that she told him all those things which he had searched for vainly all his life in the great library of the Caliph, and in the conversation of wise men. One curious detail has come down to us in Bedouin tradition. When awake she was a merry girl with no more interest in matters of the kind than other girls of her age, and Kusta, the apple of whose eye she had become, fearing that it would make her think his love but self-interest, never told her that she talked to him in her sleep. Michael Robartes frequently heard Bedouins quoting this as proof of Kusta-ben-Luka's extraordinary wisdom. . . . Even in the other world Kusta's bride is supposed to remain in ignorance of her share in founding the religion of the Judwalis, and for this reason young girls who think themselves wise are ordered by their fathers and mothers to wear little amulets on which her name has been written. All these contradictory stories seem to be a confused recollection of the contents of a little old book, lost many years ago with Kusta-ben-Luka's larger book in the desert battle which I have already described. This little book was discovered, according to tradition, by some Judwali scholar or saint between the pages of a Greek book which had once been in the Caliph’s library. The story of the discovery may however be the invention of a much later age, to justify some doctrine or development of old doctrines that it may have contained."
In my poem I have greatly elaborated this bare narrative, but I do not think it too great a poetical licence to describe Kusta as hesitating between the Poems of Sappho and the Treatise of Parmenides as hiding places. Gibbon says the poems of Sappho were extant in the twelfth century, and it does not seem impossible that a great philosophical work, of which we possess only fragments, may have found its way into an Arab library of the eighth century. Certainly there are passages of Parmenides, that for instance numbered 130 by Burkitt, and still more in his immediate predecessors, which Kusta would have recognized as his own thought. This from Heraclitus for instance: "Mortals are Immortals and Immortals are Mortals, the one living the others' death and dying the
others' life."]
