Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/169

147 gilding and rare painting and carving and magnificent furniture. There hung the most brilliant pendants of limpid crystal, and in every hollow of the crystal was an unique jewel, to whose price money might not avail. So I threw down that which was with me and fell to taking of these jewels what I could carry, bewildered as to what I should take and what I should leave, for indeed I saw the place as it were a treasure of the treasures of the cities.

Presently, I espied a little door open and within it stairs: so I entered and mounting forty stairs, heard a human voice reciting the Koran in a low voice. I followed the sound till I came to a silken curtain, laced with wires of gold, whereon were strung pearls and coral and rubies and emeralds, that gave forth a light like the light of the stars. The voice came from behind the curtain: so I raised it and discovered a gilded door, whose beauty amazed the mind. I opened the door and found myself in a saloon, as it were an enchanted treasure-house upon the surface of the earth, and therein a girl as she were the shining sun amiddleward the cloudless sky. She was clad in the costliest of raiment and decked with the most precious jewels, and withal she was of surpassing beauty and grace, full of symmetry and elegance and perfection, with slender waist and heavy buttocks and spittle such as heals the sick and languorous eyelids, as it were she of whom the poet would speak, when he saith:

My salutation to the shape that through the wede doth show And to the roses in the cheeks’ full-flowering meads that blow! It is as if the Pleiades upon her forehead hung And all night’s other stars did deck her breast, like pearls arow.