One Thousand and One Nights

by Richard Burton

  23 These lines have occurred in vol. iv. 267, where references to other places are given. I quote Lane by way of variety. In the text they are supposed to have been written by the Persian, a hint that Hasan would never be seen again.

  24 i.e. a superfetation of iniquity.

  25 Arab. “Kurbán,” Heb. { }Corban = offering, oblation to be brought to the priest’s house or to the altar of the tribal God Yahveh, Jehovah (Levit. ii, 2-3 etc.). Amongst the Maronites Kurban is the host (-wafer) and amongst the Turks ‘Id al-Kurban (sacrifice-feast) is the Greater Bayram, the time of Pilgrimage.

  26 Nár = fire, being feminine, like the names of the other “elements.”

  27 The Egyptian Kurbáj of hippopotamus-hide (Burkh. Nubia, p,282) or elephant-hide (Turner ii. 365). Hence the Fr. Cravache (as Cravat is from Croat).

  28 In Mac. Edit. “Bahriyah”: in Bresl. Edit. “Nawátíyah.”

  See vol. vi. 242, for {Naýtes}, navita, nauta.

  29 In Bresl. Edit. (iv. 285) “Yá Khwájah,” for which see vol. vi. 46.

  30 Arab. “Tabl” (vulg. baz) = a kettle-drum about half a foot broad held in the left hand and beaten with a stick or leathern thong. Lane refers to his description (M.E. ii. chapt. v.) of the Dervish’s drum of tinned copper with parchment face, and renders Zakhmah or Zukhmah (strap, stirrup-leather) by “plectrum,” which gives a wrong idea. The Bresl. Edit. ignores the strap.

  31 The “Spartivento” of Italy, mostly a tall headland which divides the clouds. The most remarkable feature of the kind is the Dalmatian Island, Pelagosa.

  32 The “Rocs” (Al-Arkhákh) in the Bresl. Edit. (iv. 290).

  The Rakham = aquiline vulture.

  33 Lane here quotes a similar incident in the romance “Sayf Zú al-Yazan,” so called from the hero, whose son, Misr, is sewn up in a camel’s hide by Bahrám, a treacherous Magian, and is carried by the Rukhs to a mountain-top.

  34 These lines occurred in Night xxvi. vol. i. 275: I quote

  Mr. Payne for variety.

  35 Thus a Moslem can not only circumcise and marry himself but can also bury canonically himself. The form of this prayer is given by Lane M. E. chapt. xv.

  36 i.e. If I fail in my self-imposed duty, thou shalt charge me therewith on the Judgment-day.

  37 Arab. “Al-Alwán,” plur. of laun (colour). The latter in Egyptian Arabic means a “dish of meat.” See Burckhardt No. 279. I repeat that the great traveller’s “Arabic Proverbs” wants republishing for two reasons. First he had not sufficient command of English to translate with the necessary laconism and assonance: secondly in his day British Philistinism was too rampant to permit a literal translation. Consequently the book falls short of what the Oriental student requires; and I have prepared it for my friend Mr. Quaritch.

  38 i.e. Lofty, high-builded. See Night dcclxviii. vol. vii. . In the Bresl. Edit. Al-Masíd (as in Al-Kazwíni): in the Mac. Edit. Al-Mashid

  39 Arab. “Munkati” here = cut off from the rest of the world. Applied to a man, and a popular term of abuse in Al-Hijáz, it means one cut off from the blessings of Allah and the benefits of mankind; a pauvre sire. (Pilgrimage ii. 22.)

  40 Arab. “Baras au Juzám,” the two common forms of leprosy. See vol. iv. 51. Popular superstition in Syria holds that coition during the menses breeds the Juzám, Dáa al-Kabír (Great Evil) or Dáa al-Fíl (Elephantine Evil), i.e. Elephantiasis and that the days between the beginning of the flow (Sabíl) to that of coition shows the age when the progeny will be attacked; for instance if it take place on the first day, the disease will appear in the tenth year, on the fourth the fortieth and so on. The only diseases really dreaded by the Badawin are leprosy and small-pox. Coition during the menses is forbidden by all Eastern faiths under the severest penalties. Al-Mas’údi relates how a man thus begotten became a determined enemy of Ali; and the ancient Jews attributed the magical powers of Joshua Nazarenus to this accident of his birth, the popular idea being that sorcerers are thus impurely engendered.

  41 By adoption - See vol. iii. 151. This sudden affection (not love) suggests the “Come to my arms, my slight acquaintance!” of the Anti-Jacobin. But it is true to Eastern nature; and nothing can be more charming than this fast friendship between the Princess and Hasan.

  42 En tout bien et en tout honneur, be it understood.

  43 He had done nothing of the kind; but the feminine mind is prone to exaggeration. Also Hasan had told them a fib, to prejudice them against the Persian.

  44 These nervous movements have been reduced to a system in the Turk. “Ihtilájnámeh” = Book of palpitations, prognosticating from the subsultus tendinum and other involuntary movements of the body from head to foot; according to Ja’afar the Just, Daniel the Prophet, Alexander the Great; the Sages of Persia and the Wise Men of Greece. In England we attend chiefly to the eye and ear.

  45 Revenge, amongst the Arabs, is a sacred duty; and, in their state of civilization, society could not be kept together without it. So the slaughter of a villain is held to be a sacrifice to Allah, who amongst Christians claims for Himself the monopoly of vengeance.

  46 Arab. “Zindík.” See vol. v. 230.

  47 Lane translates this “put for him the remaining food and water;” but Al-Ákhar (Mac. Edit.) evidently refers to the Najíb (dromedary).

  48 We can hardly see the heroism of the deed, but it must be remembered that Bahram was a wicked sorcerer, whom it was every good Moslem’s bounden duty to slay. Compare the treatment of witches in England two centuries ago.

  49 The mother in Arab tales is ma mčre, now becoming somewhat ridiculous in France on account of the over use of that venerable personage.

  50 The forbidden closet occurs also in Sayf Zú al-Yazan, who enters it and finds the bird-girls. Trébutien ii, 208 says, “Il est assez remarquable qu’il existe en Allemagne une tradition ŕ peu prčs semblable, et qui a fourni le sujet d’un des contes de Musaeus, entitulé, le voile enlevé.” Here Hasan is artfully left alone in a large palace without other companions but his thoughts and the reader is left to divine the train of ideas which drove him to open the door.

  51 Arab. “Buhayrah” (Bresl. Edit. “Bahrah”), the tank or cistern in the Hosh (court-yard) of an Eastern house. Here, however, it is a rain-cistern on the flat roof of the palace (See Night dcccviii).

  52 This description of the view is one of the most gorgeous in The Nights.

  53 Here again are the “Swan-maidens” (See vol. v. 346) “one of the primitive myths, the common heritage of the whole Aryan (Iranian) race.” In Persia Bahram-i-Gúr when carried off by the Dív Sapíd seizes the Peri’s dove-coat: in Santháli folk-lore Torica, the Goatherd, steals the garment doffed by one of the daughters of the sun; and hence the twelve birds of Russian Story. To the same cycle belong the Seal-tales of the Faroe Islands (Thorpe’s Northern Mythology) and the wise women or mermaids of Shetland (Hibbert). Wayland the smith captures a wife by seizing a mermaid’s raiment and so did Sir Hagán by annexing the wardrobe of a Danubian water-nymph. Lettsom, the translator, mixes up this swan-raiment with that of the Valkyries or Choosers of the Slain. In real life stealing women’s clothes is an old trick and has often induced them, after having been seen naked, to offer their persons spontaneously. Of this I knew two cases in India, where the theft is justified by divine example. The blue god Krishna, a barbarous and grotesque Hindu Apollo, robbed the raiment of the pretty Gopálís (cowherdesses) who were bathing in the Arjun River and carried them to the top of a Kunduna tree; nor would he restore them till he had reviewed the naked girls and taken one of them to wife. See also Imr al-Kays (of the Mu’allakah) with “Onaiza” at the port of Daratjuljul (Clouston’s Arabian Poetry, p.4). A critic has complained of my tracing the origin of the Swan-maiden legend to the physical resemblance between the bird and a high-bred girl (vol. v. 346). I should have explained my theory which is shortly, that we must seek a material basis for all so-called supernaturalisms, and that anthropomorphism satisfactorily explains the Swan-maiden, as it does the angel and the de
vil. There is much to say on the subject; but this is not the place for long discussion.

  54 Arab. “Nafs Ammárah,” corresponding with our canting term “The Flesh.” Nafs al-Nátíkah is the intellectual soul or function; Nafs al-Ghazabíyah = the animal function and Nafs al Shahwáníyah = the vegetative property.

  55 The lines occur in vol. ii. 331: I have quoted Mr.

  Payne. Here they are singularly out of place.

  56 Not the “green gown” of Anglo-India i.e. a white ball-dress with blades of grass sticking to it in consequence of a “fall backwards.”

  57 These lines occur in vol. i. 219: I have borrowed from

  Torrens ().

  58 The appearance of which ends the fast and begins the

  Lesser Festival. See vol. i. 84.

  59 See note, vol. i. 84, for notices of the large navel; much appreciated by Easterns.

  60 Arab. “Shá’ir Al-Walahán” = the love-distraught poet; Lane has “a distracted poet.” My learned friend Professor Aloys Sprenger has consulted, upon the subject of Al-Walahán the well-known Professor of Arabic at Halle, Dr. Thorbeck, who remarks that the word (here as further on) must be an adjective, mad, love-distraught, not a “lakab” or poetical cognomen. He generally finds it written Al-Shá’ir al-Walahán (the love-demented poet) not Al-Walahán al-Shá’ir = Walahán the Poet. Note this burst of song after the sweet youth falls in love: it explains the cause of verse-quotation in The Nights, poetry being the natural language of love and battle.

  61 “Them” as usual for “her.”

  62 Here Lane proposes a transposition, for “Wa-huwá (and he) fi’l-hubbi,” to read “Fi ‘l-hubbi wa huwa (wa-hwa);” but the latter is given in the Mac. Edit.

  63 For the pun in “Sabr”=aloe or patience. See vol. i. 138. In Herr Landberg (i. 93) we find a misunderstanding of the couplet —

  “Aw’ákibu s-sabri (Kála ba’azuhum)

  Mahmúdah: Kultu, ‘khshi an takhirriní.’”

  “The effects of patience” (or aloes) quoth one “are praiseworthy!” Quoth I, “Much I fear lest it make me stool.” Mahmúdah is not only un laxatif, but a slang name for a confection of aloes.

  64 Arab. “Akúna fidá-ka.” Fidá = ransom, self-sacrifice and

  Fidá’an = instead of. The phrase, which everywhere occurs in The

  Nights, means, “I would give my life to save thine”

  65 Thus accounting for his sickness, improbably enough but in flattering way. Like a good friend (feminine) she does not hesitate a moment in prescribing a fib.

  66 i.e. the 25,000 Amazons who in the Bresl. Edit. (ii. 308) are all made to be the King’s Banát” = daughters or protégées. The Amazons of Dahome (see my “Mission”) who may now number 5,000 are all officially wives of the King and are called by the lieges “our mothers.”

  67 The tale-teller has made up his mind about the damsel; although in this part of the story she is the chief and eldest sister and subsequently she appears as the youngest daughter of the supreme Jinn King. The mystification is artfully explained by the extraordinary likeness of the two sisters. (See Night dcccxi.)

  68 This is a reminiscence of the old-fashioned “marriage by capture,” of which many traces survive, even among the civilised who wholly ignore their origin.

  69 Meaning her companions and suite.

  70 Arab. “‘Abáah” vulg. “‘Abáyah.” See vol. ii. 133.

  71 Feet in the East lack that development of sebaceous glands which afflicts Europeans.

  72 i.e. cutting the animals’ throats after Moslem law.

  73 In Night dcclxxviii. supra p.5, we find the orthodox Moslem doctrine that “a single mortal is better in Allah’s sight than a thousand Jinns.” For, I repeat, Al-Islam systematically exalts human nature which Christianity takes infinite trouble to degrade and debase. The results of its ignoble teaching are only too evident in the East: the Christians of the so-called (and miscalled) “Holy Land” are a disgrace to the faith and the idiomatic Persian term for a Nazarene is “Tarsá” = funker, coward.

  74 Arab. “Sakaba Kúrahá;” the forge in which children are hammered out?

  75 Arab. “Má al-Maláhat” = water (brilliancy) of beauty.

  76 The fourth of the Seven Heavens, the “Garden of

  Eternity,” made of yellow coral.

  77 How strange this must sound to the Young Woman of London in the nineteenth century.

  78 “Forty days” is a quasi-religious period amongst Moslem for praying, fasting and religious exercises: here it represents our “honey-moon.” See vol. v. .

  79 Yá layta, still popular. Herr Carlo Landberg (Proverbes et Dictons du Peuple Arabe, vol. i. of Syria, Leyden, E. J. Brill, 1883) explains layta for rayta (=raayta) by permutation of liquids and argues that the contraction is ancient (). But the Herr is no Arabist: “Layta” means “would to Heaven,” or, simply “I wish,” “I pray” (for something possible or impossible); whilst “La’alla” (perhaps, it may be) prays only for the possible: and both are simply particles governing the noun in the oblique or accusative case.

  80 “His” for “her,” i.e. herself, making somewhat of confusion between her state and that of her son.

  81 i.e. his mother; the words are not in the Mac. Edit.

  82 Baghdad is called House of Peace, amongst other reasons, from the Dijlah (Tigris) River and Valley “of Peace.” The word was variously written Baghdád, Bághdád, (our old Bughdaud and Bagdat), Baghzáz, Baghzán, Baghdán, Baghzám and Maghdád as Makkah and Bakkah (Koran iii. 90). Religious Moslems held Bágh (idol) and Dád (gift) an ill-omened conjunction, and the Greeks changed it to Eirenopolis. (See Ouseley’s Oriental Collcctions, vol. i. p-20.)

  83 This is a popular saying but hardly a “vulgar proverb.”

  (Lane iii. 522.) It reminds rather of Shakespear’s:

  “So loving to my mother,

  That he might not beteem the winds of heaven

  Visit her face too roughly.”

  84 i.e. God forbid that I should oppose thee!

  85 Here the writer again forgets apparently, that Shahrazad is speaking: she may, however, use the plural for the singular when speaking of herself.

  86 i.e. She would have pleaded ill-treatment and lawfully demanded to be sold.

  87 The Hindus speak of “the only bond that woman knows — her heart.”

  88 i.e. a rarity, a present (especially in Persian).

  89 Arab. “Al-bisát” wa’l-masnad lit. the carpet and the cushion.

  90 For “Báb al-bahr” and “Báb al-Barr” see vol. iii. 281.

  91 She was the daughter of Ja’afar bin Mansúr; but, as will be seen, The Nights again and again called her father Al-Kásim.

  92 This is an error for the fifth which occurs in the popular saying, “Is he the fifth of the sons of Al-Abbás!” i.e. Harun al-Rashid. Lane (note, in loco) thus accounts for the frequent mention of the Caliph, the greatest of the Abbasides in The Nights. But this is a causa non causa.

  93 i.e. I find thy beauty all-sufficient. So the proverb “The son of the quarter (young neighbour) filleth not the eye,” which prefers a stranger.

  94 They are mere doggerel, like most of the pičces de circonstance.

  95 Afterwards called Wák Wák, and in the Bresl. Edit. Wák al-Wák. See Lane’s notes upon these Islands. Arab Geographers evidently speak of two Wak Waks. Ibn al-Fakih and Al-Mas’údi (Fr. Transl., vol. iii. 6-7) locate one of them in East Africa beyond Zanzibar and Sofala. “Le territoire des Zendjes (Zanzibar-Negroids) commence au canal (Al-Khalij) dérivé du haut Nil (the Juln River?) et se prolonge jusqu’au pays de Sofalah et des Wak-Wak.” It is simply the peninsula of Guardafui (Jard Hafun) occupied by the Gallas, pagans and Christians, before these were ousted by the Moslem Somal; and the former perpetually ejaculated “Wak” (God) as Moslems cry upon Allah. This identification explains a host of other myths such as the Amazons, who as Marco Polo tells us held the “Female Island” Socotra (Yule ii. 396). The fruit which resembled a woman’s head (
whence the puellć Wakwakienses hanging by the hair from trees), and which when ripe called out “Wak Wak” and “Allah al-Khallák” (the Creator) refers to the Calabash-tree (Adausonia digitata), that grotesque growth, a vegetable elephant, whose gourds, something larger than a man’s head, hang by a slender filament. Similarly the “cocoa” got its name, in Port. = Goblin, from the fancied face at one end. The other Wak Wak has been identified in turns with the Seychelles, Madagascar, Malacca, Sunda or Java (this by Langlčs), China and Japan. The learned Prof. de Goeje (Arabishe Berichten over Japan, Amsterdam, Muller, 1880) informs us that in Canton the name of Japan is Wo-Kwok, possibly a corruption of Koku-tan, the ebony-tree (Diospyros ebenum) which Ibn Khor-dábah and others find together with gold in an island 4,500 parasangs from Suez and East of China. And we must remember that Basrah was the chief starting-place for the Celestial Empire during the rule of the Tang dynasty (seventh and ninth centuries). Colonel J. W. Watson of Bombay suggests New Guinea or the adjacent islands where the Bird of Paradise is said to cry “Wak Wak!” Mr. W. F. Kirby in the Preface (p. ix.) to his neat little book “The New Arabian Nights,” says: “The Islands of Wak-Wak, seven years’ journey from Bagdad, in the story of Hasan, have receded to a distance of a hundred and fifty years’ journey in that of Majin (of Khorasan). There is no doubt(?) that the Cora Islands, near New Guinea, are intended; for the wonderful fruits which grow there are Birds of Paradise, which settle in flocks on the trees at sunset and sunrise, uttering this very cry.” Thus, like Ophir, Wak Wak has wandered all over the world and has been found even in Peru by the Turkish work Tárikh al-Hind al-Gharbi = History of the West Indies (Orient. Coll. iii 189).

  96 I accept the emendation of Lane’s Shaykh, “Nasím “

  (Zephyr) for “Nadím “ (cup-companion).

  97 “Jannat al-Ná’im” = Garden of Delights is No. V Heaven, made of white diamond.