“…the reins of this affair.”

He was then asked, “Do you know who is in the well?”

“No,” he replied.

“It holds ʿUtbah ibn Rabīʿah and Shaybah ibn Rabīʿah—your two maternal uncles, whose mother was Ruqayyah (1) bint ʿAbd Shams.”

Hearing that, he slit the ears of his she-camel and cut off its tail, then stood over the well and recited:

(from the curtailed kāmil metre)

“What has come to pass at Badr and al-ʿAqanqal—
nobles, stalwart captains….” (2)

The poem continues, and will appear in full in the account of Badr, God willing. He then returned to Mecca and to Ṭāʾif, remaining outside the fold of Islam. (3)

The writer next relates the story of the two birds and the circumstances of his death as noted above. On his death-bed he recited:

(from al-Khafīf)

“Every life, though its span grow long,
must one day wane and pass away.
Would that, before what I now behold,
I had lived on the mountain peaks, herding wild goats.
So set death ever before your eyes and beware
the ambush of Time—for Time does ambush. (4)
Its talon takes lions, wild oxen,
and the red-eyed ṭifl upon the lofty crags; (5)
It reaches the vultures atop the mountains, the startled gazelle,
and even the slight ostrich-chick it does not spare.” (6)

He explained his terms:
• qasāwir is the plural of qaswara, meaning “lion.”
• ṣidʿān are wild oxen, singular ṣadʿ.
• the ṭifl is a creature noted for the redness of its eyes.
• bughāth are vultures.
• niyāf are mountains.
• yaʿfur is the gazelle.
• ʿawhaj is the ostrich chick.

The meaning is that death spares neither the beasts of the wilderness nor the vultures that roost on the mountain-tops; it withholds its grasp from neither the small for their smallness nor the great for their greatness.

Al-Khaṭṭābī and others have discussed the unusual expressions found in these ḥadīths.