623 ([return])
[ "Mutawassi * * * al-Wisáyat al-Támmah." ("Mutawassi" has been met with before (see p. 420) and "Wisáyah" is the corresponding noun = he charged himself with (took upon himself) her complete charge, i.e. maintenance.—ST.)]
624 ([return])
[ (In Ar. "khallí-ná nak'ud," a thoroughly modern expression. It reads like a passage from Spitta Bey's Contes Arabes Modernes, where such phrases as: "khallí-ná niktib al-Kitáb," let us write the marriage contract, "ma-tkhallihsh (for "má takhallí-hu shay") yishúfak," let him not see thee, and the like are very frequent.—ST.]
625 ([return])
[ "Fi Kashshi 'l-Markab;" According to custom in the East all the ship's crew had run on shore about their own business as soon as she cast anchor. This has happened to me on board an Egyptian man-of-war where, on arriving at Suez, I found myself the sum total of the crew.]
626 ([return])
[ In text, "Jílan ba'da Jíl:" the latter word = revolutions, change of days, tribe, people.]
627 ([return])
[ The dénouement is a replica of "The Tale of the King who lost kingdom and wife and wealth and Allah restored them to him" (Suppl. Nights, vol. i. 319). That a Sultan should send his Ministers to keep watch over a ship's cargo sounds passably ridiculous to a European reader, but a coffee-house audience in the East would find it perfectly natural. Also, that three men, the Sultan and his sons, should live together for years without knowing anything of one another's lives seems to us an absurdity: in the case of an Oriental such detail would never strike him even as impossible or even improbable.]