[FN#441] The necklace-pearls are the cup-bearer’s teeth.

[FN#442] In these unregenerate days they would often be summoned to the houses of the royal family; but now they had “got religion” and, becoming freed women, were resolved to be “respectable.”  In not a few Moslem countries men of wealth and rank marry professional singers who, however loose may have been their artistic lives, mostly distinguish themselves by decency of behaviour often pushed to the extreme of rigour.  Also jeune coquette, vieille devote is a rule of the world, Eastern and Western.

[FN#443] Bresl.  Edit., vol. xii p. 383 (Night mi).  The king is called as usual “Shahrban,” which is nearly synonymous with Shahryar.

[FN#444] i.e. the old Sindibae-Nameh (see vol. vi. 122), or “The Malice of Women” which the Bresl.  Edit. entitles, “Tale of the King and his Son and his Wife and the Seven Wazirs.”  Here it immediately follows the Tale of Al-Abbas and Mariyah and occupies pp. 237-383 of vol. xii, (Nights dcccclxxix-m).

[FN#445] i.e.  Those who commit it.

[FN#446] The connection between this pompous introduction and the story which follows is not apparent.  The “Tale of the Two Kings and the Wazir’s Daughters” is that of Shahrazad told in the third person, in fact a rechauffe of the Introduction.  But as some three years have passed since the marriage, and the denouement of the plot is at hand, the Princess is made, with some art I think, to lay the whole affair before her husband in her own words, the better to bring him to a “sense of his duty.”

[FN#447] Bresl.  Edit., vol. xii.  Pp. 384-412.

[FN#448] This clause is taken from the sequence, where the older brother’s kingdom is placed in China.

[FN#449] For the Tobbas = “Successors” or the Himyaritic kings, see vol. i. 216.

[FN#450] Kayasirah, opp. to Akasirah, here and in many other places.

[FN#451] See vol. ii. 77.  King Kulayb ("little dog”) al-Wa’il, a powerful chief of the Banu Ma’ad in the Kasin district of Najd, who was connected with the war of Al-Basus.  He is so called because he lamed a pup (kulayb) and tied it up in the midst of his Hima (domain, place of pasture and water), forbidding men to camp within sound of its bark or sight of his fire.  Hence “more masterful than Kulayb,” A.P. ii. 145, and Al-Hariri Ass.  Xxvi.  (Chenery, p. 448).  This angry person came by his death for wounding in the udder a trespassing camel (Sorab) whose owner was a woman named Basus.  Her friend (Jasus) slew him; and thus arose the famous long war between the tribes Wa’il Bakr and Taghlib.  It gave origin to the saying, “Die thou and be an expiation for the shoe-latchet of Kulayb.”

[FN#452] Arab.  “Mukhaddarat,” maidens concealed behind curtains and veiled in the Harem.

[FN#453] i.e. the professional Rawis or tale-reciters who learned stories by heart from books like “The Arabian Nights.”  See my Terminal Essay, vol. x. 144.