3.18.16
“‘How clever you are!’ I said. ‘But where did you acquire all this knowledge, given that, when we first came to this island, you couldn’t tell a beardless boy from a man who’d shaved off his beard?’ ‘Many a spark has lit a furnace,’ she replied. ‘I always knew in myself that it wouldn’t be long before I became an expert in such things because of all the conflict and quarreling, complaining and contradicting that I saw and heard concerning married couples, and especially now that I’ve seen a country and people other than my own and have had experience of new customs and strange situations. That spark that was lodged in my mind beneath the dung heap of loneliness and isolation burst into flame the moment the gusts of changing circumstance and varied affairs veered across it, especially on the unforgettable night of the ball. From that time on, it’s been on my mind to dictate to you a book on the rights of men and women, and you must make a start on it.’
3.18.17
“‘I shall do so,’ I said, ‘God willing, but the emir is expecting me to go to him in the quarantine quarters tomorrow, and I shall have to go to see him before writing down the book.’ ‘I’m feeling a little better now,’ she said, ‘after what I told you, so go to him, and I just hope that the same fit doesn’t take me again when you’re not here, for if it does I shall have to call on God for help and inspiration, seek refuge with Him and say, “From God we are come and He is our final destination.”’” Then the Fāriyāq went to the aforementioned emir and, after spending the period of his quarantine with him, traveled with him to Italy. Then he returned to the island, surrounded by tokens of the emir’s hospitality and liberality.
CHAPTER 19: ASSORTED WONDERS
3.19.1
Wonders! Marvels! Prodigies! Miracles! Sensations! Astonishments! Things to gawp at, things to learn from! Things stupendous! Things incredible! Things beyond understanding! Things beyond imagining! The fantastic, the extraordinary, the bewildering, the outlandish, the awesome, the amazing! Bewilderments and puzzlements! Descriptions beggared! Beliefs staggered! Holy mackerel and holy cow! Verily, men delude themselves.
3.19.2
This bitty-buttocked,249 thin-thighed, shrivel-shanked, barely boobed, ant-armed mistress of mine uses pads, stuffing, and balls of yarn to puff out her shift at her breasts so as to make people think she’s big-busted and well-endowed, but from where, my lady, are you supposed to have acquired this ample form, this appetizing flesh, when we can see that your arms are like writing-reeds or prickly artichoke stems, your neck like a stick, your hands like combs, your face like the cake of soap a fuller uses to wash the clothes of army blacksmiths and camel drivers, donkey drivers, and camp followers, your rib cage like a chicken coop, and your shoulders honed and boney, thinned and flattened, delineated and desiccated, weedy and woggly? How could Nature have made such a mistake as to fatten you at those two noble spots and turn a blind eye to the rest?
3.19.3
This short,250 little, teeny, tiny, diminutive, itty-bitty, shrimpy, stunted, stubby, runty, scrunty, strunty, squaddy, knurly, squabby, hodmandod, miniature, minuscule, micromorphic, dwarfish, pygmy, puny, pint-sized, homuncular, hop-o’-my-thumb, gnomish, nanoid, fubsical, sesquipedalian chit of a mistress of mine leaps and bounds, stretches her neck out and holds her head straight, sticks her neck out with head held high, walks like an ostrich, or an estrich, cranes and strams, peers toward things, frisks, prances, rushes like a stream of melting snow — and thinks the onlookers aren’t measuring her inch by inch with their eyes, aren’t groping her span by span and cubit by cubit in their minds, and aren’t thinking over what bed would suit her best.
3.19.4
This black,251 sable, ebony, pitchy, inky, tar-bedaubed, raven-like, charcoal-tinted, swarthy, smutty, dusky, sooty, melanic, melanous, melanotic, melanoid, melanistic mistress of mine paints her face with Indian yellow, saffron, ceruse, rouge, and lipstick and then makes a sour face at men and looks at them askance, bestowing on them from on high glances of coquetry and pride. Should any try to see any other part of her body, she turns on them the part that’s painted and rouge-caked, embellished and faked, and makes that the intercessor for the rest of her limbs, causing them to believe that the parts of her that are covered are of a whiter white than the part that’s exposed and that her color by night is more fluorescent than by day, especially if seen in seclusion, when it increases in beauty and profusion. She may tell a long tale of how, when she got up in the morning, she had no time to set herself to rights, that she dressed in a hurry and left, she has no idea how.
3.19.5
This old,252 aged, elderly, decrepit, withered, shrunken, wizened, wrinkly, crabbed, shriveled, long-in — the-tooth, infirm, weak, debilitated, moth-eaten, doddery, tottery, grandevous, gerontic, badgerly, veterascent, senescent, doting, hoary, feeble, ravaged, wasting, superannuated mistress of mine, who kicks up the dirt as she waddles along bowlegged like a geriatric,(1) affects, for all that, girlishness, maidenly ways, and childishness, cinching her robe tight around her waist and smiling if a young man come to visit her in her den.
3.19.6
This beautiful, plump and handsome, graceful, juicy and comely, bonny and bright, lovely (both inwardly and outwardly) and delicate, smooth and black-eyed, virginal, chaste, and big-buttocked, sweet-breathed and pearly-toothed, soft-voiced and small-nosed, silken-breasted, glabrously ribbed, prettily smiling, melodiously speaking mistress of mine, who intoxicates with her coquettish shilly-shallying, enchants with her dallying, captivates the heart of him who never in his life felt desire before, robbing him of his senses and leaving him disturbed, enslaving him and rendering him perturbed, even though he be on his guard against her and call upon his good sense and endurance, his self-discipline and conscience—this mistress of mine you will observe walking with her head averted and eyes lowered from bashfulness, too shy indeed to step out and display her lusciousness, and showing not a sign of flirtatiousness, bedizenment, or finery, or walking with a provocative gait, or dressing flashily, or wearing brocade, or being prideful, or rocking and rolling from side to side as she walks, or being coquettish, or shaking and swaying, or plucking her eyebrows, or taking wide steps like an ostrich, or her beauty flaunting, or reveling in the first flush of her youth or empty vaunting, even though, should she enter the presence of the king, he’d rise to bid her welcome, handing over to her, to honor her, both scepter and baton, and reciting
I hereby ransom you from any fealty to us,