Shall we e’er be unite after severance-tide ✿ And return in the perfectest cheer to bide?
In my heart indeed is a lowe of love ✿ And I’m pained by the spies who my pain deride:
My days I pass in amaze distraught, ✿ And her image a-nights I would see by side:
By Allah, no hour brings me solace of love ✿ And how can it when makebates vex me and chide?
A soft-sided damsel of slenderest waist ✿ Her arrows of eyne on my heart hath plied?
Her form is like Bán[[507]]-tree branch in garth ✿ Shame her charms the sun who his face most hide:
Did I not fear God (be He glorified!) ✿ “My Fair be glorified!” Had I cried.
The old man looked at him and noting his beauty and grace and symmetry and the fluency of his tongue and the seductiveness of his charms, had ruth on him and his heart mourned for his case. Now that Shaykh was the captain of a ship, bound to the damsel’s city, and in this ship were a hundred Moslem merchants, men of the Saving Faith; so he said to Nur al-Din, “Have patience and all will yet be well; I will bring thee to her an it be the will of Allah, extolled and exalted be He!”——And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.
Now when it was the Eight Hundred and Eighty-first Night,
She pursued, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that when the old skipper said to Nur al-Din, “I will bring thee to her, Inshallah!” the youth asked, “When shall we set out?” and the other said, “Come but three days more and we will depart in peace and prosperity.” Nur al-Din rejoiced at the captain’s words with joy exceeding and thanked him for his bounty and benevolence. Then he recalled the days of love-liesse dear and union with his slave-girl without peer, and he shed bitter tears and recited these couplets:—