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and jessamine,[1] full-grown and laden with ripe fruits and flowers[2] whose fragrance dilated the breast and cheered the spright; and there [they heard] the voices of the birds twittering their various notes and ravishing the wit with their warblings. So Mubarek turned to Zein ul Asnam and said to him, “How deemest thou of this place, O my lord?” And the prince answered him, saying, “Methinketh, O Mubarek, this is the paradise which the Prophet (whom God bless and keep) promised us withal.”
Then they fared on till they came to a magnificent palace, builded all with stones of emerald and rubies, and its doors were of sheer gold. Before it was a bridge, the length whereof was an hundred and fifty cubits and its breadth fifty cubits, and it was [wroughten] of the rib of a fish; whilst at the other end of the bridge were many warriors[3] of the Jinn, gruesome and terrible of
- ↑ Yas, Persian form of yasm, yasmin or yasimin. Sir R. F. Burton reads yamin and supposes it to be a copyist’s error for yasmin, but this is a mistake; the word in the text is clearly yas, though the final s, being somewhat carelessly written in the Arabic MS, might easily be mistaken for mn with an undotted noun.
- ↑ Lit. “perfect or complete (kamil) of fruits and flowers.”
- ↑ Lit. “many armies” (asakir, pl. of asker, an army), but asker is constantly used in post-classical Arabic (and notably in the Nights) for “a single soldier,” and still more generally the plural (asakir), as here, for “soldiers.”
