Zemzem

“ Zemzem, a fountain at Mecca. The Mohammedans say it is the very spring which God made to slake the thirst of 279Ishmael, when Hagar was driven into the wilderness by Abraham. A bottle of this water is considered a very valuable present, even by princes.
There were also a great many bottles of water from the fountain of Zemzem, at Mecca.--Arabian Nights (“The Purveyor’s Story”) . ”

“ The water of the well of Zemzem, in the temple of Mekkeh, is believed to possess miraculous virtues, and is therefore brought away in bottles or flasks by many of the pilgrims, to be used when occasion may require as medicine, or to be sprinkled 383on grave-linen. A bottle of it is a common and acceptable present from a pilgrim, and a guest is sometimes treated with a sip of this holy water.
Note 45. A whip is sometimes used in the ḥareem of a great man; and its being attached to the waist of the damsel here mentioned marks her authority. ”

“ Death reigns in this part of the territories of Shem. He perambulates the rest of the world, occasionally shooting in the private chamber, dredging in the dungeon, hunting in the solitude of life, angling in the streams of business, sporting amidst the reserves of treasure, tilting in the scenes of gaiety and pleasure, or mowing in the battle field; but here, encircled by the ocean and shrouded in darkness, he sits enthroned upon a vast mound—a continent—of graves, amidst the bones of the dead, the groans of the dying, and the carnage of the living. ”

“ It seemed to Esmé as they walked rapidly along in the clear light air that nature revealed herself in her fairest mood that morning. Surely never had sunlight shone more golden, never had the blue of the sky appeared more intense, nor the veld glowed with such splendour of colour. A blue haze, liquid in the golden light, quivered before her vision like a thing alive with iridescent wings outspread in the untempered sunlight that poured itself out upon the earth with a brilliance hurtful to the eyes. Everywhere her gaze turned some fresh wonder met the view. ”

“ As for poor little Sheem, he was soon brought to the pinching turn of his fate. As soon as he had eaten all of the food left in the lodge, he was obliged to pick berries, and live off of such roots as he could dig with his slender hands. As he wandered about in search of wherewithal to stay his hunger, he often looked up to heaven, and saw the gray clouds going up and down. And then he looked about upon the wide earth, but he never saw sister nor brother returning from their long delay. ”

“ Motioning me to take the last place, Esmo passed himself to its head. If the figure beside me were not at once recognised, I could not mistake the touch of the hand that stole into my own. The lights in the gallery were extinguished, and then I perceived a lamp held at the end of a wand of crystal, which gleamed above Esmo's head, and sufficed to guide us, giving light enough to direct our footsteps and little more. Perhaps this half-darkness, the twilight which gave a certain air of mystery to the scene and of uncertainty to the forms of objects encountered on our route, had its own purpose. ”

“ By making their founders, Asshur, and Aram, and Heber, etc., sons or descendants of one great head or progenitor, Shem, a son of Noah. It is a kind of parable which is extremely clear once one has the key to it, when nothing is easier than to translate it into our own sober, positive forms of speech. The above bit of genealogy would read thus: A large portion of humanity is distinguished by certain features more or less peculiar to itself; it is one of several great races, and has been called for more than a hundred years the Semitic, (better Shemitic) race, the race of Shem. ”

“ Now that I have come to the close of my earthly days, and that the higher circles will soon open to me, whereof I have learned the secrets from my revered Master—where there is neither eating nor drinking, but the pious sit crowned and delight themselves with the vision of the Godhead—I would fain leave some chronicle, in these confused and evil days, of him whom I have loved best on earth, for he came to teach man the true life and the true worship. To him, the ever glorious and luminous Israel Baal Shem, the one true Master of the Name, I owe my redemption from a living death. ”

“ Shem, king of righteousness, and king of peace, and priest of the Most High God, is the type, contemporary with the holder of the promises, of the Seed, or Christ, on the throne of the Kingdom of God. ”

“ I do not remember now where we turned into darkness; in the darkness we walked up some endless stairway in silence. I did not see but I knew, I knew that she walked as I did, with closed eyes, blind, her head thrown a little backward, biting her lips and listening to the music—that is to say, to my almost audible tremor.
I returned to consciousness in one of the innumerable nooks in the courtyard of the Ancient House. There was a fence of earth with naked stone ribs and yellow teeth of walls half fallen to pieces. She opened her eyes and said, “Day after tomorrow at sixteen.” She was gone. ”

“ The school of Shammai says: In the evening all people should recline and recite [the Shema] , and in the morning they should stand, since it says [in the verse (Deut. 6:7) ] , “When you lie down and when you arise.” But the school of Hillel says: Each person may recite it in his usual way (posture) , since it says (ibid.) , “When you walk on the road.” If so, why does it say “when you lie down and when you arise”? — [It means:] at the time when people are lying down, and at the time when people are arising. ”

“ As for Semsam, he alighted and sought neither food nor sleep, but said, ‘In all my life I never met such a fighter as this youth! Anon he fights with the sword and anon with the mace: but to-morrow I will go forth and defy him to single combat and cut off these Arabs.’ Now, when Gherib returned to his camp, the princess met him, weeping and affrighted for the terror of that which had befallen, and kissed his foot in the stirrup, saying, ‘May thy hands never wither nor thine enemies rejoice, O champion of the age! Praised be God Who hath saved thee alive this day! ”

“ To be under the encompassing control of that entity they called the Zemmd! It was evident that every man here, Earthman or Martian or Jovian, was merely a controlled unit. But for what ultimate purpose? Curt felt a chill along his spine as he remembered the hundreds of alien forms waiting patiently, in suspended animation....
Tor's voice, bitter with hate, broke upon his tumult of thoughts. "Become a part of you—just as Jal Tagar did? A traitor to everything that we—"
"You have no choice," Frane replied in cold, unhuman tones. "Every man here is part and substance of the great Zemmd. ”

“ The moment I heard this, I left my father's palace, and, accompanied by that friend of the hermit's son, who showed me the way, and my attendant, I came here, and when I arrived here, I saw that that hermit's son, separated from me, had resigned, at the rising of the moon, the nectar of his life. So I, grieved by separation from him, was blaming my vital frame, and longing to enter the fire with his body. But at that very moment a man, with a body like a mass of flame, descended from the sky, and flew up to heaven with his body. ”

“ One night there was a great feast of singing and dancing before the hut where my forefather, the cacique, dwelt down by the sea. All the people of the village were there, for the cacique and the chief of the Bohitos had caused proclamation to be made that every man and every woman should come forth from their huts to dance and sing and praise Zemi, the greatest of the gods. ”

“ Going down the river, Zim Smith, who was quite a talker, told the story of the goose in my presence and in the presence of a crowd. I was terribly mortified, and informed his brother that "Zim was making fun of me." He laughed and mollified my feelings so far as to say, "Zim is only talking and means nothing by it." "In fact, he thinks you are a great boy." But I had made up my mind that I had seen enough of the wild life of the mines, mountains and plains; I would go home and attend school. No more Indians, miners, and rough men for me. ”

“ Of Shem the Rabbis have somewhat to say. "I have found in the Midrash that the Rabbi Johanan, son of Nuri, said: 'The holy, ever-blessed God took Shem, son of Noah, and consecrated him priest of the Most High, that he should minister before Him; and He let his Majesty dwell with Him, and He gave him the name Melchizedek, a priest of the Most High God, king of Salem. His brother Japheth learnt the law of him in his school, till Abraham came, who learnt it in the school of Shem. ”

“ They were walking like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.
Dawn was breaking over everything in colours at once clear and timid; as if Nature made a first attempt at yellow and a first attempt at rose. ”

“ Semele and Juno!—which the reptile! SEMELE. How blessed beyond all utterance would be Cadmus' daughter—wert thou Zeus! Alas! Thou art not Zeus! ZEUS. (Arises.) I am! (He extends his hand, and a rainbow fills the hall; music accompanies its appearance.) Knowest thou me now? SEMELE. Strong is that mortal's arm whom gods protect,— Saturnius loves thee—none can I e'er love But deities— ZEUS. What! art thou doubting still Whether my might is lent me by the gods And not god-born? The gods, my Semele, In charity oft lend their strength to man ”

“ Herr Christian Schmidt and his wife Maria, a jolly, pleasant-faced, merry-hearted couple, living in the Eschenheimer Strasse, Frankfort-on-the-Maine, and letting all the upper rooms of their house, or rather cigar-shop, are one morning busily discussing the affairs of a new lodger, when it behoves us to make their acquaintance.
“Her husband is coming to-night, and that is why she has sent out for a bottle of Moselle,” said rosy Frau Schmidt. “She knows how men love their palates.” ”

“ The fulness of life made perfect by a perfect human love lifted Esmé so completely out of the past that all her life which had gone before seemed as a dream, a thing indistinct and distant, with the haunting sense of unreality which clings to dreams in defiance of the vivid impression sometimes left on the mind. ”

“ Having recently passed into what my great-grandson Shem calls my Anecdotage, it has occurred to me that perhaps some of the recollections of a more or less extended existence upon this globular [1] mass of dust and water that we are pleased to call the earth, may prove of interest to posterity, and I have accordingly, at [2] the earnest solicitation of my grandson, Noah, and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet, consented to put them into permanent literary form. ”

“ In the front litter, the curtains of which were in part drawn back, might be seen a man about the middle age, somewhat large and heavy in figure, but with a mild, intelligent face. This was the unfortunate Zizim, the brother of Bajazet, who followed the King of France rather as a guest than a prisoner, but who well knew that he was no more the master of his own actions than if there had been manacles on his wrists. ”

“ From her mother, and from her own free life in the hills, Sammy had a body beautiful with the grace and strength of perfect physical womanhood. With this, she had inherited from many generations of gentle-folk a mind and spirit susceptible of the highest culture. Unspoiled by the hot-house, forcing process, that so often leaves the intellectual powers jaded and weak, before they have fully developed, and free from the atmosphere of falsehood and surface culture, in which so many souls struggle for their very existence, the girl took what her teacher had to offer and made it her own. ”

“ Although the universal Father of all the nations of the earth, he may be said to have more particularly adopted the descendants of Shem, in choosing them to be the depositaries of the true religion, while the rest of mankind were sunk in idolatry and ignorance. ”

“ Zajíček (Meanwhile enters the meadow, gazes at the sky and around at the forest) .—Well, people say lots of things. But this is true. At night a person has mighty queer feelings, sort of a holy horror; but at any rate, one must admit that it is a beautiful place. Beautiful!
Zima.—This sort of fear overcomes a person, usually in what they call gloomy places. (To Klásek.) One walks and walks and suddenly it seems as if somebody sprang forth out of the shadows, looked into your eyes and immediately disappeared. You see only those eyes—that terrible look. ”

“ For Zelma, she grew more humble and simple and less exacting, the more she bestowed from a "bounty boundless as the sea."
It was but a brief while, scarcely the lifetime of a rose,—the fragrant snow of the hawthorn blossoms had not melted from the hedges since they met,—and yet, in that little season, the deepest, divinest mystery of human life had grown clear and familiar to their hearts, and was conned as the simplest lesson of Nature. ”

“ Unpitied, wrongly suspected, Esmé's heart broke as she tore at the locked door. If one could find the backward road—if the Great Powers would give us back the years, seeing as we see now. Lie and scream and bleed, little human, the way is always onward—there are no scissors to cut the false stitches we have made. ”

“ He says I have spoiled him, Selma. Perhaps I have. It will be your turn now. You will fail to convert him as I have failed, and the world will be the better for it. There are too few men who think noble thoughts and practice them, who are true to themselves and the light which is in them through thick and thin. But you see, he admits himself that he needs to mix with the world a little more. Otherwise he is perfect. You know that perhaps, already, Selma. ”