Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 8.djvu/28

16 and the witnesses set their hands thereto; whereupon she took it from the Cadi and said to Mesrour, ‘Now go thy ways.’ But her slave-girl Huboub turned to him and said, ‘Recite us some verses.’ So he improvised the following verses upon [his own case and] the game of chess:

Of Fate I plain me and for that which hath befall’n me sigh And make my moan of loss by chess and by the [evil] eye, For love of one, a damsel fair, slender and delicate; Female or male, there’s not her like of all beneath the sky. Arrows upon me from her looks she launched and ’gainst me brought Troops that would conquer all the world and all men, far and nigh; Red men and white men, ay, and knights for shock of battle ranged; Then came she forth to me and did to single fight defy. ‘Look to thyself,’ quoth she; but, when she put her fingers out, Midmost a pitch-black night, most like her sable hair in dye, I had no power to move the white, to rescue them from her And passion caused the tide of tears in me run fierce and high. On, with the queens, fall pawns and rooks; they charge the host of white, And these give way, discomfited, and turn their backs to fly; Yea, and she launched at me, to boot, an arrow of her looks, And to the kernel of my heart the quivering shaft did hie. ’Twixt the two hosts she gave me choice, and I chose that which white Was with the whiteness of the moon that shineth in the sky. ‘The white, indeed, are those which best beseem to me and they Are what I fain would have; so take the red to thee,’ quoth I. Then played she with me for a stake agreed ’twixt us; but Fate did unto me the wished-for boon of her consent deny. Alas, the misery of my heart! Alas, my longing sore For the enjoyment of a maid who with the moon doth vie! It is not for my goods and lands my heart is all a-fire But that, alack! familiar ’tis grown with the [evil] eye. Distraught I’m grown and stupefied for dreariment, and Fate, For what’s betided me, I chide with many a tear and cry. ‘What ails thee to be dazed?’ asked she, and I, ‘Shall wine-bibbers Be whole of wit, when drunkenness their sense doth stupefy?’ A mortal maid hath ta’en my wit with her fair shape; if it Be soft, her bowels are like rock, uneath to mollify.