When bound the camels’ litters bearing them, ✿ And cries of drivers urged them on the way,
Outrusht my tears, despair gat hold of me ✿ And sleep betrayed mine eyes to wake a prey.
The day they went I wept, but showed no ruth ✿ The severance-spy and flared the flames alwày:
Alas for lowe o’ Love that fires me still! ✿ Alack for pine that melts my heart away!
To whom shall I complain of care, when thou ✿ Art gone, nor fain a-pillow head I lay?
And day by day Love’s ardours grow on me, ✿ And far’s the tent that holds my fondest may:
O Breeze o’ Heaven, bear for me a charge ✿ (Nor traitor-like my troth in love betray!),
Whene’er thou breathest o’er the loved one’s land ✿ Greet him with choice salam fro’ me, I pray:
Dust him with musk and powdered ambergris ✿ While time endures! Such is my wish for aye.
When the damsel had made an end of her song, Al-Abbas swooned away and they sprinkled on him musked rose-water, till he recovered from his fainting-fit, when he called another damsel (now there was on her of linen and raiment and ornaments that which undoeth description, and she was a model of beauty and brightness and loveliness and symmetry and perfect grace, such as shamed the crescent moon, and she was a Turkish girl from the land of the Roum and her name was Háfizah) and said to her, “O Hafizah, close thine eyes and tune thy lute and sing to us upon the days of severance.” She answered him, “To hear is to obey” and taking the lute, tightened its strings and cried out from her head,[[411]] in a plaintive voice, and sang these couplets:—