Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night - Volume 1.djvu/24

 heard the wild and weird songs of lads and lasses driving, or rather pelting, through the gloaming their sheep and goats; and the measured chant of the spearsmen gravely stalking behind their charge, the camels; mingled with the bleating of the flocks and the bellowing of the humpy herds; while the reremouse flitted overhead with his tiny shriek, and the rave of the jackal resounded through deepening glooms, and—most musical of music—the palm-trees answered the whispers of the night-breeze with the softest tones of falling water.

And then a shift of scene. As the giant grey shadow rises slowly in the East and the vagueness of evening waxes wan in the West and night comes on without a shade of gloaming, and, as it were, with a single stride, and Earth looks old, and pallid, and cold, alt, kalt, and ungestalt, the spectre of her former self, the camp forgathers. The Shaykhs and "white-beards" of the tribe gravely take their places, sitting with outspread skirts like hillocks on the plain, as the Arabs say, around the camp-fire, whilst I reward their hospitality and secure its continuance by reading or reciting a few pages of their favourite tales. The women and children stand motionless as silhouettes outside the ring; and all are breathless with attention; they seem to drink in the words with eyes and mouth as well as with the ears. The most fantastic flights of fancy, the wildest improbabilities, the most impossible of impossibilities, appear to them utterly natural, mere matters of everyday occurence. They enter thoroughly into each phase of feeling touched upon by the author; they take a personal pride in the chivalrous nature and knightly prowess of Taj al-Mulúk; they are touched with tenderness by the self-sacrificing love of Azízah; their mouths water as they hear of heaps of untold gold given away in largesse like clay by the mighty Hárun al-Rashíd—Aaron the Orthodox; they chuckle with delight every time a Kázi or a Fakír (a judge or a reverend) is scurvily entreated by some Pantagruelist of the Wilderness; and despite their normal solemnity and impassibility, all roar with laughter, sometimes rolling upon the ground till the reader's gravity is sorely tried, at the tales of the garrulous Barber, and of Ali with the Kurdish Sharper. To this magnetising mood the sole exception is when a Badawi of superior accomplishments, who sometimes say his