“O thou, who art the circumference of greatness to the centre of the throne!—
Thou, to whose service a hundred persons are devoted, as is the firmament to the universe—
Make thou to me, who am a stranger, my evening equal to midday,
If at the side of Kateb[486] thou art as happy as at midday.”
The Shaikh desired the society of Sarmed. The author of this book was one day among the persons present; he said to one called Jerán, who made the eulogy of the Shaikh: “In a short time the Shaikh will, with whatever he may have acquired, turn towards the voyage of the other world, and Mîr Mohammed Sâid Mîr will take complete possession of the dignity of government;” and the same year the Shaikh undertook to set out for Mecca from Hyderabad. In the year of the Hejira 1059 (A. D. 1649), in the harbor of Fahardanish, he passed from this bodily ark to the circle of freedom. Hafiz says:
“The paradise of eternity is in this cell the share of the durvishes;
The Kâbah of the universe is the dominion of the durvishes;
O my heart, be there with reverence: for the sultan and the country
All are in the service of the majesty of the durvishes.”
Sarmed gave the information that, according to the Yahuds, God, the Almighty, is corporeal; and that his body is after the image of mankind, and similar to it; that, during the course of time, he is dispersed in the same manner as splendor is dissipated. Sarmed moreover said, that it is mentioned in the Mosaic book and in the holy writings, that the spirit of the divine body is beauty itself, and manifests itself under a human form; that punishment and recompense of the other world are already experienced in this state; that life lasts one hundred and twenty years; after that, man’s whole life may be considered as one day, which, when he dies, is followed by night; that his body assumes partly the form of a mineral, partly that of a vegetable, and partly that of an animal, and the like; when one hundred and twenty years have elapsed, night comes to an end, and the morning appears again; if an atom of his bodily dust be in the east and another atom in the west, they unite in one place, and life is renewed to last again one hundred years, as we have said, when night returns. Punishment and recompense are solely for this world. They maintain that whatever is, bears eternally the form of mankind, composed of water and earth.