"'Washish squashish squeak, Sinbad, hey-diddle diddle, grunt unt
grumble, hiss, fiss, whiss,' said he to me, one day after dinner-
but I beg a thousand pardons, I had forgotten that your majesty is not
conversant with the dialect of the Cock-neighs (so the man-animals
were called; I presume because their language formed the connecting
link between that of the horse and that of the rooster). With your
permission, I will translate. 'Washish squashish,' and so forth:- that
is to say, 'I am happy to find, my dear Sinbad, that you are really
a very excellent fellow; we are now about doing a thing which is
called circumnavigating the globe; and since you are so desirous of
seeing the world, I will strain a point and give you a free passage
upon back of the beast.'"
When the Lady Scheherazade had proceeded thus far, relates the
"Isitsoornot," the king turned over from his left side to his right,
and said:
"It is, in fact, very surprising, my dear queen, that you omitted,
hitherto, these latter adventures of Sinbad. Do you know I think
them exceedingly entertaining and strange?"
The king having thus expressed himself, we are told, the fair
Scheherazade resumed her history in the following words:
"Sinbad went on in this manner with his narrative to the caliph-
'I thanked the man-animal for its kindness, and soon found myself very
much at home on the beast, which swam at a prodigious rate through the
ocean; although the surface of the latter is, in that part of the
world, by no means flat, but round like a pomegranate, so that we
went- so to say- either up hill or down hill all the time.
Pages:
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26