Thousand & One Nights: Twenty Third Night: Moonstone Man & His Wife.

The MoonStone man continued his story of previous night to the king who came in search of the mystery behind coloured fish and the lake.

"Then I followed her. She traversed the palace, and then the city, and now stood at the city gate. There she uttered words I could not follow. The locks fell off and the gate opened by itself. She went out. She slipped through the mounds of waste and came to a hut thatched with palm leaves, leading to a domed structure built with sun-dried bricks. After she entered the structure, I climbed to the top of the dome, from where I looked inside. 

My wife was standing before a decrepit black man sitting on reed shavings, and dressed in tatters. She kissed the ground before him, and he raised his head and said, "Damn you, why are you late? My black cousins were here. They played with bat and ball, sang, and drank brewed liquor. They had a good time each with his own girl friend, except for myself, because I refused even to drink with them because you were absent." 

My wife replied, "O my lord and lover, don't you know that I am married to my cousin, who finds me most loathsome and detest me more than anyone else? Were it not for your sake, I would not have let the sun rise before reducing his city to rubble, a dwelling place for bears and the foxes where the owl hoots and the crow crows, and we would have hurld its stones beyond Mount Qaf?"

He replied, "Damn you, you are lying. I swear in the name of black chivalry that as of tonight, if my cousins visit me and you fail to be present, I will never befriend you, lie down with you or let my body touch yours. You cursed woman, you have been playing with me like a piece of marble, and I am subject to your whims, you cursed woman."

When I heard their conversation, the world started to turn black before my eyes, and I lost my senses. Then I heard my wife crying and imploring, 

"O my lover and my heart's desire, if you remain angry at me, whom else have I got, and if you turn me out, who will take me in, O my lord, my  lover, and the light of my eyes?" She kept crying and begging until he was appeared. Then, feeling happy, she took off her outer garments, and asked, "My lord, have you anything for your little girl to eat?"

The black man replied, "Open the copper basin." She opened the copper basin. There were some fried rat bones in it. As she began to eat them he said, "there is some brewed liquor left in that jug." She drank the liquid and washed her hands, lay beside the black man on the reed shavings. Then she undressed and slipped under his tatters. I climbed down from the top of the dome, and entering through the door grabbed the sword that my wife had brought with her, drew it, to kill both of them. I first struck the black man on the neck and thought that I had killed him. 
The Night Ended 

Notes:-
1. Mount Qaf: A legendary place in various Middle Eastern mythologies in Arabic and Persian traditions.

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