سندبادنامه 183.4

183.4

5. The Story of the Householder, the Wife, and the Parrot
The man went out of the house, and the parrot abandoned sleep, drew the kohl of sleeplessness across
its eyes, and peered out through the lattice of the cage. The woman thought to herself:
'A subtle stratagem must be devised against this parrot, so that it does not attend to watching and examining us; for
its gaze is a partition between me and my lover, and its vigilance and wakefulness are an obstacle between me and my lover;
and whenever its words deviate and turn aside from the path of rectitude, and fall away from the highway of balance,
and change and discrepancy find their way into them, reliance upon its speech will be removed, and thereafter
whatever it says, he will deem it the phantasms of madness and the absurdities of suspicious fancies; and whatever it explains
and reports, he will consider it the whisperings of fantasy and the constructions of impossibility.' Then she commanded that where
the parrot was, a lamp be placed beneath a basin, and hung several pieces of tinder from the walls,
and turned a hand-mill atop the roof with varied motions, and brought a fan
and a sieve, and sprinkled water over the fan, so that from the fan and sieve it fell in the manner of wind
and rain; and hour by hour they would draw out the lampstand from under the basin, and hold it
opposite the surfaces of the tinder-pieces, so that the rays of the lamp were reflected from the surfaces of the tinder
like lightning and flashes; and from the grinding together of the heavy masses of the hand-mill,