The Shaving of Shagpat by George Meredith

Author:George Meredith
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fantasy fiction, English, Arab countries -- Fiction
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2017-03-16T20:02:57+00:00

And This Is the Story of Noorna Bin Noforka, the Genie Karaz, and the Princess of Oolb

Know, that when I was a babe, I lay on my mother’s bosom in the wilderness, and it was the bosom of death. Surely, I slept and smiled, and dreamed the infant’s dream, and knew not the coldness of the thing I touched. So were we even as two dead creatures lying there; but life was in me, and I awoke with hunger at the time of feeding, and turned to my mother, and put up my little mouth to her for nourishment, and sucked her, but nothing came. I cried, and commenced chiding her, and after a while it was as decreed, that certain horsemen of a troop passing through the wilderness beheld me, and seeing my distress and the helpless being I was, their hearts were stirred, and they were mindful of what the poet says concerning succour given to the poor, helpless, and innocent of this world, and took me up, and mixed for me camel’s milk and water from the bags, and comforted me, and bore me with them, after they had paid funeral rites to the body of my mother.

Now, the rosebud showeth if the rose-tree be of the wilds or of the garden, and the chief of that troop seeing me born to the uses of gentleness, carried me in his arms with him to his wife, and persuaded her that was childless to make me the child of their adoption. So I abode with them during the period of infancy and childhood, caressed and cared for, as is said:

“The flower a stranger’s hand may gather,

Strikes root into the stranger’s breast;

Affection is our mother, father,

Friend, and of cherishers the best.”

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