FOOTNOTES:
[793] i.e., Muḥammad.
[794] Two or three minutes’ rest is really sufficient.
[795] “‘Plume,’ v., to pluck the feathers off the quarry.”—Harting.
[796] There is a peculiar fascination about Eastern devices for bird-catching; the methods are so quaint and so successful, and the “quarry” is so varied.
[797] Eagles are slow in flight, but make up for their slowness by dropping suddenly from a height.
[798] Kabāb, “meat cut in little bits and roasted on a skewer,” is by a weird metaphor applied to a heart torn by grief, or love.
[799] It is possible to catch eagles in an ordinary du-gaza, for I have done so. A “sparrow-hawk du-gaza,” however, is sometimes much smaller than an ordinary du-gaza. I have caught hobbies in a du-gaza about two spans high and about four long, suspended on straws or thorns.
[800] Presumably a sparrow was the bait. For a kestril, however, a mole-cricket is a surer bait.
[801] Nasaq is any mutilating (or corporal) punishment, such as cutting off the nose and ears, etc., etc.
CHAPTER LXIX
MISCELLANEOUS NOTES
If wheat be soaked three times in the froth of a mast camel and then dried and given to birds to eat, they will fall senseless. Also if beans be boiled in rats-bane,[802] and then scattered in a spot where common cranes, and wild geese, and crows, and choughs collect, those that eat thereof will fall down in a swoon, and if left alone will become ḥarām.[803] When you take these birds, cut their throats and at once rip open the stomach and cast away the contents, so that the poison may not spread to the flesh.[804]
If you lose a hawk when out hawking and do not recover her till the next day or a few days after, know that, whether she be a young hawk of the year or a moulted[805] hawk, she will ever after be a trouble to you, for her nature will have changed for the worse, especially if she has preyed for herself while out. As for me, I would not keep her; my friends may please themselves.
Perchance some night your hawk may wanton prove,
And leaving place and keeper seek to rove.
Moreover, oh! my friend, should vagrant prey
Fall to her beak as quarry while astray;
Think not, howe’er you worry, to retain
Your hawk, that she can ever fly again.
Beshrew the jade! I would not have her so,
Not as a gift, though friends might scarce say “No.”
When garden trees run riot o’er the wall
The gardener brings his axe and fells them all.
To me, the noblest bird of all is she,
That ever sits on friends’ hands willingly.
May this Bāz-Nāma, written thus by me,
When I am dust, keep green my memory.
I wrote it in the Great Shāh’s golden days,
The King whose orders Heaven itself obeys;
High Rank and Fortune riding rein to rein,
With honour and with glory swell his train;
The game of courage captive in his noose:
His strength is mighty and his gifts profuse;
His barbéd arrows are God’s swift decrees;
His butts the lives of all his enemies.
His strength of arm is such as angels know,
The curvéd sky he uses as his bow.
When Heaven itself to praise the Shāh would fail,
What can Mushtāqī’s[806] humble verse avail?
This book, by the aid of the Munificent King, was finished on the day of Wednesday, in the month of Zū ’l-Qaʿda the Sacred, in the year 1285[807] of the Flight of the Prophet; and it contains the Views and Experience of Taymūr Mīrzā, son of Ḥusayn ʿAlī Mīrzā, and bearer of the title of Governor of the Province of Fārs.
PRINTED FOR BERNARD QUARITCH, 11, GRAFTON STREET, LONDON, W.,
BY G. NORMAN AND SON, FLORAL STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON, W.C.