…the swift dromedary, with thy sublime of humps…thy form is natural, ‘twas only nature’s mistaken largess to bestow the gifts which are of others upon man.
-The Deformed Transformed, Lord Byron
Byron had a clubbed right foot which gave him a limp, a deformity he tried to hide from others, especially lovers, until writing this unfinished play, his last. Odd that he should compare his handicap, in the guise of his character Arnold’s hunchback, to a camel’s hump. Elsewhere he called himself Un Diable Boiteux and quoted a line in Greek, the words of the Queen of the Amazons, with its rough translation given as, A cripple makes the best fuck. I wonder what the Jamal says about his Sanām at that same moment.