proudly turned away from me, showed shoulders, cried aloud:—
* 'No! no! by Him, whose hest mankind from nothingness hath
made
For hoary head and grizzled chin I've no especial-love: * What!
stuff my mouth with cotton[1] ere in sepulchre I'm
laid?'"
Now when the broker heard her words he said, "By Allah, thou art excusable, and thy price is ten thousand gold pieces!" So he told her owner that she would not accept of old man Rashid al-Din, and he said, "Consult her concerning another." Thereupon a second man came forward and said, "Be she mine for what price was offered by the oldster she would have none of;" but she looked at him and seeing that his beard was dyed, said "What be this fashion lewd and base and the blackening of the hoary face?" And she made a great show of wonderment and repeated these couplets,
"Showed me Sir Such-an-one a sight and what a frightful sight! *
A neck by Allah, only made for slipper-sole to smite[2]
A beard the meetest racing ground where gnats and lice contend, *
A brow fit only for the ropes thy temples chafe and
bite.[3]
O thou enravish" by my cheek and beauties of my form, * Why so
translate thyself to youth and think I deem it right?
Dyeing disgracefully that white of reverend aged hairs, * And
hiding for foul purposes their venerable white!
Thou goest with one beard and comest back with quite another, *
Like Punch-and-Judy man who works the Chinese shades by
night.[4]
- ↑ Before explained as used with camphor to fill the dead man's mouth.
- ↑ As has been seen, slapping on the neck is equivalent to our "boxing ears," but much less barbarous and likely to injure the child. The most insulting blow is that with shoe sandal-or slipper because it brings foot in contact with head. Of this I have spoken before.
- ↑ Arab. "Hibál" (= ropes) alluding to the A'akál-fillet which binds the Kúfiyah-kerchief on the Badawi's head. (Pilgrimage, i. 346.)
- ↑ Arab. "Khiyál"; afterwards called Kara Gyuz (= "black eyes," from the celebrated Turkish Wazir). The mise-en-scène was like that of Punch, but of transparent cloth, lamp lit inside and showing silhouettes worked by hand. Nothing could be more Fescenntne than Kara Gyuz, who appeared with a phallus longer than himself and made all the Consuls-General-periodically complain of its abuse, while the dialogue, mostly in Turkish, as even more obscene. Most ingenious were Kara Gyuz's little ways of driving on an Obstinate donkey and of tackling a huge Anatolian pilgrim. He mounted the Neddy's back face to tail, and inserting his left thumb like a clyster, hammered it with his right when the donkey started at speed. For the huge pilgrim he used a ladder. These shows now obsolete, used to enliven the Ezbekiyah Gardens every evening and explain Ovid's Words,
"Delicias videam, Nile jocose, tuas!"
