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to my place in the ship. Night dcccxcviii.Presently, they came on board again and the moon shone out upon the river and bank. Then said the Hashimi to the damsel, ‘God upon thee, trouble not our lives!’ So she took the lute, and touching it with her hand, gave a sob, that they thought her soul had departed [her body], and said, ‘By Allah, my master is with us in the ship!’ ‘By Allah,’ answered the Hashimi, ‘were this so, I would not forbid him our company! Haply he would lighten thy chagrin, so we might enjoy thy singing: but it cannot be that he is on board.’ But she said, ‘I cannot sing nor play whilst my lord is with us.’ Quoth the Hashimi, ‘Let us ask the sailors.’ And she said, ‘Do so.’ So he questioned them, saying, ‘Have ye carried any one with you?’ And they said, ‘No.’
Then I feared lest the enquiry should end there; so I laughed and said, ‘Yes; I am her master and taught her, when I was her lord.’ ‘By Allah,’ said she, ‘that is my lord’s voice!’ So the servants carried me to the Hashimi, who knew me at once and said to me, ‘Out on thee! What plight is this in which I see thee and what has brought thee to this pass?’ So I told him all that had befallen of my affair, weeping the while, and the damsel wailed aloud from behind the curtain. The Hashimi wept sore, he and his brethren, for pity of me, and he said, ‘By Allah, I have not drawn near the damsel nor lain with her, nor have I even heard her sing till this day! I am a man to whom God hath been bountiful and I came to Baghdad but to hear singing and seek my allowances of the Com-
lute purposely untuned. As a (partial) modern instance of the practice referred to in the text, may be cited Paganini’s custom of lowering or raising the G string of the violin in playing certain of his own compositions. According to the Kitab el Aghani, Ishac el Mausili is said to have familiarised himself, by incessant practice, with the exact sounds produced by each division of the strings of the four-course lute of his day, under every imaginable circumstance of tuning.
