Note 192 — THE LINGUIST-DAME, THE DUENNA AND THE KING’S SON.

These “letters of Mutalammis,” as Arabs term our Litteræ Bellerophonteæ, or “Uriah’s letters,” are a lieu commun in the East and the Prince was in luck when he opened and read the epistle here given by mistake to the wrong man. Mutalammis, a poet of The Ignorance, had this sobriquet (the “frequent asker,” or, as we should say, the Solicitor-General), his name being Jarír bin ’Abd al-Masíh. He was uncle to Tarafah of the Mu’allakah or prize-poem, a type of the witty dissolute bard of the jovial period before Al-Islam arose to cloud and dull man’s life. One day as he was playing with other children Mutalammis was reciting a panegyric upon his favourite camel, which ran:—

I mount a he-camel, dark-red and firm-fleshed; or a she-camel of Himyar, fleet of foot and driving the pebbles with her crushing hooves.

“See the he-camel turned to a she,” cried the boy, and the phrase became proverbial to express inelegant transition (Arab. Prov. ii. 246). The uncle bade his nephew put out his tongue and seeing it dark-coloured said, “That black tongue will be thy ruin!” Tarafah, who was presently entitled Ibn al-’Ishrín (the son of twenty years), grew up a model reprobate who cared nothing save for three things, “to drink the dark-red wine foaming as the water mixeth with it, to urge into the fight a broad-backed steed, and to while away the dull day with a young beauty.” His apology for wilful waste is highly poetic:—

I see that the grave of the careful, the hoarder, differeth not from the grave of the debauched, the spendthrift:

A hillock of earth covers this and that, with a few flat stones laid together thereon.

See the whole piece in Chenery’s Al-Hariri (p. 360), from which this note is borrowed. At last uncle and nephew fled from ruin to the Court of ’Amrú bin Munzír III., King of Hira, who in the tale of Al-Mutalammis and his wife Umaymah (The Nights, vol. v. 74) is called Al-Nu’umán bin Munzir but is better known as ’Amrú bin Hind (his mother). The King who was a ferocious personage nicknamed Al-Muharrik or the Burner because he had thrown into the fire ninety-nine men and one woman of the Tamím tribe in accordance with a vow of vengeance he had taken to slaughter a full century, made the two strangers boon-companions to his boorish brother Kábús. Tarafah, offended because kept at the tent-door whilst the master drank wine within, bitterly lampooned him together with ’Abd Amrú a friend of the King; and when this was reported his death was determined upon. Amrú, the King, seeing the anxiety of the two poets to quit his Court, offered them letters of introduction to Abú Kárib, Governor of Al-Hajar (Bahrayn) under the Persian King and they were accepted. The uncle caused his letter to be read by a youth, and finding that it was an order for his execution destroyed it and fled to Syria; but the nephew was buried alive. Amrú, the King, was afterwards slain by the poet-warrior, Amrú bin Kulthum, also of the “Mu’allakát,” for an insult offered to his mother by Hind: hence the proverb, “Quicker to slay than ’Amrú bin Kulsum” (A.P. ii. 233).