from their veins. The Ghoul is familiar from The Thousand and One Nights as is the story of the Prince who having pursued a strange beast whilst hunting was carried to a great distance, and chanced to see by the wayside a lovely maiden who sat and wept. She told him that she was the daughter of an Indian king who had been lost in this desert spot by her caravan. The chivalrous youth takes her upon his horse, and a little later pleading a certain necessity she descends—latrines are particularly considered to be haunts of evil spirits and malignant entities, and Jean de Thévenot in his Travels into the Levant (“Newly done out of French, folio, London, 1687), says: “The Kerim Kiatib, merciful scribes wait upon him [the Turk] in all places, except when he does his needs, when they let him go alone, staying for him at the door till he comes out, and then they take him into possession again; wherefore when the Turks go to the house of office they put the left foot foremost, to the end the Angel who registers their sins may leave them first; and when they come out they set the right foot before, that the Angel who writes down their good works may have them first under his protection.”
The young man hears voices in the haunted latrine, the feigned Indian lady cries: “Children, to-day I have brought you a fat and comely Juvenal.” And several answer: “Bring him along, Mother, bring him along for our bellies cry for food.” At these words he trembled exceedingly for he saw he had to do with a ghoul and when she returned he lifted up his voice in prayer: “O thou who art ever ready to hearken to the oppressed who calls upon Thee and Who dost unveil all deceit, grant me to triumph over mine enemy, and keep all evil far from me, for Thou canst all that Thou dost desire.” When the ghoul heard these words she vanished from sight, and the prince is able to make his way back home. (The Fifth Night. Les Mille Nuits et Vne Nuit. trs. Dr. J. C. Mardrus, Vol. I, 1899, pp. 57–59, “Histoire du Prince et de la Goule.”)
In the story of Sidi Nouman a young man marries a wife named Amine, who to his surprise when they are set at dinner only eats a dish of rice grain by grain, taking up each single grain with a bodkin, and “instead of partaking of the other dishes she only carried to her mouth, in the most deliberate manner, small crumbs of bread, scarcely enough to satisfy
