burton--1001-nights--sample

spearsmen gravely stalking behind their charge, the camels; mingled
with bleating of the flocks and the bellowing of the humpy herds;
while the reremouse flitted overhead with his tiny shriek, and the rave
of the jackal resounded through deepening glooms, and — most
musical of music — the palm trees answered the whispers of the nightbreeze
with the softest tones of falling water.
And then a shift of scene. The Shaykhs and “white-beards” of the
tribe gravely take their places, sitting with outspread skirts like hillocks
on the plain, as the Arabs say, around the camp-fire, whilst I reward
their hospitality and secure its continuance by reading or reciting a few
pages of their favourite tales. The women and children stand motionless
as silhouettes outside the ring; and all are breathless with attention;
they seem to drink in the words with eyes and mouths as well as with
ears. The most fantastic flights of fancy, the wildest improbabilities, the
most impossible of impossibilities, appear to them utterly natural, mere
matters of every-day occurrence. They enter thoroughly into each
phase of feeling touched upon by the author: they take a personal
pride in the chivalrous nature and knightly prowess of Taj al-Mulúk;
they are touched with tenderness by the self-sacrificing love of Azízah;
their mouths water as they hear of heaps of untold gold given away in
largesse like clay; they chuckle with delight every time a Kázi or a Fakír
— a judge or a reverend — is scurvily entreated by some Pantagruelist
of the Wilderness; and, despite their normal solemnity and impassibility,
all roar with laughter, sometimes rolling upon the ground till the
reader’s gravity is sorely tried, at the tales of the garrulous Barber and
of Ali and the Kurdish Sharper. To this magnetising mood the sole
exception is when a Badawi of superior accomplishments, who sometimes
says his prayers, ejaculates a startling “Astaghfaru’llah” — I pray
Allah’s pardon! — for listening, not to Carlyle’s “downright lies,” but
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