“Perhaps this King is an hermaphrodite,[67] neither man nor woman quite.”
So he said to her:
“O King, I cannot find that thou hast a tool like the tools of men; what then moved thee to do this deed?”
Then loudly laughed Queen Budur till she fell on her back,[68] and said:
“O my dearling, how quickly thou hast forgotten the nights we have lain together!”
Then she made herself known to him, and he knew her for his wife, the Lady Budur, daughter of King al-Ghayur, Lord of the Isles and the Seas. So he embraced her and she embraced him, and he kissed her and she kissed him; then they lay down on the bed of pleasure voluptuous....
Here we end our extract from the Tale of Kamar al-Zaman, although the story runs on for another forty odd pages in Sir Richard Burton’s translation. A situation similar to that just described occurs in another story in ‘The Nights,’ and we shall have occasion to quote from that in a subsequent volume.