Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/88

70 for reverence of him. When he looked upon the boy, his eyes were dazzled and his wit confounded, and the saying of the poet was exemplified in him:

What while yon fair-faced loveling was in a certain place And the new moon of Shawwal shone glittering from his face, There came a reverend elder, who walked with leisure pace: His steps a staff supported and in his looks the trace Of abstinent devoutness was plain unto the sight. The days he had made proof of and eke the nights essayed; In lawful and unlawful he had not spared to wade. He had been love-distracted for minion and for maid And to a skewer’s likeness worn down was he and frayed; But wasted bones were left him, with parchment skin bedight. A Moor in this same fashion the sheikh himself did show, For by his side a youngling was ever seen to go: He in the love of women an Udhri was, I trow; In either mode seductive and throughly versed, for lo, Zeid was to him as Zeyneb, to wit, and wench as wight. Distraught he was with passion for this and th’ other fair; He mourned the camp, bewailing the ruins bleak and bare: Of his excess of longing, thou’dst deem him, as it were, A sapling that the zephyr still bendeth here and there. Cold-heartedness pertaineth to stones alone aright.