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of sleep for four days past caused slumber get the mastery over him;[1] so he slept till break of morn, when he awoke at the chirp[2] of the sparrows. He arose and going to a stream there which flowed into the city, washed his hands and face; then, making the ablution, he prayed the morning-prayer and after returned and sat under the windows of the Lady Bedrulbudour’s pavilion.
Now the princess, of the excess of her grief for her separation from her husband and the Sultan her father and of her sore distress at that which had
- ↑ I suppose the verb which I render “caused [sleep] get the mastery,” to be ghelleba, II of gheleba, as the only way of making sense of this passage, though this reading involves some irregularity from a grammatical point of view. This, however, is no novelty in the present text. Burton, “But whoso weareth head hard by the headsman may not sleep o’nights save whenas slumber prevail over him.”
- ↑ Zeczekeh, a word which exactly renders the sparrow’s dawn-cheep.
heads, and are therefore called raaäs, or in the Egyptian dialect rewwas.” The proverb is in the present case evidently meant as a play upon the literal meaning (“headsman,” hence by implication “executioner”) of the word rewwas, although I cannot find an instance of the word being employed in this sense. It is, however, abundantly evident from the general context that this is the author’s intention in the passage in question, Alaeddin’s head being metaphorically in the hands of (or pledged to) the headsman, inasmuch as he had engaged to return and suffer decapitation in case he should not succeed in recovering the princess within forty days.
