"If your promise of personal call prove untrue, * Deign in vision to grant me an interview: Quoth they, 'How can phantom [1] appear to the sight * Of a youth, whose sight is fordone, perdue?'"
Then, after ending his poetry, Kamar al-Zaman again turned to his father, with submission and despondency, and shedding tears in flood, began repeating these lines.--And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.
When it was the One Hundred and Ninety-second Night,
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that when Kamar al-Zaman had repeated to his father these verses, he wept and complained and groaned from a wounded heart; and added these lines,
"Beware that eye glance which hath magic might; * Wherever turn those orbs it bars our flight: Nor be deceived by low sweet voice, that breeds * A fever festering in the heart and sprite: So soft that silky skin, were rose to touch it * She'd cry and tear-drops rain for pain and fright: Did Zephyr e'en in sleep pass o'er her land, * Scented he'd choose to dwell in scented site: Her necklets vie with tinkling of her belt; * Her wrists strike either wristlet dumb with spite: When would her bangles buss those rings in ear, * Upon the lover's eyne high mysteries 'light: I'm blamed for love of her, nor pardon claim; * Eyes are not profiting which lack foresight: Heaven strip thee, blamer mine! unjust art thou; * Before this fawn must every eye low bow." [2]
- ↑ Arab. "Tayf"=phantom, the nearest approach to our "ghost," that queer remnant of Fetishism imbedded in Christianity; the phantasma, the shade (not the soul) of tile dead. Hence the accurate Niebuhr declares, "apparitions (i.e., of the departed) are unknown in Arabia." Haunted houses are there tenanted by Ghuls, Jinns and a host of supernatural creatures; but not by ghosts proper; and a man may live years in Arabia before he ever hears of the "Tayf." With the Hindus it is otherwise (Pilgrimage iii. 144). Yet the ghost, the embodied fear of the dead and of death is common, in a greater or less degree, to all peoples; and, as modern Spiritualism proves, that ghost is not yet laid.
- ↑ Mr. Payne (iii. 133) omits the lines which are àpropos de rein and read much like "nonsense verses." I retain them simply because they are in the text.
