[14]. And would bring him bad luck if allowed to go without paying.
[15]. i.e. of the first half, as has been shown.
[16]. Arab. “Kumájah” from the Persian Kumásh = bread unleavened and baked in ashes. Egyptians use the word for bannocks of fine flour.
[17]. Arab. “Kalí,” our “alcali”: for this and other abstergents see vol. i. 279.
[18]. These lines have occurred twice in vol. i. 117 (Night xii.); I quote Mr. Payne.
[19]. Arab. “Yá ’llah, yá ’lláh;” vulg. used for “Look sharp!” e.g. “Yá ’llah járí, yá walad” = “Be off at once, boy.”
[20]. Arab. “Banj akrítashí,” a term which has occurred before.
[21]. A natural clock, called by West Africans Cokkerapeek = Cock-speak. All the world over it is the subject of superstition: see Giles’s “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio” (i. 177), where Miss Li, who is a devil, hears the cock crow and vanishes.
[22]. In Lane Al-Rashid “found at the door his young men waiting for him and ordered them to convey Abu-l-Hasan upon a mule and returned to the palace; Abu-l-Hasan being intoxicated and insensible. And when the Khaleefeh had rested himself in the palace, he called for,” etc.
[23]. Arab. “Kursi,” Assyrian “Kussú” = throne; and “Korsáí” in Aramaic (or Nabathean as Al-Mas’udi calls it), the second growth-period of the “Semitic” family, which supplanted Assyrian and Babylonian, and became, as Arabic now is, the common speech of the “Semitic” world.