Note 61 — HISTORY OF NASSAR, THE SON OF KHOJA HUMAYUN, THE MERCHANT OF BAGHDAD. (continued 3)

The number forty seems to have been always a favourite among Eastern peoples, and it occurs in the Bible many times in connection with important events. Thus the Flood continued forty days (Gen. vii, 17); Joseph and his kinsmen mourned forty days for their father Jacob (Gen. l, 3); thrice Moses fasted forty days (Exod. xxiv, 18, xxxiv, 28, and Deut. ix, 9-25); during forty days the Hebrew spies searched Canaan (Numb. xiii, 25); Goliath defied the Hebrew army for forty days (1 Sam. xvii, 16); Elijah fasted forty days (1 Kings xix, 8); Nineveh was to be destroyed after forty days (Jonah iii, 4); forty days Ezekiel bore the iniquities of the house of Judah, a day for a year (Ezek. iv, 6); Christ was tempted by Satan during forty days (Matt. iv, 2, and Mark i, 13), and he continued forty days on earth after his resurrection (Acts i, 3); the Israelites were condemned to wander in the wilderness forty years (Numb. xiv, 33).—Muslims mourn forty days for their dead; and they deem a woman ceremonially unclean during forty days after childbirth: among the Israelites the period was forty days when she had given birth to a male child and eighty days in the case of a female child.—In the present romance, our unlucky hero, Nassar, is directed by the hermit’s “last will,” as above, to spend forty days in prayer for the restoration of the fairies’ fountain; he shoots an arrow through a finger-ring forty times (p. 100); but his too expert archery caused an accident to the king, from the effects of which his majesty did not recover until he had been “forty days under medical treatment” (p. 102); poor Shah Manssur was in the power of the cruel sorceress for nearly forty days (p. 26); and the son of the king of Tytmyran was tossed about on the sea in a boat for forty days (p. 73). To conclude this long note: forty is the usual number of a gang of robbers in Eastern tales—that of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” will at once occur to the reader; and we have another example in the diverting story of “Ahmed the Cobbler” (Malcolm’s Sketches of Persia), where the king’s treasury is plundered by forty robbers.