Ruby the wine and pearl the cup in the hands of the beautiful slave with waist so slender and voluptuous.
Ravishing the beauty who giveth thee to drink at once of her gaze and of her hand! Thus art thou ever seized with two intoxications.
But the second fragment gives us the dismal sequel:—
Multiply thy sins to the utmost; for thou art to meet an indulgent God.
When thou comest before Him thou wilt gnaw thy hands with regret for those pleasures thou didst avoid through fear of hell.
[RABYAH'S LAST RIDE]
A TRADITION OF PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA
This is the relation of the death of Rabyah, son of Mokaddem, of the Beni-Firaz, according to the legend transmitted from generation unto generation by the rawis, or reciters of poems and of great deeds.
And it is written down in the commentary which Abou Zakariyah Yahyah-al-Tibrizi made upon those mighty poems chanted before Islam which are called Hamasah,—a word signifying all that is stalwart and noble in a man,—and in the Hamasah the place of the legend of Rabyah is in the second book, which is the 'Book of Dirges.' But the tale hath also been told by Al-Maidani, and by Abou Riyash; and it is likewise preserved in the great Kitab-al-Aghanij or 'Book of Songs,' collected and written down by Abou I Faraj Al' Ispahani, who devoted fifty years alone to the study of the poems and the legends of the Desert Arabs of old.
Rabyah, son of Mokaddem, of the Beni-Firaz, was famed as the bravest and the strongest and the most generous of his tribe what time he lived, and he was celebrated as an escort. For from the day that he had, single-handed, as a very young man, successfully defended his bride, Raytah, against the horsemen of the Beni-Djoucham on a foray, the women deemed it no little honor to have Rabyah as their escort. And no woman ever intrusted herself to the protection of Rabyah for a journey to whom any mishap befell while he remained with her.
Now on the day of his death Rabyah was escorting a caravan of women through the country of the Beni-Sulaim, and he was the only horseman with them. For though there had been blood between the Beni-Firaz and the Beni-Sulaim, the price of blood had been paid, and it was thought peace had been brought about. And the mother and sister of Rabyah were with the caravan.