Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 5.djvu/214

188 bid me farewell in my lifetime and condole with me for myself whilst I cried out amongst them, saying, “I am a foreigner and not subject to your custom!” They paid no heed to my words, but laying hold of me, bound me by force and let me down into the cavern, with a pitcher of fair water and seven cakes of bread, as of wont. When I came to the bottom, they called out to me to cast myself loose from the cords, but I refused to do so; so they threw them down on me and closing the mouth of the pit with the stone aforesaid, went their ways.

I found myself in a vast cavern under the mountain, full of dead bodies, that exhaled a fetid and loathsome smell, and fell to blaming myself for what I had done, saying, “By Allah, I deserve all that hath befallen me! What possessed me to take a wife in this city? There is no power and no virtue but in God the Most High, the Supreme! As often as I say, ‘I have escaped from one calamity,’ I fall into a worse. By Allah, this is a fearful death to die! Would I had been drowned at sea or perished in the mountains! It were better than to die this miserable death!” Then I threw myself down on the bones of the dead and lay there, imploring God’s help and in the violence of my despair, invoking death, which came not to me, till hunger well-nigh gnawed me in sunder and thirst consumed me, when I sat up and feeling for the bread, ate a morsel and drank a mouthful of water. After this, I arose and exploring the cavern, found that it extended a long way right and left, with hollow places in its sides; and its floor was strewn with dead bodies and rotten bones, that had lain there from of old time. So I made myself a place in the sides of the cavern, afar from the freshly buried dead, and there slept.

I abode thus a long while, knowing not night from day, eating not till I was well-nigh torn in pieces with hunger,