102
wine-skin or a surly elephant. If thou go to the draught-house, thou needest one to wash out thy privy parts and pluck out the hairs; and this is the extreme of laziness and the sign of stupidity. In fine, there is no good thing in thee, and indeed the poet saith of thee:
Heavy and swollen with fat, like a blown-out water-skin, With thighs like the pillars of stone that buttress a mountain’s head,
Lo, if she walk in the West, so cumbrous her corpulence is, The Eastern hemisphere hears the sound of her heavy tread.”
Quoth her master, “It is enough: sit down.” So she sat down and he signed to the yellow girl, who rose to her feet and praised God and magnified His name, calling down peace and blessing on the best of His creatures;[1] after which she pointed at the brunette Night cccxxxvii.and said to her, “I am praised in the Koran, and the Compassionate One hath described my colour and its excellence over all others in His manifest Book, where He saith, ‘A yellow [heifer], pure yellow, whose colour rejoices the beholders.’[2] Wherefore my colour is a portent and my grace an extreme and my beauty a term; for that my colour is the colour of a dinar and of the planets and moons and of apples. My fashion is the fashion of the fair, and the colour of saffron outvies all other colours; so my fashion is rare and my colour wonderful. I am soft of body, and of great price, comprising all attributes of beauty. My colour, in that which exists, is precious as virgin gold, and how many glorious qualities are there not in me! Of the like of me quoth the poet:
Yellow she is, as is the sun that shineth in the sky, And like to golden dinars, eke, to see, her beauties are.
Nor with her brightness, anywise, can saffron hold compare, And even the very moon herself her charms outvie by far.
