Verily the praise and the grace and the kingdom are thine:
No partner hast Thou: here am I!
A single Talbiyah is a "Shart" or positive condition: and its repetition is a Sunnat or Custom of the Prophet. See Night xci.
[438]. The staple abuse of the vulgar is cursing parents and relatives, especially feminine, with specific allusions to their "shame." And when dames of high degree are angry, Nature, in the East as in the West, sometimes speaks out clearly enough, despite Mistress Chapone and all artificial restrictions.
[439]. A great beauty in Arabia and the reverse in Denmark, Germany and Slav-land, where it is a sign of being a were-wolf or a vampire. In Greece also it denotes a "Brukolak" or vampire.
[440]. This is not physiologically true: a bride rarely conceives the first night, and certainly would not know that she had conceived. Moreover the number of courses furnished by the bridegroom would be against conception. It is popularly said that a young couple often undoes in the morning what it has done during the night.
[441]. Torrens (Notes, xxiv.) quotes "Fleisher" upon the word "Ghamghama" (Diss. Crit. de Glossis Habichtionis), which he compares with "Dumduma" and "Humbuma" determining them to be onomatopoeics, "an incomplete and an obscure murmur of a sentence as it were lingering between the teeth and lips and therefore difficult to be understood." Of this family is "Taghúm"; not used in modern days. In my Pilgrimage (i. 313) I have noticed another, "Khyas, Khyas!" occurring in a Hizb al-Bahr (Spell of the Sea). Herklots gives a host of them; and their sole characteristics are harshness and strangeness of sound, uniting consonants which are not joined in Arabic. The old Egyptians and Chaldeans had many such words composed at will for theurgic operations.
[442]. This may mean either "it is of Mosul fashion" or, it is of muslin.
[443]. To the English reader these lines would appear the reverse of apposite; but Orientals have their own ways of application, and all allusions to Badawi partings are effective and affecting. The civilised poets of Arab cities throw the charm of the Desert over their verse by images borrowed from its scenery, the dromedary, the mirage and the well, as naturally as certain of our bards who hated the country, babbled of purling rills, etc. Thoroughly to feel Arabic poetry one must know the Desert (Pilgrimage iii., 63).
[444]. In those days the Arabs and the Portuguese recorded everything which struck them, as the Chinese and Japanese do in our times. And yet we complain of the amount of our modern writing!