[FN#113] The tents of black wool woven by the Badawi women are generally supported by three parallel rows of poles lengthways and crossways (the highest line being the central) and the covering is pegged down.  Thus the outline of the roofs forms two or more hanging curves, and these characterise the architecture of the Tartars and Chinese; they are still preserved in the Turkish (and sometimes in the European) “Kiosque,” and they have extended to the Brazil where the upturned eaves, often painted vermilion below, at once attract the traveller’s notice.

[FN#114] See vol. iv., 159.  The author of “Antar,” known to Englishmen by the old translation of Mr. Terrick Hamilton, secretary of Legation at Constantinople.  There is an abridgement of the forty-five volumes of Al-Asma’i’s “Antar” which mostly supplies or rather supplied the “Antariyyah” or professional tale-tellers; whose theme was the heroic Mulatto lover.

[FN#115] The “Dakkah” or long wooden sofa, as opposed to the “mastabah” or stone bench, is often a tall platform and in mosques is a kind of ambo railed round and supported by columns.  Here readers recite the Koran:  Lane (M.E. chapt. iii.) sketches it in the “Interior of a Mosque.”

[FN#116] Alif, Ha and Waw, the first, twenty-seventh and twenty-sixth letters of the Arabic alphabet:  No. 1 is the most simple and difficult to write caligraphically.

[FN#117] Reeds washed with gold and used for love-letters, &c.

[FN#118] Lane introduced this tale into vol. i., p. 223, notes on chapt. iii., apparently not knowing that it was in The Nights.  He gives a mere abstract, omitting all the verse, and he borrowed it either from the Halbat al-Kumayt (chapt. xiv.) or from Al-Mas’udi (chapt. cxi.).  See the French translation, vol. vi. p. 340.  I am at pains to understand why M. C. Barbier de Maynard writes “Rechid” with an accented vowel; although French delicacy made him render, by “fils de courtisane,” the expression in the text, “O biter of thy mother’s enlarged (or uncircumcised) clitoris” (Bazar).

[FN#119] In Al-Mas’udi the Devil is “a young man fair of favour and formous of figure,” which is more appropriate to a “Tempter.”  He also wears light stuffs of dyed silks.

[FN#120] It would have been more courteous in an utter stranger to say, O my lord.

[FN#121] The Arab Tempe (of fiction, not of grisly fact).

[FN#122] These four lines are in Al-Mas’udi, chapt, cxviii.  Fr. Trans. vii. 313, but that author does not tell us who wrote them.

[FN#123] i.e.  Father of Bitterness=the Devil.  This legend of the Foul Fiend appearing to Ibrahim of Mosul (and also to Isam, N. dcxcv.) seems to have been accepted by contemporaries and reminds us of similar visitations in Europe—­notably to Dr. Faust.  One can only exclaim, “Lor, papa, what nonsense you are talking!” the words of a small girl whose father thought proper to indoctrinate her into certain Biblical stories.  I once began to write a biography of the Devil; but I found that European folk-lore had made such an unmitigated fool of the grand old Typhon-Ahriman as to take away from him all human interest.