[FN#22] Easterns as a rule sleep with head and body covered by a sheet or in cold weather a blanket. The practice is doubtless hygienic, defending the body from draughts when the pores are open; but Europeans find it hard to adopt; it seems to stop their breathing. Another excellent practice in the East, and indeed amongst barbarians and savages generally, is training children to sleep with mouths shut: in after life they never snore and in malarious lands they do not require Outram's "fever-guard," a swathe of muslin over the mouth. Mr. Catlin thought so highly of the "shut mouth" that he made it the subject of a book.
[FN#23] Arab. "Hanzal"=coloquintida, an article often mentioned by Arabs in verse and prose; the bright coloured little gourd attracts every eye by its golden glance when travelling through the brown-yellow waste of sand and clay. A favourite purgative (enough for a horse) is made by filling the inside with sour milk which is drunks after a night's soaking: it is as active as the croton-nut of the Gold Coast.
[FN#24] The Bresl. Edit. iii. 354 sends him to the "land of Sνn"
(China).
[FN#25] Arab. "Yα Kisrawi!"=O subject of the Kisrα or Chosroλ; the latter explained in vol.i.,75.[Volume 1, Footnote # 128] "Fars" is the origin of "Persia"; and there is a hit at the prodigious lying of the modern race, whose forefathers were so famous as truth-tellers. "I am a Persian, but I am not lying now," is a phrase familiar to every traveller.
[FN#26] There is no such name: perhaps it is a clerical error
for "Har jαh"=(a man of) any place. I know an Englishman who in
Persian called himself "Mirza Abdullah-i-Hνchmakαni"=Master
Abdullah of Nowhere.
[FN#27] The Bresl. Edit. (loc. cit.) gives a comical description of the Prince assuming the dress of an astrologer-doctor, clapping an old book under his arm, fumbling a rosary of beads, enlarging his turband, lengthening his sleeves and blackening his eyelids with antimony. Here, however, it would be out of place. Very comical also is the way in which he pretends to cure the maniac by "muttering unknown words, blowing in her face, biting her ear," etc.
[FN#28] Arab. "Sar'a"=falling sickness. Here again we have in all its simplicity the old nursery idea of "possession" by evil spirits.
[FN#29] Arab. "Nafahαt"=breathings, benefits, the Heb. Neshamah opp. to Nephesh (soul) and Ruach (spirit). Healing by the breath is a popular idea throughout the East and not unknown to Western Magnetists and Mesmerists. The miraculous cures of the Messiah were, according to Moslems, mostly performed by aspiration. They hold that in the days of Isa, physic had reached its highest development, and thus his miracles were mostly miracles of medicine; whereas, in Mohammed's time, eloquence had attained its climax and accordingly his miracles were those of eloquence, as shown in the Koran and Ahαdνs.
[FN#30] Lit. "The rose in the sleeves or calyces." I take my English equivalent from Jeremy Taylor, "So I have seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood," etc.
[FN#31] These lines are from the Bresl. Edit. (v. 35). The four couplets in the Mac. Edit. are too irrelevant.