Note 53 — Chapter VI · Magic Rites as affecting the Life of Man

Malay descriptions of female beauty are no less curious. The “brow” (of the Malay Helen, for whose sake a thousand desperate battles are fought in Malay romances) “is like the one-day-old moon,”53 her eyebrows resemble “pictured clouds,”54 and are “arched like the fighting-cock’s (artificial) spur,”55 her cheek resembles “the sliced-off-cheek of a mango,”56 her nose “an opening jasmine bud,”57 her hair the “wavy blossom-shoots of the areca-palm,”58 slender59 is her neck, “with a triple row of dimples,”60 her bosom ripening,61 her waist “lissom as the stalk of a flower,”62 her head “of a perfect oval” (lit. bird’s-egg-shaped), her fingers like the leafy “spears of lemon-grass,”63 or the “quills of the porcupine,”64 her eyes “like the splendour of the planet Venus,”65 and her lips “like the fissure of a pomegranate.”66