[535]. Here some abridgement is necessary, for we have another recital of what has been told more than once.
[536]. This name, “King of Life” is Persian: “Tegh” or “Tigh” means a scymitar and “Bahrwán,” is, I conceive, a mistake for “Bihrún,” the Persian name of Alexander the Great.
[537]. Arab. “Mulákát” or meeting the guest which, I have said, is an essential part of Eastern ceremony; the distance from the divan, room, house or town being proportioned to his rank or consideration.
[538]. Arab. “Sifr”: whistling is held by the Badawi to be the speech of devils; and the excellent explorer Burckhardt got a bad name by the ugly habit.
[539]. The Arabs call “Shikk” (split man) and the Persians “Nímchahrah” (half-face) a kind of demon like a man divided longitudinally: this gruesome creature runs with amazing speed and is very cruel and dangerous. For the celebrated soothsayers Shikk and Sátih see Chenery’s Al-Hariri, p. 371.
[540]. Arab. “Takht” (Persian) = a throne or a capital.
[541]. Arab. Wady al Naml; a reminiscence of the Koranic Wady (chapt. xxvii.), which some place in Syria and others in Táif.
[542]. This is the old, old fable of the River Sabbation which Pliny (xxxi. 18) reports as “drying up every Sabbath-day” (Saturday): and which Josephus reports as breaking the Sabbath by flowing only on the Day of Rest.
[543]. They were keeping the Sabbath. When lodging with my Israelite friends Tiberias and Safet, I made a point of never speaking to them (after the morning salutation) till the Saturday was over.
[544]. Arab. “La’al” and “Yákút,” the latter also applied to the garnet and to a variety of inferior stones. The ruby is supposed by Moslems to be a common mineral thoroughly “cooked” by the sun, and produced only on the summits of mountains inaccessible even to Alpinists. The idea may have originated from exaggerated legends of the Badakhshán country (supposed to be the home of the ruby) and its terrors of break-neck foot-paths, jagged peaks and horrid ravines: hence our “balass-ruby” through the Spanish corruption “Balaxe.” Epiphanius, archbishop of Salamis in Cyprus, who died A.D. 403, gives, in a little treatise (De duodecim gemmis rationalis summi sacerdotis Hebræorum Liber, opera Fogginii, Romæ, 1743, p. 30), a precisely similar description of the mode of finding jacinths in Scythia. “In a wilderness in the interior of Great Scythia,” he writes, “there is a valley begirt with stony mountains as with walls. It is inaccessible to man, and so excessively deep that the bottom of the valley is invisible from the top of the surrounding mountains. So great is the darkness that it has the effect of a kind of chaos. To this place certain criminals are condemned, whose task it is to throw down into the valley slaughtered lambs, from which the skin has been first taken off. The little stones adhere to these pieces of flesh. Thereupon the eagles, which live on the summits of the mountains, fly down following the scent of the flesh, and carry away the lambs with the stones adhering to them. They, then, who are condemned to this place, watch until the eagles have finished their meal, and run and take away the stones.” Epiphanius, who wrote this, is spoken of in terms of great respect by many ecclesiastical writers, and St. Jerome styles the treatise here quoted, “Egregium volumen, quod si legere volueris, plenissimam scientiam consequeris;” and, indeed, it is by no means improbable that it was from the account of Epiphanius that this story was first translated into Arabic. A similar account is given by Marco Polo and by Nicolò de Conti, as of a usage which they had heard was practised in India, and the position ascribed to the mountain by Conti, namely, fifteen days’ journey north of Vijanagar, renders it highly probable that Golconda was alluded to. He calls the mountain Albenigaras, and says that it was infested with serpents. Marco Polo also speaks of these serpents, and while his account agrees with that of Sindbad, inasmuch as the serpents, which are the prey of Sindbad’s Rukh, are devoured by the Venetian’s eagles, that of Conti makes the vultures and eagles fly away with the meat to places where they may be safe from the serpents. (Introd. p. xlii., India in the Fifteenth Century, etc., R. H. Major, London, Hakluyt Soc. MDCCCLVII.)