for a true Arab values
slenderness. Over and over again in the Nights we are told of some
seductive lady that she was straight and tall with a shape like the
letter Alif or a willow wand. The perfect woman, according to Mafzawi,
perfumes herself with scents, uses ithmid [597] (antimony) for her
toilet, and cleans her teeth with bark of the walnut tree. There are
chapters on sterility, long lists of the kind to be found in Rabelais,
and solemn warnings against excess, chiefly on account of its resulting
in weakness of sight, with other "observations useful for men and
women."

While chapters i. to xx. concern almost entirely the relations between
the opposite sexes, Chapter xxi. [598] which constitutes more than
one-half of the book, treats largely of those unspeakable vices which as
St. Paul and St. Jude show, and the pages of Petronius and other ancient
authors prove, were so common in the pagan world, and which, as Burton
and other travellers inform us, are still practised in the East.

"The style and language in which the Perfumed Garden is written are,"
says the writer of the Foreword to the Paris edition of 1904, "of the
simplest and most unpretentious kind, rising occasionally to a very
high degree of eloquence, resembling, to some extent, that of the famous
Thousand Nights and a Night; but, while the latter abounds in Egyptian
colloquialisms, the former frequently causes the translator to pause
owing to the recurrence of North African idioms and the occasional use
of Berber or Kabyle words, not generally known." In short, the literary
merits or the work are trifling.

Although Nafzawi wrote his extended Scented Garden for scholars only, he
seems afterwards to have become alarmed, and to have gone in fear lest
it might get into the hands of the ignorant and do harm. So he ended it
with:

"O you who read this, and think of the author
And do not exempt him from blame,
If you spare your good opinion of him, do not
At least fail to say 'Lord forgive us and him.'" [599]

161. Sir Richard Burton's Translation.

It was in the autumn of 1888, as we have seen, that Sir Richard Burton,
who considered the book to take, from a linguistic and ethnological
point of view, a very high rank, conceived the idea of making a new
translation, to be furnished with annotations of a most elaborate
nature. He called it at first, with his fondness for rhyming jingle, The
Scented Garden-Site for Heart's Deligh