Ode XCVII: Ah, gone on her way is

Ah, gone on her way is Idam ; and every tie to a fair one must one day wear out and snap !

Thou hast been her lover in earnest and in jest, until now that thou hast grown old, and men say — ' Verily thou art distraught ! '

Once was she well content with us for a space, and we with her : but time has no abiding !

The nights when she took thee captive with her rows of pearly teeth, whose moisture, when a third of the night had sped, was potent as heady wine,

And a bright face with shining cheeks, sleek, and a nose on and about which beauty had been showered.

[She turns her head aside] as turns an antelope with hard smooth horn, that has been left behind by the herd, in Sahah, where the acacia-trees line its moist ravines,

Her companion a fawn, brownish in colour, with languishing eyes — its bleating disquiets her motherly heart.

Yea, many the wide desert where the drumming of the Jinn resounds, and in its waterless spaces the hot wind whistles shrilly,

Where I have startled its gazelles as they took their mid-day rest, what time the hills pierced through the glistening stretches of the mirage,

Mounted on a fleet she-camel whose frame has been worn down by constant journeyings until I have reached to her ultimate nature, and her hump has vanished away.

She is like a flat-nosed wild bull that roams from one region to another, over whom has passed, in Harbah, a night set thick with rainclouds :

He stood night-long, crying ' Turn to morning, O Night ' ! till the dark-ness cleared away from his strip of sand,

And he emerged therefrom in the early dawn, as a pearl shows forth when let fall from the string.

Ho ! carry a message to the Sons of Sa'd and to their cousin — the last drops in the udder have been drawn !

' We offer you the way of uprightness : and we are a people whose affection if one quits, he will have no praise in war.

' Then, since your vessels of love are empty, and there is not in them any tie between us of mutual affection and aid,

' Therefore the valley-sides of 'Uraitinat and the gravelly plain of 'Aiham are forbidden to you.

' We will close them against you, though they be lands wherein the flanks and humps of the camels grow fat and swell :

' There the eyes of men's milch-camels are well content, and the clouds untie thereon the spouts of their water-bags.'

Yea, many the rich pasture from which the seekers for grazing refrain in fear, wherein grow luxuriantly the nafal and the JiaudMn, —

Its greenery rises high and is tangled together, and the places where the 'alajan grows stand out in it like moles—

Have we made free with for the use of a tribe great in multitude : when their herds are beset with an alarm, they [flee not, but] stand and defend them.

The meeting-place of council cannot hold them all : they must part into companies wheresoever they make a halt ;

Their men have no need to run afoot : they have spare horses in plenty standing ready bridled —

Steeds that stood the whole night and the first part of the day at al-Mimha, where thagham was cut for their fodder.

Then, when they came down into the plain from Dhu Sabah, and the torrent-beds and the hills streamed with them,

They stirred up a cloud of dust and emerged therefrom, as the arrows pierce through and come forth from the target.

In every place of soft soil where they wheeled about is a well-like foot-print of the hoof, with the sides crumbling in.

When the foremost of them emerge, dishevelled, rushing headlong with their forelocks standing out,

With bundles of mail-coats bound to their cruppers, with their colts in the evening looking [, with their long thin legs,] like pairs of shears,

Then do they race with the spear-heads, bending downwards their heads, as doves race with one another as they fly towards the scanty pools left by the rain.

Seest thou not that length of time brings forgetfulness and oblivion, even as Judham is forgotten ?

They were of our tribe, but wrought wrong against us : and we led them forth to the country of the Syrians.

We had been in defence of them a strong fortress : ours was the supreme headship and the foremost place.

And they said to us — ' Ye cannot abide where ye are if we go forth from you ' : yet we abode in our place though they had gone —

Stone blocks of Khuzaimah, firmly fixed in the soil : to us belong the ways through the mountains, whether free or forbidden.

And sooth, the day when we stood up to curse you in the valley of Dhu-l-Majaz shall bring its fruit in your punishment !