[63] Note by Sir Richard: Koran 51, 9, alluding, in the text, to the preposterous venery her lover demands.
[64] Note by Sir Richard: Arab “Futùh,” meaning openings, and also victories, benefits. The lover congratulates her on her mortifying self in order to please him.
[65] Vide note to Excursus to this story, p. 100.
[66] Note by Sir Richard: “And the righteous work will be exalt.” (Koran 35, 11). Applied ironically.
[67] Note by Sir Richard: Easterns still believe in what Westerns know to be an impossibility, human beings with the parts and proportions of both sexes equally developed and capable of reproduction; and Al-Islam even provides special rules for them. ... The old Greeks dreamed, after their fashion, a beautiful poetic dream of a human animal uniting the contradictory beauties of man and woman. The duality of the generative organs seems an old Egyptian tradition; at least we find it in Genesis (1.27), where the image of the Deity is created male and female, before man was formed out of the dust of the ground (2.7). The old tradition found its way to India (if the Hindus did not borrow the idea from the Greeks); and one of the forms of Mahadeva, the third person of their triad, is entitled “Ardhanári” = the Half-Woman, which has suggested to them some charming pictures. Europeans, seeing the left breast conspicuously feminine, have indulged in silly surmises about the “Amazons.”
[68] Note by Sir Richard: This is a mere phrase for our “dying of laughter”: the queen was on her back. And as Easterns sit on carpets, their falling back is very different from the same movement off a chair.
[69] Havelock Ellis is quoting from The Perfumed Garden of The Cheikh Nefzaoui: Cosmopoli, 1886, printed for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares.
[70] “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
[71] The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui: Cosmopoli, 1886.
[72] “In Russia at all events, a girl, as very many have acknowledged to me, cannot resist the ever-stronger impulses of sex beyond the twenty-second or twenty-third year. And if she cannot do so in natural ways she adopts artificial ways. The belief that the feminine sex feels the stimulus of sex less than the male is quite false.”—Guttceit, Dreissig Jahre Praxis, 1873.