A passage in one of the poems of al-Kumayt describes how the poet encountered a ḏi'b (in this context undoubtedly a wolf) dying of thirst, and out of pity for the beast gave it the remnants of his own water; the first hemistich of the concluding line runs: fa Ǧubba lahŪ sawlun mina'l-mā'i ǵābirun ‘so there was poured out for him a scanty boon of water'. The second hemistich bihī kaffa 'anhu 'l-ḥībata 'l-mutaḥawwibu was interpreted by M. Ullmann in his Das Gespräch mit dem Wolf as meaning,‘ (just so much as that) wherewith a man by his ablution washes away his sin'. In my review of that work (BSOAS XLVI, l, 1983, 144) I expressed doubts about this, and proposed that the poet's meaning was the much simpler and more straightforward ‘wherewith the tormented beast relieved his anguish'.