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care and anxiety from the heart and whose speech healed the troubled soul and captivated the wise and the intelligent. She was slender of shape and swelling-breasted, delicate-cheeked and bright of colour and fair of form; and indeed her face shone like the sun through the night of her tresses, and her teeth glittered above the snows of her bosom. As says the poet of her:
Slender of waist, with streaming hair the hue of night, is she, With hips like hills of sand and shape straight as the balsam-tree.
And as says another:
There are four things that ne’er unite, except it be To shed my heart’s best blood and take my soul by storm.
And these are night-black locks and brow as bright as day, Cheeks ruddy as the rose and straight and slender form.
When I looked on her, I prostrated myself before her Maker, for the grace and beauty He had created in her and she looked at me and said, “Art thou a man or a genie?” “I am a man,” answered I; and she said, “And who brought thee to this place, where I have dwelt five-and-twenty years without seeing man?” Quoth I (and indeed her speech was sweet to me), “O my lady, my good star brought me hither for the dispelling of my grief and anxiety.” And I told her all that had befallen me from first to last. My case was grievous to her and she wept: then she said, “I will tell thee my story in turn. I am the daughter of a King of Farther India, by name Efitamous, Lord of the Ebony Islands, who married me to my cousin, but on my wedding-night an Afrit called Jerjis ben Rejmous, the mother’s sister’s son of Iblis, carried me off and flying away with me, set me down in this place whither he transported all that I needed of clothes and ornaments and furniture and meat and drink and so forth. Once in every ten days he comes to me and lies the night here, then goes his way; for he took me without the
