4
and those who smote the sand[1] and said to them, “It is my will that ye enquire concerning the child that shall be born to me this month, whether it will be male or female, and tell me what will betide it of chances and what will proceed from it.”[2] So the geomancers smote their [tables of] sand and the astrologers took their altitudes[3] and observed the star of the babe [un]born and said to the Sultan, “O King of the age and lord of the time and the tide, the child that shall be born to thee of the queen is a male and it beseemeth that thou name him Zein ul Asnam.”[4] And as for those who smote upon the sand, they said
- ↑ i.e. the geomancers. For a detailed description of this magical process, (which is known as “sand-tracing,” Khettu ’r reml,) see post, p. 199, note 2.
- ↑ i.e. “What it will do in the course of its life.”
- ↑ Or “ascendants” (tewali).
- ↑ i.e. “Adornment of the Images.” This is an evident mistake (due to some ignorant copyist or reciter of the story) of the same kind as that to be found at the commencement of the story of Ghanim ben Eyoub, (see my Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol I. p. 363 et seq.), where the hero is absurdly stated to have been surnamed at birth the “Slave of Love,” a sobriquet which could only have attached itself to him in after-life and as a consequence of his passion for Fitneh. Sir R. F. Burton suggests, with great probability, that the name, as it stands in the text, is a contraction, by a common elliptical process, of the more acceptable form Zein-ud-din ul Asnam, i.e. Zein-ud-din (Adornment of the
