The Scented Garden

4 Introduction Illahi ’and will not jest if I myself bring to him the treasure of Iran. What, I exclaimed, you mean to bring me a boy without asking ? and dissolved in laughter. He stammered, with the shamed smile of the Oriental, that he had a sacred and secret book treating of the ‘ hikmat ’ but that it was never shown to anyone but a Sufi of great and exception- al sanctity — such as “ the Protector of the Poor, my father and mother, who glances at the earth in the hot season, and the fields are immediately tall and green.” Me. The MS., produced, bore on its front the legend Bagh-i-muattar, in all the glory of the finest Talik calligraphy. Why ! I exclaimed, this is the Scented Gar- den ! the famous Arab treatise of the Sheik al Nef- zawi, which Burton rendered into English and his silly wife destroyed1. This is the Ars Amoris of the Bedawin ! Mahbub (who had never heard of all this) observed that Allah knew everything, and the Sahib nearly everything. The upshot of it all was that I started to read the work as part of my daily task. But it was not until a second perusal that I grasped what had happened. Some pedantic idiot had arranged the Ghazals in alphabetical order, according to the rhymes ! A common practice in the diwan of the common poet ! here a lamentable and fatal error. For there is a psychological order in the Odes : arrange them properly, and a com- plete story — nay ! a complete system of philoso- phy issued therefrom, as the living water from the rock at the touch of Moses’ wand. When, after long labour, I had made a provisional arrangement, and shewed my great discovery to Mahbub with open triumph, he calmly observed that oh yes ! the Ru- ler of the World was wiser than Solomon, and the proper order could be checked by noticing that