Fisse- bolt, Giasser Sehar1981

NOTES TO XIII.- FIRST PART.

Few stories are more familiar and widely spread than thatof the Lost Camel, which occurs in the opening of the romance.It was formerly, and perhaps is still, reproduced in Englishschool reading- books. Voltaire, in chapter iii. of his" Zadig;ou, La Destinée"( the materials of which he is said to havederived from Geuelette's" Soirées Bretonnes,") has a versionin which a lost palfrey and a she dog are described by the" sage" from the traces they had left on the path over whichthey passed. The great Arabian historian and travellerMas'udi, in his" Meadows of Gold, and Mines of Gems,"written A.D. 943, gives the story of the Lost Camel, and fromMas'udi it was probably taken into the MS. text of the" Thousand and One Nights," procured in the East(? Con-stantinople) by Wortley Montague, and now preserved in theBodleian Library, Oxford.* In that MS. it forms an incidentin the story of the Sultan of Yeman and his Three Sons:the princes, after their father's death, quarrel over thesuccession to the throne, and at length agree to lay theirrespective claims before one of the tributary princes. On theroad one of them remarks," A camel has lately passed thisway loaded with grain on one side, and with sweetmeats onon the other." The second observes," and the camel is blindof one eye." The third adds," and it has lost its tail." Theowner comes up, and on hearing their description of his beast,forces them to go before the king of the country, to whomthey explain how they discovered the defects of the cameland its lading. In a Persian work, entitled" Nigaristan,"three brothers rightly conjecture in like manner that a camel

* It is not generally known that the" Birnam Wood" incident in Shakespeare's" Macbeth" occurs in the same Arabian historical work.