like the tools of men; what then moved thee to do this deed?"
Then loudly laughed Queen Budur till she fell on her back,[1] and said:
"O my dearling, how quickly thou hast forgotten the nights we have lain together!"
Then she made herself known to him, and he knew her for his wife, the Lady Budur, daughter of King al-Ghayur, Lord of the Isles and the Seas. So he embraced her and she embraced him, and he kissed her and she kissed him; then they lay down on the bed of pleasure voluptuous.……
Here we end our extract from the Tale of Kamar al-Zaman, altough the story runs on for another forty odd pages in Sir Richard Burton's translation. A situation similar to that just described occurs in another story in 'The Nights,' and we shall have occasion to quote from that in a subsequent volume.
- ↑ Note by Sir Richard: This is a mere phrase for our "dying of laughter": the queen was on her back. And as Easterns sit on carpets, their falling back is very different from the same movement off a chair.
duality of the generative organs seems an old Egyptian tradition; at least we find it in Genesis (1.27), where the image of the Deity is created male and female, before man was formed out of the dust of the ground (2.7). The old tradition found its way to India (if the Hindus did not borrow the ideas from the Greeks); and one of the forms of Mahadeva, the third person of their triad, is entitled "Ardhanari"=the Half-Woman, which has suggested to them some charming pictures. Europeans, seeing the left breast conspicuously feminine, have indulged in silly surmises about the "Amazons."
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