[57] The renowned Harún er-Rashíd was not the only Oriental monarch fond of prowling through his capital after nightfall in disguise: Indian kings of the olden time, long before the Muhammedan invasion and subjugation, are said to have made it their regular practice. King James the Fifth of Scotland was wont to adopt all sorts of disguises and go about in quest of amorous adventures.
[58] Blighted, as they firmly believed, by the mere sight of the unlucky man.
[59] Copies of the Kurán are always very beautifully written and often illuminated with great taste and splendour, and are very costly. Poor Shoayb may, however, have been induced to select a Kurán out of the robbers’ booty rather from motives of piety than from any desire of gain.—I may mention that, although the art of printing is now practised both in Persia and Turkey, copies of the Kurán are still multiplied (or were so till very lately) by handwriting, from a superstitious notion that the impure materials employed in printing would profane the sacred text.
[60] Friday is the Muslim Sunday—called El-Jum’á, or the Assembly; but it is not observed as a day exclusively devoted to religious exercises, like the “Lord’s Day” among our Protestant “evangelicals,” whose motto seems to be, “Let us all be unhappy together,” on that day which they ought rather to regard as a day of pious rejoicing, could they be consistent; nor are the superstitious notions associated with the Sabbath in Jewish minds entertained by Muslims regarding the day of El-Jum’á.
[61] The number forty seems to have been always a favourite among Eastern peoples, and it occurs in the Bible many times in connection with important events. Thus the Flood continued forty days (Gen. vii, 17); Joseph and his kinsmen mourned forty days for their father Jacob (Gen. l, 3); thrice Moses fasted forty days (Exod. xxiv, 18, xxxiv, 28, and Deut. ix, 9-25); during forty days the Hebrew spies searched Canaan (Numb. xiii, 25); Goliath defied the Hebrew army for forty days (1 Sam. xvii, 16); Elijah fasted forty days (1 Kings xix, 8); Nineveh was to be destroyed after forty days (Jonah iii, 4); forty days Ezekiel bore the iniquities of the house of Judah, a day for a year (Ezek. iv, 6); Christ was tempted by Satan during forty days (Matt. iv, 2, and Mark i, 13), and he continued forty days on earth after his resurrection (Acts i, 3); the Israelites were condemned to wander in the wilderness forty years (Numb. xiv, 33).—Muslims mourn forty days for their dead; and they deem a woman ceremonially unclean during forty days after childbirth: among the Israelites the period was forty days when she had given birth to a male child and eighty days in the case of a female child.—In the present romance, our unlucky hero, Nassar, is directed by the hermit’s “last will,” as above, to spend forty days in prayer for the restoration of the fairies’ fountain; he shoots an arrow through a finger-ring forty times (p. 100); but his too expert archery caused an accident to the king, from the effects of which his majesty did not recover until he had been “forty days under medical treatment” (p. 102); poor Shah Manssur was in the power of the cruel sorceress for nearly forty days (p. 26); and the son of the king of Tytmyran was tossed about on the sea in a boat for forty days (p. 73). To conclude this long note: forty is the usual number of a gang of robbers in Eastern tales—that of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” will at once occur to the reader; and we have another example in the diverting story of “Ahmed the Cobbler” (Malcolm’s Sketches of Persia), where the king’s treasury is plundered by forty robbers.
[62] Excepting, surely, “the shark and the sun-fish dark”!
[63] “Sometimes it happens,” says our author, “that a man is such a favourite of fortune that if another try to injure him even that will turn to his advantage. Good men refrain in thought and word and deed from injuring their fellow men; but evil-minded men resemble scorpions in their nature, stinging everybody without cause, and with no profit to themselves, while the objects of their hatred nevertheless prosper;—as will appear from the following story of the adventures of Farrukhrúz, whose success was promoted by the enmity which the vazírs of the king of Yaman entertained against him.”
[64] A sensible man! He was well aware that frequently “riches take unto themselves wings and flee away.” The sons of “self-made” men seldom turn out to be of much account—probably because fathers such as Khoja Marján are not often found among those whose sole aim in life has been to “mak’ siller”!
[65] Or Yemen: the ancient Arabia Felix.
[66] “Forty days” again!—see ante, note on pp. [140, 141].