the greatest liar. But in this case Abu'l-Ala in prose was not so
truthful as in poetry; for if Jabalah's house had vanished, the
Ghassanites were still a power. The poet, for our consolation,
has a simile (_quatrain_ 77) that may be put against a passage of
Homer:

As with autumnal harvests cover'd o'er,
And thick bestrown, lies Ceres' sacred floor,
When round and round, with never-weary'd pain
The trampling steers beat out th' unnumber'd grain:
So the fierce coursers, as the chariot rolls,
Tread down whole ranks, and crush out heroes' souls.[16]

For everything there is decay, and (_quatrain_ 78) for the
striped garment of a long cut which now we are unable to
identify.

We read in the Wisdom of Solomon: "As when an arrow is shot at a
mark, it parteth the air which immediately cometh together again,
so that a man cannot know where it went through." In this place
(_quatrain_ 84), if the weapon's road of air is not in vain it
will discover justice in the sky. How much the Arabs were averse
from frigid justice is to be observed in the matter of recompense
for slaying. There existed a regular tariff--so many camels or
dates--but they looked askance upon the person who was willing to
accept this and forgo his vengeance. If a man was anxious to
accept a gift as satisfaction and at the same time to escape
reproach, he shot an arrow into the air. Should it come down
unspotted, he was able to accept the gift; if it was bloody, then
he was obliged to seek for blood. The Arabs, by the way, had been