67
Flowers?’ ‘I will well, O my lord,’ answered he. So Gherib and his company and Fekhr Taj all rose and went forth, whilst Saadan commanded his slaves and slave-girls, (of whom he had a hundred and fifty female and a thousand male slaves, to pasture his sheep and oxen and camels) to slaughter and cook and make ready the morning-meal and bring it to them among the trees.
When they came to the valley, they found it beautiful passing measure, full of trees growing singly and in clusters and birds warbling on the branches. There sang the mocking-bird, trilling out her melodious notes, and the cushat filling with her warble the mansions of God’s creation, Night dcxxx.and the nightingale, with her voice like that of a man, and the merle, that the tongue fails to describe, and the turtle, whose plaining maddens men for love, and the ringdove and the popinjay answering her with fluent tongue. There also were trees laden with all manner of fruits, of each two kinds, the pomegranate, sweet and sour, the almond-apricot,[1] the camphor-apricot[2] and the almond of Khorassan and the plum, with whose branches entwine the boughs of the myrobalan, and the orange, as it were a flaming cresset, and the shaddock, weighing down its branches, and the lemon, that cures lack of appetite, and the citron, sovereign against the jaundice, and the date, red and yellow, the [especial] handiwork of God the Most High. Of the like of this place saith the poet El Welhan:
When its birds sing in the dawn o’er its limpid lake, El Welhan yearns for its sight ere morning break.
For as it were Paradise ’tis with its fragrant gales And its fruits and its streams that run through its shady brake.
Gherib marvelled at the beauty of the place and bade
