"So they both proceeded until, when they came to the people of a town, they asked its people for food, but they refused to offer them hospitality. Then they found in it a wall that was on the point of collapsing," meaning: falling.

Muhammad said: The wall [fol. 198] being described this way is by way of simile, and such usage is widespread in the speech of the Arabs and their poetry. Al-Ra'i said:

(In a desert where its summits were agitated ... like the agitation of axes when they seek to dislodge.)

His saying: "He said: If you had wished," Musa said it, "you could have taken for it a payment," meaning: something that would suffice us for the day.