Note 22 — ARABIC LITERATURE (continued 4)

This Assembly, like several others that will be met with in the course of the work, is so essentially Arabic as almost to forbid intelligible translation. Two suitors, an old man and a youth, appear before the Kadi of Ma'arrah. The former narrates to the Kadi that he had possessed a beautiful and attractive, yet obedient and active, slave girl; that the youth had borrowed her, treated her roughly, and then returned her in an infirm state. The youth admits the charge, but declares that he had offered sufficient compensation; and then complains that the old man detained as a pledge a male slave of his, who was of good origin and qualities, and highly serviceable to his master. The Kadi perceives from the style of these addresses that the language is enigmatical, and bids the litigants speak plainly. The youth then improvises some verses to explain that by a slave girl the old man meant a needle which the youth had borrowed, and the eye of which he had broken by accident as he was drawing the thread through it; the male slave which the old man detained was a pencil, or stylus, for the application of kohl, the dark pigment with which Orientals anoint the eyelid to heighten by contrast the luster of the eye. The old man in his turn admits the truth of this, but pleads in mournful verse his poverty and his inability to bear the loss even of a needle. The chief feature in the composition is the enigmatical description of the needle and pencil, which depends on the double meanings of the words and phrases contained in it. Some of these are so subtle that even the native commentators are undecided about them; and we may assume that the double-entente of passages like this was among the lessons which Hariri is said to have taught to his pupils.