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When he saw her making for him, with the knife in her hand, he opened his eyes and rose, laughing; whereupon, ‘It was not of thine own wit,’ said she, ‘that thou camest at the meaning of the token, but by the help of some wily cheat; so tell me whence had thou this knowledge.’ ‘From an old woman,’ answered he and told her all that had passed between himself and the barber’s wife. ‘To-morrow,’ said she, ‘go thou to her and say, “Hast thou any further device in store?” And if she say, “Yes,” do thou rejoin, “Then do thine endeavour to bring me to enjoy her publicly.” But, if she say, “I have no means of doing that, and this is the last of my contrivance,” put her away from thy thought, and to-morrow night my husband will come to thee and invite thee. Do thou come with him and tell me and I will consider what remains to be done.’ ‘Good,’ answered he.
Then he spent the rest of the night with her in kissing and clipping, plying the particle of copulation in concert and according the conjunctive with the conjoined,[1] whilst her husband was as a cast-out nunation of construction,[2]
- ↑ Double-entendre founded upon the rules of Arabic grammar. The meaning is sufficiently obvious.
- ↑ Tenwin el idsafeh. The nunation (tenwin) is the affixed n (nun), the sign of the indefinite noun in Arabic grammar, e.g. et taj, the crown, tajun, a crown. (The penultimate u is the distinctive termination of the nominative case and is dropped in ordinary talk and in prose, but retained in poetry and in reading the Koran, in which et taj would be pronounced et taju.) It is a rule of Arabic grammar that the first of two nouns in construction or regimen (e.g, “the crown of the king”) loses both the prefixed article (el, the) and the nunation. Thus in Arabic et taj (the crown) and el melik (the king) would in construction become (not et taj ul melik or tajun el melik, but) taj ul melik, (the crown of the king), thus dropping or casting out the nunation. This explanation will show what is meant by the comparison of the sleeping and unconscious husband to the cast-out (or dropped) nunation of construction. N.B. el before t becomes et and in construction, after the nominative, ul.
