And some of the kisses of those days, too, have become historical; we read of a single kiss being paid for with two pearls worth forty thousand drachmas. The giver was no caliph, but a private citizen who sold his property to buy the pearls, and gave them away on the easy condition that the girl should take them from his lips with hers. The tendency of such splendid voluptuousness, extravagance, and luxury has been the same in all civilized countries; the results similarly lamentable: national enervation, indolence, loss of patriotism and warrior-daring, loss of moral principle, death of ethical sentiment. Pleasure ruined the Caliphate as it ruined Rome. Abou Nouwas, Haroun's court poet, wrote two poems, of which two fragments reveal the whole history of the moral decadence of Islam. The first fragment is not without beauty:-- Ruby the wine and pearl the cup in the hands of the beautiful slave with waist so slender and voluptuous. Ravishing the beauty who giveth thee to drink at once of her gaze and of her hand! Thus art thou ever seized with two intoxications. But the second fragment gives us the dismal sequel:-- Multiply thy sins to the utmost; for thou art to meet an indulgent God. When thou comest before Him thou wilt gnaw thy hands with regret for those pleasures thou didst avoid through fear of hell. RABYAH'S LAST RIDE A TRADITION OF PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA This is the relation of the death of Rabyah, son of Mokaddem, of the Beni-Firaz, according to the legend transmitted from generation unto generation by the _rawis_, or reciters of poems and of great deeds. And it is written down in the commentary which Abou Zakariyah Yahyah-al-Tibrizi made upon those mighty poems chanted before Islam which are called _Hamasah_,--a word signifying all that is stalwart and noble in a man,--and in the _Hamasah_ the place of the legend of Rabyah is in the second book, which is the 'Book of Dirges.' But the tale hath also been told by Al-Maidani, and by Abou Riyash; and it is likewise preserved in the great _Kitab-al-Aghanij_ or 'Book of Songs,' collected and written down by Abou I Faraj Al' Ispahani, who devoted fifty years alone to the study of the poems and the legends of the Desert Arabs of old. Rabyah, son of Mokaddem, of the Beni-Firaz, was famed as the bravest and the strongest and the most generous of his tribe what time he lived, and he was celebrated as an escort. For from the day that he had, single-handed, as a very young man, successfully defended his bride, Raytah, against the horsemen of the Beni-Djoucham on a foray, the women deemed it no little honor to have Rabyah as their escort. And no woman ever intrusted herself to the protection of Rabyah for a journey to whom any mishap befell while he remained with her.