can twist and roll
out, flexible as a bamboo switch, resilient as a fine steel rapier.
But once Shakib, after reading one of Khalid's first attempts, gets up in
the night when his friend is asleep, takes from the bottom drawer of the
peddling-box the evil-working dictionary, and places therein a grammar.
This touch of delicacy, this fine piece of criticism, brief and neat,
without words withal, Khalid this time is not slow to grasp and
appreciate. He plunges, therefore, headlong into the grammar, turns a
few somersaults in the mazes of Sibawai and Naftawai, and coming out
with a broken noddle, writes on the door the following: "What do I care
about your theories of nouns and verbs? Whether the one be derived from
the other, concerns not me. But this I know, after stumbling once or
twice in your labyrinths, one comes out parsing the verb, to run.
Indeed, verbs are more essential than nouns and adjectives. A noun can
be represented pictorially; but how, pictorially, can you represent a noun
in motion,--Khalid, for instance, running out of your labyrinths? Even
an abstract state can be represented in a picture, but a transitive state
never. The richest language, therefore, is not the one which can boast of
a thousand names for the lion or two thousand for the camel, but the
one whose verbs have a complete and perfect gamut of moods and tenses."

That is why, although writing in Arabic, Khalid prefers English. For
the Arabic verb is confined to three tenses, the primary ones only;
and to break through any of these in any degree, requires such
crowbars as only auxiliaries and other verbs can furnish. For this and
many other reasons Khalid stops short in the mazes of Sibawai, runs
out of them exasperated, depressed, and never for a long time after
looks in that direction. He is now curious to know if the English
language have its Sibawais and Naftawais. And so, he buys him a
grammar, and there finds the way somewhat devious, too, but not enough
to constitute a maze. The men who wrote these grammars must have had
plenty of time to do a little useful work. They do not seem to have
walked leisurely in flowing robes disserting a life-long dissertation
on the origin and descent of a preposition. One day Shakib is amazed
by finding the grammars page by page tacked on the walls of the cellar
and Khalid pacing around leisurely lingering a moment before each
page, as if he were in an art gallery. That is how he tackled his
subject. A