Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night - Volume 3.djvu/334

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306
Alf Laylah wa Laylah.

fire for confusion, and found her thighs cooler than cream and softer than silk. The touching of them pleasured him and he moved his hand hither and thither, till it came to a dome abounding in good gifts and movements and shifts, and said in himself, "Perhaps this King is a hermaphrodite,[1] neither man nor woman quite;" so he said to her, "O King, I cannot find that thou hast a tool like the tools of men; what then moved thee to do this deed?" Then loudly laughed Queen Budur till she fell on her back,[2] and said, "O my dearling, how quickly thou hast forgotten the nights we have lain together!" Then she made herself known to him, and he knew her for his wife, the Lady Budur, daughter of King al-Ghayur, Lord of the Isles and the Seas. So he embraced her and she embraced him, and he kissed her and she kissed him; then they lay down on the bed of pleasure voluptuous, repeating the words of the poet,

"When his softly bending shape bid him close to my embrace ○ Which clips him all about like the tendrils of the vine
And shed a flood of softness on the hardness of his heart, ○ He yielded; though at first he was minded to decline;
And dreading lest the railer's eye should light upon his form, ○ Came armourèd with caution to baffle his design:
His waist makes moan of hinder cheeks that weigh upon his feet ○ Like heavy load of merchandise upon young camel li'en;
Girt with his glances 'scymitar which seemed athirst for blood, ○ And clad in mail of dusky curls that show the sheeniest shine,


  1. Arab. "Khunsa" flexible or flaccid, from Khans=bending inwards, i.e. the mouth of a water-skin before drinking. Like Mukhannas, it is also used for an effeminate man, a passive sodomite and even for a eunuch. Easterns still believe in what Westerns know to be an impossibility, human beings with the parts and proportions of both sexes equally developed and capable of reproduction; and Al-Islam even provides special rules for them (Pilgrimage iii. 237). We hold them to be Buffon's fourth class of (duplicate) monsters belonging essentially to one or the other sex, and related to its opposite only by some few characteristics. The old Greeks dreamed, after their fashion, a beautiful poetic dream of a human animal uniting the contradictory beauties of man and woman. The duality of the generative organs seems an old Egyptian tradition, at least we find it in Genesis (i. 27) where the image of the Deity is created male and female, before man was formed out of the dust of the ground (ii. 7). The old tradition found its way to India (if the Hindus did not borrow the idea from the Greeks); and one of the forms of Mahadeva, the third person of their triad, is entitled "Ardhanárí"=the Half-woman, which has suggested to them some charming pictures. Europeans, seeing the left breast conspicuously feminine, have indulged in silly surmises about the "Amazons."
  2. This is a mere phrase for our "dying of laughter": the queen was on her back. And as Easterns sit on carpets, their falling back is very different from the same movement off a chair.