marry each of the sages to one of his daughters. Now it fortuned
that the Princesses were behind a curtain, looking on; and when
they heard this, the youngest considered her husband to be and
behold, he was an old man,[FN#7] an hundred years of age, with
hair frosted, forehead drooping, eyebrows mangy, ears slitten,
beard and mustachios stained and dyed; eyes red and goggle;
cheeks bleached and hollow; flabby nose like a brinjall, or egg-
plant[FN#8]; face like a cobbler's apron, teeth overlapping and
lips like camel's kidneys, loose and pendulous; in brief a
terror, a horror, a monster, for he was of the folk of his time
the unsightliest and of his age the frightfullest; sundry of his
grinders had been knocked out and his eye-teeth were like the
tusks of the Jinni who frighteneth poultry in hen-houses. Now the
girl was the fairest and most graceful of her time, more elegant
than the gazelle however tender, than the gentlest zephyr blander
and brighter than the moon at her full; for amorous fray right
suitable; confounding in graceful sway the waving bough and
outdoing in swimming gait the pacing roe; in fine she was fairer
and sweeter by far than all her sisters. So, when she saw her
suitor, she went to her chamber and strewed dust on her head and
tore her clothes and fell to buffeting her face and weeping and
wailing. Now the Prince, her brother, Kamar al-Akmar, or the Moon
of Moons hight, was then newly returned from a journey and,
hearing her weeping and crying came in to her (for he loved her
with fond affection, more than his other sisters) and asked her,
"What aileth thee? What hath befallen thee? Tell me and conceal
naught from me." So she smote her breast and answered, "O my
brother and my dear one, I have nothing to hide. If the palace be
straitened upon thy father, I will go out; and if he be resolved
upon a foul thing, I will separate myself from him, though he