Lesson 8: How the king sent messengers to Samarcand to fetch the goldsmith.

Meaning: The king sent a messenger or two in that direction (Samarkand), skilled, competent, and highly trustworthy and just.

Meaning: Those two messengers travelled all the way to Samarkand, bringing the good news from the king to the goldsmith.

Meaning: Saying, 'O fine master, perfect in knowledge! Your fame in craft has spread openly through every city.'

Meaning: 'Now such-and-such a king has chosen you for the work of goldsmithing, for you are the finest in this craft.'

Meaning: 'Here, take this robe of honour along with gold and silver; when you come with us, you will become the king's favourite and intimate companion.'

Meaning: The man saw the great wealth and many robes of honour; he was beguiled and turned away from his town and his children.

Meaning: The man set out on his way joyfully, unaware that the king had designs upon his life.

Meaning: He mounted a swift Arab horse and rode off joyfully, deeming what was in truth the price of his blood to be a robe of honour.

Meaning: O you who set out on this journey with a hundred willing hearts, walking with your own feet straight into your evil fate.

Meaning: In his fancy were dreams of kingship, honour, and greatness; while the Angel of Death mockingly said: 'Go on, yes, surely you will attain them!'

Meaning: When the stranger arrived from his journey, the divine physician brought him before the king.

Meaning: They led him before the king with honour and grace, that he might burn like a moth before that beautiful candle (handmaiden).

Meaning: When the king saw him, he honoured him greatly and entrusted the treasury of gold to him.

Meaning: Then the divine physician said to him: 'O great king, give that handmaiden to this master goldsmith.'

Meaning: 'So that the handmaiden might find joy and healing in union with him, and that very water of union might extinguish the fire of her passion.'

Meaning: The king granted that moon-faced beauty to him and united the two who longed for each other's company.

Meaning: For six months, they satisfied their desire until the girl was fully recovered.

Meaning: After that, the divine physician prepared a potion for him, so that upon drinking it, he would waste away before the girl.

Meaning: When his beauty faded away from illness, the girl's heart no longer remained ensnared by him.

Meaning: Since he grew ugly, sickly, and pale-faced, little by little, her heart grew cold toward him.

Meaning: Loves that arise merely from colour or outward beauty are not true love, and in the end, they turn into disgrace.

Meaning: Would that those colourful and superficial loves had been utterly disgraceful, so that such an evil fate would never have befallen him.

Meaning: Blood streamed from his eyes like a river; for his own handsome face had become the enemy of his life.

Meaning: The peacock’s enemy is its own beautiful plumage; how many a king has been slain by his own splendour!

Meaning: He said, 'I am like that gazelle for whose musk-gland this hunter has shed my pure, innocent blood.'

Meaning: 'Ah, I am like that desert fox whose head they severed from an ambush merely for the sake of its fur.'

Meaning: 'Ah, I am like that elephant whose blood was spilled by the spear of the mahout, only for the sake of its ivory.'

Meaning: 'He who has killed me for something inferior to me does not know that my blood will not rest quiet and unavenged.'

Meaning: 'Today it is upon me, and tomorrow it will be upon him; how could the blood of someone like me ever go to waste like this?'

Meaning: 'Although the wall casts a long shadow, that shadow ultimately returns to the wall itself.' (Just as the consequences of a person's actions are certain to return to them.)

Meaning: 'This world is like a mountain, and our deeds are the call we send into it; the echo of every call comes back to us.'

Meaning: He said this and, in that very moment, passed away and went beneath the earth, while the handmaiden was cleansed and freed from that love and suffering.

Meaning: For love of the dead is not enduring, for the dead never return to us.

Meaning: But love for the living, in both soul and sight, grows fresher with every passing moment than a newly blossoming bud.

Meaning: Choose the love of that Living One who ever endures, who is the cupbearer of a wine that renews and enlivens the soul.

Meaning: Choose the love of Him through whose love all the prophets attained power, glory, and noble status.

Meaning: Do not say, 'We have no way to reach that King;' with the generous, nothing ever remains difficult.