I looked on her with loving eyne ✿ And grew anew my old repine:
But he knew not what to say next; so he sent for Abu Nowas and said to him, “Make me a piece of verse commencing with this line.” “I hear and obey,” replied the poet and in an eye-twinkling extemporised these couplets:—
I looked on her with longing eyne ✿ And grew anew my old repine For the gazelle, who captured me ✿ Where the two lotus-trees incline: There was the water poured on it ✿ From ewer of the silvern mine; And seen me she had hidden it ✿ But ‘twas too plump for fingers fine. Would Heaven that I were on it, ✿ An hour, or better two hours, li’en.[108]
Thereupon the Commander of the Faithful smiled and made him a handsome present and he went away rejoicing. And I have heard another story of
This leisurely operation of the “deed of kind” was sure to be noticed; but we do not find in The Nights any allusion to that systematic _prolongatio veneris_ which is so much cultivated by Moslems under the name Imsák = retention, withholding _i.e._ the semen. Yet Eastern books on domestic medicine consist mostly of two parts; the first of general prescriptions and the second of aphrodisiacs especially those _qui prolongent le plaisir_ as did the Gaul by thinking of _sa pauvre mère_. The Ananga-Ranga, by the Reverend Koka Pandit before quoted, gives a host of recipes which are used, either externally or internally, to hasten the paroxysm of the woman and delay the orgasm of the man (p. 27). Some of these are curious in the extreme. I heard of a Hindi who made a candle of frogs’ fat and fibre warranted to retain the seed till it burned out: it failed notably because, relying upon it, he worked too vigorously. The essence of the “retaining art” is to avoid over-tension of the muscles and to pre-occupy the brain: hence in coition Hindus will drink sherbet, chew betel-nut and even smoke. Europeans ignoring the science and practice, are contemptuously compared with village-cocks by Hindu women who cannot be satisfied, such is their natural coldness, increased doubtless by vegetable diet and unuse of stimulants, with less than twenty minutes. Hence too while thousands of Europeans have cohabited for years with and have had families by “native women,” they are never loved by them:—at least I never heard of a case.