When
Verbs And Nouns Have, Each One, Many Different Significations, Only The
Radical Or General Idea Suggests Itself.[FN#37]
Rich and varied
synonyms, illustrating the finest shades of meaning, are artfully used;
now scattered to startle us by distinctness,
Now to form as it were a
star about which dimly seen satellites revolve. And, to cut short a
disquisition
[p.101] which might be prolonged indefinitely, there is in the Semitic
dialect a copiousness of rhyme which leaves the poet almost unfettered
to choose the desired expression.[FN#38] Hence it is that a stranger
speaking Arabic becomes poetical as naturally as he would be witty in
French and philosophic in German. Truly spake Mohammed al-Damiri, “Wisdom
hath alighted upon three things—the brain of the Franks, the hands of the
Chinese, and the tongues of the Arabs.”
The name of Harami—brigand—is still honourable among the Hijazi Badawin.
Slain in raid or foray, a man is said to die Ghandur, or a brave. He,
on the other hand, who is lucky enough, as we should express it, to die
in his bed, is called Fatis (carrion, the corps creve of the Klephts);
his weeping mother will exclaim, “O that my son had perished of a cut
throat!” and her attendant crones will suggest, with deference, that such
evil came of the will of Allah. It is told of the Lahabah, a sept of
the Auf near Rabigh, that a girl will refuse even her cousin unless, in
the absence of other opportunities, he plunder some article from the
Hajj Caravan in front of the Pasha’s links. Detected twenty years ago,
the delinquent would have been impaled; now he escapes with a
rib-roasting. Fear of the blood-feud, and the certainty of a shut road
to future travellers, prevent the Turks proceeding to extremes. They
conceal their weakness by pretending that
[p.102] the Sultan hesitates to wage a war of extermination with the
thieves of the Holy Land.
It is easy to understand this respect for brigands. Whoso revolts
against society requires an iron mind in an iron body, and these
mankind instinctively admires, however misdirected be their energies.
Thus, in all imaginative countries, the brigand is a hero; even the
assassin who shoots his victim from behind a hedge appeals to the fancy
in Tipperary or on the Abruzzian hills. Romance invests his loneliness
with grandeur; if he have a wife or a friend’s wife, romance becomes
doubly romantic, and a tithe of the superfluity robbed from the rich
and bestowed upon the poor will win to Gasparoni the hearts of a
people. The true Badawi style of plundering, with its numerous niceties
of honour and gentlemanly manners, gives the robber a consciousness of
moral rectitude. “Strip off that coat, O certain person! and that turband,”
exclaims the highwayman, “they are wanted by the daughter of my paternal
uncle (wife).” You will (of course, if necessary) lend ready ear to an
order thus politely attributed to the wants of the fair sex.
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