Good is good and he's best whoso worketh it first; * And ill is for me of provisions the worst.
The provision is = viaticum, provaunt for the way.]
The MS. has "akram" and "azlam" = "the more generous," "the more "turayyih," a modern form for "turawwih." iniquitous," meaning that while good should be requited by good, and evil provokes further evil in retaliation, the beginner in either case deserves the greater praise or blame.
365 ([return])
[ I have noted (vols. iii. 75, and viii. 266) that there are two "Soudans" as we write the word, one Eastern upon the Upper Nile Valley and the other Western and drained by the Niger water-shed. The former is here meant. It is or should be a word of shame to English ears after the ungodly murder and massacre of the gallant "Soudanese" negroids who had ever been most friendly to us and whom with scant reason to boast we attacked and destroyed because they aspired to become free from Turkish task-masters and Egyptian tax-gatherers. That such horrors were perpetrated by order of one of the most humane amongst our statesmen proves and decidedly proves one thing, an intense ignorance of geography and ethnology.]
366 ([return])
[ [In the MS. "lawá 'a-hu" for which Sir Richard conjectures the reading "lawwahahu" taking the pronoun to refer to the sword. I believe, however, the word to be a clerical error for our old acquaintance "láwa'a-hu" (see supra p. 266) and, referring the pronoun in the three verbs to the Lion, would translate: "and he worried him," etc.?ST.]
367 ([return])
[ Arab. "Al-bashárah," see vol. i. 30: Scott has (vi. 204) "Good tidings to our sovereign.">[