nto another hall, spacious, and clouded
with heavy scents and perfumes burning in censers and urns, musk, myrrh,
ambergris, and livelier odours, gladdening the nostril like wine, making
the soul reel as with a draught of the forbidden drink. Here, before a
feast that would prick the dead with appetite, were shapes of beasts with
heads of men, asses, elephants, bulls, horses, swine, foxes,
river-horses, dromedaries; and they ate and drank as do the famished with
munch and gurgle, clacking their lips joyfully. Shibli Bagarag remembered
the condition of his frame when first he looked upon the City of Shagpat,
and was incited to eat and accede to the invitation of the cock with the
man's head, and sit among these merry feeders and pickers of
mouth-watering morsels, when, with the City of Shagpat, lo! he had a
vision of Shagpat, hairier than at their interview, arrogant in
hairiness; his head remote in contemptuous waves and curls and frizzes,
and bushy protuberances of hair, lost in it, like an idolatrous temple in
impenetrable thickets. Then the yearning of the Barber seized Shibli
Bagarag, and desire to shear Shagpat was as a mighty overwhelming wave in
his bosom, and he shouted, 'The Sword of Aklis! nought save the Sword!'

Now, at these words the beasts with men's heads wagged their tails, all
of them, from right to left, and kept their jaws from motion, staring
stupidly at the dishes; but the dishes began to send forth stealthy
steams, insidious whispers to the nose, silver intimations of
savouriness, so that they on a sudden set up a howl, and Shibli Bagarag
puckered his garments from them as from devouring dogs, and hastened from
that hall to a third, where at the entrance a damsel stood that smiled to
him, and led him into a vast marbled chamber, forty cubits high, hung
with draperies, and in it a hundred doors; and he was in the midst of a
very rose-garden of young beauties, such as the Blest behold in Paradise,
robed in the colours of the rising and setting sun; plump, with long,
black, languishing, almond-shaped eyes, and undulating figures. So they
cried to him, 'What greeting, O our King?'

Now, he counted twenty and seven of them, and, fitting his gallantry to
verse, answered:

Poor are the heavens that have not ye
To swell their glowing plenty;
Up there but one bright moon I see,
Here mark I seven-and-twenty.

The damsels laughed and flung back their locks at his flattery, sporting