said, “I will have her first.”  So they fell out one with the other concerning this, and while so doing a company of blackamoors came down upon them, and they drew their swords and both sides fell to laying on load.  The mellay waxed hot with cut and thrust; and the two slaves fought their best; but the blacks slew them both in less than the twinkling of an eye.  So the damsel abode alone and wandered about the forest, eating of its fruits and drinking of its founts, till in due time she gave birth to a boy, brown but clean limbed and comely, whom she named Gharib, the Stranger, by reason of her strangerhood.  Then she cut his navel-string and wrapping him in some of her own clothes, gave him to suck, harrowed at heart, and with vitals sorrowing for the estate she had lost and its honour and solace.  And Shahrazed perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say,

      When it was the Six Hundred and Twenty-fifth Night,

She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that the damsel abode in the bush harrowed at heart and a-sorrowed; but she suckled her babe albeit she was full of grief and fear for her loneliness.  Now behold, one day, there came horsemen and footmen into the forest with hawks and hounds and horses laden with partridges and cranes and wild geese and divers and other waterfowl; and young ostriches and hares and gazelles and wild oxen and lynxes and wolves and lions.[FN#316] Presently, these Arabs entered the thicket and came upon the damsel, sitting with her child on her breast a-suckling him:  so they drew near and asked her, “Say art thou a mortal or a Jinniyah?” Answered she, “I am a mortal, O Chiefs of the Arabs.”  Thereupon they told their Emir, whose name was Mardas, Prince of the Banu Kahtan,[FN#317] and who had come forth that day to hunt with five hundred of his cousins and the nobles of his tribe, and who in the course of the chase had happened upon her.  He bade them bring her before him, which they did and she related to him her past from first to last, whereat he marvelled.  Then he cried to his kinsmen and escort to continue the chase, after which they took her and returned to their encampment, where the Emir appointed her a separate dwelling-place and five damsels to serve her; and he loved her with exceeding love and went in to her and lay with her.  She conceived by him straightway, and, when her months were accomplished, she bare a man child and named him Sahim al-Layl.[FN#318] He grew up with his brother Gharib among the nurses and throve and waxed upon the lap of the Emir Mardas who, in due time committed the two boys to a Fakih for instruction in the things of their faith; after which he gave them in charge to valiant knights of the Arabs, for training them to smite with sword and lunge with lance and shoot with shaft; so by the time they reached the age of fifteen, they knew all they needed and surpassed each and every brave of their tribe; for Gharib would undertake a thousand horse and Sahim al-Layl no fewer.  Now