unexpected moments; pious beasts—­nay, the very hills—­praising Allah and glorifying his vice-gerent; gullible saints, gifted scoundrels; learned men with camel loads of dictionaries and classics, thieves with camel loads of plunder; warriors, zanies, necromancers, masculine women, feminine men, ghouls, lutists, negroes, court poets, wags—­ the central figure being the gorgeous, but truculent, Haroun Al Rashid, who is generally accompanied by Ja’afer and Masrur, and sometimes by the abandoned but irresistible Abu Nowas.  What magnificent trencher-folk they all are!  Even the love-lorn damsels.  If you ask for a snack between meals they send in a trifle of 1,500 dishes.[FN#458] Diamonds and amethysts are plentiful as blackberries.  If you are a poet, and you make good verses, it is likely enough that some queen will stuff your mouth with balass rubies.  How poorly our modern means of locomotion compare with those of the Nights.  If you take a jinni or a swan-maiden you can go from Cairo to Bokhara in less time than our best expresses could cover a mile.  The recent battles between the Russians and the Japanese are mere skirmishes compared with the fight described in “The City of Brass”—­where 700 million are engaged.  The people who fare worst in The Arabian Nights are those who pry into what does not concern them or what is forbidden, as, for example, that foolish, fatuous Third Kalendar, and the equally foolish and fatuous Man who Never Laughed Again;[FN#459] and perhaps The Edinburgh Review was right in giving as the moral of the tales:  “Nothing is impossible to him who loves, provided”—­and the proviso is of crucial importance—­“he is not cursed with a spirit of curiosity.”  Few persons care, however, whether there is any moral or not—­ most of us would as soon look for one in the outstretched pride of a peacock’s tale.

Where the dust of Shahrazad is kept tradition does not tell us.  If we knew we would hasten to her tomb, and in imitation of the lover of Azizeh[FN#460] lay thereon seven blood-red anemones.

Chapter XXVIII The Two Translations Compared

134.  The Blacksmith Who, etc.

Having glanced through the Nights, let us now compare the two famous translations.  As we have already mentioned, Burton in his Translator’s Foreword did not do Mr. Payne complete justice, but he pays so many compliments to Mr. Payne’s translation elsewhere that no one can suppose that he desired to underrate the work of his friend.  In the Foreword he says that Mr. Payne “succeeds admirably in the most difficult passages and often hits upon choice and special terms and the exact vernacular equivalent of the foreign word so happily and so picturesquely that all future translators must perforce use the same expression under pain of falling far short.”  Still this does not go far enough, seeing that, as we said before, he made his translation very largely a paraphrase of Payne’s.  Consequently he was able to get done in two broken years (April 1884 to April 1886) and with several other books in hand, work that had occupied Mr. Payne six years (1876-1882).  Let us now take Mr. Payne’s rendering and Burton’s rendering of two short tales and put them in juxtaposition.  The Blacksmith who could handle Fire without Hurt and Abu Al Hasan and Abu Ja’afar the Leper will suit our purpose admirably.