[FN#332] These verses have occurred twice (Night ix. etc.): so I give Lane's version (ii. 482).
[FN#333] A Badawi tribe to which belonged the generous Ma'an bin
Za'idab, often mentioned The Nights.
[FN#334] Wealthy harems, I have said, are hot-beds of Sapphism and Tribadism. Every woman past her first youth has a girl whom she calls her "Myrtle" (in Damascus). At Agbome, capital-of Dahome, I found that a troop of women was kept for the use of the "Amazons" (Mission to Gelele, ii. 73). Amongst the wild Arabs, who ignore Socratic and Sapphic perversions, the lover is always more jealous of his beloved's girl-friends than of men rivals. In England we content ourselves with saying that women corrupt women more than men do.
[FN#335] The Hebrew Pentateuch; Roll of the Law.
[FN#336] I need hardly notice the brass trays, platters and table-covers with inscriptions which are familiar to every reader: those made in the East for foreign markets mostly carry imitation inscriptions lest infidel eyes fall upon Holy Writ.
[FN#337] These six distichs are in Night xiii. I borrow Torrens (p. 125) to show his peculiar treatment of spinning out 12 lines to 38.
[FN#338] Arab. "Musбmirah"=chatting at night. Easterns are inordinately fond of the practice and the wild Arabs often sit up till dawn, talking over the affairs of the tribe, indeed a Shaykh is expected to do so. "Early to bed and early to rise" is a civilised, not a savage or a barbarous saying. Samнr is a companion in night talk; Rafнk of the road; Rahнb in riding horse or camel, Kб'id in sitting, Sharнb and Rafнs at drink, and Nadнm at table: Ahнd is an ally. and Sharнk a partner all on the model of "Fa'нl."
[FN#339] In both lover and beloved the excess of love gave them this clairvoyance.
[FN#340] The prayer will be granted for the excess (not the purity) of her love.
[FN#341] This wailing over the Past is one of the common-places of Badawi poetry. The traveller cannot fail, I repeat, to notice the chronic melancholy of peoples dwelling under the brightest skies.