Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 6.djvu/232

204 “With my soul and my folk I will ransom him, whom my bedfellow still I see Each night and whose scent is pleasanter than the scent of musk to me!” So, when I considered that which they said and sentence passed thereon, I judged not so as to give the wits a cause for mockery; Nay, judgment I gave for the youngest maid and deemed her verse the best, For that I judged the words she spake e’en nearest the truth to be.

Then I gave the scroll to the girl, who went in with it, and presently I heard a noise of dancing and clapping of hands and tumult. Quoth I to myself, “It is time for me to go.” So I rose from the bench and was about to go away, when the damsel cried out to me, saying, “Sit down, O Asmaï!” “Who gave thee to know that I was El Asmaï?” asked I, and she, “If thy name be unknown to us, thy poetry is not.” So I sat down again and behold, the door opened and out came the first damsel, with a dish of fruits and another of sweetmeats. I ate of both and praised their fashion and would have gone away; but she cried out, saying, “Sit down, O Asmaï!” Wherewith I raised my eyes to her and saw a rosy palm in a saffron sleeve, meseemed it was the full moon breaking out from under the clouds. Then she threw me a purse containing three hundred dinars and said to me, “This is mine and I give it to thee in requital of thy judgment.”’ [sic]

Quoth the Khalif, ‘Why didst thou decide for the youngest?’ ‘O Commander of the Faithful, whose life God prolong,’ answered El Asmaï, ‘the eldest said, “I should delight in him, if he visited my couch in sleep.” Now this is restricted and dependent upon a condition, that may befall or may not befall; whilst, for the second, an image of dreams came to her in sleep, and she saluted it; but the youngest said that she actually lay with her lover and smelt his breath sweeter than musk and she engaged her soul and her folk for him, which she had not