burton--1001-nights--sample

The Translator’s Foreword
This work, labourious as it may appear, has been to me a labour of
love, an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction. During my long
years of official banishment to the luxuriant and deadly deserts of
Western Africa, and to the dull and dreary half clearings of South
America, it proved itself a charm, a talisman against ennui and
despondency. Impossible even to open the pages without a vision
starting into view; without drawing a picture from the pinacothek of
the brain; without reviving a host of memories and reminiscences
which are not the common property of travellers, however widely they
may have travelled. From my dull and commonplace and “respectable”
surroundings, the Jinn bore me at once to the land of my predilection,
Arabia, a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it
seemed a reminiscence of some by-gone metem-psychic life in the
distant Past. Again I stood under the diaphanous skies, in air glorious
as aether, whose every breath raises men’s spirits like sparkling wine.
Once more I saw the evening star hanging like a solitaire from the pure
front of the western firmament; and the after-glow transfiguring and
transforming, as by magic, the homely and rugged features of the scene
into a fairy-land lit with a light which never shines on other soils or
seas. Then would appear the woollen tents, low and black, of the true
Badawin, mere dots in the boundless waste of lion-tawny clays and
gazelle-brown gravels, and the camp fire dotting like a glow-worm the
village centre. Presently, sweetened by distance, would be heard the
wild weird song of lads and lasses, driving or rather pelting, through
the gloaming their sheep and goats; and the measured chant of the
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