The chill of sorrow numbs my thought:
methinks I hear the passing knell;
As dies across yon thin blue line
the tinkling of the Camel-bell.

The next section quotes the various aspects under which Life appeared to the wise and foolish teachers of humanity. First comes Hafiz, whose well-known lines are quoted beginning with Shab-i-târîk o bîm-i-mauj, etc. Hûr is the plural of Ahwar, in full Ahwar el-Ayn, a maid whose eyes are intensely white where they should be white, and black elsewhere: hence our silly “Houries.” Follows Umar-i-Khayyâm, who spiritualized Tasawwof, or Sooffeism, even as the Soofis (Gnostics) spiritualized Moslem Puritanism. The verses alluded to are:—

You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse
I made a second marriage in my house,
Divorced old barren Reason from my bed
And took the Daughter of the Vine to spouse.
(St. 60, Mr. Fitzgerald’s translation.)

Here “Wine” is used in its mystic sense of entranced Love for the Soul of Souls. Umar was hated and feared because he spoke boldly when his brethren the Soofis dealt in innuendoes. A third quotation has been trained into a likeness of the “Hymn of Life,” despite the commonplace and the navrante vulgarité which characterize the pseudo-Schiller-Anglo-American School. The same has been done to the words of Isâ (Jesus); for the author, who is well-read in the Ingîl (Evangel), evidently intended the allusion. Mansur el-Hallâj (the Cotton-Cleaner) was stoned for crudely uttering the Pantheistic dogma Ana ’l Hakk (I am the Truth, i.e., God), wa laysa fi-jubbatî il’ Allah (and within my coat is nought but God). His blood traced on the ground the first-quoted sentence. Lastly, there is a quotation from “Sardanapalus, son of Anacyndaraxes,” etc.: here {Greek: paîze} may mean sport; but the context determines the kind of sport intended. The Zâhid is the literal believer in the letter of the Law, opposed to the Soofi, who believes in its spirit: hence the former is called a Zâhiri (outsider), and the latter a Bâtini, an insider. Moses is quoted because he ignored future rewards and punishments. As regards the “two Eternities,” Persian and Arab metaphysicians split Eternity, i.e., the negation of Time, into two halves, Azal (beginninglessness) and Abad (endlessness); both being mere words, gatherings of letters with a subjective significance. In English we use “Eternal” (Æviternus, age-long, life-long) as loosely, by applying it to three distinct ideas; (1) the habitual, in popular parlance; (2) the exempt from duration; and (3) the everlasting, which embraces all duration. “Omniscience-Maker” is the old Roman sceptic’s Homo fecit Deos.

The next section is one long wail over the contradictions, the mysteries, the dark end, the infinite sorrowfulness of all existence, and the arcanum of grief which, Luther said, underlies all life. As with Euripides “to live is to die, to die is to live.” Hâjî Abdû borrows the Hindu idea of the human body. “It is a mansion,” says Menu, “with bones for its beams and rafters; with nerves and tendons for cords; with muscles and blood for cement; with skin for its outer covering; filled with no sweet perfume, but loaded with impurities; a mansion infested by age and sorrow; the seat of malady; harassed with pains; haunted with the quality of darkness (Tama-guna), and incapable of standing.” The Pot and Potter began with the ancient Egyptians. “Sitting as a potter at the wheel, Cneph (at Philæ) moulds clay, and gives the spirit of life to the nostrils of Osiris.” Hence the Genesitic “breath.” Then we meet him in the Vedas, the Being “by whom the fictile vase is formed; the clay out of which it is fabricated.” We find him next in Jeremiah’s “Arise and go down unto the Potter’s house,” etc. (xviii. 2), and lastly in Romans (ix. 20), “Hath not the potter power over the clay?” No wonder that the first Hand who moulded the man-mud is a lieu commun in Eastern thought. The “waste of agony” is Buddhism, or Schopenhauerism pure and simple, I have moulded “Earth on Earth” upon “Seint Ysidre”’s well-known rhymes (A.D. 1440):—

Erthe out of Erthe is wondirli wrouzt,
Erthe out of Erthe hath gete a dignity of nouzt,
Erthe upon Erthe hath sett all his thouzt
How that Erthe upon Erthe may be his brouzt, etc.

The “Camel-rider,” suggests Ossian, “yet a few years and the blast of the desert comes.” The dromedary was chosen as Death’s vehicle by the Arabs, probably because it bears the Bedouin’s corpse to the distant burial-ground, where he will lie among his kith and kin. The end of this section reminds us of:—

How poor, how rich; how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful is Man!

The Hâjî now passes to the results of his long and anxious thoughts: I have purposely twisted his exordium into an echo of Milton:—

Till old experience doth attain
To something of prophetic strain.