Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/358

324 thirty millions of dirhems is entered as the aggregate amount bestowed, in money and goods, on Jaafer the Barmecide, and Fekhreddin Razi mentions (on the authority of the historian El Amrani), as occurring in a similar list, shortly before Jaafer’s death, the almost incredible item, “Four hundred thousand dinars for a dress of honour for the Vizier Jaafer ben Yehya,” to be shortly followed by the entry, tragic in its terrible contrast, “Ten carats for naphtha and reeds for burning the body of Jaafer the Barmecide.” Again, at the instance of his great vizier, he gave Abdulmelik es Salih a sum of four millions of dirhems; nor was he less lavish in his gifts to the poets, musicians and literati who tickled his intellectual palate with apropos recitals, songs, stories and pleasantries, as well as to the men of learning and chicane who extricated him by their ready wit from some dilemma of conscience or by a legal quibble enabled him to conciliate orthodoxy with the enjoyment of some prohibited pleasure. His wife Zubeideh was equally prodigal, especially in matters religious, having (according to Ibn el Jauzi) spent three millions of dinars, in the course of a single pilgrimage, in expenses, gifts to the learned men of Mecca and Medina and public works.