[FN#187] See vols. iv. 100; viii. 268.  In his Introduction (p. 22) to the Assemblies of Al-Hariri Chenery says, “This prosperity had now passed away, for God had brought the people of Rum (so the Arabs call the Byzantines, whom Abu Zayd here confounds with the Franks) on the land,” etc.  The confusion is not Abu Zayd’s:  “Rumi” in Marocco and other archaic parts of the Moslem world is still synonymous with our “European.”

[FN#188] This obedience to children is common in Eastern folk-lore:  see Suppl. vol. i. 143, in which the royal father orders his son to sell him.  The underlying idea is that the parents find their offspring too clever for them; not, as in the “New World,” that Youth is entitled to take precedence and command of Age.

[FN#189] In text “Fa min tumma” for “thumma”—­then, alors.

[FN#190] Such as the headstall and hobbles the cords and chains for binding captives, and the mace and sword hanging to the saddle-bow.

[FN#191] i.e. not a well-known or distinguished horseman, but a chance rider.

[FN#192] These “letters of Mutalammis,” as Arabs term our Litterae Bellerophonteae, or “Uriah’s letters,” are a lieu commun in the East and the Prince was in luck when he opened and read the epistle here given by mistake to the wrong man.  Mutalammis, a poet of The Ignorance, had this sobriquet (the “frequent asker,” or, as we should say, the Solicitor-General), his name being Jarir bin ’Abd al-Masih.  He was uncle to Tarafah of the Mu’-allakah or prize poem, a type of the witty dissolute bard of the jovial period before Al-Islam arose to cloud and dull man’s life.  One day as he was playing with other children Mutalammis was reciting a panegyric upon his favourite camel, which ran:—­

I mount a he-camel, dark-red and firm-fleshed; or a she-camel of Himyar, fleet of foot and driving the pebbles with her crushing hooves.

“See the he-camel turned to a she,” cried the boy, and the phrase became proverbial to express inelegant transition (Arab.  Prov. ii. 246).  The uncle bade his nephew put out his tongue and seeing it dark-coloured said, “That black tongue will be thy ruin!” Tarafah, who was presently entitled Ibn al-’Ishrin (the son of twenty years), grew up a model reprobate who cared nothing save for three things, “to drink the dark-red wine foaming as the water mixeth with it, to urge into the fight a broad-backed steed, and to while away the dull day with a young beauty.”  His apology for wilful waste is highly poetic:—­

I see that the grave of the careful, the hoarder, differeth not from the grave of the debauched, the spendthrift:  A hillock of earth covers this and that, with a few flat stones laid together thereon.