save in Allah, the Glorious, the Great! This is the fated decree of the All-powerful, the All-wise!"
And he doffed his bag-trousers, shameful and abashed, with the tears running from his eyes from stress of affright. Thereat she smiled and making him mount upon a couch with her, said to him:
"After this night, thou shalt see naught that will offend thee."
Then she turned to him bussing and bosoming him and bending calf over calf, and said to him:
"Put thy hand between my thighs to the accustomed place; so haply it may stand up to prayer after prostration."
He wept and cried:
"I am not good at aught of this."
But she said:
"By my life, an thou do as I bid thee, it shall profit thee!"
So he put out his hand, with vitals afire for confusion, and found her thighs cooler than cream and softer than silk. The touching of them pleasured him and he moved his hand hither and thither, till it came to a dome abounding in good gifts and movements and shifts, and said in himself:
"Perhaps this King is an hermaphrodite,[1] neither man nor woman quite."
So he said to her:
"O King, I cannot find that thou hast a tool
- ↑ Note by Sir Richard: Easterns still believe in what Westerns known to be an impossibility, human beings with the parts and proportions of both sexes equally developed and capable of reproduction; and Al-Islam even provides special rules for them.……The old Greeks dreamed, after their fashion, a beautiful poetic dream of a human animal uniting the contradictory beauties of man and woman. The
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