93 – Abū Zayd al-Numayrī told me: Abū Ghassān Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā al-Kinānī narrated to us, from ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn ʿImrān al-Zuhrī, from Muʿāwiyah ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Bahīr ibn Raysān, from his father, who said:

When ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ was overtaken by death, his son said to him, “Father, you used to say to us, ‘How I wish I could meet an intelligent man at the descent of death so that he might describe to me what he experiences.’ Now you are that man, so describe death to me.” He replied, “My son, by Allah, it is as though my flanks were caught in a clamp, as though I were breathing through the eye of a needle, and as though a thorny branch were being dragged from my feet to the crown of my head.” Then he said:

Would that, before what has now come upon me,
I had been herding ibex in the hidden mountain ravines.
By Allah, would that I had been mere menstrual blood
that slave-girls scrub away on the track of Idhkhir.