to be correct again as long as I live!”—and he kissed her, very much to the delight of the old nurse who, remembering a lover of her youth, a Rajput with split beard and hooded eyes and a sprig of jessamine behind his ear who had drifted across the Himalayas into Central Asia, broke into a high-pitched Indian love song:
“As the sugar cane has a sweeter taste,
Knot after knot from the top,
Even thus is the sweetness of thy body, beloved,
Each time thou givest it to me …
And, in the exuberance of her emotion, she threw her bony arms around Mr. Warburtons neck and kissed him smackingly on the lips. The financier, embarrassed, indignant, would doubtless have been even more indignant had he been able to understand the words of her song, as she continued:
“For thy body, beloved,
Is a garden of strange and lascivious flowers
Which I gather in the night …
By this time Musa Al-Mutasim, who had enjoyed to the full the sensation which his arrival had caused, had salaamed before the princess with outstretched hands.
“I am in the shade of thy little white feet,” he said, with that rather grandiose and irresistible hypocrisy which is the Arab's birthright as much as passion and greed, “and my sword is thine and my manhood and my loyalty and my strength!”
Words which, given Musa Al-Mutasim's reputation
