[264]. The young man must have been a demon of chastity.
[265]. Arab. "Kirát" from κεράτιον, i.e. bean, the seed of the Abrus precatorius, in weight = two to three (English) grains; and in length = one finger-breadth here; 24 being the total. The Moslem system is evidently borrowed from the Roman "as" and "uncia."
[266]. Names of women.
[267]. Arab. "Amsa" (lit. he passed the evening) like "asbaha" (he rose in the morning) "Azhá" (he spent the forenoon) and "báta" (he spent the night), are idiomatically used for "to be in any state, to continue" without specification of time or season.
[268]. Lit. "my liver;" which viscus, and not the heart, is held the seat of passion; a fancy dating from the oldest days. Theocritus says of Hercules, "In his liver Love had fixed a wound" (Idyl. xiii). In the Anthologia "Cease, Love, to wound my liver and my heart" (lib. vii.) So Horace (Odes, i. 2); his Latin Jecur and the Persian "Jigar" being evident congeners. The idea was long prevalent and we find in Shakespeare:—
Alas, then Love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver but the palate.
[269]. A marvellous touch of nature, love ousting affection; the same trait will appear in the lover and both illustrate the deep Italian saying, "Amor discende, non ascende." "The further it goes down the stronger it becomes as of grand-parent for grand-child and vice versâ."
[270]. This tenet of the universal East is at once fact and unfact. As a generalism asserting that women's passion is ten times greater than man's (Pilgrimage, ii. 282), it is unfact. The world shows that while women have more philoprogenitiveness, men have more amativeness; otherwise the latter would not propose and would nurse the doll and baby. Fact, however, in low-lying lands, like Persian Mazanderan versus the Plateau; Indian Malabar compared with Marátha-land; California as opposed to Utah and especially Egypt contrasted with Arabia. In these hot-damp climates the venereal requirements and reproductive powers of the female greatly exceed those of the male; and hence the dissoluteness of morals would be phenomenal, were it not obviated by seclusion, the sabre and the revolver. In cold-dry or hot-dry mountainous lands the reverse is the case; hence polygamy there prevails whilst the low countries require polyandry in either form, legal or illegal (i.e. prostitution). I have discussed this curious point of "geographical morality" (for all morality is, like conscience, both geographical and chronological), a subject so interesting to the lawgiver, the student of ethics and the anthropologist, in "The City of the Saints." But strange and unpleasant truths progress slowly, especially in England.
[271]. This morning evacuation is considered, in the East, a sine quâ non of health; and old Anglo-Indians are unanimous in their opinion of the "bari fajar" (as they mispronounce the dawn-clearance). The natives of India, Hindús (pagans) and Hindís (Moslems), unlike Europeans, accustom themselves to evacuate twice a day, evening as well as morning. This may, perhaps, partly account for their mildness and effeminacy; for:—