In this tale from Jami's Haft Awrang, a handmaiden and a slave, bound by a consuming mutual love yet kept apart by jealous guardians on the banks of the Tigris, wash their hands of life and cast themselves together into the river. Their drowning works as an allegory for the Sufi doctrine of annihilation (fana): the lovers' willing surrender of physical existence dissolves the separate self, and the 'thirst of the shore of separation' (firaq) is quenched only by immersion in the water of union. Jami frames self-sacrificing love as a passage in which the extinction of the ego becomes the very means of reaching the beloved, so that death by water figures the lover's absorption into the ocean of Divine Love. Reading this poem's imagery through the lens of this allegory is a prerequisite for grasping how the narrative surface encodes its mystical meaning.