Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/396

362 The horror and discontent excited in Baghdad by the miserable fate of the much and justly loved family was extreme and neither the sanguinary edict issued by the tyrant, to the effect that all who mourned the Barmecides should share their fate, nor the executions that followed it, availed to silence the popular grief and indignation. Elegies were composed by hundreds upon the fallen house and all the poets of the time (even those attached to the court) mourned them. “It was a heavy blow for me,” cries Er Recashi, one of Er Reshid’s “boon companions,” “to lose those princely stars by whose generous showers we were watered, when the skies withheld their rain. Let beneficence and the world say adieu to the glory of the Barmecides. By Allah, O son of Yehya, but for fear of spies and of the Khalif’s eye, which sleeps not, we should compass thy gibbet [like the Kaabeh] and kiss it as men kiss the Sacred Stone!” “On seeing the sword fall on Jaafer,” says Dibil el Khuzaï, “and hearing the Khalif’s crier proclaim vengeance on Yehya, I wept for the world and felt how true it is that the goal of man’s life is the quitting it.” And indeed it would be hard to name a poet of the day who did not tune his lyre to the same sorrowful strain.

The following anecdotes will give some idea of the violence of the popular mourning for the Barmecides. The Khalif, hearing that, despite his prohibition, an old man named Mundir used every day to take his station before one of their ruined houses and harangue the passers-by on the great and noble deeds of the fallen family, sent for him and sentenced him to death; but