The scholarly Dr. Wood [the antiquarian Robert Wood in The Ruins of Balbec,1757]… noted that the Arab inhabitants took pleasure in speaking of the “hours of dalliance…a subject on which the warm imagination of the Arabs is apt to be too particular.”
-The Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay
The drovers did not speak of women until we passed a white tent far off the trail, and then they erupted in hoots and hollers. Shahr al-’Asal, Month of Honey, and they explained how a newlywed couple would stay inside, never coming out, for a full lunar month while their relatives would leave sweet meats for them every day outside the tent flap. Hours, no, a month of dalliance. KhairAllah’s men meanwhile had to hurry for forty days, he would not let them linger or loaf. Dally when you get to Cairo, he would say.