an antelope that takes the lion-whelps to prize.
The midnight of her locks lets fall o’er her a tent of hair,[2] Unfixed of tent-pegs, that protects her beauty from the spies.
The fire, that in th’ unfading rose still burneth of her cheek, Is fed with entrails that consume and hearts and lovers’ sighs.
An if the beauties of the time beheld her, unto her, Saying, ‘Unto the precedent the palm,’ they would arise.
And how well saith a third:
Three things for ever hinder her to visit us, for fear Of the intriguing spy and eke the rancorous envier;
Her forehead’s lustre and the sound of all her ornaments And the sweet scent her creases hold of ambergris and myrrh.
Grant with the border of her sleeve she hide her brow and doff Her ornaments, how shall she do her scent[3] away from her?
- ↑ The Syrian and Mesopotamian Christian, in turning towards Jerusalem, would naturally face the West, instead of the East, as with his European brethren.
- ↑ beit shar, lit. a house of hair, the distinctive name of the Bedouin tent, which is made of camels’ hair. Syn. a line of verse.
- ↑ The bodies of Eastern women of the higher classes by dint of continual maceration, Esther-fashion, in aromatic oils and essences, would naturally become impregnated with the sweet scent of the cosmetics used.
