[FN#483] This is always mentioned: the nearer seat the higher the honour.
[FN#484] Alluding to the phrase "Al-safar zafar" = voyaging is victory (Pilgrimage i., 127).
[FN#485] Arab. "Habb;" alluding to the black drop in the human heart which the Archangel Gabriel removed from Mohammed by opening his breast.
[FN#486] This phrase, I have said, often occurs: it alludes to the horripilation (Arab. Kush'arírah), horror or gooseflesh which, in Arab as in Hindu fables, is a symptom of great joy. So Boccaccio's "pelo arriciato" v., 8: Germ. Gänsehaut.
[FN#487] Arab. "Hasanta ya Hasan" = Bene detto, Benedetto! the usual word-play vulgarly called "pun": Hasan (not Hassan, as we will write it) meaning "beautiful."
[FN#488] Arab. "Loghah" also = a vocabulary, a dictionary; the Arabs had them by camel-loads.
[FN#489] The seventh of the sixteen "Bahr" (metres) in Arabic prosody; the easiest because allowing the most license and, consequently, a favourite for didactic, homiletic and gnomic themes. It means literally "agitated" and was originally applied to the rude song of the Cameleer. De Sacy calls this doggrel "the poet's ass" (Torrens, Notes xxvi.). It was the only metre in which Mohammed the Apostle ever spoke: he was no poet (Koran xxxvi., 69) but he occasionally recited a verse and recited it wrongly (Dabistan iii., 212). In Persian prosody Rajaz is the seventh of nineteen and has six distinct varieties (pp. 79-81), "Gladwin's Dissertations on Rhetoric," etc. Calcutta, 1801). I shall have more to say about it in the Terminal Essay.
[FN#490] "Her stature tall—I hate a dumpy woman" (Don Juan).
[FN#491] A worthy who was Kazi of Kufah (Cufa) in the seventh century. Al-Najaf, generally entitled "Najaf al-Ashraf" (the Venerand) is the place where Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed, lies or is supposed to lie buried, and has ever been a holy place to the Shi'ahs. I am not certain whether to translate "Sa'alab" by fox or jackal; the Arabs make scant distinction between them. "Abu Hosayn" (Father of the Fortlet) is certainly the fox, and as certainly "Sha'arhar" is the jackal from the Pehlevi Shagál or Shaghál.
[FN#492] Usually by all manner of extortions and robbery, corruption and bribery, the ruler's motto being