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تحفة النظار في غرايب الامصار وعجايب الاسفار 13.33

English (machine translation) 13.33

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English

13.33.1

When my footman whom I had sent with the camel returned to me and told me what had happened concerning it, I made two saddles, with the front and back of each covered with gilded silver plates, and covered them with woollen cloth. I made a bridle plated with silver plates, and made for them two blankets of chain-mail lined with kamkhā, and put silver anklets on the two camels. I made eleven trays and filled them with sweetmeats, and covered each tray with a silk napkin. When the Sultan came back from the hunt and sat, on the second day after his arrival, in his place of public audience, I went to him in the morning with the camels. He ordered them to be put in motion before him, and they trotted; the anklet of one of them flew off, and he said to Bahāʾ al-Dīn ibn al-Falakī: "Pāyil wardārī," meaning "Pick up the anklet," and he picked it up. Then he looked at the trays and said: "Chi dārī dar ān ṭabaqhā? Ḥalwā ast?" meaning: "What have you in those trays? Is it sweetmeats?"

13.33.2

I said to him: "Yes." He said to the jurist Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Tirmidhī the preacher: "I have never eaten nor seen the like of the sweetmeats he sent us while we were in the camp."

13.33.3

Then he ordered those trays to be carried to the place of his private sitting, and they were carried there; he rose and went to his audience room and summoned me, and ordered food, and I ate. Then he asked me about a kind of sweetmeat that I had sent him before, and I said to him, "O Khwand ʿĀlam, there are many kinds of those sweetmeats, and I do not know which kind of them you are asking about." He said, "Bring those aṭbāq" — they call a tray a ṭabaq. So they brought them, set them before him and uncovered them, and he said, "This is what I asked you about," and took the dish that it was in. I said to him, "This is called al-muqarraḍa." Then he took another kind and said, "And what is the name of this?" I said to him, "It is luqaymāt al-qāḍī [the qāḍī's morsels]." In his presence there was a merchant, one of the shaykhs of Baghdad, known as al-Sāmarrī, who traced his descent to the house of al-ʿAbbās (may God Most High be pleased with him); he was very wealthy, and the Sultan called him "my father." He envied me and wanted to embarrass me, so he said, "These are not luqaymāt al-qāḍī; rather these are," and took a piece of the kind called jild al-faras [horse's hide]. Opposite him was the Malik al-Nudamāʾ Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Kāfī al-Harawī, who often joked with this shaykh in the Sultan's presence, and he said to him:

13.33.4

"O Khwāja, you are lying, and the qāḍī is telling the truth." The Sultan said to him, "How is that?" He said, "O Khwand ʿĀlam! He is the qāḍī and these are his morsels, for he is the one who brought them." The Sultan laughed and said, "You are right!"

13.33.5

When we had finished the meal, he ate the sweetmeats, then drank fuqqāʿ [barley-beer] after that; we took betel and withdrew. It was only a short while before the treasurer came to me and said, "Send your companions to collect the money." I sent them and returned to my house after sunset, and found the money there: three bags containing six thousand two hundred and thirty-three tankas. That was the exchange value of the fifty-five thousand that were my debt, and of the twelve thousand that he had previously ordered for me, after deduction of the tenth according to their custom. The tanka is worth two and a half dinars of Maghribi gold.

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