PS 3543 
 .E135 
 P8 
 1922 
 Copy 1 
 
ABU BEN ALADDIN: 
 A JUST-SO NIGHT 
 
 BEING A PAPER READ BEFORE THE ENGLISH CLUB OF 
 UNION COLLEGE AT ITS SECOND ANNUAL BANQUET 
 HELD IN THE ROSE ROOM OF THE TWENTIETH CEN- 
 TURY LUNCH IN SCHENECTADY, NEW YORK, ON THE 
 TWENTIETH DAY OF DECEMBER, M DCCCC XX 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN N.VeDDER, M.A. 
 
 ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF THERMODYNAMICS 
 IN UNION COLLEGE 
 
 AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS 
 
 AT THE SNAIL'S PACE PRESS 
 
 1922 
 

 i*?r 6 h\ 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
 FRANCIS H. FODES 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 U 6 74 7 22 
 
 JUN24 72 
 
Cr2 
 
 ABU BEN ALADDIN 
 A JUST- SO NIGHT 
 
 NCE upon a time there was 
 an Arab whose name was 
 Abu ben Aladdin. He 
 lived in Arabia, or to be 
 more definite in that part 
 of Arabia which is infelici- 
 _ tously called Arabia Felix. 
 Now Arabia Felix is a trackless desert. In the 
 respecl: of being trackless it resembled J^ew 
 Tor\ State after Charlie Hughes' famous 
 anti-racing camjpaign, but as this is the only 
 respecl: in which it ever resembled Kiew Yor\ 
 State, there is little chance of confusion here. 
 It might however be confused with Boothia 
 Felix, which is also a trackless desert ; but as 
 Arabia Felix is very hot and Boothia Felix is 
 very cold, the two places should be carefully 
 distinguished. All possibility of falling into 
 the endless chain of error and misapprehen- 
 sion which might arise from confounding the 
 two may be avoided by the simple mnemonic 
 device of associating the F in Arabia Felix 
 with the word Fire and carefully guarding 
 against the formation of a similar association 
 in the case of Boothia Felix. 
 
4 ABU BEN ALADDIN : 
 
 Abu had many wives, among whom there 
 was one who had a name which if transliter- 
 ated into English would look like the name of 
 one of the complex methylated diazo com- 
 pounds of organic chemistry, and when pro- 
 nounced would sound like an exceptionally 
 long line of a Pindaric ode read metrically. 
 We will therefore call her Josephine for short. 
 She was more precious in Abu's sight than 
 any of his other wives, to say nothing of his 
 concubines and of course the less said about 
 them the better. 
 
 Now Abu had many possessions, but the 
 larger part of his wealth consisted of an enor- 
 mous herd of finely bred camels, in which he 
 took great pride. They were fed on the choi- 
 cest fodder that the country provided I which 
 is not saying much), and when the store of 
 dates and cocoa-nut oil ran low, he and his 
 whole establishment subsisted oncamcrs milk. 
 
 Our hero was a man of a highly reflective 
 type of mind. He would often go out from his 
 tent, seat himself on a sand-drift, and think. 
 He cogitated on such fundamental problems as 
 pre-established harmony, the eternal fitness of 
 things, and the atomic theory of the universe. 
 While so engaged he would often fall into a 
 train of ratiocinative thought which involved 
 such prodigious cerebration that there was 
 distinctly visible around his head an aura 
 
A JUST-SO NIGHT 5 
 
 which looked like the brush discharge from a 
 high-potential electrode. 
 
 One day while evolving a theory of the 
 granular structure of the luminiferous ether, 
 his thought activity assumed such unusual [vio- 
 lence that he did not notice the coming of a 
 sand storm and disregarded it even after it was 
 upon him. Finally however a terrific gust tore 
 up a large piece of slate, which in falling hit 
 him on the bean. This aroused him to the con- 
 sciousness of an unmistakable disharmony be- 
 tween his physical organism and its immediate 
 environment. As he started at topspeedfor his 
 tent, there arose in his mind a vehement long- 
 ing for the flower-spangled shores of the Straits 
 of Bab'd'Mandeb, where the coffee-blossom 
 spreads its gorgeous petals and the air is ever 
 fragrant with the delicate odor of the night- 
 blooming jessamine. When at length he ar- 
 rived at his tent, he was so exhausted that he 
 fell unconscious to the ground. Then Jose- 
 phine and her hand-maidens ministered to him 
 and laid him on his couch. 
 
 When he awoke the next morning, his ears 
 still resounded with the babbling of melliflu- 
 ous Bab-el'Mandeb, and he gave orders at 
 once to start for its sun-kissed shores. Then 
 after a scene of indescribable hurry and con- 
 fusion they were at length all mounted on 
 camels ready to start the journey. When Abu 
 
6 ABU BEN ALADDIN : 
 
 gave the word of command, they all stepped 
 off at once, simultaneously and together. To 
 relieve the tedium of the journey they sang 
 many sweet songs, among which were I 'm 
 Forever Blowing Bubbles, J\[ot Because Tour 
 Hair Is Curly, and Who Put the Overalls in 
 Mrs. Murphy s Chowder 1 
 
 On the second day of the journey one of the 
 ladies who was riding near to Abu cried, 
 1 Look you, my Lord, at yon monstrous beast 
 far away in the offing ! Methinks "t is a kanga- 
 roo, or a dinosaur, or peradventure a niffty 
 udellum." 
 
 Then Abu looked, and as he looked he 
 smiled; but the lady was smit with sore amaze, 
 for Abu's countenance usually bore a rather 
 sober and subdued expression such as you 
 would expecl: to see on the face of one who 
 during twenty years of solitary confinement 
 had meditated on nothing but judgment, con- 
 demnation, and the second death. He an- 
 swered her forthwith, ' Not so, my Lady ; the 
 pristine clarity of your intellect is clouded o'er 
 by the wild phantasmagorical imagery of a 
 fevered dream. What you see is only a wild 
 Bedouin coursing over the desert's burning 
 sands on his fleet-footed charger." 
 
 After traveling many days, in which they 
 covered 647 x io' J micro-millimeters or (if you 
 prefer to think in larger units of distance ) ex- 
 
A JUST-SO NIGHT *f 
 
 adtly 3.17 x io 17 light-years, they were near 
 to their destination but not so near that anti- 
 cipations of arrival served to assuage the dis- 
 comforts of the journey. They therefore di- 
 verted themselves with conversation. 
 
 1 My Lord ! ' quoth Josephine, ■ If I remem- 
 ber correctly, it was Omar Khayyam who 
 wrote the quatrain which readeth thus : 
 "And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, 
 
 Whereunder crawling coop'd we live 6? die, 
 Lift not your hands to It for help -for it 
 
 As impotently rolls as you or I." ' 
 
 'Thou hast spoken sooth, Lady,' replied 
 Abu : 'it was the inimitable Omar, the Astron- 
 omer Poet of Persia, who wrote that beautiful 
 stanza.' 
 
 ' Why do you call him inimitable,' replied 
 Josephine, ' for herein he seems to imply that 
 we would all admit unquestioningly that we 
 roll constantly and unceasingly ? ' 
 
 ' The words are figurative/ replied Abu ; 
 1 we are all involved in the whirling maelstrom 
 of a Bergsonian flux, and it is this which the 
 poet has in mind/ 
 
 ' But I don t care ! I just don t roll/ insisted 
 Josephine. 
 
 Then Abu frowned, and he spoke chidingly 
 to her and said, * Cease your carping criticism 
 of that which is beyond your feeble compre- 
 hension. For you to amend the glorious Omar 
 
8 ABU BEN ALADDIN '. 
 
 in either form or content would be as i( one 
 were to try to enhance the flawless beauty of 
 the lily's snowy chalice with a white-wash 
 brush and a bucket of red barn paint/ 
 
 This marital rebuke seemed to touch the 
 raw of a subconscious Freudian idea-complex 
 in Josephine s mind, and she retreated to the 
 inner precincts of her own subjectivity. 
 
 And now they were almost in view of the 
 watery main— even the much-desired shores 
 of the Straits of Bab-el'Mandeb. Then Abu 
 said, ' Listen ! Hear you not how the sound of 
 the silvery babbling of Bab-el-Mandeb looms 
 up in the distance ? ' 
 
 4 But, my Lord,' cried one of the party, ' a 
 sound can t loom.' 
 
 1 Well,' replied Abu, 'if I am in the company 
 of those who require such punctilious exact- 
 ness of expression, I will amend my statement 
 and say that the sound behaves exactly like a 
 thing which can loom when it is in the act of 
 looming/ 
 
 Then they arrived at the shore. But arriv- 
 ing at a place bears a close analogy to the at- 
 tainment of a limit by a mathematical variable, 
 and as we all know, there are many difficulties 
 involved in this. Does it really attain the limit 
 or only indefinitely approach it ? To decide 
 whether they really arrived or not, an analysis 
 something like the following is required to 
 
A JUST'SO NIGHT 9 
 
 establish the necessary & sufficient conditions 
 for arrival. Given a definite epoch t, and a cor' 
 responding finite distance from the goal d,,it 
 must be possible, for any arbitrarily small dis- 
 tance d, assigned in advance, to find an epoch 
 t, and a corresponding distance d, such that 
 d, < d< however small d e may be, the time in- 
 terval t, — t a being finite. 
 
 It is thus seen that when, in the play called 
 The Highwayman, the principal character, 
 Foxy Quiller, walks pompously on the stage 
 and, striking an attitude, exclaims in rotund 
 tones, ' Something tells me I have arrived,' the 
 philosophically minded will not be inclined to 
 regard this as mere broad comedy but rather 
 as a case of cutting the Gordian knot of logic 
 with the shining sword of intuition. 
 
 They then pitched their tents, all the time 
 inhaling deep breaths of the perfume-laden air, 
 and their hearts were filled with gladness. The 
 illustrious citizens of the place greeted them 
 kindly and made a great banquet for them, at 
 which they feasted many days. But as time 
 went on, Abu bethought him of merchandise, 
 and he let build great ships, in which he traded 
 in camel's hair when the trade-winds were 
 blowing, and those who bought the camel's 
 hair made it into camel's hair brushes. He 
 thought how fitting and reasonable a thing it 
 is to trade bv the trade-winds in camel's hair 
 
10 ABU BEN ALADDIN 
 
 for making camel's hair brushes, nor did the 
 thought escape him what an alogical, disjoint' 
 ed, and incomprehensible universe this would 
 be if real camel's hair brushes could be made 
 with no component of camel's hair whatever. 
 
 As his riches increased he caused a great 
 course to be built, on which he raced his cam- 
 els when he desired recreation from the tedi- 
 um of business, and he challenged other noble 
 Arabs to match their camels against his. This 
 diversion he greatly enjoyed when the track 
 was fast, but when it rained it irked him sore 
 to see his royally bred beasts slopping through 
 the unspeakable mire. This and other incon- 
 veniences disturbed his equanimity, but on re- 
 flection he concluded that, in spite of all the 
 hazards and hardships of finite selfhood, his 
 own lot was about as happy as it could be in 
 a universe whose fundamental constitution is 
 such that no mortal can reasonably exped: to 
 get place odds on a two-horse race. 
 
 Thus he lived many years, increasing in 
 wealth and honor ; and in the fullness of time 
 he was gathered to his fathers, being old and 
 full of days. 
 
Of this edition seventy - eight copies have 
 been printed on italian hand -made paper. 
 This copy is no. I f 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
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