She resumed, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that the young man continued to describe before the Prince of True Believers the young lady's characteristics, saying, "She was like the full moon on her fourteenth night, a model of grace and symmetry and loveliness. Her speech shamed the tones of the lute, and it was as it were she whom the poet meant in these verses, 'She cried while played in her side Desire, * And Night o'er hung her with blackest blee:— 'O Night shall thy murk bring me ne'er a chum * To tumble and futter this coynte of me?' And she smote that part with her palm and sighed * Sore sighs and a-weeping continued she, 'As the toothstick beautifies teeth e'en so * Must prickle to coynte as a toothstick be. O Moslems, is never a stand to your tools, * To assist a woman's necessity?' Thereat rose upstanding beneath its clothes * My yard, as crying, 'At thee! at thee!' And I loosed her trouser-string, startling her: * 'Who art thou?' and I said, 'A reply to thy plea!' And began to stroke her with wrist-thick yard, * Hurting hinder cheeks by its potency: And she cried as I rose after courses three * 'Suit thy gree the stroke!' and I—'suit thy gree!' And how excellent is the saying of another![FN#287], 'A fair one, to idolaters if she her face should show, They'd leave their idols and her face for only Lord would know. If in the Eastward she appeared unto a monk, for sure, He'd cease from turning to the West and to the East bend low; And if into the briny sea one day she chanced to spit, Assuredly the salt sea's floods straight fresh and sweet would grow.' And that of another, 'I looked at her one look and that dazed me * Such rarest gifts of mind and form to see, When doubt inspired her that I loved her, and * Upon her cheeks the doubt showed showily.' I saluted her and she said to me, 'Well come and welcome, and fair welcome!'; and taking me by the hand, O Prince of True Believers, made me sit down by her side; whereupon, of the excess of my desire, I fell a-weeping for fear of severance and pouring forth the tears of the eye, recited these two couplets, 'I love the nights of parting though I joy not in the same * Time haply may exchange them for the boons of Union-day: And the days that bring Union I unlove for single thought, * Seeing everything in life lacking steadfastness of stay.' Then she strave to solace me with soft sweet speech, but I was drowned in the deeps of passion, fearing even in union the pangs of disunion, for excess of longing and ecstasy of passion; and I bethought me of the lowe of absence and estrangement and repeated these two couplets, 'I thought of estrangement in her embrace * And my eyes rained tears red as 'Andam-wood. So I wiped the drops on that long white neck; * For camphor[FN#288] is wont to stay flow of blood.'