of the
mystery of apparent identity between the Divinity and his adorers.

"Then a voice was heard saying, 'The Majesty of the Simurgh is a
sun-resembling mirror; whosoever contemplates Him beholds his own
reflection; body and soul see in Him body and soul. As you are thirty
birds, you appear in this mirror as thirty birds; if forty or fifty
birds came here they would see forty or fifty. Although you have passed
through many changes, it is yourselves only whom you have seen
throughout. Can the eye of an ant reach the Pleiades? Then how can your
inch of inkling attain to Us?

"In all the valleys which you have traversed, in all the acts of
kindness which you have done to others, it was by Our impulse alone that
you were acting. All this while you have been asleep in the Valley of
the Essence and the Attributes. You thirty birds have been unconscious
hitherto. The name "thirty birds" belongs rather to Us, who are the
veritable Simurgh. Find then in Us a glorious self-effacement, in order
to find yourselves again in us.'

"So they vanished in Him for ever, as the shadow disappears in the sun.
While on pilgrimage they conversed; when they had arrived, all converse
ceased. There was no longer a guide; there were no longer pilgrims; the
road itself had ceased to be."

Such is this allegory, or Sufi's "Pilgrim's Progress," which contains
nearly five thousand couplets. Attar varies the monotony of the long
speeches of the Hoopoe and the other birds by inserting anecdotes, of
which the following is one of the most striking:--

STORY OF THE SHEIKH SANAAN.

The Sheikh Sanaan was one of the saints of his age; four or five times
he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca; his prayers and fasts were
countless; no practice enjoined by the religious law was omitted by him;
he had passed through all the degrees of the spiritual life; his very
breath had a healing influence upon the sick. In joy and in grief, he
was an example for men, and, as it were, a standard lifted up.

One night, to his distress, he dreamt that he was fated to leave Mecca
(where he was then residing) for Roum (Asia Minor), and there become an
idolator. When he awoke, he said to his disciples, of whom he had four
hundred, "My decision is taken; I must go to Roum in order to have this
dream explained." His four hundred disciples accompanied him on the
journey. They went from Mecca to Roum, and traversed the country from
one end to another. One day, by chance they