Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 7.djvu/117

99 my shoulders again, drove me on, now walking, now running and now trotting, and he the while mounted on me, laughing and saying, “Never in my life saw I an ass like unto thee!”

We abode thus awhile, till, one day, it chanced that we came upon great plenty of vines, covered with ripe fruit; so we gathered a quantity of bunches of grapes and throwing them into a pit, trod them with our feet, till the pit became a great pool. Then we waited awhile and presently returning thither, found that the sun had smitten the grape-juice and it was become wine. So we used to drink of it, till we were drunken and our faces flushed and we fell to singing and dancing, for the hilarity of drunkenness; whereupon our masters said to us, “What is it that reddens your faces and makes you dance and sing?” “Ask us not,” answered we. “What is your intent in questioning us of this?” But they insisted, till we told them how we had pressed grapes and made wine. Quoth they, “Give us to drink thereof;” but we said, “The grapes are spent.”

So they brought us to a valley, whose length we knew not from its breadth, wherein were vines without beginning or end, each bunch of grapes on them twenty pounds in weight and all within easy reach, and said, “Gather of these.” So we gathered great store of grapes and filling therewith a great trench that we found there, bigger than the great tank [in the king’s garden], trod them with our feet and did with the juice as before, till it became wine, whereupon we said to them, “It is come to perfection; but in what will ye drink it?” And they answered, saying, “We had asses like unto you; but we ate them and kept their heads: so give us to drink in their skulls.” So we gave them to drink, and they became drunken and lay down, nigh two hundred of them.

Then said we to one another, “Is it not enough that