Verse.
“’Tis a day of mirth and jollity,
A daily market of flowers and odours;
The earth-heaps are suffused with ambergris,
The zephyr sheds rose-water from his skirt,
From contact with the morning breeze the pool
Is roughened and pointed, like the edge of a file.”
As this garden is in the charge of K͟hwāja Jahān, he presented me as offerings with some pieces of brocade of a new fashion they had lately brought for him from ʿIrāq. Selecting what I approved of, I presented the remainder to him. He had arranged the garden well, and his mansab was ordered to be raised to 5,000 personal and 3,000 horse, original and increased.
A strange circumstance was that I was so much delighted with a jewelled dagger-hilt of piebald teeth which K͟hān ʿĀlam had got from S͟hāh ʿAbbās and sent to me (see ante), that I appointed several skilful men to go to Īrān and Tūrān to look for them and to be consistently searching for them, and to bring some from anywhere and any person, anyhow, and at any price. Many of my servants who knew my disposition, and dignified Amīrs in the course of their duty, engaged in the search. It happened that in this city a stupid stranger bought in the open bazaar a coloured tooth of great beauty and delicacy for a trifle; he believed that some time or other it had fallen into the fire, and that the black on it was the mark of burning! After some time he showed it to one of the carpenters on the establishment of my prosperous son S͟hāh-Jahān, desiring that he should take off a piece of the tooth in order to make a ring (s͟hast), and pointed out that he should remove the marks of burning and the blacknesses, being ignorant that the blackness enhanced the value and price of the whiteness. Those moles and patches were what the tirewoman of destiny had given as an adornment of its beauty. The carpenter at once went to the Superintendent of his workshop, and gave him the good news that such a rare and precious thing, in search of which people were wandering and going long distances, and hastening to all corners and in all directions in various countries, had fallen for nothing into the hands of an ignorant man, who did not know its value. It could be easily and cheaply obtained from him. The Superintendent went off with him and immediately procured it, and next day produced it before my son. When my son S͟hāh-Jahān came to wait on me, he at first showed great delight, and after his brain had become free from the intoxication of the wine of joy, produced it, and greatly pleased me—