On the Excellence of Contentment
STORY CII
A year of dearth set in at Alexandria, so that [even] a Dervish lost the reins of patience from his hands, the pearls[1] of heaven were withheld from the heart, and the lamentations of mankind ascended to the firmament. There was no wild beasts, fowl, fish, or ant whose wailings, prompted by distress, had not reached the sky. For a wonder, the heart-smoke of the people did not condense to form clouds, and the torrents of their tears rain.
In such year there was a hermaphrodite; I owe it to my friends not to describe him, because it would be an abandonment of good manners, especially in the presence of great men; on the other hand, it would likewise be improper and in the way of negligence not to mention anything about him, because certain people would impute it to the ignorance of the narrator; accordingly I shall briefly describe him in the following two distichs, because a little indicates much, and a handful is a sample of a donkey-load:
If a Tatar slays that hermaphrodite,
The Tatar must not be slain in return;
How long will he be like the bridge of Baghdad,
With water flowing beneath and men on the bank?
Such a man, a portion of whose eulogy thou hast now heard, possessed in that year boundless wealth, bestowed silver and gold upon the needy, and laid out tables for travellers. A
- ↑ The word is durhai, the duplication of the letter r being understood, as the sign reshdid, which indicates it, is generally omitted; accordingly it was rendered by 'pearls,' meaning, of course, the drops of rain, which are precious; but if the word be taken simply as it stands, it means 'the doors,' in which case the phrase would be 'the doors of heaven were shut against the earth.'
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