[FN#480] The description of the famous upper hall with the four-and- twenty windows is one of the most contused and incoherent parts of the Nights and well-nigh defies the efforts of the translator to define the exact nature of the building described by the various and contradictory passages which refer to it.  The following is a literal rendering of the above passage:  “An upper chamber (keszr) and (or?) a kiosk (kushk, a word explained by a modern Syrian dictionary as meaning ’[a building] like a balcony projecting from the level of the rest of the house,’ but by others as an isolated building or pavilion erected on the top of a house, i.e. a keszr, in its classical meaning of ‘upper chamber,’ in which sense Lane indeed gives it as synonymous with the Turkish koushk, variant kushk,) with four-and-twenty estrades (liwan, a raised recess, generally a square-shaped room, large or small, open on the side facing the main saloon), all of it of emeralds and rubies and other jewels, and one estrade its kiosk was not finished.”  Later on, when the Sultan visits the enchanted palace for the first time, Alaeddin “brought him to the high kiosk and he looked at the belvedere (teyyareh, a square or round erection on the top of a house, either open at the sides or pierced with windows, =our architectural term ‘lantern’) and its casements (shebabik,, pl. of shubbak, a window formed of grating or lattice-work) and their lattices (she"ri for she"rir, pl. of sheriyyeh, a lattice), all wroughten of emeralds and rubies and other than it of precious jewels.”  The Sultan “goes round in the kiosk” and seeing “the casement (shubbak), which Alaeddin had purposely left defective, without completion,” said to the Vizier, “Knowest thou the reason (or cause) of the lack of completion of this casement and its lattices?” (shearihi, or quaere, “[this] lattice,” the copyist having probably omitted by mistake the diacritical points over the final ha).  Then he asked Alaeddin, “What is the cause that the lattice of yonder kiosk (kushk) is not complete?” The defective part is soon after referred to, no less than four times, as “the lattice of the kiosk” (sheriyyetu ’l kushk), thus showing that, in the writer’s mind, kushk, liwan and shubbak were synonymous terms for the common Arab projecting square-sided window, made of latticework, and I have therefore rendered the three words, when they occur in this sense, by our English “oriel,” to whose modern meaning (a window that juts out, so as to form a small apartment), they exactly correspond.  Again, in the episode of the Maugrabin’s brother, the princess shows the latter (disguised as Fatimeh) “the belvedere (teyyarrh) and the kiosk (kushk) of jewels, the which [was] with (i.e. had) the four-and-twenty portals” (mejouz, apparently a Syrian variant of mejaz, lit. a place of passage, but by extension a porch, a gallery, an opening, here (and here only) used by synecdoche for the oriel itself), and the famous roe’s egg is proposed to be suspended from “the dome