Page:Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp.djvu/219

175 palace an upper hall and a belvedere with four-and-twenty oriels, all wroughten of emeralds and rubies and other jewels, and of one of these oriels the lattice-work was by his desire left unfinished, The description of the famous upper hall with the four-and-twenty windows is one of the most confused and incoherent parts of the Nights and well-nigh defies the efforts of the translator to define the exact nature of the building described by the various and contradictory passages which refer to it. The following is a literal rendering of the above passage: “An upper chamber (keszr) and (or?) a kiosk (kushk, a word explained by a modern Syrian dictionary as meaning ‘[a building] like a balcony projecting from the level of the rest of the house,’ but by others as an isolated building or pavilion erected on the top of a house, i.e. a keszr, in its classical meaning of ‘upper chamber,’ in which sense Lane indeed gives it as synonymous with the Turkish koushk, variant kushk,) with four-and-twenty estrades (liwan, a raised recess, generally a square-shaped room, large or small, open on the side facing the main saloon), all of it of emeralds and rubies and other jewels, and one estrade its kiosk was not finished.” Later on, when the Sultan visits the enchanted palace for the first time, Alaeddin “brought him to the high kiosk and he looked at the belvedere (teyyareh, a square or round erection on the top of a house, either open at the sides or pierced with windows, = our architectural term ‘lantern’) and its casements (shebabik, pl. of shubbak, a window formed of grating or lattice-work) and their lattices (sheäri for sheärir, pl. of sheriyyeh, a lattice), all wroughten of emeralds and rubies and other than it of precious jewels.” The Sultan “goes round in the kiosk” and seeing “the casement (shubbak), which Alaeddin had purposely left defective, without completion,” said to the Vizier, “Knowest thou the reason (or cause) of the lack of completion of this casement and its lattices?” (shearihi, or quære, “[this] lattice,” the copyist having probably omitted by mistake the so the Sultan should