Ode LXXVI: O Fatimah, before thou goest grant

O Fatimah, before thou goest grant me some delight ! and thy withholding of what I ask is as though thou wert already gone ;

And cheat me not with lying promises, which the winds of the summer shall sweep from me far away.

In sooth, if my left hand were to oppose me as thou opposest, I would no longer let it pair my right :

Instantly would I cut it off, and say to it ' Begone ! thus do I requite with dislike one that likes not me'.

Whose are the women's litters that mount upwards from Dubaib, as soon as they issue slowly from the Valley ?

They passed along over Sharafi and then Dhat-Rijl, and left adh-Dharanih aside to the right ;

And thus did they show when they cut through Falj, as though their burdens were laden upon ships :

Yea, most like to ships are they — Bactrian camels, broad in the back and the sutures of the skull.

And there sit the ladies, nestling in the litters — murderous to the most valiant, though he humble himself before them,

Like gazelles that have lingered behind the herd in a place of wild lote-trees, that draw clown to themselves the nearest of the branches.

Above them they have spread a thin curtain, and let fall over it a broidered covering ; and they have pierced in them peep-holes for their eyes ;

[Some of their charms they display, others they hide away — the white-ness of their necks and their daintily-tended skins.]

Gold glitters upon their bosoms the colour of ivory, with no wrinkles to mar their surface.

In spite of their tyranny, they are the objects of men's ceaseless quest : long are their ringlets and their side-locks ;

When on a day they leave [their slave] behind, carrying off as a pledge all that he values most, never will that pledge return to him again.

With a jest I feather my arrows for them : they excel all the long-necked [gazelles] of the herd that stand at gaze.

They mounted a ridge, and descended into a hollow that hid them, and they hardly took any mid-day rest.

And I said to one of them — and my saddle was bound on my beast to face a noon-tide to which I had steadfastly set my brow—

' It may be, if thou cuttest thy bond and leavest me, that even so I shall endure, with my soul in my own power.'

So then bring forgetfulness of care to thee with a strong she-camel, mighty, hard like a smithying hammer,

One to be trusted in her steady swift pace, as though a cat were vying with her and aiming [with its claws] at her girth ;

She has been clothed with a towering hump, with matted wool thereon, by a diet of bruised date-stones of the Sawdd, together with ample fodder.

When her gear becomes loose, I bind upon her the breast-strap in front of the breast-bone, on account of the slackness of the fore-girth.

The hollows in the ground where [, on couching,] she sets her [five] callosities are [in smallness] like the settling-places of the black-backed sand-grouse that come in the early dawn to drink.

When she takes a deep breath and so fills her chest, it almost cuts through the plaited strands of unsoftened leather with ridges on them [, forming the girth].

She strikes, as she hurries along, the two great veins in her inner thighs with pebbles cast up by her feet, that resound with a dull thud as they fall again to ground ;

The stones which her forelegs throw up as she gallops along are like those which the hired herdsman pelts at a strange camel [trespassing on his cistern].

She blocks with a bushy tail in constant motion the aperture of a womb that has borne no offspring, [with dugs] that yield not a drop of milk ;

And thou hearest the buzzing of the flies thereabout, when they hum, as it were the moaning of doves over their nests.

I cast the reins to her [and dismounted], and she composed herself to sleep, as her custom was, on the first appearance of dawn.

The place where she couched, upon a piece of stony ground, rough and rugged, was like the place where one throws down a bridle.

It seems as though the saddle and the plaited thongs of her girth were upon a long-keeled ship, well smeared with oil and grease, that sails the seas ;

The prow of it cleaves the water, and mounts high on the topmost crests of all the swelling far-extending billows.

She has grown up long-necked, [fat] so that the sciatic vein is apparent between the lumps of flesh on her thighs, and is stout and fleshy in the parts about the back-vein and the aorta.

When I approach her to saddle her at night, she moans like the moaning of a melancholy man :

She says, when I spread out the fore-girth to fasten it upon her — ' Is this to be for ever his way and mine ?

' Is the whole of time to be unloosing and binding-on of gear? Will he never spare me, or save me [from being utterly worn out] ? '

Yea, my frivolity and her earnestness have left of her a frame like a door-keeper's hut plastered with clay.

I gathered in my hand her rein, and set-to my saddle, and under my right hand I placed a cushion to support it ;

Then I started at nightfall with her, she keeping the side of a long-extended track, over its level plain and its saddle-backs [as they met us],

To seek 'Amr — and from 'Amr she came to me — the man of valiant deeds and steadfast deliberateness.

Be thou to me either a brother in truth, so that I may know, in respect of thee, my lean and my fat :

Or, if not, then cast me off and hold me for an enemy, so that I may beware of thee and thou of me.

Yea, I know not, when I make a matter the end of my action, desiring good therefrom, which of the two will draw near to me —

Whether the Good for which I myself am seeking, or the Evil which is looking out for me.