Zahhák sat on the throne a thousand years
Obeyed by all the world. Through that long time
The customs of the wise were out of vogue,
The lusts of madmen flourished everywhere,
All virtue was despised, black art esteemed,
Right lost to sight, disaster manifest;
While dívs accomplished their fell purposes
And no man spake of good unless by stealth.
Two sisters of Jamshíd, their sex's crown,
Were brought out trembling like a willow-leaf.
Of those two ladies visaged like the moon
The names were Shahrináz and Arnawáz.
Men bore them to the palace of Zahhák
And gave them over to the dragon king,
Who educated them in evil ways
And taught them sorcery and necromancy.
The only teaching that he knew was bad—
To massacre, to pillage, and to burn.
Each night two youths of high or lowly birth
Were taken to the palace by the cook,
Who having slaughtered them took out their brains
To feed the snakes and ease the monarch's anguish.
Now in the realm were two good high-born Persians—
The pious Irmá'íl and Karmá'íl
The prescient. Talking of the lawless Sháh,
Of his retainers and those hideous meals,
One said: “By cookery we might approach
The Sháh, and by our wits devise a scheme

To rescue one from each pair doomed to death.”
They went and learned that art. The clever twain
Became the monarch's cooks and joyed in secret.
The time for shedding blood and taking life
Came, and some murderous minions of the Sháh
Dragged to the cooks with violence two youths
And flung them prone. The livers of the cooks
Ached, their eyes filled with blood, their hearts with wrath,
And each glanced at the other as he thought
Of such an outrage by the Sháh. They slew
One of the youths and thought it best to mingle
His precious brains with sheep's and spare the other,
To whom they said: “Make shift to hide thyself,
Approach not any dwelling-place of man,
Thine are the wastes and heights.”

A worthless head

Thus fed the serpents, and in every month
The cooks preserved from slaughter thirty youths,
And when the number reached two hundred saved
Provided them, the donors all unknown,
With sheep and goats, and sent them desertward.
Thus sprang the Kúrds, who know no settled home,
But dwell in woollen tents and fear not God.
Zahhák was wont, such was his evil nature,
To choose him one among his warriors
And slay him for conspiring with the dívs.
Moreover, all the lovely noble maidens
Secluded in their bowers, not tanged of tongues,

He took for handmaids. Not a jot had he
Of faith, king's uses, or morality.