[FN#501] Arab.  “Ihtida,"=divine direction to Huda or salvation.  The old bawd was still dressed as a devotee, and keeps up the cant of her caste.  No sensible man in the East ever allows a religious old woman to pass his threshold.

[FN#502] In this tale “poetical justice” is neglected, but the teller skilfully caused the wife to be ravished and not to be a particeps criminis.  The lover escapes scot-free because Moslems, as well as Hindus, hold that the amourist under certain conditions is justified in obtaining his object by fair means or foul.  See p. 147 of “Early Ideas, a Group of Hindoo Stories,” collected and collated by Anaryan:  London, Allens, 1881.

[FN#503] This is supplied from the “Tale of the King and his Wazir’s Wife,” vol. vi. 129.

[FN#504] Arab.  “Ibl,” a specific name:  it is presently opposed to “Nakah,” a she-dromedary, and “Rahilah,” a riding-camel.

[FN#505] Here “Amsaytu” is used in its literal sense “I evened” (came at evening), and this is the case with seven such verbs, Asbaha, Amsa, Azha, Azhara, A’tama, Zalla, and Bata, which either conjoin the sense of the sentence with their respective times, morning, evening, forenoon, noon and the first sundown watch, all day and all night or are used “elegantly,” as grammarians say, for the simple “becoming” or “being.”

[FN#506] The Badawi dogs are as dangerous as those of Montenegro but not so treacherous:  the latter will sneak up to the stranger and suddenly bite him most viciously.  I once had a narrow escape from an ignoble death near the slaughter-house of Alexandria-Ramlah, where the beasts were unusually ferocious.  A pack assailed me at early dawn and but for an iron stick and a convenient wall I should have been torn to pieces.

[FN#507] These elopements are of most frequent occurrence:  see Pilgrimage iii. 52.

[FN#508] The principal incidents, the loss and recovery of wife and children, occur in the Story of the Knight Placidus (Gesta Romanorum, cx.).  But the ecclesiastical taleteller does not do poetical justice upon any offenders, and he vilely slanders the great Caesar, Trajan.

[FN#509] i.e. a long time:  the idiom has already been noticed.  In the original we have “of days and years and twelvemonths” in order that “A’wam” (years) may jingle with “Ayyam” (days).

[FN#510] Nothing can be more beautiful than the natural parks which travellers describe on the coasts of tropical seas.

[FN#511] Arab.  “Khayyal” not only a rider but a good and a hard rider.  Hence the proverb “Al-Khayyal” kabr maftuh=uomo a cavallo sepoltura aperta.

[FN#512] i.e. the crew and the islanders.

[FN#513] Arab.  “Hadas,” a word not easy to render.  In grammar Lumsden renders it by “event” and the learned Captain Lockett (Miut Amil) in an awful long note (pp. 195 to 224) by “mode,” grammatical or logical.  The value of his disquisition is its proving that, as the Arabs borrowed their romance from the Persians, so they took their physics and metaphysics of grammar and syntax; logic and science in general, from the Greeks.