expeditions with caravans or for plunder,' says Sprenger of the Arabs, 'they generally travel during the night. When one rides on a camel at a slow pace through the monotonous desert, the nights seem very long. But the heart is filled with quiet delight by the stillness of the night and the enjoyment of the fresh air, and the eye involuntarily looks upwards. Hence we find even in the Ḳorân and in the poetry of the Bedawî frequent allusion to the starry heaven and its motion.'[1] The caravan-songs (ḥidâh) accordingly refer mainly to night-travelling, as e.g. one quoted by Wetzstein:
O how journey we, while dew is scattered out
And desert-dust bedecks the lips of sumpter beasts.
O how journey we, while townsmen sleep
With limbs involved in coverlets;[2]
and when he travels by day he follows the course of the clouds, seeking coolness and shade. The Arabic poet Abû-l-‘Alâ al-Ma‘arrî, who, like all the later writers of ḳaṣîdâs,[3] makes the horizon of Beduin life the background of his poetry, says somewhere of his beloved,
As though the cloud were her lover, she always turns her saddle
To the quarter where the cloud is moving;
and the scholiast observes on the passage, 'that is, she is a Beduin, and the Bedawî always follow the rain and the places where raindrops fall from heaven.'[4] The old Arabian poet wishes for rain also on the grave of his friend; he cannot bear to see it scorched by the sun's heat. 'Drench, O clouds, the earth of that grave!' is a frequently recurring formula in the old Arabic poetry; and the later poetry, with its imitation of old forms, has
- ↑ On the Calendar of the Arabs before Moḥammed (in Zeitschrift der D. M. G., 1859, XIII. 161).
- ↑ Sprachliches aus den Zeltlagern der syrischen Wüste, p. 32, note 21 (a reprint from Zeitschrift der D. M. G., 1868, XXII.).
- ↑ A species of lyric poem or elegy.—Tr.
- ↑ Saḳt al-zand (Bûlâḳ edition of 1286), II. 34. Yet Aġâni, I. 147. 20, in a poem of Nvṣeyb: wa lam ara matbû‘an aḍarra min-al-muṭari.
