donna," and "The Negro Al Dhurgham" [586]--all furiously Fescinnine.
The story of Moseilema, Lord of Yamama, is familiar in one form or
another to most students of Arab History. Washington Irving epitomises
it in his inexpressibly beautiful "Successors" of Mahomet [587] and
Gibbon [588] tells it more fully, partly in his text and partly in
his Latin footnotes. Moseilema was, no doubt, for some years quite as
influential a prophet as his rival Mohammed. He may even have been as
good a man, [589] but Nafzawi--staunch Mohammedan--will not let "the
Whig dogs have the best of the argument." He charges Moseilema
with having perverted sundry chapters in the Koran by his lies and
impostures, and declares that he did worse than fail when he attempted
to imitate Mohammed's miracles. "Now Moseilema (whom may Allah curse!),
when he put his luckless hand on the head of some one who had not much
hair, the man was at once quite bald... and when he laid his hand upon
the head of an infant, saying, 'Live a hundred years,' the infant died
within an hour." As a matter of fact, however, Moseilema was one of
the most romantic figures in Arabic history. [590] Sedja, Queen and
Prophetess, went to see him in much the same spirit that the Queen of
Sheba visited Solomon. Moseilema, who outlived Mohammed about a year,
was defeated and slain near his capital Yamama, by the Mohammedan hero
Khalid, and Sedjah subsequently embraced Islamism.

In the tale entitled "Djoaidi and Fadehat el Djemal" [591] appears that
hoary poet, philosopher and reprobate, Abu Nowas [592] of The Arabian
Nights. Like the Nights, The Scented Garden has a cycle of tales
illustrative of the cunning and malice of women. But all the women
in those days and countries were not bad, just as all were not plain.
Plumpness seems to have been the principal attraction of sex, and the
Kama Shastra version goes so far as to assure us that a woman who had a
double chin, [593] was irresistible. If so, there were probably no
words in the language good enough to describe a woman with three chins.
According, however, to the author of the recent Paris translation [594]
this particular rendering is a mistake. He considers that the idea
Nafzawi wished to convey was the tower-like form of the neck, [595] but
in any circumstances the denizens of The Scented Garden placed plumpness
in the forefront of the virtues; which proves, of course, the negroid
origin of at any rate some of the stories, [596]