When I crossed the deserts towards Zabîd.—This is a prosperous town in Yemen, the largest and most important after Ṣanâ, the scene of the first Assembly, from which it is about forty parasangs distant. It is abundantly irrigated, and therefore rich in gardens and orchards, which grow fruit of various kinds, especially bananas.

Whom I had reared until he reached the full vigour of life, reckoned by the Arabs from fifteen to forty years of age. The word used for it in the original is ashudda-hu, which is variously explained as plural of shadd, like aflus from fals, or of shudd, like awudd from wudd, or of shiddah, like an ‘um from ni‘mah, or lastly as a singular without plural, like ânuk (tin).

And trained until his straightness had waxed perfect, a simile taken from the straightening of a lance, here to be taken in a moral sense

Therefore needs his good services had won him my heart, literally had attached themselves or clung to my heart, a proverbial expression, for which see Ar. Prov., ii. 510 and iii., P. 2, 493.

When the sole of his foot was turned up and his voice had been silenced.— This translation takes the word na‘âmah in the sense bât̤inu ’l-qadam, mentioned above, p. 198. According to Sherîshi it has also the meaning of “bier,” and of “gallows-tree,” the being raised of either of which is a popular idiom for death and destruction. Others explain “when his ostrich had fled,” i.e., when he had departed life, in analogy with the saying shâlat na‘âmatu ’l-gaum, the people’s ostrich has taken himself off, when they leave a place or disperse. As for “his voice had been silenced,” sakanat na’matu-hu, it is taken from the imprecation “may God silence his voice,” askata ’llâhu na’mata-hu, whence some commentators propose to read in the present passage sakatat, “was silent,” instead of sakanat, the original meaning of which is “was at rest,” and tallies better with the secondary signification of na’meh, movement or motion [ḥarakah].

Who might be a stopgap for my needs.—Sadâd, here rendered by stopgap, is, according to Maydâni’s remark on this proverbial expression, a small quantity of milk which has dried up in the udder and obstructs the flow of the milk (Ar. Prov., i. 616).

Who gives satisfaction when he is tried.—The final part of the clause is in Arabic iẕâ qulliba, literally when he is turned about, which is paraphrased by, when he is stripped, to examine the soundness of his limbs.

That not every one who undertakes a work carries it through, and that nothing will scratch my skin as well as my own nail.—The first clause of this proposition alludes to the following couplet, taken from a poem of Zohayr in praise of Hârim bin Sinân:

“Thou carriest through what thou hast undertaken, while some undertake but fail to carry through.”

The second is an adaptation of the proverb “Naught scratches my back as well as my own hand” (Ar. Prov., ii. 602), to which Sherîshi quotes some lines of the celebrated Imâm Ash-Shâfi’i, in which also the word “nail” is substituted for the word “hand” of the proverb, and which exhort, like the latter itself, to self-exertion in preference to reliance on others.

With the yellow and the white, meaning gold denars and silver dirhems.

Who if thou stumble says to thee, “Rise to thy feet.”—La‘an or la‘ for la‘an laka is an exclamation in the sense of a prayer that he may rise sound and safe, addressed to one who has tripped or fallen, and is opposed to the imprecatory formula ta‘san, fall or perdition on thee, which occurs Koran xlvii. 9: “But as for the infidels, let them perish!” In a disputed passage of the Ḥamâseh fa’t-ta‘su adná la-hâ min an yuqâla la‘an is explained by Ḥarîri himself in his Durrat al-Ghawwâs by “she is worthier to be prayed for than to be prayed against,” while Tabrîzî in his Commentary reads the initial word fa’n-na‘shu, and interprets: “she has sooner risen than one could say to her Rise!” The origin of la‘an la-ka is said to be the elliptical idiom la‘alla-ka “haply thou mayst,” here mentally supplemented with “rise in safety.”

And were it not, by God, for life’s straitening stress (ẓanku ‘aishin).— Compare Koran xx. 123: “But whoso turneth away from My warning, his truly shall be a straitened life,” i.e., a life of misery (ma‘îshatan ẓankan).

I would not sell him for the realms that Kisrá rules.—To this the commentators quote the following line of a poet to the same effect: “Necessity, O Mother of Mâlik, at times compels a man to part with belongings which otherwise he would guard with a niggard’s care.”

I fancied him one of the youths of the garden of delight, and said, “This is not a man but an honoured angel.”—Allusion to Koran lvi. 11, 12, and 17: “These are they who shall be brought nigh to God in gardens of delight . . . immortal youths go round about to them with goblets and ewers and a cup from a fountain.” The second clause is a quotation of the words with which, in Sûra xii. 31, the Egyptian ladies praise the beauty of Joseph, a quota­tion which, as the sequel will show, proves ominous on the present occasion.

Whether his elocution matched his comeliness, and how his utterance tallied with the fairness of his countenance.—Literally where his eloquence was from his brightness of face, and how his tongue or language from his fairness, the preposition min, from, here meaning “considered apart from” or “in contrast with.”

So I turned aside from him.—In Arabic ẓarabtu ‘an-hu ṣafḥan, another Koranic idiom, taken from ch. xliii. 4: “Shall We then turn aside this warning from you as if with repulsion, because ye are a people who transgress?” The accusative ṣafḥan is in this passage, according to the most plausible explanations, an infinitive of a verb synonymous with ẓarab, and corroborative of the idea con­tained in the latter verb, which we might here translate “I struck out and away from him.”

Then listen: Joseph I am, ay, Joseph I am.—Allusion to Koran, xii. 90: “They said, ‘Canst thou indeed be Joseph?’ He said, ‘I am Joseph, and this is my brother.’”

But he did not soar whither I had soared.—Hallaqa, lit., he de­scribed circles (ḥalqah), is applied to a bird, which rises into the air, and the phrase means here, “he demanded not such a high price for the boy as I had expected him to do, and was ready to pay,” and in similar manner the following, nor held he on to that to which I held on, signifies, “he showed less eagerness to keep the youth than I was anxious to take possession of him.”

That every thing sold cheap proves dear, a piece of worldly wisdom which I dare say most of my readers have bought sometime or other with their own experience.

Both eyes of the lad flowed over with tears, more abundant than the tear-flow of the clouds, literally, they brimmed over, and not with the brimming of the tears of the clouds, an idiom for which compare (vol. i., p. 304) Chenery’s note on the phrase, “With an earliness beyond the earliness of the crow.”

The hungry bellies, in Arabic a’l-karishu ’l-jiyâ‘u, an idiom remark­able in more than one respect. Karish is, literally, the stomach of a ruminant, and denotes metaphorically a man’s children, family, or household. In this sense we shall meet with it in Assembly XLVIII., attakhiztu-hum karishî wa ‘aibatî, which may approximately be trans­lated: “I took them for my kith and kin,” and is used by Harîri in allusion to a tradition according to which Mohammed applied the expression to the Anṣâr, or Helpers, i.e., the Meccans who joined him after his flight to Medina, and the inhabitants of the latter town who embraced his cause. The word ‘aibah means originally a chest or wardrobe to keep clothes in, and has become a popular metaphor for intimate friends as depositories of a man’s secrets (comp. Ar. Prov., i. 59). In the present passage of our text it is further to be noticed that the singular karish is followed by the plural jiyâ, for which the native grammarians adduce two reasons. The most natural explanation is that the noun karish, though gram­matically a singular, is here logically a plural, and may therefore fitly be accompanied by an adjective in that number. The other view of the case is that the plural of the adjective intensifies its meaning, and is joined to the substantive singular, in order to qualify the one subject, as it were, with the aggregate hunger of several subjects, a rather far-fetched explanation, here only given as an instance of the subtlety of grammatical discussion in which the Arabs delight. As another etymological curiosity, I may men­tion that the word al-‘aibah figures in the parlance of the common people as a corruption of ‘al-lu‘aibah, diminutive of lu‘bah, a toy for children, a doll, from the totally different verb la‘b, playing, sporting.