Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/170

148 An if a wede of purest rose she donned, the leaves for sure Would from her body’s fresh-plucked fruits enforce the blood to flow; And if into the salt sea’s flood one day she chanced to spit, Sweeter than honey to the taste its briny tides would grow. If to a graybeard, leant upon a staff, she deigned her grace To grant, a lion-tamer straight he would become, I trow. Oriental writers, Indian and Persian, as well as Arab, lay great stress upon the extreme delicacy of the skin of the fair ones celebrated in their works, constantly attributing to their heroines bodies so sensitive as to brook with difficulty the contact of the finest shift. Several instances of this will be found in the present collection and we may fairly assume that the skin of an Eastern beauty, under the influence of constant seclusion and the unremitting use of cosmetics and the bath, would in time attain a pitch of delicacy and sensitiveness such as would in some measure justify the seemingly extravagant statements of their poetical admirers, of which the following anecdote (quoted by Ibn Khellikan from the historian Et Teberi) is a fair specimen. Ardeshir ibn Babek (Artaxerxes I.), the first Sassanian King of Persia (A.D. 226–42), having long unsuccessfully besieged El Hedr, a strong city of Mesopotamia belonging to the petty King Es Satiroun, at last obtained possession of it by the treachery of the owner’s daughter Nezireh and married the latter, this having been the price stipulated by her for the betrayal to him of the place. “It happened afterwards that, one night, as she was unable to sleep and turned from side to side in the bed, Ardeshir asked her what prevented her from sleeping. She replied, ‘I never yet slept on a rougher bed than this; I feel something irk me.’ He ordered the bed to be changed, but she was still unable to sleep. Next morning, she complained of her side, and on examination, a myrtle-leaf was found adhering to a fold of the skin, from which it had drawn blood. Astonished at this circumstance, Ardeshir asked her if it was this that had kept her awake and she replied in the affirmative. ‘How then,’ asked he, ‘did your father bring you up?’ She answered, ‘He spread me a bed of satin and clad me in silk and fed me with marrow and cream and the honey of virgin bees and gave me pure wine to drink.’ Quoth Ardeshir, ‘The same return which you made your father for his kindness would be made much more readily to me;’ and bade bind her by the hair to the tail of a horse, which galloped off with her and killed her.” It will be remembered that the true princess, in the well-known German popular tale, is discovered by a similar incident to that of the myrtle-leaf.