Flexibility of the joints was considered essential to womanly perfection; and Nabiga describes a 'delicate hand, whose fingers are like the stalks of the _anam_ that may be tied into a knot, so flexible they are.' A perfectly straight nose was not thought especially beautiful; the Arabs believed aquiline features to indicate a finer human thoroughbredness and force of character. Often the curve of a woman's nose is compared to 'the curve of a fine sabre well-furbished.' Rounded cheeks were held in abhorrence; the nomad considered fleshiness a sign of inferior blood; and 'smooth flat cheeks, like polished silver,' are highly praised. 'She hath no stoutness; sleek she is, and full-hipped' is said of a fine woman by an Arab admirer, who expressed the view of his people that solid flesh, not adipose tissue, should give the line of beauty. 'Flesh firm as the fruit of a ripening pomegranate.' The hair of a woman was indeed one of her chief glories; but a certain thickness, heaviness, and glossiness was demanded, and a poet did not think it ungallant to compare such tresses to the black splendor of his stallion's mane or sweeping tail. Operating upon a race thus imbued with æsthetic ideas and learned in the minutest details of physical completeness, the law of natural selection could not fail to produce remarkable results. Tribes were proud of special characteristics of beauty, transmitted from generation to generation. Thus the Kodaides were famed for the beauty of foot and leg; the Kindides, for the slender elegance of their flexible waists; the Khozaides, for the graceful delicacy of both upper and lower limbs; the Ozrides, or Beni-Azra, for the eyes of their women not less than their famed liability to die of love. When the poet El-Asmai was asked by Haroun El Rashid to describe in verse the beauty of a slave, he was obliged to cite from the desert Arabs:-- She hath the members of a Kinanide, The rounded loveliness of a Saidide, The beautiful eyes of a Hilalide, The graceful mouth of a Tayide.