Эдгар Аллан По

EDGAR ALLAN POE Ultimate Collection: 160+ Short Stories, Novels & Poems (Including Essays, Letters & Biography)


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rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_6e0985ae-55cc-5a59-bd9b-9ac3268c1284">19 which, no doubt, served to stimulate them by their painful writhings and wrigglings to the most miraculous efforts of imagination!’”

      “Nonsense!” said the king.

      “Twattle!” said the king.

      “Fa! lal!” said the king.

      “Ridiculous!” said the king.

      “Absurd!” said the king.

      Analogous experiments in respect to sound produce analogous results.

      “Preposterous!” said the king.

      “‘The wives and daughters of these incomparably great and wise magi,’” continued Scheherazade, without being in any manner disturbed by these frequent and most ungentlemanly interruptions on the part of her husband —"‘the wives and daughters of these eminent conjurers are every thing that is accomplished and refined; and would be every thing that is interesting and beautiful, but for an unhappy fatality that besets them, and from which not even the miraculous powers of their husbands and fathers has, hitherto, been adequate to save. Some fatalities come in certain shapes, and some in others — but this of which I speak has come in the shape of a crotchet.’”

      “A what?” said the king.

      “‘A crotchet’” said Scheherazade. “‘One of the evil genii, who are perpetually upon the watch to inflict ill, has put it into the heads of these accomplished ladies that the thing which we describe as personal beauty consists altogether in the protuberance of the region which lies not very far below the small of the back. Perfection of loveliness, they say, is in the direct ratio of the extent of this lump. Having been long possessed of this idea, and bolsters being cheap in that country, the days have long gone by since it was possible to distinguish a woman from a dromedary-’”

      “Stop!” said the king —“I can’t stand that, and I won’t. You have already given me a dreadful headache with your lies. The day, too, I perceive, is beginning to break. How long have we been married? — my conscience is getting to be troublesome again. And then that dromedary touch — do you take me for a fool? Upon the whole, you might as well get up and be throttled.”

      These words, as I learn from the “Isitsoornot,” both grieved and astonished Scheherazade; but, as she knew the king to be a man of scrupulous integrity, and quite unlikely to forfeit his word, she submitted to her fate with a good grace. She derived, however, great consolation, (during the tightening of the bowstring,) from the reflection that much of the history remained still untold, and that the petulance of her brute of a husband had reaped for him a most righteous reward, in depriving him of many inconceivable adventures.