The passage in question is one of several which show Lebid’s surprisingly close acquaintance with the ways and thoughts of wild animals. It is one of those elaborate similes which were the pride of Arabian poets, who often preferred to take comparisons already in use than to invent new ones. Wherever literature became a living entertainment, something of this kind happened: witness the borrowings from the Classics by the poets of the Renaissance; people liked to recognise familiar ideas in a new dress. Lebid’s similes have been turned and re-turned by other poets, but none approached the art and truth he infused into them. I am indebted to Sir Charles Lyall for the following version, which is not included in his volume of splendid translations of early Arabian poetry. The subject of the passage is the grief of a wild cow that has lost her calf:— “Flat-nosed is she—she has lost her calf and ceases not to roam About the marge of the sand meadows and cry For her youngling, just weaned, white, whose limbs have been torn By the ash-grey hunting wolves who lack not for food. They came upon it while she knew not, and dealt her a deadly woe: —Verily, Death, when it shoots, misses not the mark! The night came upon her, as the dripping rain of the steady shower Poured on and its continuous flow soaked the leafage through and through. She took refuge in the hollow trunk of a tree with lofty branches standing apart On the skirts of the sandhills where the fine sand sloped her way. The steady rain poured down, and the flood reached the ridge of her back, In a night when thick darkness hid away all the stars; And she shone in the face of the mirk with a white, glimmering light Like a pearl born in a sea-shell, that has dropped from its string. Until, when the darkness was folded away and morning dawned, She stood, her legs slipping in the muddy earth. She wandered distracted about all the pools of So’âid For seven nights twinned with seven whole long days, Until she lost all hope, and her udders shrunk— The udders that had not failed in all the days of the suckling and weaning, Then she heard the sound of men and it filled her heart with fear, Of men from a hidden place; and men, she knew, were her bane. She rushed blindly along, now thinking the chase before, And now behind her: each was a place of dread. Until, when the archers lost hope, they let loose on her Trained hounds with hanging ears, each with a stiff leather collar on its neck; They beset her and she turned to meet them with her horns Like to spears of Semhar in their sharpness and their length. To thrust them away: for she knew well, if she drove them not off, That the fated day of her death among the fates of beasts had come; And among them, Kesâb was thrust through and slain and rolled in blood lay there,