The Scented Garden

The Material Basis of Spiritual Sensation1. 39 BAGH-I-MUATTAR - I - ABDULLAH EL HAJI,2 CALLED EL QAHAR3 ————— I THE ABYSS As I placed the rigid pen4 of my thought within the inkstand of my imagination, I tasted the bliss of Allah ; and withdrawing, beheld Night and the Void like an hollow vortical shell.5 But it was only Habib’s podex ;6 and EL QAHAR would rather pos- sess Habib’s podex than the universe. 1. I am alone responsible for these capital summaries ; but a well known lady mystic in Lon- don assures me that they are just. 2. [Persian text] satirist, not to be confused with [Persian text] pilgrim. 3. El Qahar — The Conqueror — Abdullah’s ‘ Takhallus ’ or cognomen qua poeta. 4. Common symbols for member and po- dex. See Burton, Priapeia. 5. Not the common cowrie, which would be more probably taken as an emblem of pudendum mulie- bre. [Persian text] is the pearl-oyster shell ; [Per- sian text] the cowrie, here the text reads [Persian text] shell-whirlpool, which I took to mean the common spiral sea-shell. There may be a less fan- tastic phrase for this ; to my Munshi, who had