Page:Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp.djvu/220

176 diacritical points over the final ha). Then he asked Alaeddin, “What is the cause that the lattice of yonder kiosk (kushk) is not complete?” The defective part is soon after referred to, no less than four times, as “the lattice of the kiosk” (sheriyyetu ’l kushk), thus showing that, in the writer’s mind, kushk, liwan and shubbak were synonymous terms for the common Arab projecting square-sided window, made of lattice-work, and I have therefore rendered the three words, when they occur in this sense, by our English “oriel,” to whose modern meaning (a window that juts out, so as to form a small apartment), they exactly correspond. Again, in the episode of the Maugrabin’s brother, the princess shows the latter (disguised as Fatimeh) “the belvedere (teyyareh) and the kiosk (kushk) of jewels, the which [was] with (i.e. had) the four-and-twenty portals” (mejouz, apparently a Syrian variant of mejaz, lit. a place of passage, but by extension a porch, a gallery, an opening, here (and here only) used by synecdoche for the oriel itself), and the famous roc’s egg is proposed to be suspended from “the dome (cubbeh) of the upper chamber” (el keszr el faucaniyy), thus showing that the latter was crowned with a dome or cupola. It is difficult to extricate the author’s exact meaning from the above tangle of confused references; but, as far as can be gathered. in the face of the carelessness with which the text treats kushk as synonymous now with keszr or teyyareh and now with liwan or shubbak, it would seem that what is intended to be described is a lofty hall (or soler), erected on the roof of the palace, whether round or square we cannot tell, but crowned with a dome or cupola and having four-and-twenty deep projecting windows or oriels, the lattice or trellis-work of which latter was formed (instead of the usual wood) of emeralds, rubies and other jewels, strung, we may suppose, upon rods of gold or other metal. I have, at the risk of wearying my reader, treated this point at some length, as well because it is an important one as to show the almost insuperable difficulties that beset the conscientious translator at well-nigh every page of such works as the “Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night.” fail of its completion. When he had viewed the palace,