“What I left, I left it not for nobility of soul, * But through sentence and decree that to every man are dight. What while I lived happy, with a temper haught and high, * My hoarding-place defending like a lion in the fight, I took no rest, and greed of gain forbad me give a grain * Of mustard seed to save from the fires of Hell my sprite, Until stricken on a day, as with arrow, by decree * Of the Maker, the Fashioner, the Lord of Might and Right. When my death was appointed, my life I could not keep * By the many of my stratagems, my cunning and my sleight: My troops I had collected availed me not, and none * Of my friends and of my neighbours had power to mend my plight: Through my life I was weaned in journeying to death * In stress or in solace, in joyance or despight: So when money-bags are bloated, and dinar unto dinar * Thou addest, all may leave thee with fleeting of the night: And the driver of a camel and the digger of a grave[FN#115] * Are what thine heirs shall bring ere the morning dawneth bright: And on Judgment Day alone shalt thou stand before thy Lord, * Overladen with thy sins and thy crimes and thine affright: Let the world not seduce thee with lurings, but behold * What measure to thy family and neighbours it hath doled.” When Musa heard these verses, he wept with such weeping that he swooned away; then, coming to himself, he entered the pavilion and saw therein a long tomb, awesome to look upon, whereon was a tablet of China steel and Shaykh Abd al-Samad drew near it and read this inscription: “In the name of Ever-lasting Allah, the Never-beginning, the Never-ending; in the name of Allah who begetteth not nor is He begot and unto whom the like is not; in the name of Allah the Lord of Majesty and Might; in the name of the Living One who to death is never dight!”—And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say. When it was the Five Hundred and Sixty-ninth Night,