Nothing Kept Past Dawn

The First Page of the Roll

The tales have been written down. They fill thirty volumes in the King's treasury, in letters of gold, and any scribe will tell you what my sister said on any night you name. This is not those. I am Dunyazad. I sat at the foot of the bed, I slept there when I could not help it, and I kept the Roll. The Roll holds much less than the volumes do: a night, a name, and what had become of the name by morning. I mean to set it down in the order it happened, because the chroniclers were not in the room, and I was awake for most of it.

It was my father's book. He was the King's Vizier, which is to say that he kept the treasury and the roads, the grain and the water, the army's pay and the King's temper, and in the year the book begins he was given one thing more to keep. The Roll was a modest book, bound in brown goatskin and no longer than my forearm. His clerks had ruled every page in three columns, headed Night, Name and Struck. On the flyleaf the chief clerk had written, in the hand he used for treaties, the King's own words: Nothing kept past dawn.

I should say how I mean to go on. The Roll has a line for every night, and I will give you the line at the foot of the night it belongs to. Between the lines I will tell you what I saw and heard. The tales themselves I will give as my sister told them, or as I heard them, which is not always the same thing. I was fifteen, the lamp was low, and there are nights I know only by their first and last sentences and by the sound of her voice in the middle. Some of the tales will be better here than she told them, because I have had all these years to think; some will be worse, because I fell asleep. Where nothing happened but the stroke, I will say so and go on.

To understand the flyleaf you need two brothers. Both of them were kings, and they loved one another as brothers do who have met twice in twenty years. The elder, Shahryar, held the great kingdom of the coasts and the islands, and my father was his Vizier. The younger, Shah Zaman, held Samarkand. When the elder grew lonely for the younger, he sent my father over the mountains with a letter, and the younger read it, packed his tents, and set out for his brother's court with a train of horse and a gift.

Three days out, Shah Zaman remembered that he had left the gift behind. He rode back alone in the dark, let himself in by the garden door, and found his wife in his own bed with one of the men from the kitchens. I will not improve on what the old story says he did then; it says it plainly, and I would rather not be plainer. He rode out again before dawn and said nothing to anyone. By the time he reached his brother's court he had grown yellow and thin, he would not eat, and he sat all day at a window with his face turned from the room.

The elder king tried feasts, and then he tried hunting. On the morning of the great hunt the younger said he was not well enough to ride, and was left in the palace with his window. It looked into the garden. At noon the doors of the women's quarters opened, and the Queen came out among her ladies, and with her as many men as she had ladies, whom the King had not sent for. They sat down by the fountain and stayed there till the shadows were long. By evening Shah Zaman had understood that what had happened to him was not particular to him, and he said so, to the empty room: "Then it is not only mine." That night he ate for the first time in weeks.

When the King came back from the hunt and found his brother mended, he asked how. The younger would not say. The elder asked again every day for a week, and in the end he was told, and he did not believe it. So he gave out that he would ride to the hunt a second time, and rode a mile, and came back on foot in the dark and sat down behind the same window beside his brother. He saw what he had been told he would see. Then the two kings left the palace by a postern with nothing but what they wore and what they could carry, and walked away from both their kingdoms.

They walked for many days, until they came to a meadow beside the sea. While they were resting under a tree, the water at the edge of the sky began to boil, and a dark column rose out of it and came toward the shore, and they climbed into the branches and held very still. The column came ashore and became a Jinni, a great one, with a casket of glass on his head bound with seven steel locks. He set the casket down under their tree and undid the seven locks one after another, and out of it he took a young woman, as lovely as the moon on the fourteenth night. He laid his head in her lap and was asleep before she had settled her skirts.

She looked up, and saw two kings in a tree, and she did not scream. She lifted the Jinni's head from her lap and set it on the ground as gently as one sets down a full bowl, and went and stood under the branches and told them to come down. They said they would rather not. She said that if they did not she would wake him, and then they would see; so they came down. What she required of them she required in a few words, and they gave it, since there was a Jinni asleep a yard away. When it was over she took from her neck a cord strung with rings, rings of every sort, iron and silver and glass and gold, and she asked for theirs. "Five hundred and seventy," she said, looking at the cord. "Every one of them a man who found his way to me. He puts me in a glass box with seven locks, and still they come. Give me yours." They gave her theirs, and the cord went to five hundred and seventy-two.

I have thought about her more than I have thought about either king. She had been taken on her wedding night out of a house full of people and shut in a box, and everything she owned would go on a cord at her neck. What she had was a string of rings, and she counted them. The brothers walked back the way they had come, and for a day and a night neither of them spoke of her. Then the younger said that if a Jinni with seven locks could not keep one woman, a king with a palace had been a fool to think he could. The elder said that he agreed. At the crossroads where the roads to their two kingdoms divided, they embraced, and the younger went home to Samarkand.

The elder king came to his own city in the evening. By then the Queen and her company had nothing more to say to anyone. He sent for my father, and my father came, and the King said: "Bring me a bride this evening, a maiden of a good house. At dawn she is to be struck. Tomorrow evening, another." My father said that he thought the King might wish to consider. "Nothing kept past dawn," said the King. "Do you understand me? Not a wife, not a night, not a name. Whatever I hold, I hold till morning, and after morning someone else is holding it." Those were very nearly his words. My father had been present at a good many bad decisions in his life, and he knew that this was not the time for argument. He said, "I understand," and went out, and ordered a book.

That is the Roll. Every evening my father wrote a name in it, and every morning, at first light, he carried it to the King's door and held it open, and the King looked at the page for as long as it takes to read one name, and nodded; and my father took it away and drew his line. That was the whole of the ceremony. The King did not look at the line. He looked at the name above it, for the length of one breath. I have wondered about that breath for a good many years.

It took the city less than a year to work out what no one would say aloud, that a city has only so many daughters. In the first months there were enough, and the first pages of the Roll are all good houses, with the father's rank written beside the name. By the second year every family with a girl of marriageable age had found a cousin in some other town. In the third year my father went out at dusk with a clerk and a lantern and walked the streets looking for a door that was not already shut, and came back at midnight with a name, or without one. The pages show it: the later names have a street and a trade beside them, and the last twenty only a first name. People left in the night with their daughters on donkeys. A woman I knew dressed hers as a boy and sent her to the camel-drivers. A cloth merchant bricked up a room. By the spring I am speaking of, the old women were saying that the only girls left in the city were the ones too young to count, and nobody said what came after that.

My sister was the elder of us two, and she had read a thousand books. I do not give the figure for show. When she was eleven my father, who was proud of it, had a clerk count her borrowing slips, and the clerk stopped at a thousand and said that after that it was a matter of opinion. Histories, and the lives of the old kings, and medicine, and poems, and the sayings of the wise and of fools, and the kind of book called the lives of the ancients, which is mostly lies and which she liked best. She read in the library with her knees drawn up and her back against a shelf, and ate whatever was put beside her without looking at it. And she spoke the way water leaves a jug. She could pour out any book she had read, from any page, in the voice of whoever was speaking in it, and none of what she poured stayed in her. If you asked her what she had said to you a minute ago, she looked at you with real interest.

She told my father at supper, between the bread and the fruit. "I want you to give me to the King." My father put down his knife. He said no. He said it through the whole of the meal, and when his arguments were done he did what a Vizier does, and told a tale. It was the tale of the Bull and the Ass: a merchant who understood the speech of animals, an ox who was tired of the plough, and an ass who gave the ox some advice and was put to the plough in his place for it. "The one who meddles comes to harm," my father said at the end, in the voice he used when he put us to sleep as children. He did not say who the ass was. She had listened to the whole of it with her chin on her hand, the way she listened to every tale, and when he had finished she said: "That is a good tale, Father. I shall remember it. I will do it anyway." It was the entire speech, and I have always thought it was the right size.

The next day, instead of packing, she went to the clerks' room and asked to see the Roll. The chief clerk could not refuse the Vizier's daughter and could not meet her eye; he set the book in front of her and went to stand by the window. She read it from the first page, all afternoon, with her finger beside each name, the way you read stones in a graveyard. She did not skip. At the last name, the one drawn through that morning, she closed it and laid her hand flat on the cover. "Does anyone read this?" she asked. "The King, lady," said the chief clerk to the window. "At dawn. One name, for the length of a breath." She nodded, as if that answered something, and asked him for a pen.

Late that afternoon she came to my room and told me what she meant to do. I said she was mad. She said that was possible but unhelpful. She would go to the King, and she would ask his leave to say good-bye to her sister, and I would come and sit at the foot of the bed. Toward the end of the night I would say: "Sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us a story to pass the hour." The King did not sleep after, she had it from the chief clerk; he would say yes, because he had nothing else to do with the hours. "And then?" I said. "And then I shall tell him one." "Which?" "I'll start with one and see." That was the whole of the plan. She had sat up with the greater part of the world's literature and had come away with a plan that thin, and I believe she knew it.

"There is one thing more," she said. "Whatever I tell, I can't keep. You know I can't. I could tell him the whole of the Fisherman, and by morning I could not say how it began. If I am to leave a tale open at dawn I must know where I left it, and what else is open, and I will be tired, and frightened, and I won't." I said that I would remember. She said that remembering was not enough; it had to be on paper. "He has a rule about what is finished. A tale that is open at dawn he cannot draw a line through without losing the end of it. So I must know what is open. I need a column." She said it as if she had been working it out for years, and I believe she had.

I ruled the page myself, in the last of the light, with the clerk's ruler and a sharpened reed. The three columns were my father's: Night, Name, Struck. For the fourth my sister dictated the heading, and I wrote it: Open. In the column where my father drew his line, I was to draw something shorter, a stroke standing upright, the stroke the guard-rolls use for present. In the fourth I would write what was still unfinished when the light came. Then she took the Roll from the clerk's hand, which no bride had done, and put it under her own arm, and the clerk let her, and my father did not look at her.

We walked to the palace at sunset. My father went a pace ahead with nothing in his hands. He had come home at noon without a name for the evening; two days of walking the quarters, and not one door open, and I think that was the true reason he gave in, and not my sister's speech. The streets were quiet. Shutters closed as we passed, one after another, a little ahead of us, like a row of eyes. At a window a woman put her hand to her mouth. No one said anything. At the last door, the one that opens on the King's stair, my father put his hand on my sister's head as he used to do when we were small, and took it away, and went in first.

The King was sitting on the edge of a divan with his hands between his knees, like a man waiting in the antechamber of his own life. He was not old. He had a plain, tired face, the face of someone who has practised a difficult thing every night for three years and has not got better at it. He looked at my sister, and at me, and then at the book under her arm. "You have brought the Roll," he said. "I thought you would want to see it written," she said, and she laid it open on the table beside the lamp, at the page I had ruled, where a line was waiting for the night and a name stood in it in her own hand: Shahrazad.

The page lay open under the lamp: Night 1. Shahrazad. The two columns beside her name were empty. I was fifteen, and I remember that I thought they looked very large.

Nights One and Two: The Trader and the Jinni

I will not describe the first part of the night. I will say only that I sat on the carpet at the foot of the bed with my back to it and my eyes on the lamp, and that nobody asked me to look. When it was over I turned round and sat with my knees under my chin. The lamp was low. My sister lay on her back with her eyes open, the King lay on his with his eyes shut, and neither of them was asleep, and the house made the noises a great house makes in the last hours of the dark, which are mostly the noises of people not breathing. I had been told what to say and when to say it. I waited for the moment, and I did not know the moment, and in the end my sister moved her foot against the bedpost, twice, as one knocks at a door, and I said it.

I said it badly. I said it in the voice of someone reading out a price. "Sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us a story, to pass the hour." "With joy," said Shahrazad, "if the King permits." There was a long pause, in which the King did not open his eyes. "Tell it," he said, to the ceiling, and I saw that he was glad of something to do with the hour. He had the look of a man who has been awake at this time of night for three years' worth of nights and has long ago stopped expecting it to be different.

My sister sat up. She arranged the pillows behind her as if for a long job of work, and folded her hands in her lap, and something went out of her face, and something else came in. It is hard to explain to anyone who did not hear it. She did not become another woman. She became a place from which another voice could be heard, lower than hers, and slower, and not in any hurry, and when it said, "It is related, O auspicious King," I felt the hair stand on my arms.

There was a merchant, it said, with money out in many cities. One day he rode out to collect what was owed him, and the heat came down on him like a lid, and he got off under a tree beside a wall and took from his saddlebag some dry bread and a handful of dates. He ate them. When he had finished he threw the stones away, hard, as one does when the meal is over and the mind has gone back to business; and the instant they left his hand a Jinni stood in front of him, tall as a palm, with a drawn sword. "Get up," said the Jinni, "so that I can kill you, as you killed my son."

"I never saw your son," said the merchant. The Jinni told him that his son had been walking past, as the people of the air do, unseen, and that the date stones had struck him full in the chest, and that he had fallen down dead. The merchant said that we come from Allah and to Allah we return, and that if he had killed a man he had done it without knowing it, and begged to be forgiven. "There is no help for it," said the Jinni, and took him by the collar and threw him to the ground and lifted the sword.

The merchant wept, and said a few lines of verse about how a day has two halves, one for blessing and one for bane, and how in a hurricane it is only the tallest tree that feels the strain. (My sister did not give the verses all the way through, and I will not either; the King's eyes had opened at the first line and closed again at the third, and she took the hint.) Then he said: "I have debts that are owed to me, and debts that I owe. I have children and a wife and goods in other men's keeping. Let me go home and settle with each person what is theirs, and I will be back under this tree at the turn of the year. I swear it by Allah, who is my witness and my surety. Then you may do with me what you like."

The Jinni looked at him for a long time, and took his oath, and let him go.

He rode home. He did what he had said: he went from door to door, and collected, and paid, and divided the property among his heirs, and told his wife and his children what had happened, and found them a guardian. He lived with them for the rest of the year. On the last day he washed himself as the dead are washed, and took his shroud under his arm, and kissed his household one by one, and went out, and they wept behind him as people weep for someone they will not see again. He came to the same wall and the same tree on the same day of the new year, and sat down under it, and cried.

While he was crying an old man came down the road, leading a gazelle on a chain. He bowed, and asked what a man was doing alone in a place that belonged to evil spirits, and the merchant told him. The old man was silent for a moment. Then he said that he had heard many stories, but that a man who rode back to be killed because he had said he would was something that, cut with a graver at the corner of the eye, would be a lesson to anyone who could be taught. He sat down beside him. "I will not leave this place," he said, "until I have seen what becomes of you and this Jinni."

A second old man came along, with two black dogs, and asked, and was told, and sat. A third came, leading a bay mule, and asked, and was told, and sat. I will not tell you the same story three times; my sister did not either, and observed, in her ordinary voice, that a thing twice told is of no use to anyone. There were four of them under the tree now, and then there was a cloud of dust coming over the plain, and a wind in it, and out of the middle of it, with his sword already drawn and sparks coming out of his eyes, the Jinni.

He took the merchant by the arm and dragged him out from among the others. "Get up," he said, "so that I may do what I swore I would do, and kill you as you killed my son, the lining of my liver." The merchant wept, and the three old men wept with him, and then the first of them, the one with the gazelle, stood up and went to the Jinni and kissed his hand, and said: "O crown of the kings of the Jann, if I tell you the story of me and this gazelle, and you find it strange, will you give me a third of this man's blood?" "If it is strange," said the Jinni, "and I say that it is, you shall have a third."

"This gazelle," said the first old man, "is my cousin, the daughter of my father's brother, and she was my wife for thirty years. We had no child. So I took a girl into the house to bear me one, and she bore me a son, a boy so fair that people stopped in the street. When he was fifteen I had to go away, to buy and to sell, and I was gone a long time. My cousin had learned the arts of the magicians when she was young. She changed my son into a calf and his mother into a heifer, and gave them both to the herdsman to keep with the cattle. When I came home I asked after them. She said the girl had died, and the boy had run away, and she did not know where.

"I grieved for a year. When the great feast came round, I sent to the herdsman for a fat heifer to sacrifice, and he sent me the one that my cousin had bewitched, the mother of my son. I took the knife and stood in front of her, and she lowed, and the tears ran down her face. I could not do it. I told the herdsman to bring me another, and my cousin said, 'Kill that one; we have none that is fatter.' I went to her again with the knife, and she lowed again, and I could not, and I told the herdsman to kill her and skin her himself. He did, and found no meat on her at all, only hide and bone. And I was sorry when it was too late for sorrow.

"Then I said, 'Bring me a fat calf,' and he brought me my son. When the calf saw me he broke his tether and ran to me and fell at my feet and wept, and I felt pity for him, and told the herdsman to let him go, and bring me a heifer. But my cousin cried out that it was a holy day, and only a perfect thing may be killed on a holy day, and we had no calf finer than this. I said, 'Look what I did to the heifer at your bidding, and what came of it. I am sorry for that. I will not do it again.' She said, 'By Allah, you will kill this calf today, or you are no man, and I am no wife to you.' And hearing these hard words, and not seeing her purpose, I went up to the calf with the knife in my hand—"

And at that moment the first call to prayer came out of the minaret across the river, and the grey was in the shutters, and my sister stopped, in the middle of the sentence, with her mouth a little open, as one stops on a stair that is not there.

She said, "And Shahrazad perceived the dawn, and ceased from her permitted say." That was the formula, the one the storytellers have, which she had from her thousand books; and I heard it that morning for the first time, and understood it as a lease. She had been given the hours till the call to prayer, and the call had come, and the hours were up. A lease can be renewed. I said what I had been told to say, which was that her story was lovely and well made, and she said what she had been told to answer, which was that it was nothing to what she could tell me the next night, if she lived and the King allowed it. We were doing something in front of the King, with the lamp for a witness, and none of us said so.

Then I got up from the carpet, and took the Roll from the table, and wrote the line. I made the short upright stroke in the column where my father drew his, and in the fourth column I wrote what was open: the Trader and the Jinni, at the tree, with the sword lifted; the first old man and his gazelle, at the calf, with the knife in his hand; the second old man and the third, waiting by the roadside with a pair of dogs and a mule. The reed scratched. When I looked up, the King was standing over me. He read the page. He read it for the length of one breath, as he had read every name, and for a moment longer; and he lifted his eyes to my sister, who was already asleep with her face in her arm, and he said nothing, and went out.

My father told me afterward that he had stood at that door from the last of the stars with the shroud under his arm, and that the King came out and looked at him, and at the shroud, and walked on to the hall of audience without a word, and gave judgments all day as if nothing had happened, and did not send for him. My father stood there the whole day. No one told him to go.

Night 1. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Trader and the Jinni, the sword lifted; the first old man and his gazelle, the knife in his hand at the calf; the second old man and the third, waiting.

Nobody came for a bride that evening. I suppose it was my father's doing, or the King's forgetting, or both: there was simply no name to write. The house was quiet in a new way, like a house in which a clock has stopped, and everyone keeps looking at the place on the wall where they used to be able to hear it. When the lamp was low, my sister sat up against the pillows, and I read her what I had written. "Ah," she said, "the knife." She said it as one picks up a thread. She would have gone on without it, I think, and told something else; she could not have said where she had been. Then the King, who had not moved, said, "Go on," and she went on.

The calf, she said, was not killed. At the last moment the old man's heart turned over in him, and he told the herdsman to take the animal back to the herd. The next morning the herdsman came to him and said he had news that would gladden him and earn the herdsman a gift. He had a daughter who had learned magic from an old woman in their house, and the day before, when the calf was brought in, she had looked at it and veiled her face, and laughed, and cried, one after the other. 'Father,' she had said, 'have you no shame, to bring a strange man in to me?' This was not a calf, she said, it was the son of their master, put under a spell by his stepmother, and he wept because his mother was dead, his father having killed her without knowing.

The old man went to the herdsman's house as if drunk without wine. The girl kissed his hand, and the calf came to him as before. She said she wanted no money, only two things: that he would marry her to his son, and that she might put the same spell on the one who had done it, for her own safety. He said: all the cattle and the goods in your father's keeping are yours, and as for my cousin, her blood is lawful to you. The girl filled a cup of water and said some words over it and sprinkled the calf, and said, "If Allah made you a calf, stay a calf; but if you were enchanted, come back as you were, by command of the Most High." The calf shook, and was a boy. The old man fell on his neck. Then the girl took her cup to his wife, and changed her, and said it was a shape that was not hideous. So the gazelle lived in the house, and the son and the herdsman's daughter were married, and in time she died; and the son went to seek his fortune in the cities of India. The old man took the gazelle and went from town to town after him, and so they came to the tree where a merchant sat in tears.

"That," said the Jinni, "is strange." And he gave the first old man a third of the merchant's blood.

The second old man, the one with the two black dogs, stepped forward. "If I tell you what these two did to me," he said, "and if you find it stranger, will you give me a third?" The Jinni said that he would. "These two," said the old man, "are my brothers. Our father died and left us three thousand pieces of gold, and we each opened a shop. My eldest brother sold up and went to foreign parts with a caravan. He was gone a year. Then one day a beggar stood at my shop asking for alms, and I said, 'God open another door for you,' and he began to cry and said, 'Don't you know me?' I took him to the bath, and dressed him in my own clothes, and cast up my accounts, and found that between us we had made two thousand over and above the principal, and I gave him half. The middle brother did the same, and came back as the first had, and I did the same for him. Then they wanted me to travel with them, and for six years I would not. At the end of six years I gave way. I looked at what they had, and found nothing: they had spent every piece on food and wine. I said nothing about it. I sold my shop and divided what I had, a thousand each, and buried the rest in the ground in case we should need it.

"We hired a ship and sailed for a month, and at a city we sold our goods and made ten for one. On the shore, as we were getting under way, there was a girl in rags, who kissed my hand and said, 'Is there kindness in you? Take me to your house. I will repay you for it.' I did. I was moved, and I do not know why. I put her in the ship and clothed her. I loved her. And my brothers, who had seen me prefer her to them, and had seen what I had, said to one another that it would be better if I were not there; and one night when I was asleep beside her, they took us both up, and threw us into the sea.

"I woke in the air. My wife had changed into a female spirit, a Jinniyah, and she carried me to an island, and went away, and came back in the morning. 'I am your faithful servant,' she said. 'I have paid you what I owed. I am a Jinniyah, and I saw you and loved you, and came to you as you saw me, and you married me. Now I have saved you from drowning. But I am angry with your brothers, and I am going to kill them.' I begged for them. I said that a man should do good to one who does him evil, and that they were still my brothers. She said that there was no help for it, and she carried me up and set me down on the roof of my own house. I opened the doors, and dug up what I had buried, and opened my shop.

"That evening I went home, and found these two dogs tied up in my house. They rose and whined and fawned on me, and my wife said, 'These are your brothers. I sent word to my sister, and this is what she has done. They will be as you see them for ten years.' It is ten years now, and I am on my way to her sister, to ask that she free them, and on the road I met this young man, and what has befallen him, and I stayed. That is my story." "It is stranger than the first," said the Jinni, "and I give you a third."

Then the third old man came forward, with the bay mule on a rope. "I can tell you something stranger than either of them," he said, "if you give me what is left." "You have my word," said the Jinni. "This mule," said the old man, "was my wife. I was away for a year, and when I came home I came at night, and found a man of her household lying with her on my own carpet, the two of them laughing, and talking, and kissing, and I do not know what else. When she saw me she came across the room with a jug of water, and said something over it, and threw it in my face, and said, 'Come out of that shape into the shape of a dog,' and I was a dog. She drove me out. I ran until I came to a butcher's stall, and ate bones. The butcher took me home, and his daughter, when she saw me, covered her face and said, 'Father, why do you bring a man in to me?' and he said, 'Where is the man?' and she said, 'That dog. His wife has put a spell on him, and I can undo it.' She sprinkled me with water and spoke, and I was myself. I kissed her hand and asked her for some more of the water, to do the same to my wife; and she gave it to me. I went home and found her asleep, and said the words she had taught me, and sprinkled her, and said, 'Come out of that shape into the shape of a mule.' That is the one you see."

Here the King made a sound. It was the first he had made in two nights: a short breath through the nose, and it might have been the beginning of a laugh, and it might have been the other thing. His hands, which had been between his knees, had closed. My sister did not stop. The Jinni, said the voice, turned to the mule and asked, "Is this true?" And the mule nodded, and told him by signs that it was.

The Jinni shook with pleasure. He said that he had given the old man the third of the merchant's blood that was left, and for their sakes he let the merchant go. The merchant embraced the three old men and thanked them. They wished him joy of his life, and went each to his own town, and the merchant went home to his wife and children, and the Jinni went back into the dust. "And this," said my sister, in her own voice, which was hoarse, "is nothing to the story of the Fisherman and the Jinni."

The call to prayer came across the river again. I had not expected it so soon.

I made the stroke, and I wrote what was open: a better tale than this, promised and not named. It was only while I was writing it that I saw what she had done. To a king who struck a name every dawn she had told, as her first tale, a tale in which a man's life was bought off a third at a time, with stories; and she had kept the wife and the mule for the last, when he had stopped guarding himself. When I asked her afterward whether she had chosen it so, she said that it was the first that came into her head. I did not believe her. I do not think she believed it herself, but I have never settled which of us was nearer the truth. The King came and stood over me. He read it, and I counted: one breath, two, and a third that he held a little before he let it go. Then he went out. My father, I learned later, was at the door.

Night 2. Shahrazad. Present. Open: a tale she says is stranger than all of these, promised, not begun.

Nights Three and Four: The Fisherman and the Jinni

When the King had gone out on the morning of the second day, I took the Roll under my arm and went to find my father. He was where I had been told he would be, with his back against the wall beside the door and the shroud folded across his knees, in the clothes he had put on the day before. He looked up at me as one looks at a stranger who is going to say something. I did not say anything. I opened the book at the page and held it out.

He read it. He read the line, and the column that was open, and then he put out one finger and touched the stroke in the third column, very lightly, as you touch a wet seal. "Who ruled that?" he said. "I did." "It is very straight," said my father. He gave the page back. I told him that she was asleep, and that she was well, and he nodded several times, and went on nodding, and did not get up. After a while he said, "Tell her I told that tale badly." He did not say which. I did not tell her. She knew.

The city talked. A maid who would not meet my eye told me, while she was filling the basin, that in the bazaar they were saying the Vizier's daughter had lasted two nights, and that the price of lamp oil had gone up because so many people were sitting up. My sister slept until afternoon. I did not sleep at all, and at sunset I was at the foot of the bed with the lamp trimmed and the Roll open on my knee, and my line ready in my mouth, when the King, who had come in late and had not yet lain down, said: "The Fisherman."

It was the first thing he had said without being asked. My sister turned her head on the pillow and looked at him for a moment as one looks at a bird that has come down on the sill. Then she said, "With joy, if the King permits," and he said, "Tell it." I put my line back where I had kept it.

There was a fisherman, said the voice, an old man, poor, with a wife and three children, who cast his net four times a day and no more. It was his rule. He had made it, I think, so that there should be a place where wanting stopped. One noon he waded in with his shirt tucked up, and cast, and the net came down on something heavy; he hauled until he thought his arms would leave him, and brought it up, and found a dead donkey, with the meshes torn. "This is a strange sort of daily bread," he said, and said the words people say, and spread the net to dry.

The second cast was a jar of sand and mud. The third was broken pots and bits of glass. He looked up at the sky and said what any of us would say: that he had cast three times, that the rule was four, that he had been given nothing, and would Heaven kindly consider. And the fourth time the net came down on something it could not lift; he had to dive to free it, and when he got it ashore there was a copper jar in it, the shape of a cucumber, yellow, heavy, with a leaden stopper pressed with the seal of Solomon son of David. "That," said the fisherman, "will fetch ten dinars in the brass bazaar." He shook it; it did not rattle. He slit the lead with his knife, and put the stopper on the sand, and tipped the jar to see what he had bought.

Smoke came out. It went straight up, a long way, and then spread along the shore, and then it gathered, and became a Jinni, with his head in the clouds and his feet on the beach, hands like pitchforks, legs like masts, mouth like a cave, teeth like boulders, eyes like two lamps; and the first thing the Jinni did was throw himself on his face in the sand and cry, "There is no god but God, and Solomon is the Prophet of God! O Prophet, do not kill me! I will never disobey you again!"

The fisherman found that he could speak, which surprised him. He said, "Solomon has been dead eighteen hundred years. We are at the end of the world. Who are you, and how did you come to be in a jar?" The Jinni sat up and looked at him, and the fear went out of his face and something else came in. "Good news, fisherman," he said. "You are going to die." "Why?" "Because you let me out." "I let you out of that jar, and I brought you up from the bottom of the sea, and set you on dry land, and that is why I am to die?" "Choose how," said the Jinni. "Choose the manner of it. That is my gift."

"Hear my story," he said, and the fisherman, whose breath was in his nostrils, said that he would hear it if it was short. It was not short. He had rebelled against Solomon, said the Jinni, with Sakhr the great one, and Solomon had sent his Vizier Asaf and had him brought in chains, and shut him in the jar, and sealed it, and had it thrown into the middle of the sea. "And I lay on the bottom. For the first hundred years I said in my heart: whoever frees me, I will make rich for ever. Nobody came."

Here my sister stopped. She let the quiet stand in the room, a long time, as long as it would take a hundred years to pass. I looked at the King. He was lying on his back with his eyes open, and his lips were moving a little, as a man's do who is counting something. "For the second hundred," said the voice, "I said: whoever frees me, I will open to him the treasures of the earth. Nobody came." She stopped again. "For the third I said: three wishes. Nobody came." Another silence. "After four hundred years had gone by I was angry, and I swore: whoever frees me from now on, I will kill, and let him choose his death. And you are the first."

"I did you good," said the fisherman, "and you pay me with evil. The proverb is right: we did them good, and they answered us with ill; such is every bad man's work." "No more talk," said the Jinni. "You will die." The fisherman said, "Spare me, so that God may spare you; do not kill me, or God will kill you," and the Jinni said that there was no help for it. And the fisherman said to himself: this is a Jinni, and I am a man to whom God has given a little cunning; let him take counsel with his anger, and I will take counsel with my wits. He said, "Before I die, in the name of the Most Great Name that is cut on Solomon's seal: will you answer me one question truly?" The Jinni, who had been enormous a moment before, flinched. "Ask, and be quick." "How did you get into that jar? It would not hold your hand. It would not hold your foot. I will never believe the whole of you was in it, not until I see it with my own eyes."

"You do not believe I was all there?" "I will not believe it," said the fisherman, "until I see you go in."

And the light came into the shutters, and the first call went up from the minaret across the river, and my sister stopped with her mouth a little open. "And Shahrazad perceived the dawn," she said, "and ceased from her permitted say." I said what I had been told to say. She said what she had been told to answer. The King lay with his eyes on the ceiling. I took the reed.

Night 3. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Fisherman and the Jinni, the Jinni turning to smoke to prove he can fit, the fisherman with the stopper in his hand.

On the fourth night my sister was hoarse. I poured her a cup of water from the jug and held it for her, and when I looked up the King was watching me do it. He did not say anything. I read her what was open, and she drank, and the King said, "Go on," and she went on.

The Jinni, she said, shook himself, and became smoke, and the smoke poured into the jar a little at a time, like water going down a drain, until the last of it was in; and at once the fisherman snatched up the stopper and pressed it on with its seal. He stood there with the jar clasped against him. He called out, "Now choose how you will die! I am going to throw you into the sea, and I am going to build a house here, and tell every fisherman who comes that in these waters there lives a Jinni who, in return for being let out, gives his rescuer a choice of deaths." The Jinni, in the jar, understood that he had been out-thought by a man, and that the seal was holding, and he said, "I was joking! I was only joking!" "You are a liar," said the fisherman. "And the vilest of your people." He started down to the water. "No! No!" said the jar. "Yes! Yes!" said the fisherman.

The jar softened its voice. It said that the fisherman was a generous man, and a Jinni was, after all, a creature of mere impulse. It said: let me out, and I will do you a service that will take you out of want. It said that the fisherman was right to be angry, and that it was ready to be sorry. The fisherman said that his case with him was the case of the Vizier of King Yunan with the sage Duban. "And who were they?" said the Jinni. "I am in a jar, and I have the time."

In the city of Fars, said the fisherman, in the land of the Greeks, there was a king named Yunan, who had leprosy. It had begun in his hands. Every doctor in his kingdom had been brought to him, and he had drunk their draughts and swallowed their powders and been rubbed with their ointments, and he was no better. Then a physician came to the city, an old man, a reader of books in six languages, who had heard of the King's sickness, and sat up all night turning it over, and in the morning put on his best robe and presented himself. "O King," he said, "I can cure you, and I will not make you drink a thing or rub on you a thing." The King said that if the man could do that, he would be rich to his grandson's grandson, and a companion at the King's table for as long as he lived.

The physician, whose name was Duban, went home and spent that night and the next day in his workroom with a mallet of the kind they use for polo. He hollowed the head of it, and the handle, and filled the hollow with his medicines, and stopped it up, and made a ball to go with it. On the third morning he took them to the palace. "Go out on the field," he said, "and play with this. Hold it as I do. Ride hard. When your hand is wet and your body is wet, the medicine will go in. Then bathe, and sleep, and in the morning you will be well."

The King did as he was told. He rode up and down the field with his lords behind him, driving the ball, until the sweat ran off him, and his hand was wet on the handle, and the drugs came out of the wood into his palm. Duban watched from the side of the field. When the time had come, he said, "Now go and bathe." The King went to the baths, and washed for a long while, and put on clean clothes, and went to his bed and slept. When he woke, he looked at his arms, and there was nothing on them. The skin was as clean as silver that has never been worked. He wept for joy.

In the morning he went out to the hall, and Duban came in and kissed the ground and said a poem; and the King rose and took him in his arms and sat him at his own right hand. They ate together. That evening the King gave him two thousand pieces of gold and a robe of honour and sent him home on one of the royal horses. The next day, five robes of honour and a thousand dinars; and so each day after, until the King said to his lords that this was a man such as one finds only once, and that he meant to keep him near for the rest of his days.

Now the King had a Vizier, said the fisherman, who was ugly to look upon, ill-omened, small in spirit and sour, and who looked on all this and could not eat. He waited until the audience was ended and the lords had gone out, and he came forward and kissed the ground and said, "O King of the age, I have been your servant since I was a boy. I have counsel for you. If I held it back I should not be the son of my father." "What is it?" said the King. "The wise have said that whoever does not look to the end of a thing has no luck in it. And I have seen the King go the wrong way. You heap honours on your enemy, a man whose whole purpose is the fall of your throne. I fear for your life." The King, who had gone pale, said, "Whom do you mean?" "I mean the physician Duban."

"Be silent!" said the King. "That is my only true friend, and the best of all men. He cured me with something I held in my hand, after all the doctors in the world had failed. Where else would you find his like, from the east to the west? From this day I give him a thousand gold pieces a month, and if I gave him half my kingdom it would be little. I know what you are. You are jealous, as the Vizier of King Sindibad was jealous—"

Light was in the shutters. The call to prayer went up across the river and came down again. My sister said, "And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day, and ceased from her permitted say," and I said what I had to say, and she answered, and I saw that she was too tired to be frightened. I made the stroke. I wrote what was open. I wrote it more slowly than the first time, because I was afraid of getting it wrong: the Fisherman and the Jinni, the jar by the sea and the stopper in the fisherman's hand; King Yunan and the physician, the Vizier's accusation just made; the King's answer to it just begun, and in it a King named Sindibad, whom I had never heard of. When I looked up the King had taken the Roll off the table and carried it to the window. He stood with his back to us and read it in the morning light. He read it for a good deal longer than a breath. When he put it down, he put it where he had found it, squared to the edge of the table, and went out.

Night 4. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Fisherman and the Jinni, the jar and the stopper; King Yunan and the sage Duban, the Vizier's accusation, the King's answer begun, a King named Sindibad not yet told.

Nights Five and Six: The Sage Duban, and the Four-Coloured Fish

By the fifth night I could no longer keep the Open column in a line. It had become a house with rooms inside rooms. My sister was telling a fisherman, who was telling a Jinni in a jar about a King, who was about to tell his Vizier about another King; and if I wrote only the last room, the others would be lost, and if I wrote them all in a row they would look like five stories instead of one inside another. So I began, that evening, to write the column as a stair. Each teller on his own line, a little to the right of the one before. When I had the whole stair down, I could read it from the bottom, where the one who was speaking was, to the top, where my sister was, and know whose mouth I was in.

"Go on," said the King, and my sister said that King Yunan had answered his Vizier like this: "You are possessed by the demon of envy, and you want me to put this physician to death, and then I shall be sorry, as King Sindibad was sorry that he killed his falcon." "How was that, O King?" said the Vizier; and the King told him.

There was a King of Persia, she said, who loved the chase, and kept a falcon that rode on his fist all night as well as all day, and wore a little golden cup at its neck to drink from. One morning the master of the hawks said it was a day for birding. They rode out to a valley and spread the nets, and a gazelle walked into them. The King, who was in the mood to make a law, said: "Whoever lets that gazelle leap over his head, I will kill him." The ring of beaters closed in. The gazelle came to where the King stood, and sat back on her haunches, and crossed her forelegs on her breast, as if she meant to kiss the ground before him; and he, who had not expected it, bowed his head to her. She went over it in one bound and was gone into the waste.

His men began to look at one another. The King said to the Vizier, "What are they saying?" and the Vizier said, "That you swore to kill whoever let her over his head." "By the life of my head," said the King, "I will bring her back," and he put his horse after her. He rode her down to the foothills of a range, where she went into a cave; he loosed the falcon, which went in at her eyes with its talons, and he came up and killed her with his mace. He cut her throat and skinned her and hung her from his saddle.

It was the hour of the siesta, and the land was dry, and there was no water, and the King and the horse were mad with thirst. Then he saw a tree that was dripping water from its branches, like butter melting. He was wearing gloves of hide, as kings do against poison. He took the little golden cup from the falcon's neck and filled it at the drip and set it in front of the bird; and the falcon struck it with her foot and knocked it over. He filled it again, thinking she was only too eager. She knocked it over again. He filled it a third time and offered it to the horse, and the falcon beat it from his hand with a flap of her wing.

"God confound you," said the King, "you unluckiest of flying things! You keep me from drinking, and you keep yourself from drinking, and you keep the horse." And he drew his sword and cut off her wing.

My sister's voice stopped. In the dark, I heard the King's breath come in and not go out again.

The falcon, said the voice, lifted her head, and told him by signs: look at what is on the tree. He looked, and in the branches was a nest of vipers, and what he had taken for water was the poison running from their mouths. He was sorry. He got back on his horse, with the dead gazelle, and rode to his camp, and threw the carcass to the cook, saying, "Take and roast it," and sat down in his chair with the falcon on his fist. And the falcon gasped and died.

"Did it die?" said the King.

He had sat up. He had sat up all at once, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and put his feet on the floor, and I thought, as clearly as I have ever thought anything: this is the night. I looked at the door. I looked at the lamp. I did not look at my sister.

"It died on his fist," she said, in the voice. "In the camp, where he had come back to eat."

"Because of the wing."

"Because of the wing, O King."

The King sat. I do not know how long. It might have been long enough to say a prayer. Then he drew up his feet, and lay down again, and turned his face to the wall; and my sister, who had not moved, drew a breath, and said, "And King Yunan said to his Vizier: I tell you, if I did as you wish, I should be as sorry as the man who killed his parrot."

He was a merchant, she said, who had a wife so beautiful that he could not bear to let her out of his sight, and when business at last forced him to go away, he went to the bird market and bought a parrot for a hundred gold pieces, to keep watch for him. It was a wise bird. It remembered everything it heard. And while he was gone the wife had a young man to the house, by day to dine and by night to stay. When the merchant came home he sent for the parrot first, and asked, and the parrot told him, and he went to his wife and beat her. She was not stupid. She guessed it was the bird; she called the maids and found that they all swore they had said nothing, and that the parrot had; and she gave them their orders. That night one of them ground flour in a hand-mill under the cage, and one sprinkled water through the roof of it, and one ran back and forth with a steel mirror, in the lamplight, all night long.

In the morning the merchant asked his parrot what had gone on the night before. "Pardon me, master," said the parrot, "I could neither see nor hear anything, for the dark and the thunder and the lightning all night." "But this is midsummer," said the merchant. "God knows," said the parrot, "that I saw what I saw." And the merchant, who believed his wife's version of the weather, pulled the parrot from the cage and dashed her on the floor, and she died. A few days later one of the maids told him the truth. He did not believe it until he saw the young man himself come out of her room. Then he drew his sword. He killed the young man, and he killed his wife; and he sat in the house with the empty cage, and mourned the parrot, when mourning was no use.

"Now what have I done to him?" said the Wazir, in the tale; and then he said that he had only the King's good at heart, and that if the King did not take his advice he would be destroyed like another Vizier, who played false with a young prince. "How was that?" said the King; and the Vizier told it.

A king's son, she said, was mad for hunting, and his father set a Vizier to ride with him. One day a great beast came up, and the Vizier said: "There is your quarry, Prince!" and the Prince went after it, and lost it, and lost his way, and found a girl in the waste, weeping. She said she was a king's daughter from India, who had fallen off a camel in a caravan. He put her up behind him, and when they came to a ruin she asked to be set down for a moment. She was gone so long that he went after her, and found that she was an ogress, and was saying to her children: "I have a fat young man for your dinner." They said: "Bring him quick, Mother." The Prince began to shake. She came out. "Why are you afraid?" "Of an enemy." "Pay him off." "He wants my life." "Then ask God to deliver you from him." The Prince lifted his eyes and prayed, and the ogress turned from him, and he went home and told his father what the Vizier had done; and the King put the Vizier to death.

So the Vizier of King Yunan finished, said my sister: "And you, O King, if you go on trusting this man, will die the worst of deaths. See how he cured you by something held in your hand: how do you know he will not kill you by something held in the same way?" And King Yunan, who was in the grip of fear, said: "You are right. He may be a spy. What shall I do?" "Send for him at once," said the Vizier. "When he comes, strike off his head, and you will be rid of him before he is rid of you." So the King sent.

Duban came in, happy, not knowing, and said a poem. The King said: "Do you know why I called you?" "God alone knows hidden things." "I called you to kill you." Duban stood very still. "Why would you kill me? What have I done?" "Men say you are a spy. I shall kill you before you kill me." And he told his sworder to strike. "Spare me," said Duban, "and God will spare you. Kill me not, or God will kill you." (Those are the very words, said the Fisherman to the Jinni, that I said to you; and you did not hear them, either.) "I cannot be safe without your death," said the King.

When Duban saw that it was no use, he wept, and said that he regretted the good he had done to those who did not deserve it. Then he asked for a little time to go home and settle his debts, and tell his people where to bury him, and give away his books. "And there is one book," he said, "which I want you to have. If you cut off my head, and open this book, and read three lines from the third leaf, my head will answer any question you put to it." The King was shaking with the strangeness of this; he sent him home under guard.

Next day Duban came to the hall in front of all the lords, with a worn old book and a little box of powder. "Take this book," he said, "and do not open it until my head is off. Then have it set on a tray on the powder, to stop the blood; and when the blood has stopped, open it." The King made a sign, and the sworder struck, and the head was set on the powder, and the blood stopped. The head opened its eyes. "Open the book," it said.

The King licked his finger and turned the first leaf, but it stuck, and the second, which stuck, and the third; and he did the same for six, and found nothing written on any of them. "There is nothing here," he said. "Turn more," said the head. He turned three more. The book was poisoned. The poison went through his finger and his lips, and he cried out, "The poison has done its work!" And the head of the sage Duban said some lines of verse, which I give as I remember them, which is shortly: that kings who ruled by the sword are gone, and what they did is done to them; that what you do to others will be done to you; that there is no use in being angry with Fortune. When the head was silent, the King rolled over dead.

"So you see," said the fisherman to the Jinni, "if King Yunan had spared the physician, God would have spared him; and if you had spared me, God would have spared you."

The light was in the shutters. My sister said her words, and I said mine, and she gave hers, and she sat very straight with her hands in her lap. I took the reed. Down the stair I wrote: the fisherman at the water's edge with the jar in his arms and the Jinni inside, begging. It was one line. The whole of the stair had come down, one room after another, to that.

I looked at the King. He had not turned over. I wrote the line, and waited for him to rise and come to read it, and he did not. His back was to me. After a long time he got up, as a man gets up who has been lying a long time on a hard place, and put on his robe, and went to the door without looking at the table. I had the Roll in my hands. I held it up. He did not see it. I think now that he could not.

Night 5. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Fisherman and the Jinni, at the edge of the sea, the jar in the fisherman's arms.

My father told me, afterwards, what he said at the door. The King came out and found him with the shroud under his arm, as on every other morning, and for the first time he stopped. He stood in front of my father, and looked at the shroud, and looked at my father's face, and said, "Go home." My father said, "Lord, I would rather wait." The King said nothing more, and went to the hall. My father waited.

On the sixth night I began the stair again, and there was only one rung. My sister, with a pillow at her back and the water jug at her elbow, said that the fisherman, hearing the Jinni plead, thought about it for a while. The Jinni swore by the Name that he would do no harm and would do good. The fisherman, who was a man who kept the rule of four, opened the jar. The smoke came up, and gathered, and stood on the beach; and the first thing the Jinni did was kick the jar clear into the sea. The fisherman wet himself. "This looks bad," he said; but he said to the Jinni that God had said: keep your covenant; and he said it as the physician had, and the Jinni laughed, and told him to follow.

They went round the walls of the city, and out over the fields, and across a stony place, and down into a broad waste, and in the midst of the waste there was a lake. The Jinni waded in. "Cast your net," he said, and the fisherman did, and when he hauled it in there were four fish in it, one white, one red, one blue and one yellow. "Take these to the Sultan," said the Jinni, "and he will give you what will make you rich. I'm sorry that I can do no better. I have been under the sea eighteen hundred years and I've seen the world for an hour. But do not fish here more than once a day." And he struck the ground with his foot, and the ground opened and shut over him.

The fisherman put the fish in a bowl of water, and carried the bowl on his head to the palace, and the Sultan, who had never seen such fish, gave him four hundred dinars; and the fisherman ran home with the money in his shirt, stumbling, thinking it was a dream. The Sultan gave the fish to the new cook-girl, who had been sent from the King of Greece only three days before, to try her hand. She cleaned them and put them in the pan with oil and fried one side; and she turned them; and the kitchen wall split open.

A young woman came out of it. She was beautiful, in a blue headcloth with tassels, with earrings and bracelets and rings with stones in them, and in her hand a long cane, which she poked into the pan. "Fish," she said, "fish, do you keep your covenant?" The cook-girl fell down in a faint. "Fish, do you keep your covenant?" said the young woman again; and a third time; and the fish raised their heads from the pan and said, "Yes, yes," and said a couplet together in one voice, which was that if she kept faith they would, and if she went back on it they would pay her back in the same coin. The young woman kicked the pan over and went out by the way she had come, and the wall closed. When the cook-girl woke the fish were black as coal. "His staff broke at the first blow," she said, and fainted again.

The Vizier found her like that and shook her with his foot. She told him. He sent for the fisherman, who went back to the lake and cast and brought up four fish exactly like the first, and the Vizier stood over the cook-girl while she fried them; and the wall split, and the young woman came out with her cane, and said, "Fish, fish, do you keep your covenant?" and the fish said, "Yes, yes"; and she kicked the pan over—

The light came. My sister, who had been telling for I do not know how long, stopped. I wrote what was open, down the stair, the one rung and then a second under it: the fisherman's fish; the cook-girl's pan; the young woman who asked them a question, and what they answered; and what the Vizier was going to tell the Sultan. My hand had a tremor in it. When I looked up, the King was standing beside me. I do not know how long he had stood there. He took the Roll from my hands, as one takes a bowl, and read it, and read it for as long as I could count to forty; and then he put out one finger, as my father had, and touched the stroke in the third column, very lightly, as you touch a wet seal.

He gave me the book. He did not say anything. He went out.

Night 6. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Fisherman's fish; the cook-girl and her frying pan; the young woman who comes through the wall and asks the fish if they keep their covenant, and what they say; the Vizier on his way to the Sultan.

Nights Seven, Eight and Nine: The Ensorcelled Prince, and the Porter at the Door

On the seventh evening there was a cushion at the foot of the bed that had not been there before. It was a plain one, of dull green silk, laid on the carpet where I had sat for six nights with my knees under my chin. Nobody said whose it was or who had put it there. I looked at my sister, who was looking at the ceiling, and at the King, who was looking at the lamp. I sat down on it. It was a good deal better than the carpet, and I will say now that I never said so to anyone.

"The fish," said the King.

The Vizier, said my sister, went to the Sultan and told him what he had seen, and the Sultan said that he would see it for himself. The fisherman was sent for and told to bring four fish like the others, and three men to witness it. He did. The Sultan had four hundred gold pieces counted into his hand, and said to the Vizier, "Fry them here, in front of me." The pan was put on the fire; the fish went into it; and the wall split, and a man came out of it as big as a piece of cliff, with a green branch in his hand, and cried, "Fish, fish, do you keep your old covenant?" "Yes, yes," said the fish, and they said their two lines. The giant put out the pan with his branch and went back into the wall. The fish were black as charcoal. The Sultan said, "This is not a matter to be left alone," and sent for the fisherman and asked him where the fish came from.

"From a lake," said the fisherman, "behind the mountain, half an hour's walk." The Sultan could not believe that there was a lake half an hour from his own gate that he had never seen. He took his army up the mountain with the fisherman for a guide, and there it was, in a wide desert between four hills, with fish of four colours in it. No one with him had seen it. The oldest men in the army had not seen it. "By God," said the Sultan, "I will not go home, nor sit on my father's throne, until I know the truth about this lake." He had the army camp round the mountain. He called his Vizier, a man of experience, and said: "My heart tells me to go out alone tonight and find the root of this. You will sit at the door of my tent. You will tell everyone who asks that the Sultan is ill and sees no one. Tell no one anything else." And the Vizier could not argue with him.

He changed his clothes and hung his sword on his shoulder and went up one of the mountains, and walked all night, and rested in the heat of the day, and walked all the next night. At dawn he saw a black point in the distance. It was a palace of black stone plated with iron; one leaf of the gate stood open, the other was shut. He knocked once, softly. He knocked again. He knocked loudly. No one came. "It is empty," he said, and went in. He cried out in the hall that he was a stranger and wanted something to eat. No one answered. He walked through the vestibule into the middle of the house. It was furnished with silk and gold, and the hangings were down over the doors; in the centre there was a court with four open halls round it, and a fountain with four red-gold lions at its corners, each pouring out water clear as pearls; and over the whole of the court there was a net of gold wire, and under the net there were birds, which could not get out. There was everything in it that a house ought to have except people.

He sat between two doors, thinking, and he heard someone sigh in a room nearby, a long sigh, and a voice reciting some verses about how a man who has been rich can be brought low, and how none of us can run from his fate. He found the door, with a curtain over it, and drew the curtain back. A young man was sitting on a couch, a cubit off the ground: handsome, with a white forehead and a rose cheek and a mole on it like a grain of ambergris; in a silk coat, with gold on it, and a crown with jewels; and his face was the face of someone who has been sad for years. He did not get up. "My lord," he said, "your rank requires that I rise, and I ask your pardon that I cannot."

"You are forgiven," said the Sultan. "Look on me as a guest who has come with a question. Tell me the secret of the lake and the fish, and of this palace, and why you are alone in it, and why you cry." The young man wept until his chest was wet. Then he put out his hand and lifted the hem of his coat. From his navel to the hair of his head he was a man; from his navel down to his feet he was stone.

"Lend me your ears," said the Prince; and it was his own tale now. He had been King of that city, said the voice, the son of a King called Mahmud, Lord of the Black Islands, and he had married the daughter of his father's brother, who loved him so well that if he were away from her she would neither eat nor drink till she saw his face again. They had been five years together when one afternoon she went to the bath, and he lay down in his own room to wait for supper, with two girls fanning him, one at his head and one at his feet, and he could not sleep. He shut his eyes. His mind stayed open. The girl at his head said to the girl at his feet, in the low voice that servants use when they think the master is asleep: "How wretched our master is, and what a pity, to be wasted so, and betrayed—"

The King got up.

I had been watching the Sultan, and the lake, and the lions, and I did not see him do it. I heard the bed give, and when I looked he was on his feet, in the middle of the floor, with his hands open at his sides, as if he had put something down and could not remember what. He did not look at my sister. He did not look at me. He went out of the door, and drew it behind him; not slammed it; drew it, so that the latch caught softly, and the lamp-flame leaned and stood up again.

My sister had stopped in the middle of the word. We sat in a silence that had something in it. After a time I saw that she was looking at me, and that her mouth had moved. "Shall I stop?" she said, with no voice. I understood that she did not know. A storyteller who has been told that she may go on has no leave to stop; but a storyteller whose listener has gone out of the room is telling it to herself. I looked at the door. There was a line of lamplight under it, and in the line of lamplight a shadow, which did not move. He was standing on the other side.

I said, to the door, "Go on."

I have asked myself since what I should have done if the door had opened. I did not know then. My sister drew a long breath, and took up the sentence where the King had left it.

"—betrayed by our mistress, the whore," said the voice, quite low, as if to a person in the next room; and she went on, and the shadow under the door stayed where it was. The other girl said: "God curse all women who play false. And a man like our master. She is out every night. Do you not know that she puts a drug in his cup, so that he sleeps, and does not know where she goes? She dresses in her best and goes out till daybreak, and when she comes back she burns a pastille under his nose and he wakes up."

He lay still. The light went black, he said, in front of his eyes, and he thought night would never come. When she came back from the bath they sat to supper, as they always did, and they drank their wine, as they always did, and she brought him his cup for the night. He raised it to his lips and tipped it down his shirt, and lay down, and let her hear that he was asleep. She stood over him. "Sleep," she said, "sleep, and never wake. By God, I loathe you, and I loathe your whole body, and I cannot wait for the day when God takes your life." Then she dressed, and put on her scent, and slung his sword on her shoulder, and went out; and he got up and followed her, and she went through the streets to the city gate, where she said some words he did not understand, and the padlocks fell off the gate, and it opened for her. She went out into the rubbish-mounds beyond the walls, and he behind her, unseen, to a reed fence round a hut of mud brick. She went in. He climbed on the roof and looked down through the smoke-hole.

In the hut, on a bed of cane trash and rags, lay a man, one of the hands from the stables, who had once been strong and was now a leper and paralysed, with a sore on his lip and a hoarse voice. She kissed the ground in front of him. "What kept you?" he said. "Others have been here, drinking, and each had a girl, and I could not drink for your being away." "My heart," said she, "my light, do you not know I am married to a man I cannot look at? If I did not fear for your sake I would not leave one sun to rise on his city; I would heap it up for the ravens and the owls." "Liar," he said, "you play with us." She wept, and humbled herself, and begged, until at last he allowed himself to be pacified. Then she asked what there was to eat. He told her to lift the cover on the basin, where she would find the bones of the rats they had had for dinner, and to drink the dregs of a jug of beer. She ate the bones. She drank the beer. She lay down beside him under the rags.

The King's shadow had not moved. I thought I heard him breathing, though I may have been listening to my own.

Her husband, said the voice, came down off the roof and took her sword out of the corner and drew it to kill them both. He struck the man in the throat. He thought it had been enough. The man made a long hissing noise; but he had cut only the skin and the flesh of the neck. The noise woke her, and he sheathed the sword and walked home in the dark, and lay down, and slept; and in the morning, when she woke him, she had cut off her hair and put on mourning. "Do not blame me," she said. "I have heard that my mother is dead, and my father is killed in the holy war, and one of my brothers has been stung by a snake and the other has fallen off a cliff. I can do nothing but cry." And the Prince said, "Do what you like."

I could hear the dawn coming. It was not light yet, but the air had the feeling of an hour that was about to be called. My sister said her words about the dawn, and her voice did not catch on them; and I said what I had been told to say, in a voice rather clearer than I meant, and she answered. I took up the reed. I wrote the stair, two rungs: Shahrazad, and under her the half-stone Prince telling the Sultan, at the place where his wife wept for her mother. The door opened. The King came in. He crossed the room as a man crosses a room in which he does not wish to disturb a sleeper; he took the Roll from my hands and read it, standing, and did not touch the stroke. He put it back in my lap. His face was grey. He went out.

Night 7. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Sultan in the black palace with the Prince who is stone to the waist; the Prince's tale at the place where his wife, in mourning, has begun to weep.

On the eighth night the King was already in the bed when I came in. He did not turn his head. He lay on his side with his face to the wall and his knees drawn up, as the young lie, and my sister did not ask him whether she might tell; she waited for me to read what was open and, when I had, she began, and he made no sign.

The wife, said the voice, wept for a year, to the end of its circle. At the end of it she said: "I want to build in your palace a tomb with a dome, for my grieving. I shall call it the House of Lamentations." "Do as you like," said the Prince. She built it. She had the wounded man carried into it, and laid in a tomb that was no tomb, since he could not die, and could not speak, and could not do anything but drink wine. She went there every morning and every evening and wept over him and gave him broth. This went on for a second year, and the Prince put up with it. One day he went in unawares, and found her beating her face and saying: "Why have you gone from my sight, my heart's delight? Speak to me, my life!" And she said some verses about how, if her lover were dead, she would be buried beside him. He told her that she had mourned enough. She said, "Cross me in nothing I do, or I will lay hands on myself." So he left her; and it went on a third year.

In the third year he lost patience. One afternoon, when something had gone wrong with his day, he went into the House of Lamentations, and heard her say: "Why do you never speak to me, my lord? Why do you not answer me?" And he lost his temper, and cried out: "Well-away! How long is this to last?" And she was on her feet at once. "You dog! All this is your doing. You wounded my heart's darling, and you have wasted his youth, and three years he has lain more dead than alive!" And he, in a rage, said: "Yes, I did it. You are the vilest harlot ever lain with by a groom"—and snatched up his sword.

She laughed at him. "To heel, hound!" she said. "What is done is done. God has delivered into my hand the man who did this to me. This is a fire that does not die." She stood up and said some words, and when she said them he felt his legs go, and cold come up into him, and he was what the Sultan saw: half stone, half man, neither dead nor alive. But that was only him. She turned the whole city to enchantment, with its streets and its gardens, and the four islands became four mountains round a lake, and the people of the city, who were of four faiths, she turned into fish, white and red and blue and yellow, a colour for each. "And every day," said the Prince to the Sultan, "she comes and strips me, and beats me with a hundred strokes of a leather whip, and I cry out, and I cannot move my legs to keep her off. Then she puts a hair-shirt on my back, and the silk over it, and goes to the man in the tomb, with wine and broth. She will come tomorrow at sunrise."

"By God," said the Sultan, "I shall do you a good deed that the world will not willingly let die." And he sat the evening by the Prince and talked, and lay down and slept; and before the false dawn he rose and took off his outer clothes, and drew his sword, and went to the House of Lamentations. He followed the light of the lamps and the smell of the incense to the man lying in the tomb, and he killed him with one stroke, and carried him on his back and threw him down a well in the palace. Then he came back and put on the man's clothes and lay down in his place, with the drawn sword along his side.

After about an hour she came. She went first to her husband, and stripped him, and took a whip to him, and he cried out, "Enough, enough, have pity!" "Did you have pity on my love?" she said. She laid the hair-shirt on him again and the silk over it, and went down to the tomb with a bowl of broth in her hand. "My lord," she said. "Speak to me, my lord." The Sultan, who had made his voice small, and slurred, the voice of a man who has not spoken for three years, said the name of God and that there was no strength but in God. At that she cried out for joy, and fell down in a faint; and when she came to herself she said: "Can it be that you can speak?" "Why should I speak to you?" said the Sultan. "All day you torment your husband, and he calls on Heaven till I cannot sleep from sundown to dawn; he curses us both, and if it were not for that I should long since have been well." "Then I will let him go from his spell," she said. "Let him go," said the Sultan. "Let's have some quiet."

She went out of the tomb and into the palace, and filled a bowl with water, and said words over it, so that it bubbled like a pot, and sprinkled her husband with it. "By the power of what I have said," she said, "if you are as you are by my spell, come out of that shape and be what you were." He trembled, and shook, and got to his feet, whole; and he cried out that there was no god but God. She told him to go, and never come back, or she would kill him. And she went back to the tomb. "What have you done?" the Sultan said, in his small voice. "You have rid me of the branch and not of the root." "What is the root, my darling?" "The people of this city and of the four islands lift their heads out of the lake every night, at midnight, and pray to Heaven against you and me. That is why I cannot get well. Go and set them free, and then come and take my hand and help me up. I am beginning to feel the strength come back."

She was overjoyed. She ran down to the lake, and took a little of the water in her palm, and said some words over it—

The call to prayer came up out of the dark. My sister stopped. I wrote the stair: two rungs, Shahrazad, and the Prince; and beside the rungs, in the margin, the Sultan in the tomb in a dead man's clothes, and the sorceress with a handful of lake-water, and the words she had not yet said. My hand was steadier than the night before. When I looked up the King was lying as he had lain, with his face to the wall. He did not rise to read. "Read it to me," he said.

It was the first time he had asked me for anything. I read it aloud, the whole of the stair, from the bottom up, in the voice I use for reading price lists, and when I had finished he said, "And the Sultan?" "In the tomb," I said, "in a dead man's clothes." "With a sword." "Along his side." He nodded, once, against the pillow. Then he got up and put on his robe and went out; and he stopped at the door, and did not look round, and said, to the air in front of him: "You wrote it down right."

Night 8. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Sultan in the tomb, in the dead man's clothes, with a sword along his side; the sorceress at the lake with the water in her hand; the words not yet said.

On the ninth night there was nothing for me to read that I had not read the night before, and I read it, and the King said, "Go on," and my sister went on.

The sorceress said the words, and the fish lifted their heads, said the voice, and stood up on the instant as men; and the lake was a city, with its markets and its shops, and each man at his trade, and the four hills were islands. She came back to the tomb, and said, "My love, give me your hand, and I will help you up." "Nearer," said the Sultan, in the faint voice. She came close, to embrace him. He took up the sword and put it through her breast, so that the point came out behind, and struck again and cut her in two, and left her where she fell. He went out to the Prince, who was waiting for him, restored; and the Prince kissed his hand.

"Will you stay in this city," said the Sultan, "or come with me to mine?" "Do you know how far it is to yours?" "Two days and a half." "If you are awake," said the Prince, "wake up. It is a year's march for a man who can walk, and you were not here in two days and a half but because the place was enchanted. I shall never leave you, not for the blink of an eye." "God be thanked," said the Sultan, "who has given you to me. From this hour you are my son, my only son, for I have never been given another." They embraced. The Prince told his lords that he was going to make the pilgrimage, and in ten days he was ready, and they set out for the Sultan's city, with an escort and gifts, and travelled a year. The Vizier and the army came out to meet them, for they had given up hope. The Sultan sat on his throne and gave gifts to the people. Then he said, "Bring the fisherman who brought the fish."

The man came in, in a rough coat, with his net still smelling of the lake. The Sultan gave him a robe of honour and asked whether he had children; he had two daughters and a son. The Sultan married one daughter himself, and gave the other to the Prince, and made the son his chief of the treasury; and he sent the Vizier to rule the Black Islands in the Prince's place, with an escort of fifty. So the fisherman became the richest man of his age, and his daughters were wives of kings. "He cast his net no more than four times a day to the end of his life," said my sister, "and that was the rule." (She said it twice.) "And this, O King, is not more wondrous than the tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad."

"The Porter," said the King.

There was a porter in Baghdad, she said, a bachelor, who intended to stay one. One day, as he was leaning on his crate in the street, a woman came up to him in a muslin wrap with a gold border and shoes embroidered with gold, and raised her veil, and looked at him with two black eyes, and said, "Pick up your crate and follow me." He did it so fast he almost left his feet behind. She took him to a Christian's door and bought a jar of strained wine; to a fruiterer's, and bought apples and quinces, peaches and cucumbers and lemons and oranges, and myrtle berries, and jasmine, and violets and anemones and every flower that was open; to a butcher's, and bought ten pounds of mutton; to a grocer's, for dry fruit and almonds and pistachios; to a confectioner's, for a platter of sweets; to a perfumer's, for ten kinds of scented water, and sugar, and incense, and ambergris, and wax candles; and at each she said, "Lift and follow," and he lifted and followed. "You should have told me," said the porter, "and I should have brought a camel." She hit him lightly on the back of the neck. "Step out, and don't talk. You will be paid."

She stopped at last before a house with a courtyard and a pair of ebony doors inlaid with red gold. She knocked with her knuckles. The door was opened by another woman, tall and fair, with a forehead like white flowers and eyes like a gazelle's; and the porter's crate almost came off his head. Beyond her, on a couch with a canopy looped up with pearls, there was a third lady, who got down and said, "What are you standing there for? Take it off this poor man's head." They unloaded him; they put everything in its place; and they gave him two gold pieces and said, "Go, porter."

He did not go. He stood looking at the ladies, and at the wine, and at the fruit, and at the silk, and at the three of them, and at there being no man in the house. "What is the matter?" said the eldest. "Is it too little?" "It is not that, my lady," said the porter. "I never take more than two dirhams. But I am troubled, looking at three of you alone, with no man in the house. A minaret falls over unless it stands on four. You are three. You want a fourth." They laughed. "And who," said the youngest, "is to assure us of a fourth who can keep a secret? We read in a book—"

Light came into the shutters. The call to prayer went out over the river, and my sister said that she perceived the dawn and ceased her permitted say. The King lay on his back with his eyes shut and his hand on his breast. I wrote down the stair, one rung, and a rung under it: the Porter in the hall of the three ladies of Baghdad, at the door of a secret he has not yet been asked to keep. When I got up with the Roll he was awake. He put his hand out. I put the book in it. He read it, and read it again, and then he turned the page back, and looked at the night before, and the night before that, and went back through all of them, to the first. He read them all, the way my sister had read the names. I do not know how long he took. I know that the sun came up, and that he was still reading, and that nobody dared come to the door to ask where the King was.

Night 9. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Porter in the hall of the three ladies of Baghdad, at the door of a secret he has not yet been asked to keep; the eldest lady, the doorkeeper, and the housekeeper, who have not yet said yes.

Nights Ten and Eleven: The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad

At about the middle of the morning on the tenth day, when the King had read the whole of the Roll twice and was beginning it a third time, there was a knock at the door. It was a quiet knock, the kind a man gives who has been working up to it for ten days. The King did not look up. "Come in," he said.

My father came in with the shroud under his arm, and stopped in the doorway like a man who has walked into the wrong house. His eyes went to the bed, where my sister lay asleep with one hand under her cheek; then to me, on my green cushion; then to the King, who was sitting at the table with the Roll open in front of him and a reed in his hand that I had not seen him pick up. "Sit," said the King. My father looked about him for a chair. There was no chair. He sat on the floor.

"How many are there?" said the King. He did not say of what. My father said that he did not know, lord. "You do not know." "I have never counted." My father looked at his hands. "If I had counted, lord, it would have been a number." The King was silent a long while. Then he said, "Count them." "Now, lord?" "Not now." My father waited to see if there was anything more, and there was not, and the King went back to his reading. As my father got up I saw him look at the shroud, as if he were not sure whether he was still entitled to it. "Keep it where you can reach it," said the King, not lifting his eyes; and my father, who had understood the sentence perfectly and had taken it for a mercy, went out. I took it for a lease. I have always been a little afraid of leases.

That night, when the lamp was low, the King said, "The porter," and my sister, with a pillow at her back and a cup of water on the carpet within reach, began to tell us what had passed in the house of the three ladies after the porter was admitted to their company.

I will not give it all. It was the kind of evening in which a man who has carried a load all day is given wine by three women who are, between them, rather cleverer than he is; and there is a game they play with him about the names of a certain thing, in which he is struck on the neck for every wrong answer; and the game goes on a long while. My sister told it cleanly and quickly and made it funny, and I will let it stand at that. At the end the porter knew that there are several names in Baghdad for the one thing, and that he had been using all of the wrong ones, and he rubbed his neck, and said that his neck and shoulders were on the way of God.

At nightfall they told him he might stay on one condition, which was that he ask no questions about anything that did not concern him. He agreed. They told him to go and read what was written over the door. He went, and found it there in letters of gold: WHOSO SPEAKETH OF WHAT CONCERNETH HIM NOT SHALL HEAR WHAT PLEASETH HIM NOT. I thought, listening, that every house in these tales has a sentence over the door. Ours had one on the flyleaf.

There was a knock; the portress went; and she came back to say that at the gate were three foreigners, dervishes, with their heads and their beards and their eyebrows shaved, and all three of them blind in the left eye. It was, she said, a most curious coincidence. They had come to Baghdad that evening and could not find a lodging, and had asked for the key of a stable. "And each of them," she said, "is a figure of fun, in his own way. If we let them in we shall have something to laugh at." So the ladies had them in, and made them promise what the porter had promised; and the dervishes sat down, and looked about them, and said, with one voice, that it was good. They took the porter for another of their trade, and said so, and he rose up with his eyes blazing, in a splendid temper, and told them to hold their tongues and read the door. It was the only time that night that anyone was afraid of him.

Then they sent for music, and the three dervishes took up a tambourine, a lute and a harp, and the ladies sang, and the noise was considerable; and there was a second knock. The cause of it, said my sister, was the Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, Commander of the Faithful. He went out into his own city on some nights in a merchant's coat, with his Vizier Ja'afar and his sworder Masrur, to hear what was being said of him; and that night, passing the house, they heard the harp and the singing, and he said that he wished to go in. "They are drunk, lord," said Ja'afar. "There is no help for it; I will go in," said the Caliph. "Find me an excuse."

The King, I saw, had turned his head on the pillow, and was listening to this with a peculiar attention. I have wondered since whether a man who has himself once walked out of his own palace in the night, with nothing but what he could carry, hears differently the part of a story in which a king slips out of his own gate to see how he is spoken of. I do not know. I know that he said nothing, and that when the Caliph's name was spoken he put one hand over his mouth.

Ja'afar knocked, and told the portress that they were merchants of Tiberias who had been dining with a man in the city, and had lost their way home. The ladies looked them over, merchants, men of weight, and let them in, on the same condition. The Caliph, offered wine, said that he was vowed to the pilgrimage, and the portress laid a gold-worked cloth in front of him and set on it a porcelain bowl of willow-flower water with a lump of snow in it and a spoon of sugar-candy; and the Caliph, who had been served by a thousand servants and had never in his life been given a bowl of water by someone who did not know who he was, said in himself that he would repay her.

Then the ladies stood up. The eldest, who kept the house, tucked up her sleeves, and the cateress opened a closet, and called the porter to help her, and out of the closet came two black bitches, on chains. The eldest took a whip. She had the porter pull one of the bitches forward by its chain, and she beat it about the head, while it wept and shook its head at her; and she beat it until her arm failed. Then she threw down the whip and took the dog to her breast and wiped its tears with her hands and kissed its head. She did the same with the other. And the Caliph's heart, said my sister, was moved, and his chest was tight, and he winked at Ja'afar to ask, and Ja'afar made a sign to him: be still.

Now the portress sat down, and the cateress brought out of the closet a lute in a bag of green satin, and played it, and sang three songs. I will not give them. They were songs of a lover who has been kept away; and at the end of the first, the portress cried out, and tore her dress, and fell on the floor in a faint; and they put a fresh one on her, and when her back was bare the Caliph saw on it the scars of the palm rod and the whip. She fainted at the second song, and at the third. It was a great deal to take in, in one night, and the three dervishes said that they wished they had never come into the house, but had slept on the rubbish-heaps outside the city.

The light was in the shutters. My sister said her words about the dawn; I said mine; she answered; and then the King, who had not moved for a long while, spoke. He said, "Did he ask?" My sister said, "Not yet, O King." The King said nothing more. I wrote the stair, one rung, and under it a second: the house of the three ladies, with seven strangers in it; the two bitches; the scars; the question that is forbidden, which is in every mouth, and which has not yet been asked. I turned the book round. He read it in the old way, standing, and he did not touch the stroke.

Night 10. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the house of the three ladies, the seven strangers who have promised not to ask; the two bitches, the scars, the question in everyone's mouth.

That evening my sister was sick behind the screen. She said it was the stuffy air and the tales together. She came back with a damp face and sat up against the pillows, and I said nothing, and the King said nothing, and I knew only that I had begun to be afraid for her in a way that had nothing to do with the King.

"Did he ask?" said the King.

They could not leave it alone, said the voice, none of the seven. The Caliph said to Ja'afar, "Did you not see the scars on her back? I cannot sit quiet or be at ease until I know." Ja'afar said that they had promised, and that it was better to be silent, and that in an hour or two it would be morning, and he could bring the ladies to the Caliph's court the next day and have the whole of it for nothing. The Caliph raised his head and said that he had no patience. They argued in whispers, the seven of them, and the voices rose, and in the end they agreed that the porter should ask. The porter stood up in front of the lady of the house and said, "Lady, these people would like to know the story of the two bitches, and why you beat them and then weep over them and kiss them, and why your sister has been beaten with the palm rod like a man. They have charged me to ask. Peace be with you."

"Is this true?" said the lady of the house. "Is this what he says for you?" They all said that it was, except Ja'afar, who said nothing. "You have done us a great wrong," she said. "We made a compact with you when you came in. It is not enough for you that we gave you our house and our food; you must also ask." She struck the floor three times with her hand. A door opened in the wall, and seven big men came out with drawn swords in their hands. "Bind them each to each," she said. They were bound. "Shall we strike off their heads?" said the swordsmen. "Leave them a while," she said, "I wish to know who they are."

"Lady, for God's sake, do not kill me for another's sin," the porter said. "These men did it. It would have been a lovely night but for these squinting dervishes, whose coming into a city would turn it to a desert." And he said a line of poetry about how the pardon of the strong is easy to give to the weak; and the lady, in spite of her anger, laughed. She said to them that they had an hour to live, and that if they were not men of consequence she would have hurried it. "Woe to you, Ja'afar," the Caliph whispered, "tell her who we are, or we shall be killed by mistake." "You asked for it," said Ja'afar, who had advised against the whole business. "There is a time for jokes," said the Caliph, "and a time for serious work."

The lady asked the three dervishes, "Are you brothers?" "No, we are only dervishes and foreigners." "Was one of you born with one eye?" "No, lady," said each of them, "I lost it in a strange affair, which, if it were written on the corner of the eye with a needle, would be a lesson to anyone who could take one." And each of them said that he was a king's son, ruling in his own right over a city. "Then," said the lady, "each of you will tell me his story, from first to last, and why he came to our house. And if it pleases us, he may rub his head and go in peace." "My story is soon told, lady," said the porter. "This lady hired me; she took me to a vintner, a butcher, a fruiterer, a grocer, a confectioner and a perfumer; and she brought me here; and what has happened to me since you know." The lady laughed and said: "Rub your head and go." "By God," said the porter, "I will not stir until I have heard what these others have to say."

Then the first dervish stood up, bound as he was, and told his story. He said that he was the son of a King, and that his father had had a brother, who was also a King; and that he and his cousin, the uncle's son, had been born on the same day. When they grew up he used to spend some months of each year at his uncle's court, and he and his cousin were like one person. One night, when they had been drinking, his cousin said: "I need a great service of you. Swear that you will not refuse it." He swore. His cousin went out and came back leading a woman, veiled, in rich dress; and told him: "Take this lady, and go before me to such a graveyard, and wait in such a tomb until I come." He swore that he would do it, and he did. Then his cousin came, with a bowl of water and a bag of mortar and an adze, and broke open the grave in the middle of the tomb, and dug until he came to an iron plate, like a small door; and under it was a winding stair. "Take your final choice," said the cousin, to the lady. She went down the stairs and was gone. "My friend," said the cousin, "when I have gone down, put the iron plate back, and the earth on it, and mix the lime in the bag with the water in the bowl and plaster the stones, so that no one who sees it will say: This is a new opening in an old tomb. I have worked at this for a year, and no one in the world knows of it but God. This is the thing I wanted of you." He went down the stairs, and he did not come back.

"That," said the first dervish, "is what I did; and I was drunk, and I put the plate back, and heaped the earth on it, and plastered the stones until the tomb was as it had been. In the morning I could hardly believe I had not dreamed it. I went to the graveyard to look for the tomb, and I could not find it. I looked for seven days. I went home to my father's city, and just outside the gate a crowd of men leapt on me and bound me, and I saw that they were my own father's subjects, and among them some of my own slaves. One of them, who had been a servant in our house, told me that fortune had turned on my father: his troops had betrayed him, and the Vizier had killed him and now sat on his throne, and had set watchers to take me."

And the dawn came, in the shutters, and the call to prayer. My sister said her words, and I wrote: the stair, with three rungs now, Shahrazad, the first dervish, and under him the cousin who went down the stairs; and what was open beside them was the Vizier on the throne and what he would do. I held the book out. The King read it standing, and said, to the window, "He plastered it himself." "Yes, lord." "And did not go back." "He went back. In a week. He could not find it." The King nodded as a man nods at the confirmation of a measurement. Then he put out one finger, and touched the stroke. I did not breathe.

Night 11. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the first dervish, who has plastered a tomb he cannot find again; the Vizier on his father's throne; the house of the three ladies, with seven strangers bound each to each.

Nights Twelve, Thirteen and Fourteen: The First Dervish's End, and the Second Dervish

On the morning of the twelfth day I saw what the reed was for. I had gone to the table to put the Roll straight, and I opened it at the first leaf, and there, in the margin where the clerks leave a thumb's width for binding, in the King's hand, which is square and a little cramped, was a column of small strokes: eleven of them, in rows of five, each row crossed through with a sixth, as the guards tally their days. He had been counting the nights. He had begun, I worked out, on the very first morning, and he had made a stroke every dawn after he finished reading what I had written, and I had not seen him do it because I had always been looking at the book and never at the margin. Under the eleventh there was a space for the twelfth. I closed the book and put it back as I had found it, square to the edge, and I said nothing to anyone.

That evening he said, "The first one," and my sister, who was pale, and had been sick behind the screen again, and had rinsed her mouth twice, said that the first dervish had gone on with his tale before the lady and the Caliph and the seven swordsmen, and I read her where she had stopped.

The young man, she said, had been dragged before the Vizier who had killed his father and taken his throne, and between them there was an old grudge. As a boy he had been fond of the stone-bow. One day a bird had settled on the roof of the Vizier's house, and he had shot at it, and missed, and hit the Vizier in the eye; and the Vizier, who could say nothing then, had said nothing for years. "What is my crime?" said the young man. The Vizier pointed at the place where his eye had been. "I did it by accident." "Then I will do it by intent," said the Vizier, and put his thumb into the young man's left eye. He shut him in a chest and sent him out to the waste with a sworder who had once been his father's, and who wept, and let him go. He ran to his uncle's city, and told his uncle everything; and the uncle, who had been looking for his own son for weeks, said, "Show me the tomb."

They found it. They went down fifty steps, through smoke, to a hall strewn with grain and flour and every necessity, with a canopy and a couch; and on the couch, in each other's arms, black as charred wood, lay the cousin and the woman. The uncle spat in his son's face and struck the body with his slipper. "It is the judgment of this world," he said, "and there is a harder one to come." And when his nephew cried out at the hardness of it, he told him what the woman was. She was the boy's sister. They had loved one another from the nursery. Their father had parted them, and shut her up, and threatened, and beaten; and the boy had spent a year digging a house in the earth where no one would ever find them; and God had struck them with fire.

The King lay still. Whatever he thought about a father who builds a wall between two people who do not wish to be apart, he did not say. My sister went on. The Vizier who had killed the first dervish's father marched on the uncle's city with the whole of his army and took it; the uncle was killed; and the young man, who now had no father, no uncle, no cousin and no eye, shaved off his beard and his eyebrows and put on a dervish's rags, and made his way to Baghdad to ask the Commander of the Faithful for justice. He arrived that night, and met the other two at a corner, each of them in the same state, each a stranger; and the three had come on together to the door.

"Rub your head and go," said the lady of the house. "I will not," said the first dervish, "till I have heard my companions." So the second dervish came forward, bound at the elbow, and kissed the ground, and said that his story was like no one's.

He had been a King's son, he said, who had read every book; the calligraphers admired his hand and the poets his verse, and the King of India, hearing of him, had sent to his father to ask that he be sent. He set out by sea with six ships. Inland, fifty horsemen came out of a dust-cloud and robbed them and killed his slaves and wounded him, and he ran. He came to a city and found a tailor who gave him bread and said: "Do not tell anyone who you are; the King of this city is your father's enemy." The prince said that he could write and reckon and read the stars. "Here that is worth nothing," said the tailor. "Take an axe and a rope, and cut wood." For a year the prince cut wood. One day, in a thicket where he had never been, his axe rang on an iron ring under a tree-stump.

There was a trapdoor, and a stair, and below, a hall, and in the hall a woman, who asked him whether he was a man or a Jinni. She had lived there twenty-five years, she said, and had never seen a man. She was the daughter of a King, and on her wedding night a Jinni named Jirjis had snatched her up out of the house, with the guests still singing, and put her there. He came once in ten days and stayed one night. If she ever needed him she had only to touch two lines engraved on the alcove. He had been there four days ago; there were six to go; the young man could stay five. The second dervish said yes, and yes. They bathed; they ate; he slept, and woke to find her rubbing his feet; she brought out an old sealed flask and sang. On the second day he was drunk, and stood up, and said: "Come, I will take you out of here and free you from your Jinni. I will break the alcove and call him, and kill him. It is a practice of mine to kill Jinn." She went white, and begged, and said a line about how the wise do not go on where they can stop. He raised his foot and kicked the alcove.

The light was in the shutters. My sister said her words, and I said mine, and I wrote the stair, three rungs, and under them the Jinni who was coming. The King read it standing. Then he took up the reed and made the twelfth stroke in the margin, and then, to my surprise, another, smaller, in the space beside it, which I did not understand and did not ask about.

Night 12. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the second dervish, who has kicked the alcove, and what is coming up the stair; the house of the three ladies and the seven bound strangers.

The next night the King said, "The second," and my sister said that the earth cracked and the Jinni came out of it in a rage, and found his woman on the floor with a cup of wine beside her, and said: "What is this noise? What has happened to you?" "Nothing," she said. "My heart was heavy, and I drank a little wine to widen it; and I got up, and the wine was in my head, and I fell against the alcove." "You lie, whore," said the Jinni. He looked about, and saw on the floor an axe and a pair of sandals. "Whose are these?" "I never saw them till now. They must have come on your clothes." He did not believe her. He stripped her and bound her and put her to the question. The young man could not bear the sound; he went up the stair on knees that gave way under him, and put back the trapdoor and covered it with earth, and went to the tailor, and sat in a corner thinking what a fool he was.

My sister did not give what the Jinni did to the woman to make her say what she did not know. She said that it took a long time and that the woman said nothing; and I will not add to it. The King had sat up. "She was twelve," he said, in the dark. "When he took her, lord." "And he came every ten days." "Every tenth night." "In a box?" "Not a box, lord. Earth." He was silent a moment. "How many locks?" "One, lord. A stair." "But it was a Jinni." "It may be the same one," my sister said. "They are numerous." And the King, who had himself once watched a Jinni set down a glass casket under a tree, and who had not, in all this time, asked how many such creatures there were, lay with his hand over his eyes while she took up the tale.

The Jinni, in the shape of a Persian, said she, went to the woodcutters with the axe and sandals, saying he had found them, and they told him whose they were; and he sat in the tailor's shop till the young man came in. He caught him up like a hawk taking a mouse, and carried him underground; and there was the woman, bound to four stakes, with blood coming from her. "Is this your lover?" he said to her. "I have never seen him." "If you do not know him, take this sword and strike off his head." She took the sword. She came up to the young man. He saw in her face what she meant to do and what it would cost her, and he signed to her with his eyebrows: This is the time for mercy. And she let the sword fall. "How shall I kill a man I do not know, who has done me no wrong? It is against my law." "I see," said the Jinni. "Only like pities like." He turned to the young man. "Strike off hers, and I shall believe you do not know her." The young man took the sword and lifted it; and she looked at him and said, without a sound: Have I failed you in anything? And he threw it down. "If a woman who has been shut up twenty-five years will not strike me, how can I strike her? Do what you like."

The Jinni took the sword himself. It was done in a few strokes, and my sister told it in a few words, and I will tell it in fewer. She died looking at the young man, and he made sure that he was next. "It is our law," said the Jinni, "that if a wife plays me false, I may kill her. I took her on her wedding night, when she was twelve, and she had known no one but me. I came every ten days, in the shape of a man. When I was sure that she had made me a cuckold, I killed her. About you I am not sure. But I cannot let you go unhurt. Ask a boon. Into what shape shall I put you: a dog, an ass, or an ape?"

The young man went down on his knees. "Spare me, that God may spare you," he said. "O Jinni, it would become you to forgive me, as the Envied forgave the Envier." "How was that?" said the Jinni; and the second dervish told him.

Two men, said my sister, lived in adjoining houses, with a party wall between. One of them envied the other. He looked on him with an evil eye and did his best to harm him, and could not eat for it, or sleep; and the other, whatever was done to him, prospered. The Envied, hearing at last how he was hated, said, "God's earth is wide," and left. He went to another city and bought a piece of land with an old dry well in it, and built a little oratory there, and gave himself to prayer; and holy men came to him, and the notables, and his name went through the country. The Envier heard of it, and came, and was received with all honour. "I have something to tell you," he said. "Send your dervishes away." The Envied sent them; and the two walked out together to the old well; and on the brink the Envier pushed him in, and went away, thinking him dead.

The well was haunted by Jinn, who caught him, and let him down gently onto a stone. "Do you know who this is?" one said. "He is the one who ran from the Envier, and has edified us here with his prayers; and the Envier has followed him, and thrown him in. And the Sultan is coming tomorrow to ask him about his daughter." "What is wrong with her?" "She is possessed. Maymun, the son of Damdam, is in love with her. If the holy man knew the cure it would be easy: there is a black tomcat in his oratory with a white spot the size of a coin at the end of its tail. He has only to pull seven of the white hairs and burn them under her." The Envied heard all this at the bottom of the well. In the morning his dervishes found him climbing the wall, and were struck with awe; he pulled seven hairs from the cat; the Sultan came; the daughter was brought bound; the hairs were burned; the thing in her head cried out and was gone. "What shall be done for the man who has cured her?" said the Sultan. "Let him marry her," said the nobles. And he did; and when the Vizier died he was Vizier; and when the Sultan died the people said, "Who but the Vizier?" So the man who had been thrown into a well became King.

One day, riding out among his emirs, he saw the Envier standing at the side of the road on foot. He turned to a minister. "Bring that man to me, and do not frighten him." And to the Envier, when he came, he said nothing. He said to the treasurer: "Give him a thousand pieces of gold, and load ten camels with goods, and send him home to his own town with an escort." And that was all. He did not punish him for anything that he had done.

The King, in the dark, had not moved. "A thousand pieces," he said. "And ten camels. And an escort. To his own town." "Yes, lord." He said it again under his breath, like a man learning a sum.

"You see, O Jinni," said the second dervish, with tears running into his shaved beard, "the mercy of the Envied to the Envier." And the Jinni said: "Do not lengthen your words. As to my killing you, fear it not. As to my pardoning you, hope it not. As to my bewitching you, there is no escape." He tore the young man from the ground and flew with him up into the sky, until the earth was a white cloud, and set him down on a mountain, and took a handful of dust, and said some words over it, and sprinkled him. "Leave that shape," he said, "and take the shape of an ape."

It was light. It had come while she was talking, and I had not noticed, and I had written nothing. My sister said her words, quickly, as if to catch up. I wrote the stair, three rungs, and the ape on the mountain. The King read it, took up the reed, and made the thirteenth stroke, and another beside it, smaller.

Night 13. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the second dervish, turned to an ape on a mountain; the house of the three ladies, with the seven bound strangers.

On the fourteenth night my sister told how the ape came down off the mountain, and crossed a plain in a month, and came to the sea, and saw a ship. He was nearly thrown off for bad luck, but he took hold of the captain's skirt and wept, and the captain took pity and made him his own. They sailed fifty days, and anchored under a great city, whose King's Vizier, the best calligrapher in the country, had died; and the King had sworn that he would have no other but one who wrote as well. The merchants on the ship each wrote a line on a scroll, ten cubits long, and the ape got up, to their horror, and took the reed, and wrote in six hands, one after another, six couplets of verse. The King read the scroll and no writing pleased him but that.

They mounted the ape on a mule and led him through the streets to the sound of drums; and the people said to one another, Is the Sultan going to make an ape his Vizier? He kissed the ground before the King three times. He sat on his heels. He ate at the King's table, and washed his hands in seven waters, and wrote verses on his plate about the food; he drank, and wrote verses on his cup; he played chess with the King, and won, and wrote a couplet on the board. The King sent for his daughter, Sitt al-Husn, to see the wonder, and she came to the door and veiled her face and said, "Father, have you no shame? You send for me to look at a man." "He is an ape," said the King. "He is a king's son," she said, "and an Ifrit has put a spell on him, after putting his own wife to death." She had been taught magic as a child by an old woman, she said, a hundred and seventy chapters of it. "Free him, then," said the King, "and I will make him my Vizier, and you shall marry him." She took an iron knife with the name of God cut on it in Hebrew letters, and drew a circle on the floor of the hall, and wrote names in it, and whispered; and the world went dark; and the Ifrit stood in the hall with his hands like pitchforks and his legs like ships' masts. "No welcome to you, dog," said Sitt al-Husn.

Of the contest between them I will say only that it was a good one. He was a lion, and she plucked a hair from her head and made it a sword and cut him in two. He was a scorpion; she, a serpent. He was a vulture; she, an eagle. He a black tomcat; she a wolf. He became a worm, and went into a pomegranate, which swelled to the size of a melon in the air and burst on the marble, and its seeds scattered over the whole floor; and she became a white cock, and ate them up, grain after grain, all but one, which had rolled to the edge of the fountain. The cock crowed, and clapped his wings; and the seed leapt into the water and became a fish, and the cock became a bigger fish and went after it, and the room shook with shrieks. Then the Ifrit rose out of the basin like a flame, and she rose after him like a coal, and they burned at one another until the hall was full of smoke and the King and the ape were pressed against the wall, trying not to breathe.

The voice had risen. The King was sitting up with his knees drawn up and his hands round them, and I saw him bite his lip. The Princess, said the voice, blew fire in the Ifrit's face, and the sparks fell on the three of them; hers did no harm; but one of his fell on the ape's left eye and put it out. One fell on the King's face, and burned off the lower half of his beard and loosened his teeth. One fell on the eunuch's breast, and killed him. Then there was a cry: God is great. The Princess had burned the Ifrit to ashes. She came to the ape and sprinkled him from a cup, and he was a man, save for the eye. "The fire," she said. "Father, the fire. He has struck me. I forgot the one seed. Had I picked it up he would have died at once. I am a dead woman; may God supply my place to you." A black spark crept up from her feet to her thighs, to her breast, to her face. She said the profession of faith, and she was a heap of ashes beside the other.

The King of that city wept, and tore what was left of his beard. He was ill a month. When he recovered, he sent for the young man and said: "Fate had decreed that we should be happy, safe from the chances of Time, until you came. Would to God we had never seen you. We took pity on you, and have lost our all. I do not blame you; it was out of your power to prevent it; and God be thanked that my daughter delivered you, though it cost her her life. Go now, my son, out of my city; and if I see you again, I shall kill you." The young man went out weeping. At a bath he shaved off his hair and beard and eyebrows, and put on a dervish's robe of black wool; and he wept every day, and said, "My eye, and not my life"; and he came to Baghdad, and found the first dervish standing about like a man with a question.

"Rub your head and go," said the lady of the house. "I will not," said the second dervish, "till I have heard the third." And the third came forward. "My story," he said, "is not like theirs, which fell on them from the sky. I drew mine down on my own head. I shaved my own beard and lost my own eye."

The call to prayer came. It seemed to me that I had been breathing high in the chest for an hour. My sister stopped in the middle of a sentence that had taken the third dervish to the foot of the Mountain of the Loadstone, and a stair carved in the stone, and a prayer. I wrote the stair; and put down the reed.

The King said, "The Princess did not see the seed." "She saw the others, lord. She ate each grain. She saw the one that rolled; she did not see where it went." He considered this. He took up the reed and made the fourteenth stroke, and, beside it, the small one. I could not stand it any longer. "What is the small one, lord?" He looked at it. "That is what is left," he said. "Each night I count what she has not finished. It is not a long sum." And he turned the leaf and showed me. In the space beside the strokes, in his square hand, very small, he had been making a second list, a night at a time: the Jinni, the dog and the gazelle, the jar, the lake, the fish, the porter, the tomb, the ape. It was my stair; it was the Roll, in the margin of the Roll. The thing was being kept twice.

Night 14. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the third dervish at the foot of the Mountain of the Loadstone, on a stair carved in the stone; the house of the three ladies, with the seven bound strangers and the two bitches.

Nights Fifteen and Sixteen: The Third Dervish

On the morning of the fifteenth day the King said to my father, in the passage, in front of two chamberlains and a boy with a ewer, "Take your daughter home for the afternoon." My father said "Lord?" in the voice of a man who has been handed something too large to carry. "The younger," said the King. "She has not seen the sun for a fortnight. Bring her back before the lamps." He went on. My father took me by the elbow as if I might break, and we went out of the palace by the side gate, and down the long hill into the city.

It was the first time I had seen it since the evening we walked up. The shutters were open. I had not known I would notice that. In the street of the dyers a child was running with a hoop, and a woman on a roof was beating a carpet, and the hot smell of the bread-ovens came out and met us at the corner, and an old man was selling pistachios from a tray; and I understood that for three years the streets of this city had been quiet in a particular way, and that the quiet had gone out of them in a fortnight like a splinter. At the third turning a woman stepped in front of us. She was perhaps forty, in a grey veil, with a basket on her arm, and she did not look at my father. She looked at me.

"You are the sister," she said. I said that I was. "Is she alive?" "She is asleep," I said. "She is well." The woman put her free hand over her mouth and stood so for a moment. Then she said, in a low and level voice, as one asks the price of an onion: "My daughter's name was Zubayda. She was fourteen. She was the three hundred and eleventh." And she looked at me as if there were something I was to do with this.

My father made a small sound. I said, "I will tell her." "No," said the woman. "Not her. I do not want her told. I want it written somewhere." She was not asking me to write it in the Roll; she did not know the Roll from a laundry list. She wanted it written, by someone, and she had picked out the one person in the city who was going into that palace. "I can write it," I said. "I have not got anything to write on." And my father, who for three years had carried the book of the thousand names up the hill every dawn and carried it down again, put his hand into his sleeve and drew out a little tablet of ivory leaves and a pencil of lead, which he used for his sums; and gave them to me without a word.

I wrote it down. Zubayda; fourteen; the three hundred and eleventh; the daughter of — "Bakr the cloth-dealer's widow," said the woman. "She had the dimple here." I wrote that too. When I looked up there were four more women behind her, and a man with a limp, and an old grandmother on a doorstep leaning forward with her hands on her knees. We were there an hour. My father did not hurry me. He stood in the sun with his head bent and the shroud under his arm, and when someone had finished telling me, he nodded to them, once, in the manner of a witness. In the end I had two leaves and a half. I went back up the hill in the evening with the ivory in my sleeve, and I did not give it to the King, and did not tell him what I had; I put it under my green cushion where my hand could find it. I did not know yet what it was for. I knew only that the Roll, which had one name a night, was a book with a certain kind of gap in it.

That night the King said, "The third one," and my sister, whose colour had come back, and who sat with her hands round a cup of cardamom, said that the third dervish had stood up before the lady and said that he was a King, the son of a King, and that he drew his own destiny down upon himself.

His name was Ajib, she said, son of Khazib, and his city stood on the sea. He had a fleet, and was fond of sailing; and once, going out to some islands for a month's pleasure, he was struck by a storm and by a current that took the ship away from every chart. They sailed eleven days. The look-out saw a dark thing on the water, and something bright and dark by turns on the horizon; and the captain tore off his turban and beat his face. "That is the Mountain of the Loadstone," he said. "In the morning the ship will come under its lee, and every nail in her will fly out of the planks and go to the mountain, because it loves iron. On the top is a dome of yellow brass on ten pillars, and on the dome a horseman on a brass horse, with a tablet of lead on his breast; and no one will be saved until he falls."

The ships came apart in the morning, as he had said. The prince was thrown on a plank to the foot of the cliff; there were steps cut in the rock; he climbed them and slept under the dome and heard a voice in his sleep: Dig under your feet. You will find a bow of brass and three arrows of lead with names on them. Shoot the horseman, and he will fall in the sea, and the horse at your feet; bury it where the bow was. The sea will rise to the top of the mountain, and a man of brass will come in a skiff, with two paddles. Embark with him. But do not say the name of God, whatever you see. He will row you ten days, and set you among the Islands of Safety.

He dug. He found the bow. He shot; the horseman fell; the horse dropped at his feet; he buried it. The sea came up the mountain like a floor rising, and the skiff came, with its man of brass, who said nothing, and the prince did not either. They went ten days. On the tenth, when the green line of the Islands of Safety rose out of the water, the prince, from joy, from sheer relief, cried out, "God! God is great! There is no god but God!" and the skiff turned over and the man of brass sank like a stone.

"He broke the one rule," said the King.

"He was in the sight of land, lord."

"He broke the one rule." The King was silent. I know now that he was not talking about the prince.

He swam all day, my sister said, and at night a wave like a hill threw him high up a beach, and in the morning he found that he was on an islet with a stand of low trees, and thought: whatever frees me from one great calamity throws me into a greater. Then he saw a ship, and climbed a tree. Ten slaves came ashore with iron hoes and baskets and dug in the middle of the island until they uncovered a plate of metal, and lifted a trapdoor; and they brought from the ship bread and flour and honey and carpets and lamps and everything that a house could want, and took it down; and last of all an old, old man, a bone in a rag of blue, leading by the hand a boy of such beauty that the poets would have given up. They went down. They were an hour. The slaves and the old man came up without him, and put back the plate, and heaped the earth over it, and sailed away.

When the ship was out of sight the prince came down out of his tree, and dug, and went down the stair. In a hall as bright as a bride's room, among flowers and fans, sat the boy, alone. He went white. "Do not be afraid," said the prince. "I am a man like you, and a king's son. Fate has sent me to keep you company." And the boy told him. His father was a jeweller, who had had no children, and who had dreamed a dream that he should be given a son who would not live long. The astrologers had cast the boy's birth. He should live fifteen years; in the fifteenth was a danger, and if he passed it, he would live to be old; and the danger was this: in the Sea of Peril was a mountain called the Magnet, and on it a horseman; and fifty days after the horseman fell, the boy would die, and his killer would be he who shot him down, a Prince named Ajib, the son of King Khazib. "Ten days ago," said the boy, "my father had word that the horseman had fallen. So he has put me here. When forty days are over, if I am alive, he will come for me." And the prince, who was Ajib, son of Khazib, understood that he was the one. He said nothing. He said to himself: By God, I will not kill him.

For thirty-nine days he served the boy. He lighted his lamps and warmed his water; he cut his fruit; they played at board-games; he told him stories at night until the boy slept, and covered him up. He thought: the astrologers lied. On the fortieth night the boy said, "Heat me water, brother, and wash me, and change my clothes; I am saved. Then cut me a melon and sweeten it with a little sugar-candy." The prince washed him with lupin-meal and rubbed him down and spread his bed. He went to the store and found a melon, and said: "Have you a knife?" "There, over my head, on the high shelf." The prince climbed up and took the knife from its sheath, and his foot slipped on the step, and he fell on the boy with the blade in his hand; and it went into the boy's heart as if it had been planted there.

My sister told it in a single level breath. The King had closed his eyes. "He did not mean to," he said. "No, lord." "He did every one of the things," said the King. "He washed him. He cut the fruit." "Yes, lord." "And it was on the last day." He did not say anything else for some time. I thought of the old jeweller, who had put his son into the ground in order to keep him alive, and I thought of a cousin, in another tale, who had dug a house in the earth in order to keep a woman; and I wondered whether, in all the tales that were to come, there was going to be anyone who did not build a room underground. I did not say that. I said, "Shall I read what is open?" and the King said, "Not yet."

The prince, said my sister, shut the trapdoor and heaped the earth on it, and climbed into his tree; and the ship came back, and the old man, and the slaves, and found the boy dead on his couch with the knife in his heart and clean linen on him. They carried him up, and wrapped him in silk, and the old man fell down and put dust on his head and tore out his beard, and fainted; and at sunset he came to himself and spoke some lines of verse that I do not remember, and he gave one sob, and his soul went out of him. The slaves took both bodies on board the ship, and sailed. The prince stayed in the tree until they were out of sight.

The light came. I wrote the stair: Shahrazad; the third dervish; and, under him, a ship going away with two bodies, and an island with an underground room and no one in it. I held out the book. The King read it, and made the fifteenth stroke, and then the small one; and he turned the leaf, and with his own pen, in his own cramped hand, wrote under the list a new line: the melon. Then he looked at the cushion, and at the place where my hand had gone to lie, and he said nothing about it.

Night 15. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the third dervish, alone on an island with an empty room under it, a ship gone away; the house of the three ladies, with the seven bound strangers.

On the sixteenth night my sister said that the prince stayed a month on the island, going about by day and sleeping in the room at night, and that he noticed one morning that the water to the west went out every day a little farther. By the end of the month there was dry land, and he forded it, and came to sand in which a camel would sink to the knee, and a light burning in the distance that was not a fire but the gate of a palace, of burnished copper, in the sun. Ten young men met him at the door, in rich clothes, all of them blind of the left eye; and an old man. They took him in; they put him at the foot of the hall, on the floor; the ten sat each on his own couch with blue covers, and the old man on a smaller one in the middle. "Do not ask us anything about ourselves," said the old man. He gave them all food. When the hall was dark, the ten said, "Bring us our usual," and the old man went out and returned with ten trays, with ten candles on them, and under the covers there was ashes and charcoal and the soot of kettles. The ten tucked up their sleeves and blackened their faces and beat their breasts and wept, crying, "We were sitting at ease and our frowardness brought us unease." They did this all night; at dawn they washed, and put on fresh clothes. He lived with them a month. He could not eat for wanting to know.

"Tell me," said Ajib, "or let me go." "Do not ask. You will lose your eye." "I must know." And they gave in: they slaughtered a ram and skinned it and sewed him into the skin, with a knife, and told him that the bird Rukh would take him in its claws and put him down on a mountain, and he was to cut his way out, and walk half a day to a palace of aloes and sandal-wood. "That is where we lost our eyes. We will not tell you why; it would take too long."

The bird took him. He cut himself out. He walked to a palace in a hall like a racecourse, with a hundred doors of sandal-wood, and at the top of it forty young women, each one of them like the moon, who rose and said: "Welcome. We have waited for you this month. You are our lord; we are your servants." They fed him and bathed him. He drank wine with them, and they played the lute, and each night he chose one to lie with. He thought: this is life, and the only trouble is that it passes. A year went by, in this way, to the new year. And on the first day of it, they came to him in tears. "We have to leave you," they said. "We are the daughters of kings. Once a year we must go away for forty days. We will give you the keys to forty chambers. Thirty-nine you may open. The fortieth you must not open, for in it is what will part us for ever." He swore. He kissed the girl who wept. He watched them fly away like birds.

My sister's voice dropped to a murmur. Thirty-nine chambers, she said, in thirty-nine days. A garden with fruit on every tree. A plain with date-palms and a river. A hall of cages of sandal-wood, and birds. A saloon with forty rooms leading off it, full of pearls and rubies and emeralds. He opened them one at a time, as one eats a meal that one does not want to end. And on the fortieth day there was only one door; and he stood in front of it, and the rest of his life, he said, was in the way he stood. There was one day left of the forty. He opened it.

The King had turned his face to the wall. I saw his shoulders. "One day," he said, into the pillow. "One day, lord." "He had thirty-nine." "Yes, lord." I could not tell what he meant to do with this; whether he was angry at the prince, or at the princesses, who had left a door to be opened, or at himself. I looked at my sister. She went on.

A scent met him, said the voice, so keen that it made him swoon; and when he came to himself there was a floor of saffron, and candelabra of gold, and two great censers burning aloes, and in the middle, black as the darkest night, a horse, saddled and bridled, with a saddle of red gold, between two crystal mangers, one of sesame and one of rose-water. He thought: there must be a mystery in this. He led it out. It would not move. He struck it with the rein; and it neighed like thunder and opened a pair of wings and rose with him into the sky for an hour, and set him down on a terrace roof, and shook him off, and struck him across the face with its tail, and put out his left eye. Then it flew away.

He went down off the terrace into the hall of the ten one-eyed men. "No welcome to you," they said. "We were all happy, and ate and drank of the best, and slept on cloth of gold with our heads in beauty's lap, and we could not wait one day to have the delights of a year." He asked for a tray of soot to blacken his face. "No." They drove him out. So he shaved his beard and his eyebrows, and wandered in a dervish's coat, and came to Baghdad on the evening of that same night; and that was how it was, with the three of them, blind in the one eye, come to the door.

The lady of the house said, "Rub your head and go." "I will not," he said, "till I have heard the others"; and she turned to the Caliph and Ja'afar and Masrur, who were bound each to each, and said, "And you." Ja'afar spoke up, with the story of the merchants of Mosul who had lost their way in the dark, and the lady, who was not a fool, and had some idea who had come to her house, said, "I grant you your lives, each for the sake of the other. Now go." They went out into the street. The Caliph turned to the dervishes. "Where will you go now? The morning has not come." "We do not know." "Come and spend the rest of the night with us," said the Caliph; and to Ja'afar, "Take them home with you, and bring them to me tomorrow, that we may write down their adventures."

He did not sleep. He lay awake wondering about the ladies, and the bitches, and what was under the stripes. At first light he sat on his throne of state, and said, "Ja'afar, bring me the three ladies, and the two bitches, and the three dervishes." And they were brought, and the ladies were veiled. "We pardon you your rudeness to us," said Ja'afar, "in consideration of the kindness that went before it, and because you did not know who we were. Know that you stand before Harun al-Rashid, Commander of the Faithful, of the house of Abbas. Speak the truth." The eldest lady came forward. "O Commander of the Faithful," she said, "my story is one which, if it were written on the corner of the eye with a needle, would be a lesson to anyone who could be taught."

The call to prayer came. I had my hand under my cushion. I wrote the stair: Shahrazad; the Caliph, on his throne, with the ladies standing before him, veiled, and the eldest about to speak. I turned the book to the King. He read it, made the sixteenth stroke and the small one, and, in the margin of the margin, wrote: the door. I put the reed down. And he said, without looking up from the page, "What have you got under the cushion?"

I said, "Names, lord." He waited. I took out the ivory leaves and held them to him, and he read them as he had read the Roll, in the old way, standing, for the length of one breath each, and I counted them: Zubayda, fourteen, the dimple; a Fatima; a Nur; a girl whose mother did not know her age. At the end he gave them back to me. His face was the colour of the paper. "Keep them," he said. "Where?" "With the book." And he went out, and left me with the ivory in my hand, and the sense, which I have never lost, that I had been given something to carry that was heavier than it looked.

Night 16. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Caliph on his throne, and the three ladies, veiled, and the eldest about to speak; the two bitches; and a small book of names, which is not a tale.

Nights Seventeen, Eighteen and Nineteen: The Eldest Lady and the Portress; the Three Apples Begin

By the seventeenth day there were two hundred people at the side gate at noon. I do not know how they heard. The woman in the grey veil had told her neighbours, and the neighbours their cousins; someone at the dyers' had told the water-sellers; and when my father and I came down the hill with the ivory tablets in my sleeve there was a line along the wall of the palace as long as the line at the bakers' on the eve of a feast. They stood quietly. They had brought nothing with them, no petitions, no money, only the name of a girl, in the mouth, as one carries a coin under the tongue.

The King had sent a stationer. I had not asked. A man in an apron stood by the gate with a book under his arm, a real one, bound in plain blue cloth with a hundred leaves ruled for writing, and he put it into my hands and said that it had been paid for, and would not say by whom; and my father, who had been sitting on a stool in the shade with the shroud across his knees, looked at the book and at me and nodded his head, once, and so I sat down on the step with the book on my knee and began. One name, and what the mother or the brother or the neighbour remembered: a laugh, a shawl, a trade, a way of walking. My father sat beside me, and as each one finished, he bowed his head in the way of a witness.

An old man came who had no one with him. He said he wanted to write down his sister's name. She had been the eight hundred and fifth, he said, or near it. He did not know her trade, because she had had none; she had been a girl in a house at the end of a lane, and she had loved plums. He had come, he said, because the day before he had seen a clerk of the Vizier's pass by in the street and had thought: someone knows. He looked at my father. "Which of them was it who drew the line?" My father said, "I did." The old man looked at him. He was not angry. He was only looking, as one looks at a man to see how he is made. "Then you might as well write it," he said. "You know her." And my father took the pencil out of my hand, and the book, and wrote, without being told, in the flat clerk's hand he used for the Roll: Hind, daughter of Salim the lamp-maker; she had a grey shawl and a gap in her teeth; the eight hundred and fifth. He had never counted. He had it by heart.

That night the King said, "The eldest," and my sister, with a new brazier at her feet that nobody explained, said that the eldest lady had stood before the Caliph and said that the two black bitches were her sisters.

Her father had died, she said, and her mother after him, and the three thousand pieces of gold had been divided, a thousand to each of the daughters; and the elder two had married and gone with their husbands to trade, and in five years they had come back to her, one after the other, in rags, abandoned by men who had spent every coin. She took them in. She washed them, and dressed them in her own clothes, and shared her money with them, because, she said, I have made more by spinning silk, and God has blessed it. They stayed a year; then they wished to marry again, and she told them what she thought of marriage; and they married, and were abandoned again, and came back; and she took them in again. At last she fitted out a ship, and they asked to go with her, because they could not bear to be parted from her; and a storm took them off the chart, and eleven days later they put in at a city none of them had heard of.

At the gate of that city there were men standing with staves in their hands who were stone. In the market there was gold lying on the stalls, and nobody to mind it, because every man was stone; in the palace the King sat on his throne with his viziers round him, and all were stone, and the Queen lay in her robes and was stone. The sisters went to collect what they could carry, as people do, and the youngest walked on, up through the empty halls, to a room at the back where a single lamp was burning on a table beside a couch; and, listening, she heard a voice reading the Koran.

It was a boy. He sat in a closet that was a small mosque, with a book on a stand in front of him, quite alone, and he looked up and gave her good-day as if she had been expected. "Tell me why you have come," he said, "and I shall tell you what has happened here." She told him. And he said that the city was his father's, and that the King on the throne was his father, and the Queen in the alcove his mother; and that they and all the people had worshipped fire, until a voice came from the sky and cried to them three times, once a year for three years, to worship God; and they did not listen. In the third year, at dawn, they became stone. The boy alone had been spared, because he alone had learned the faith, secretly, from an old woman who had been his nurse, and who was dead; and he had stayed, reading, and keeping the lamp, for as long as it had been. He was tired of being the only person awake.

"Come with me to Baghdad," said the eldest lady. "I have a ship. You shall be my husband, and I your servant." And she persuaded him, with the arts of a person who has not been loved by anyone for a long time and has just found someone; and he came. She took only what was light and precious from the treasuries. When her sisters saw the boy at her side, the sisters, who had been abandoned twice, and who had not once been refused a place in her house, were jealous of him, and said nothing; and that night, off Basra, when the lady and the boy were asleep, they lifted them, bed and all, and threw them into the sea.

"Did he drown?" said the King.

"He could not swim, lord."

The King put his hand over his face. My sister did not wait for him. She said that the lady got hold of a plank in the dark and was carried to an island and walked in the morning to the mainland. Two hours from the city, she saw a great serpent come fleeing along the track, with a dragon after her, and the dragon caught her by the tail; and the lady, who had a good deal of grief to put somewhere, picked up a stone and threw it with all her strength and killed the dragon. The serpent opened a pair of wings and flew off. The lady lay down and slept, and when she woke a black girl was kneeling at her feet, rubbing them, with two black bitches by her. "I am the serpent," the girl said. "I am a Jinniyah, and he was a Jinni who hated me. You saved my life. I went to the ship where your sisters threw you, and I took everything that was in it and put it in your house, and sank the ship; and I have made your sisters into these." She set them down on the lady's roof. "Every day you will give each of them three hundred strokes. If you fail, I shall come and shut you in the earth, for ever." And she gave her a ringlet of her own hair, to burn when she wanted her.

"And I have done it every day," said the eldest lady to the Caliph, "and I pity them, and I weep, and they know it is not by my will."

The first light was on the shutters. I wrote the stair: the Caliph and Ja'afar and the three ladies, the portress about to speak; and, in the margin, because the King had said it was to go there, what my father had written: Hind, daughter of Salim the lamp-maker, the eight hundred and fifth. I did not know whether it belonged. I put it where the book of names was, which was beside the Roll, which was in the margin of the Roll; and the King read it all, and made his stroke, and then stood with the pen in his hand for a long time, and said, to the page, "She took them back twice."

"Yes, lord."

"And they threw her in the sea."

"Yes, lord."

He wrote the small stroke. And, under it, in the list, a word I could not read upside down.

Night 17. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Caliph, the eldest lady, and the second lady, the portress, who is about to speak; the two black bitches; and a book of names, which has a hundred leaves.

On the eighteenth night the King said, "The one with the stripes," and my sister, who was holding a piece of bread in her hand which she had forgotten to eat, said that the portress had stood forward and said she was the daughter of a rich man who had died and left her much, and she had married a richer, who also died; and she had eighty thousand dinars.

An old woman came to her door one day, with a face like a dried date and a voice like a bell, and told a story of an orphan girl who was to be married that night, among strangers; and the portress, who was kind, said she would come. The old woman took her through the streets to a great house with a black curtain on the door, and in it a beautiful girl on a couch rose and kissed her. "I have a brother," said the girl. "He saw you at weddings. He has been in love with you for a year. It was he who sent the old woman." She clapped her hands, and a door opened, and out came a young man of such good looks and good manners that the portress, who had been a widow some while, found that it was no great hardship to be tricked. The Kazi came in with his four witnesses and the contract was drawn. The young man said: "I have a condition. Swear on this book that you will never look at another man, nor incline yourself to one." She swore it. She was very happy; they lived a month in perfect pleasure.

Then she asked leave to go to the market, to buy some silks. The old woman went with her. They sat in front of a young merchant's shop, and he showed her everything he had, and would take no money for it; he would take one kiss. The old woman whispered: "What harm? Don't speak to him, don't lean over him; it's only a kiss, and you keep your oath, and your money." The portress said that she would not. She was talked into it, in the end, by the sort of voice that has talked many people into many things; she held up the edge of her veil, and he put his mouth to her cheek, and he bit it so hard that he took the flesh. She fainted. When she came to, the shop was shut, and the old woman was holding her, and telling her to go home and say she was ill.

Her husband came in that night and lit a candle. "What is that on your cheek?" "A camel loaded with firewood bumped me." "I'll go to the governor tomorrow and have every wood-seller in Baghdad hanged." "Do not burden your soul. I was on an ass, and it stumbled." "Then I'll go to Ja'afar the Barmecide, and every donkey-boy shall be killed." "Would you destroy so many men for my cheek? It was God's decree." But she began to stammer, and he knew. "You have been false to your oath," he said; and called out; and seven slaves came in, and held her down on the floor, one on her head, one on her knees; and he drew his sword and gave it to the third, and said: "Cut her in half, Sa'ad, and let each of you take a half and throw it in the Tigris for the fish. That is what is owed to those who break their word."

The King had stood up. I had not heard him. He had gone to the window and stood with his back to us, with both hands on the sill, and my sister did not stop; she lowered her voice, and I could hardly hear it, and I wrote nothing, because there was nothing to write on. The slave on her head, said the voice, bent down to her and said: "Say the profession of faith, mistress, and remember anything you would like done; for this is the last hour of your life." She asked for a little time to say her last injunctions. She lifted her head. She saw where she was, how far she had fallen, from a good house to the floor of it, and that she had done it herself. She wept. He said some verses at her. She said some back. He called out again: "Cut her!" And the slave came near, and she made sure of death—

"The old woman came in," said the King, at the window.

"Yes, lord."

"She threw herself at his feet."

"Yes, lord. She said, by the right of my nursing of you, and my long service, spare her. You are young. It is said: whoever kills shall be killed."

"And he listened."

"He listened. He said he would pardon her, but he must set his mark on her that would show all her life." My sister told it in two words more. A quince rod, and the back and the sides, until she fainted. They dragged her out and left her at her old door. She had mended in four months. When she went back to the house to look, it was a ruin; the street was down.

The King turned from the window. His face was calm. "He pardoned her because an old woman asked," he said. "Yes, lord." "That is all it took." "It took the old woman, lord. And that he had been nursed by her." "A nurse," said the King. "Forty years of a nurse." He came back and sat on the edge of the bed, with his back to my sister, as he had sat on the first night. "And what became of her?" "She went to her father's daughter, lord, the eldest lady, who had the dogs. She told her what had happened. And the eldest said, Who is safe from the spite of Time? And they lived together. They did not speak of marriage all those years." The King said nothing. I wrote the stair, and the date, and the old woman.

Night 18. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Caliph and the three ladies, the second lady's tale just finished; the Jinniyah, who has not yet been called; a book of names, which has a hundred leaves.

On the nineteenth night my sister said that the Caliph, having had the tales written down for his archives, asked the eldest lady if she knew where he might find the Jinniyah; and she had a lock of the Jinniyah's hair, to be burned when needed. He threw it on the fire. The palace shook; there was a sound as of wings; and the Jinniyah stood before him and gave him peace. She said that she would release the sisters if he wished. She sprinkled water on the bitches and said, "Return to your former shape," and they became women, and wept. And she said: "As for the man who beat the portress, he is the nearest of all men to you." The Caliph said: "Who?" "Your son Al-Amin." He had heard of her beauty, and played a lover's trick, and married her by the law; and he had laid on her a condition, and sworn her by an oath; and she broke it. "He is not to be blamed for it," said the Jinniyah. "He was minded to kill her, and he feared God, and was content with a beating."

The Caliph sent for his son, who told it as it was. And the Caliph, who was the kind of man who liked to leave behind him a deed to be remembered, married the three ladies to the three dervishes, who were all kings' sons, and made them chamberlains, with stipends; and took the eldest lady's sisters, who were women again, into her house; and gave the portress back to his son, with the marriage contract renewed, and a great sum of money, and a house rebuilt better than before; and for himself, he married the cateress. And that night he lay with her.

"He married them all," said the King.

"Every one, lord."

"And she went back to him. The beaten one." My sister said that it was so. "Did she say she forgave him?" My sister was quiet. "It is not said, lord." The King considered this, on his back, looking at the tester. Then he said, in an even voice, like a man correcting a clerk: "It should have been said." My sister said, "Yes, lord." "Say it." "I cannot, lord," said my sister. "I was not told. But there is a woman further on, in a tale I have for you, who is more patient, and she will do it better." He said, "When?" "At the three hundred and forty-seventh night, I think." "That is a long way," said the King. He was counting. I saw his lips move. I think that he reached it, in his head, and found it a long way, and found it not impossible; and he said, "Go on, then," and she went on, with the Three Apples.

They relate, she said, that the Caliph Harun al-Rashid summoned Ja'afar one night and said, "I wish to go down into the city and ask the people how they are governed; those they complain of we shall depose, and those they praise we shall promote." And they went down with Masrur, and in a narrow alley they came upon an old man with a fishing net and a crate on his head, walking slowly, reciting some lines of verse about how a poor man's learning is of no use to him: he has a pen, and an inkwell, and a book, and nothing to eat.

The dawn was in the shutters. I wrote the stair; and put at the foot of it, in the margin of the margin, in my own hand, because the King would not, that the Caliph had walked into the city to ask how they were governed. He read it, standing, and made his stroke, and the small one. He did not say anything. At the door he turned. "Take the book to the gate at noon," he said. "The people will want to know it is being kept." And he went out. I went to my sister, who was asleep with the bread still in her hand, and took it, and put it on the table, and sat down on the cushion with the book of names across my knees, and counted the leaves. There were sixty-one written.

Night 19. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Caliph and Ja'afar in the city at night, and an old fisherman with a net on his head, reciting; a book of names, which has a hundred leaves.

Nights Twenty to Twenty-Four: The Three Apples; Nur al-Din Ali and His Son, in Bones

On the twentieth day, at noon, when my father and I came down to the side gate with the blue book, there was a man standing on an upturned crate outside the gate of the dyers' quarter telling the story of the Fisherman and the Jinni. He had a crowd of thirty. He had a good voice, and a rag on a stick, which he used for the Jinni's smoke, and he was getting it all wrong. In his version the fisherman chose the manner of his death by lot; the Jinni's four vows were in three hundreds; and the physician Duban had been a Jew. I stopped on the hill with my hand on my father's arm. "He has missed the second hundred," said my father, very low. I looked at him. "I have it from you," he said, "on the stair. You say it over to yourself in your sleep."

The people stood round the man, and when he came to the jar they clapped, and when he came to the Jinni's oath they were silent, with their mouths a little open, like children; and I understood that it was out. That my sister's voice had gone through the walls, in the pockets of the maids and the mouths of the chamberlains' boys, and was walking about the city by itself. It was not what we had meant. She had said, on the first night, that she could not keep what she told. She had not said that it would be kept by everyone else.

I told the King that evening. He was lying on his back with his hands on his chest, looking at the canopy, and he did not say anything for a while. "Who told them?" "No one, lord. They have been told by the walls." "Is it right?" "No, lord. He gave the fisherman a lottery for his death." "That is wrong," said the King. "It was his choice." "Yes, lord." "Let them tell it," he said, to the canopy. It was not clear to me whether this was a permission or a defeat. "And you will bring me the names."

"The chest," he said, a little later, when the lamp was low; and my sister, who had a shawl round her that I did not know, began with the Caliph and the Vizier, and the old fisherman with his net, who had no supper to give his children.

The Caliph said to him, said the voice: cast your net again on my luck, and whatever comes up I will buy for a hundred gold pieces. The old man said yes, and they went down to the river; he cast; and he drew in a chest, padlocked, so heavy that it took the Caliph and Masrur together to carry it to the palace. The fisherman had his two hundred. In the palace they broke the lock. Inside was a basket of palm leaves, corded with red wool; and in the basket a piece of carpet; and under the carpet a woman's wrap, folded in four; and in the wrap a young woman, white as silver, who had been killed and cut in pieces.

The Caliph wept. Then he stopped weeping and turned on his Vizier. "Dog of Viziers, shall people be murdered in our reign and thrown in the river, to be a burden on us at the Judgment? By God, we shall have her blood from the one who did it, and he shall die the worst of deaths. And as surely as I am descended from the sons of Abbas, if you do not bring me the man who killed her, I shall hang you at the gate of the palace, you and forty of your kin." Ja'afar said, "Give me three days." "You have them."

The Vizier went home. He sat in his house for three days, and could not think of anything to do; the third day passed, and the fourth came, and the Caliph sent for him, and asked: where is the murderer? "Am I the inspector of the murdered, O Commander of the Faithful, that I should know who killed her?" The Caliph's rage was such that he ordered Ja'afar hanged at the gate that very day, and a crier sent about the city to say that all who wished to see the Barmecide hanged, with forty of his cousins, might come; and the people came from every quarter, not knowing why, and wept; and the gallows was set up; and Ja'afar and his kinsmen stood under it.

I heard my own breath. My father was not in the room; he was at the foot of the stair, as he was every night. But I thought of him, on his stool, under the lamp, with the blue book; and I thought, as I had not allowed myself to think, that he too had been given a certain number of days, and that nobody had told him which of them was the last. My sister did not look at me. She had never looked away from the story.

Then a young man pushed through the crowd, said the voice. He was handsome, and neat, and had a mole on his cheek like a grain of ambergris, and he stood in front of Ja'afar and said: "Safety to you. I am the man who killed the woman in the chest. Hang me for her." And while Ja'afar was still standing, astonished, an old man came pushing through the crowd, and said: "Don't believe him. It was I." The young man said, "This is an old man in his dotage." "I am old," said the old man, "and tired of the world. I will give my life to ransom yours and the Vizier's and all his cousins'." The Vizier took them both to the Caliph. "Which of you killed her?" "I did." "I did." "Hang them both," said the Caliph. "If one of them is the murderer," said Ja'afar, "it would be an injustice to hang the other." And the young man described exactly how she had been killed: the basket, the wrap, the carpet. So the Caliph was satisfied that he was the man; and asked how it had come about.

She was his wife, said the youth, and the daughter of his father's brother, who was the old man, and the mother of his three sons. He had loved her. In the first days of that month she fell ill. When she began to recover she said: "I have a longing to smell an apple, and to bite it." He went out and looked in every shop and could not find one. The next morning he went round the gardens. An old gardener told him that apples had to be had from the Caliph's own orchard at Basra; so he went. It took fifteen days there and back, and he paid three dinars for three apples. And when he brought them, she had no pleasure in them, and let them lie beside her; for she was weak, and the fever was still on her. Ten days. Then she began to mend.

He went to his shop. At about noon a big slave passed it, a man in the household of somebody he did not know, with one of his three apples in his hand, tossing it. "Where did you get that?" "From my mistress. I had been away, and when I came back she was lying ill with three apples beside her; and she said to me, My horned fool of a husband made the journey to Basra for them and paid three dinars. And I ate and drank with her. And I took this one." The young man shut his shop. He went home. He counted the apples. Two. "Where is the third?" he said to his wife. She raised her head, weakly, and said: "I don't know."

The King, in the dark, said, "He did not ask her twice."

"No, lord."

"He asked once. She said she did not know. She was ill." My sister did not answer. The King said, "He cut her throat on the word of a servant in the street." "On the word of a servant, lord, and an apple missing from a bedside." "That is a very small thing to be missing," said the King, in a voice of curious flatness, and said nothing more.

The young man cut her throat, said the voice; and cut her up, and wrapped her in her wrap and a piece of carpet, and sewed it into a basket, and the basket into a chest, and put the chest on his mule, and threw it into the Tigris with his own hands. And then he went home, and found his eldest boy crying at the door. "Why are you crying?" "I took one of the apples that were by Mother, and went out to play, and a big slave snatched it from me. I said it was my mother's, that my father had gone to Basra to fetch it. He did not listen. I asked three times. He hit me and kicked me. I was afraid she would beat me, so I went outside the city with my brother. Don't tell her, Father, it would make her worse." And the father knew that the slave had lied; that the slave had never seen his wife; that he had killed her for a thing a boy had lost in the street.

"So make haste and hang me," the young man said to the Caliph, "for I am afraid she will accuse me on the Day of Resurrection." The old man wept beside him. The Caliph said that the young man was excusable, and that he would hang no one but the slave; and he told Ja'afar to bring him in three days, or die in his stead.

Dawn was in the shutters. My sister said her words, and I said mine, and she said hers; I wrote the stair, and the King read it, and made his stroke; and I heard a new thing: the King spoke before he left the page. "Which of them is the father?" he said. "The old man, lord. The father of the woman. The uncle." "He came to be hanged for his nephew." "Yes." "And the husband came to be hanged for his wife." "Yes." The King looked at the page in front of him and did not make the small stroke. He took the pen, and hesitated, and wrote a new word in his list, beside the apple. I could read it, this time. It was the word asked.

Night 20. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Ja'afar, who has three days to find a slave he has never heard of; the old man and the young man; a book of names, which has eighty-three names in it.

The slave was in Ja'afar's own house. On the fourth day, said my sister on the twenty-first night, Ja'afar made his will, and farewelled his household, and embraced his youngest daughter last of all; and felt something round inside the bosom of her dress. "What is in your pocket, little one?" "An apple, father, with the name of our lord the Caliph written on it. Rayhan, our slave, brought it to me four days ago and would not give it to me till I gave him two dinars." Ja'afar put his hand in and drew out the apple, and knew it. He had Rayhan brought. "Where did you get this apple?" "By God, master," said the slave, "a lie may get a man out once, but the truth gets him out again and again. I did not steal it from you or from the Caliph. Five days ago I saw a child playing in an alley with this apple in his hand. I took it from him. I hit him. He cried, and said that it was his mother's, who was ill, and that his father had gone to Basra for it. I did not listen. I brought it here, and sold it to the little lady for two dinars. That is the whole of it."

Ja'afar took the slave to the Caliph. The Caliph laughed till he fell over backward, and said that the story must be written, and told in public. "Do not marvel at this, O Commander of the Faithful," said Ja'afar. "It is not more wondrous than the history of Nur al-Din Ali of Egypt and his brother Shams al-Din Mohammed." "What could be stranger?" "I will tell you, on condition that you pardon my slave." "If it is stranger than the apples, I give you his blood. If not, I shall kill him." And my sister, with a smile that was the first one I had seen on her since the Fisherman, began.

I shall give it in bones, since I am the one who falls asleep. It took four nights, and I remember perhaps one. There were two brothers, Viziers of Egypt, beautiful, and loved by the Sultan; and on one evening, drinking, the two of them fell into an argument about whose child, if they should have children on the same night, should marry whose. The argument grew absurd, as these arguments do. The younger, Nur al-Din Ali, left Egypt that night in a fury and went to Basra, where he became Vizier. He married the Vizier's daughter. A son was born, Badr al-Din Hasan, so beautiful that people stopped in the street; and the father died. Meanwhile in Cairo the elder brother's daughter, by the Sultan's whim, was betrothed to a hunchback groom, who was a groom in the literal sense, from the stables; and the Jinn Maymun and an Ifritah, passing, saw the bride weeping, and looked, in jest, for a handsomer man to put in the bridegroom's place. They found Badr al-Din asleep in Basra. They carried him to Cairo.

I have this clearly, because the King laughed. It was a very small laugh; it was one breath, down the nose, as at the Mule; but the corner of his mouth went, I saw it by the lamp. It was at the hunchback, who had gone out of the bride's chamber to relieve himself, and found at the privy that the Jinn had sat down on the cover and swelled to the size of a buffalo; he sat there all night, said my sister, on the floor, with his teeth chattering and the word Jinn on his lips, and when the bridegroom came to look for him in the morning he had gone mad. The beautiful boy from Basra lay with the bride in the meantime and had a night I shall not describe, and when he woke, he was in Damascus, in his shirt, at the gate; and he became a seller of cream tarts. His son was born in Cairo, eight months after. The Sultan's anger, the pursuit, the seven years, the mother who knows her son by a tart: it all comes right. In the end they were all found, with their ages on them, as in a ledger that has been added up.

"A better tale?" said Ja'afar to the Caliph. "A much better," said the Caliph, "and the slave is free." And so a slave whose lie had killed a woman was pardoned by a tale, on the day he would otherwise have been hanged for it. I did not say that. The King said it. He said, at the end of the twenty-fourth night, to the empty room, "The tale saved him."

"Yes, lord."

"The one who carried the lie."

"Yes, lord."

He lay a long time. "That is a poor use of a tale," he said. And my sister, who was too tired to hear anything but the rhythm of it, said, "It is the only use I have, lord." And the King turned his head and looked at her. It was the first time that I had seen him look at my sister while she was awake. He looked for the length of a breath, and then another; and then he put out his hand, as one reaches for a cup in the dark, and laid it on the coverlet beside hers, not on it; and left it there, and said nothing.

Night 21. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Nur al-Din Ali and Shams al-Din, brothers, in a quarrel about the marriage of their unborn children; a book of names.

Night 22. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the boy from Basra on the road between Damascus and Cairo; a seller of tarts; a book of names.

Night 23. Shahrazad. Present. Open: a mother in Damascus, a tart without pepper, a boy of seven; a book of names.

Night 24. Shahrazad. Present. Open: nothing in the Egyptian tale; the Caliph pleased; a hunchback of the Sultan of China, not yet begun; a book of names which has a hundred and sixty-eight names in it.

Nights Twenty-five to Twenty-nine: The Hunchback; the Broker, the Reeve and the Doctor

By the twenty-fifth day the first blue book was full. I wrote the last name on the last ruled line of the hundredth leaf, a Maymuna, daughter of a tinsmith, with a limp, and when I looked up the stationer was at my elbow with a second book. It was the same blue cloth. "Paid for," he said, before I could ask. I thought he would not say by whom, and I was right. I thought also that the person who had paid was a man who knew how many leaves a hundred leaves are, and what a thousand names would need; and that he had not stopped to count them.

That night the King said, "The Hunchback." My sister, who had put on a little flesh in a fortnight and whose colour was now her own, said that there lived in a city of China a tailor who was fond of pleasure, and that he and his wife, coming back at nightfall from a day's outing, fell in with a hunchback whose look would have drawn a laugh out of despair. They asked him to supper. He came. The tailor bought a fried fish, and bread, and lemons; and while they ate, the wife, in play, took a piece of fish and stuffed it into the hunchback's mouth, holding her hand over it. "You'll swallow it at a gulp," she said, "I won't let you chew." It had a bone. The hunchback died of it, quite quietly, with a mouth full of fish.

"There is no help in lamenting," said the tailor's wife. She wrapped him in a kerchief, and the tailor took him in his arms, and she walked ahead, crying, "O my little one, where does it hurt? Where has the smallpox got you?" and everyone who saw them said, "A child with the smallpox," and made way. They found a Jewish physician's door, and the wife sent the maid up with a quarter dinar to fetch her master down, and while she was gone they stood the dead man at the head of the stairs and ran. The physician, who loved a quarter dinar, came out in the dark, stepped on the corpse, and sent it rolling down to the bottom. He cried out for Moses and Aaron, and for Joshua the son of Nun. "I have killed a patient!" And his wife said that they were both lost if the body were here in the morning; so they carried it up on the roof and let it down by the ventilator into the house of the neighbour, a Muslim, who was the Reeve of the Sultan's kitchen.

The Reeve had been robbed for months. Somebody had been at his oil and fat; the rats, he had decided, or the cats, or the dogs that came over the roofs at the smell of a sheep's tail; and he had killed a great number of them. When he came home from a night of Koran-reading and saw a man standing in the corner under the ventilator, he said, "So it is you. And I have been murdering the cats of the quarter." He took a hammer and struck the thief in the breast, and the man fell down; and when he saw that it was a hunchback, and dead, he said, "Was it not enough for you to be a hunchback? You must needs be a thief as well?" And he took him on his shoulders and carried him to the market at the end of the night and stood him up against a shop-front, in a dark lane.

My sister's voice had a small unsteadiness in it, which I took for the effort of keeping a straight face. I looked at the King. He had his hand across his mouth, and his shoulders were not still.

A Christian broker came reeling along, she said, drunk, on his way to the bath. He had had his turban snatched in the first part of the night; and when he saw a man standing against a wall in the dark, he took him for another thief and struck him on the neck. The man fell. The broker, in his fury, sat on him and went on beating him, and called the watch; and the watch came and found a Christian kneeling on a Muslim, who was dead. "A Christian killing a Muslim!" he said. They took the broker to the Governor. The Governor, in the morning, gave order that he should be hanged.

The gallows was put up, and the rope round the Christian's neck, and the hangman about to haul, when the Reeve pushed through the crowd and said, "Stop! It was I." The Governor asked how. The Reeve told him, hammer and all, and was put under the gallows in the broker's place. Then the Jewish physician pushed through and said, "Stop! It was I who killed him." He told the stairs and the quarter dinar. The rope went round the Jew. Then the tailor came through the crowd, and said, "It is I, and no one else. I killed him." And he told the fish.

"Hold!" said the hangman, wearily. "We bring out one man and change him for another, and no one is hanged after all!" And this was when the Sultan's chamberlain arrived, in haste. The hunchback, it turned out, had been the Sultan of China's own jester; the Sultan had asked for him all the morning, and been told he was dead, and that four men had confessed to the death.

"The Sultan sent for them," said my sister, "and for the dead man on his bier. The Governor told the whole tale, which I will not tell again, as there is no use in a thrice-told tale. And the Sultan was moved to mirth." She stopped. In the quiet I could hear the lamp. "He laughed, lord. He had it written in letters of gold. He said to the court, Did you ever hear a story more wondrous than that of my hunchback? And no one had."

"He laughed," said the King.

"Yes, lord."

"And the four of them were standing there with ropes still on their necks."

"Yes, lord."

"They were not let go."

"No, lord. The Nazarene broker came forward, and said that he had a story that would surprise the Sultan more than the hunchback's. And the Sultan said, Tell it. And the Sultan said, If it does not surprise me more, all four of you will be hanged."

The King said nothing for a time. Then: "That is the shape," he said.

"Lord?"

"Of the thing. Every one of them is told to stand under a rope, and tell. The man with the date stones. The fisherman and the Jinni in the jar. The Vizier with the apples. Now these." He was not angry. I would have said he was interested, in the way of a man discovering that a pattern in the carpet has a name. "I see what you are doing," said the King.

"I am telling a story, lord," said my sister, in a very small voice.

"Yes," said the King. "Go on."

Night 25. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Sultan of China, with four men under the gallows and a hunchback on a bier; the Nazarene broker, who has a better story.

I shall give the broker's tale as I have it, which is shortly; it took a night. He was a Copt of Cairo, he said, and a broker in sesame, and one day a young man came to him with a sample, and sold fifty ardabbs, and left four thousand five hundred dirhams in deposit, and did not come back for a year. When he did, he ate with the broker, and ate with his left hand; and the broker, who had been thinking about it for twelve months, asked why. He drew out his right sleeve. There was no hand in it.

He was from Baghdad, he said, and a merchant, and he had come to Cairo with a load of cloth. In the shop of a Syndic one day he saw a woman, and heard her speak, and was lost; she bought a piece of cloth on credit, and he told the Syndic to put it on his account, and she said, "May God make you master of all I have," and went. He saw her again. She sent a slave-girl after him to say that she was waiting. He went to her house on a Friday night, in the Habbaniyah quarter; two young women opened the door; and she herself came to meet him, crowned with a diadem of pearls, and sat him down in a hall with seven doors and a jetting fountain. They ate; they drank; she put her mouth to his; they slept. He went away in the morning and left fifty dinars under the carpet. He did it again the next night, and the next, and the one after, a kerchief of fifty dinars under the carpet each morning, until one morning he woke and found that he was beggared, dinar-less, dirham-less, and that Satan, he said, had done it.

He went into the street. At the Zuwaylah Gate there was a crowd, and he was pushed against a soldier, and his hand, which was in the soldier's pocket by no more than the crush, found a purse. A camel with a load of firewood jostled the soldier on the other side. And the purse was in his hand. The soldier found his pocket light, and turned, and struck him on the head with his mace. "Thief!" he said. The Governor was passing. "Strip him," said the Governor; they found the purse, with twenty dinars in it. "Did you steal this?" He thought: if I say no, they will beat me; and said yes. They cut off his right hand there and then, with the link-bearer's sword, and cauterised the stump; and the soldier, whose heart had turned, gave him back the purse.

He went to her. He lay down on the carpet, with his hand wrapped in a rag in his bosom, and said his head ached. She saw the colour of him. She asked and he would not tell. She gave him wine, and he took it with his left hand, and she gave him more, and he fell asleep, and when he woke he found that she had searched him, and found the purse, and the hand. She had sat all night looking at it. In the morning she sent for the Kazi and the witnesses, and wrote her whole fortune to him in the marriage contract. She opened a chest to show him all the kerchiefs, with the fifty dinars in each, that he had left under her carpet: she had put them away. "This is yours," she said. "It was only that I wanted you." She lived with him for a month. Then she fell ill, of grief for his hand, and was fifty days dying; and he buried her, and sold her property, and that, said the broker, was where the sesame came from. "And this story, O King of China, is it not more wondrous than the hunchback's?"

"No," said the Sultan. "There is no help for it; you will all be hanged."

My sister stopped. The light was in the shutters. The King lay on his back, looking at the tester. After a while he said, "She did not leave. The woman." "No, lord." "She took a man who had no hand." "And a purse in his shirt." "Without asking him anything." My sister said, "No, lord. She waited till he was asleep." "Yes," said the King, in a voice like a man laying a stone on another stone. "She would."

Night 26. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Sultan of China, who has refused the broker's tale; the Reeve of the Sultan's kitchen, who says he has one better; four men with ropes.

The Reeve's tale was a chest. I will say only that he had been at a party the night before where there was cumin ragout, and a guest who would not touch it, until it was agreed that he might wash his hands a hundred and twenty times; and that the guest, when he ate, ate with four fingers, having neither thumb nor great toe; and that this was because of a woman in the household of the Lady Zubaydah, whom he had seen in a shop in Baghdad, and loved, and who had loved him; and because, to get him into the palace, she had had him shut in a chest among the lady's dresses, and carried in a skiff over the Tigris, and set down in front of the Chief Eunuch. "Open them," said the eunuch. "Open them all." The man in the chest lost control of himself, and the water ran out of the chest, and the woman said, "You will kill me, and yourself, you have broken a flask of Zemzem water, it is spoiling the dresses." And then someone cried, "The Caliph!"

The King was laughing. It was not much, but it was a laugh, and it went on long enough to be called one. My sister had to stop. She waited with her hands in her lap, and I saw her smile, a little, at nothing.

The Caliph opened every chest but that one, she went on. "That one," said the girl, "is the Lady Zubaydah's secret"; and the Caliph, who was in a good humour, let it pass. The young man was taken out of the chest among the dresses, in the presence of the Lady Zubaydah, who looked him over and said, "He will do." The Caliph gave leave and ten thousand dinars. They were married with a feast that went on for ten days. And at the end of it, when the bride was at the baths, they set before the bridegroom a tray, and on the tray a dish of cumin ragout, with chicken breasts, sugar, pistachios, musk and rose-water; and he ate it all, and wiped his hands; and forgot to wash them.

I could not look at the King. I looked at the lamp. In the evening the bride was carried round the palace in her seven dresses and brought to him and left. He embraced her, hardly believing it; and she smelt the cumin on his fingers, and cried out so that all her women came running. "Take this madman away," she said. "I took him for a man of sense. He has eaten cumin ragout and not washed his hands. Is this a man to come to my bed?" She took a plaited whip and beat him until her arms were numb and he fainted. For ten days she did not come near him. She sent his food by a servant, and the servant said that her mistress was sick from the smell. On the tenth day she came in and said, "I will teach you to eat cumin ragout without washing your hands," and her women held him down, and she took a razor and cut off his thumbs and his great toes. She sprinkled the stumps with healing powder. And when the bleeding stopped, the bridegroom, who had seen what she was, swore that he would never again eat cumin without washing his hands forty times with potash and forty times with galangal and forty times with soap; and she took his oath; and her anger went down; and he lay with her that night. They lived together for a long time. The Lady Zubaydah gave them fifty thousand dinars to buy a house. "But he has never seen a dish of cumin since," said my sister, "without washing a hundred and twenty times. He told us so himself, at the party."

"And this," said the Reeve, "is my story."

"It is not," said the Sultan, "more wondrous than the hunchback's. You will be hanged."

The King said, "She cut off his thumbs because he forgot to wash." "Yes, lord." "That is very little." "She said she would teach him, lord." The King turned his head on the pillow. "To eat cumin without washing his hands," he said. "Teach him." And after a moment he began to laugh again, silently, with his shoulders; and I understood that he was laughing at himself, or at the world, or at the notion of a man who washes a hundred and twenty times because a woman has taught him a lesson with a razor. I have never known. It was not a happy laugh. It was a laugh of the sort that is the first thing a man does when he has not done it for three years.

Night 27. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Reeve's tale just ended; the Sultan, who is not moved; the Jewish physician, who says that his is better; four men with ropes.

The physician's tale was shorter, my sister said on the twenty-eighth night, and sadder, and I will give it shorter still. He was a doctor at Damascus, and was called to the Viceroy's house to cure a young man with the fever, who held out his left hand to be felt; and when the young man was recovered, and in the bath, the doctor saw that his right hand had been cut off, and the stump was new.

The young man was of Mosul. He had gone to Damascus with his uncles' goods, and stayed behind to sell; and a lady, richly dressed, had come into his house one day, and he had lain with her, and she would take no money, and brought him fifteen dinars a time. One night she brought a younger sister. They drank. The lady, who was jealous, told him to lie with the sister that night; and when he woke in the morning he was wet with blood, and the girl's head was off her shoulders, and the lady was gone. He buried the girl under the floor of the courtyard, with her jewels, and left Damascus. Three years later, out of money, he came back, and found under the carpet a necklace of ten gems; and took it to the market to sell; and was beaten until he said he had stolen it, and his right hand was cut off and the stump boiled in oil. And then the Viceroy, the Governor of Damascus, summoned him, and it was his own necklace; it had been missing three years from his house with his younger daughter.

The King had turned on his side to look at my sister while she told it. She was not looking at him.

"He told the Viceroy all of it, as it was," my sister said. "The first lady was the Viceroy's elder daughter, who had been married in Cairo, and been widowed there, and come home with ideas. She had brought her sister to the house of a stranger to share her pleasure, and killed her in jealousy, and said to her mother, I know nothing of her. And her mother wept till her heart broke, and she died. The Viceroy wept. He said to the young man, I will not blame you. And he gave him his youngest daughter in marriage."

"The one who did it?" said the King.

"No, lord. The youngest. A third. She had been a girl in the next room."

"And the elder?"

"It is not said," said my sister. "I think she grew old in the house, lord, without being asked for anything."

The King lay still. "That too," he said, "should have been said."

I wrote down what was open, that night, with a hand that was not wholly steady. The Sultan of China, with four men and a hunchback; the physician's tale ended; the tailor, who still had a rope round his neck, who said that his story was better than all of them put together, and that it was the story of a barber.

Night 28. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Sultan of China, who is still not moved; the tailor, who has a barber; four men with ropes.

On the twenty-ninth night the King said, "The tailor," and my sister, who had had to stop three times in the middle of the night to rest, took up the thread, and said that the tailor had been at a party the night before at which the host's servants had been about to put the food on the table, when a foreign young man had come in, a handsome Baghdadi, lame in one leg; and had looked round the room, and seen among the guests a barber, and turned to go. The host stopped him. "What is the matter?" "I will not sit in the same room," the young man said, "with that barber, that omen. He was the cause of my breaking my leg; I swore not to stay in any city where he lived, and left Baghdad; and I find him here the first night." And the guests said: tell us.

The light came in, and it was the twenty-ninth dawn. I wrote the line, and under it the stair; and the King did not read it, but looked, and said, "Where is the shroud?"

I looked up. My father was at the door. He was standing there, as he had stood every morning of the last month, in the clothes of the day before. But his arms were at his sides. "Lord," my father said, "I have put it in the chest at the foot of my bed." "Why?" "You said, lord, to keep it where I could reach it." The King looked at him for a while. "Is it reachable?" "It is the third thing from the top, lord." "Good," said the King. And my father, who had understood the sentence correctly again, and who had also understood that the King was making a joke, put his hand over his face and wept, standing in the doorway, as I have never seen him weep before or since.

Night 29. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the tailor's tale, in which a lame young man from Baghdad will not sit in a room with a barber; the Sultan of China, four men with ropes, and a hunchback on a bier.

Nights Thirty to Thirty-four: The Barber, his Six Brothers, and the Hunchback's End

On the thirtieth night the King said, "The Barber," and for the first time since the beginning I saw my sister take a drink of water before she began, as an actor does; and when she began, it was not her voice, nor the other one. It was a third voice, high and quick and friendly, a voice that went on and on without once drawing breath; and I understood, before the second sentence was done, that she was going to be the Barber.

The young man from Baghdad had told them in the room, she said, that he was a merchant's son who hated women until one morning, in a blind alley, he saw a girl at a window watering her flowers; and from that hour he had no appetite for anything. She was the Kazi's daughter. The Kazi's daughter's old nurse took his case in hand and, after a month of messages, came with the news: Friday, at the hour of public prayer, when her father would be in the mosque, he might come to the house. "Go to the bath first," said the old woman, "and have your head shaved; you've been ill." He sent his page for a barber. "A discreet man," he said, "no meddler, no talker. Someone who won't split my head with his chatter." The boy came back with this old man.

"Good morning," said the Barber, in my sister's voice, "good morning, and God give you ease, and God drive your trouble and your sorrow far from you. I see you are thin. Are you well? Recovery, they say, is a great gift. You want your head polled? Or bled? It was Ibn Abbas who said, whoso cuts his hair on a Friday, the Lord shall avert from him seventy calamities. Let me look at the astrolabe." And he took it out of a kerchief, an astrolabe with seven plates, in silver, and went into the courtyard, and stood a long time with his face to the sun, and came back and said, "You have, my lord, three hours exactly before the hour of prayer, neither more nor less, according to the most learned astronomers and the wisest almanacs. And now, if I may ask, why are you in such a hurry?"

The King was laughing. It was a new laugh, quite different from the one in the night of the cumin: it came up out of his chest, with a catch in it, like a man who has been sick and is tasting food. My sister did not stop. The young man cried: "Shave my head! You are breaking my liver!" "I will, I will," said the Barber, and shaved two hairs, and stopped. "I am concerned about your haste. Tell me where you are going, for it can come to no good; and may I add that your father, and your grandfather, never did one thing without asking me." The young man said, "I am going to a party." "A party!" said the Barber. "What a lucky day for me! It was only yesterday that I invited my friends and I have nothing to give them to eat. I was just thinking of it. What is in your house?" "Five dishes of meat, ten chickens, a roast lamb—take it all, and shave me!" "And wine?" "I have two flasks." "And scent?" "Take a box of scent worth fifty dinars! Only shave my head!" And the Barber put down the razor, and sat down on the floor, and went through the box, grain by grain, with the greatest care, while the poor young man sat with half a head of hair, listening to the muezzin in the next street. And when he had finished with the scent he said, "Now, let me tell you about my friends, who are all excellent, and not one of whom speaks more than he should. There is Zantut the bath-keeper, who sings to the tom-tom; and Sali'a the corn-chandler; and Humayd the scavenger, who sings so that the birds stop to listen, with a song that begins, 'My wife has news that is not locked in a box.' You must come and meet them."

"Go to your friends," the young man said.

"I will not let you go alone."

"Where I am going no one can go but me."

"Ah!" said the Barber, with a great light in his face. "An assignation! A woman! And on a Friday. The Governor of this city is a very sharp blade. I am exactly the person to take with you."

The King had both hands over his face. The sounds that came through them were not any longer the sounds of a man who is laughing out of politeness. My sister, who had gone pink to the roots of her hair, drank some water, and went on.

At last, said she, the Barber finished the shave. The young man made him promise to take the meat and wine to his friends and come back, and he would wait; and the Barber went out with the lamb and the chickens and the flagons, and left them with a porter at the end of the street, and hid in an alley. The young man dressed in a minute, and ran out, for the muezzins had called the Friday prayer, and went to the Kazi's house; and the old nurse took him upstairs. The Kazi came home from the mosque. He shut himself in the big room below. And the young man looked out of the window of the girl's chamber, and saw, sitting against the door across the lane, the Barber.

It happened then that the Kazi's servant had done some wrong that day, and the Kazi began to beat her; and she shrieked; and a slave ran in to plead for her and the Kazi beat him too, and he roared. The Barber, in the lane, heard the roars. "They are killing my master!" he screamed. He tore his clothes. He scattered dust on his head. "Help! My master is being murdered in the Kazi's house!" And he ran off to the young man's house, where he told the servants, and the servants came running, tearing their clothes, in a wave, shouting, "Alas for our murdered master!", and in front of them all, with his robe in ribbons and his turban gone, the Barber. In the lane there were soon ten thousand people. The Kazi came out to the door to see what the matter was. "You have killed our master!" "What has your master done that I should kill him?" "I heard him cry out!" "This is my house," said the Kazi, "and it is open to you all; go in and look." And the Barber went in.

"He was in the chest," said the King, with the tears running down his face. He was not asking.

"Yes, lord. The young man in the upper room could find no place to hide but a great chest, and he got into it. The Barber looked right and left, and then walked straight over to the chest, and heaved it on his head, and made for the stairs. And inside the chest the young man, who had resolved to bear any humiliation but this, burst the lid and threw himself on the ground in front of ten thousand people, and broke his leg. He had gold in his sleeve. He scattered it. While the people scrambled for it he made off, hopping through the lanes of Baghdad. And behind him came the Barber, calling at the top of his voice, 'They would have robbed me of my master! They would have killed him who has been a father to me! Praise be to God, who gave me the strength to prevail over them! Where are you going now, you who would not listen to me? Had it not been for me, you would be dead.'"

The King made a high, wheezing noise, such as a child makes, and rolled on his side. I could not look at my sister, because I should have laughed myself, and I knew that if I did the whole of it would come apart. I looked at the lamp.

The young man, said she, went into a weaver's shop and sat down in the back room; and sent for witnesses and made a will, dividing most of his property among his people; and left Baghdad that same day; and had travelled far to be rid of this man. "And when I came into this city and was bidden to supper," said the young man to the party, "the first person I saw was he, in the place of honour." And he went out.

That was the end of the night. The light was in the shutters. I held out the Roll and the King took it; but he could not read it; he sat holding it, with his shoulders going, and the water running down. He gave it back. It was the first time in thirty nights that he had not read a line. He got up, and I heard him in the passage; and I heard, from the door, a sound that was my father sitting down on the floor.

Night 30. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Tailor's tale: the Barber, who says he is the Silent Man; the Tailor and the guests, who ask him whether the young man spoke the truth; the Sultan of China; four men with ropes.

On the thirty-first night he said, "The Silent Man," and my sister said: "He said it was all his generosity. Had the youth not been rescued by him, he would have been killed. 'It is well for him that he suffered in his leg and not in his life. And that you may know I am a man of few words, and very unlike my six brothers, I shall tell you a tale about myself.'"

He was living in Baghdad, she said, in the time of the Caliph al-Mustansir. The Caliph was angry with ten highwaymen and ordered them brought to him on the festival; and the Prefect of the city put them in a boat. The Barber saw them embarking. He thought, "These are people going to a wedding, they will eat and drink the whole day in that boat; none shall be their companion but me." So, from generosity of heart, he got in. On the other bank the watch chained them, and chained him among them. "And is it not a proof of my spareness of speech," said the Barber, "that I held my peace and did not please to speak?" The next day they were taken to the Caliph, who ordered them beheaded; and the Sworder cut off nine heads, and came to the tenth, who was the Barber, and stopped, because he was an old man. "Why have you struck off only nine?" said the Caliph. "I have struck off ten." "Count them." They counted. There were ten, and the Barber was standing.

"What made you keep silence in a moment like that?" said the Caliph. "I am the Silent Shaykh," said the Barber, "and am so called to distinguish me from my six brothers, who are men of great speech and no understanding, and each of whom has some maim or other. It was out of my generosity that I did not name myself to you, and shared their death with them." The Caliph laughed until he fell on his back. "O Silent Man, do your six brothers resemble you?" "Never!" said the Barber, "it grieves me that you compare us. One is a hunchback, one is lame, one is blind, one is cropped of both ears, one is cropped of both lips, one has one eye. I will tell you how." And he told the Caliph how.

"And I shall not tell you, lord," said my sister, "because there are six, and they are long, and mostly humiliations. The first brother was a hunchback tailor, who loved a lady at a window, and was set by her husband to work a flour-mill like an ox, yoked, and flogged round and round till morning; and afterwards, for a worse mistake, was paraded on a camel and fell and broke his leg. The second was led by an old woman to a lady, who had her women slap him on the neck, and pluck out his moustaches, and shave his beard, and paint his cheeks, and chase her naked into a dark room that opened into the market of the tanners. The third was blind, and was beaten before the Governor, with two other blind men, on the word of a stranger who had slipped in among them to learn where they kept their money. The fourth was a butcher, and lost an eye and was given five hundred sticks over a counterfeit dirham and a ram's carcass that he hung in his shop. The fifth and the sixth I will tell you."

The King had wiped his face. His voice was hoarse. "The fifth," he said.

Night 31. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Barber, telling the Caliph al-Mustansir about the maims of his six brothers; the first four, told, the fifth and sixth still to come; the Tailor, the Sultan of China, four men with ropes.

The fifth brother's name, said my sister on the thirty-second night, was Al-Nashshar, and he was a beggar by night and lived on the alms by day. When their father died he left seven hundred dirhams among his seven sons, and each took his hundred. Al-Nashshar did not know what to do with it. He bought glassware, a hundred dirhams' worth, and put it in a tray, and sat down against a wall to sell it. And as he sat he began to think.

"I shall sell this for two hundred," he thought, "and buy more glass, and sell that for four hundred; and I shall go on until I have four thousand. And then I shall buy jewels, and scents, and make a hundred thousand; and buy a house, and slaves, and horses. I shall send out the marriage brokeresses, and ask for the daughter of the Vizier, the eldest, for I hear she is perfect. I shall give her a marriage portion of a thousand dinars, and if her father refuses I shall take her from under his nose. I shall buy ten little eunuchs. I shall buy a saddle of gold. I shall ride round the town, with all the people blessing me, and go to the Vizier with armed slaves before and behind. And when he sees me he will stand up and seat me in his own place, and sit far below me, for I am to be his son-in-law. I shall have two eunuchs with purses of a thousand dinars each, one for the portion and one for a gift, that he may see the greatness of my spirit and the littleness of the world in my eyes. For every ten words he says to me I shall answer two."

It was one of the most extraordinary things I ever heard my sister do. She did it entirely without hurry. She let the beggar plan his wedding to its last detail: the wedding night, the dressing of the bride, the seven showings of her in her seven dresses, to which he would turn his face only when begged; and how he would lie with his face to the wall; and how her mother would come in, and kiss his hand and his feet, and say, "Look at your handmaid, who longs for your favour;" and he would not answer; and she would bring a cup, and say, "Do not refuse the cup from your handmaid;" and he would not look at her. "And then," said my sister, "I shall shake my fist in her face, thus—and kick her, thus—"

She lifted her foot and kicked the air.

"—and with his toe," said she, in the voice of the story, "he knocked over the tray of glass; and the glass fell from the bench; and everything on it was broken to bits."

The King made no sound for a long moment. Then he said, in a quiet voice: "And the wedding?"

"There was no wedding, lord."

"And the Vizier's daughter?"

"There was no Vizier's daughter."

"She did not exist." My sister said no. "He killed her," said the King, "with his foot. She did not exist, and he killed her." And he began to laugh again, but softly, as a man laughs who is, at the same moment, doing something else with his face. I do not know what he was thinking. I think I know. I think he was thinking of the garden, and of a woman at a fountain with as many men as ladies, and a window, and a brother, and a Queen who had not for some time been anyone; and of how long a man can plan, with his heart, a wedding with someone who is not there. He did not say so, and I should not like to put it in his mouth.

The beggar, said my sister, wept, and buffeted his face and rent his clothes, and the people going to Friday prayer pitied him, and one great lady on a mule, with eunuchs, passing, asked what ailed him, and gave him a purse of five hundred dinars, and he went home blessing her; and after that, said my sister, he had other adventures with her which cost him his ears, and which you will have to hear another time. The King said, "Another time." He was looking at the canopy. It was the first time he had made an arrangement for a night he had not yet counted.

Night 32. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Barber's fifth brother, who has kicked over a tray of glass and who will lose his ears to a lady with a mule; the sixth brother, who has not yet begun; the Tailor and the Sultan of China, and four men with ropes.

The sixth, said my sister on the thirty-third night, was Shakashik, or Many Clamours, the one without lips. He had been rich, and become poor, and one day he went out to beg. He came to a large and handsome palace with eunuchs at the door, and was told that it belonged to a Barmecide. He was told to go in at the great gate and ask the Vizier his master for alms.

He walked through the vestibule into a hall paved with marble, with a garden in the middle such as he had never seen; and at the end of it a handsome man with a fine beard, who rose and bade him welcome. He asked what he wanted. "Alms, my lord. I am in want." The man was shocked. He tore his robe. "What! I am in this city, and you here, hungry? I cannot bear the disgrace. You will eat my salt." "My lord," said the beggar, "I am dying of hunger." "Boy!" cried the host. "Bring the basin and the ewer!" and turned to him: "Wash your hands." The beggar rose to do so, and saw neither basin nor ewer; and his host went on washing his hands with invisible soap in invisible water. "Bring the table!" There was no table. "Please do me the honour of eating," said the host, moving his hand to and fro as if he were eating, and the beggar thought: This man likes to make fun of people. And he said, "I have never seen bread so white, my lord."

"It was baked," said the Barmecide, "by a maid of mine whom I bought for five hundred dinars. Boy! Bring in the meat pudding, with plenty of fat." And he turned to the guest: "Did you ever see anything finer than this pudding? Eat, and don't be shy." The beggar began to wag his jaws as if chewing. Then came the stew, with fat sand-grouse; and the chickens stuffed with pistachios; and honey fritters, with a dinar's weight of musk in every one; and almonds, and walnuts, and raisins. And at every one the host said, "By my life, eat, and don't be shy," and at every one the beggar, whose hunger by this time was a savage thing, said it was the best he had ever had. They came to the wine. The host held out an empty hand. "It is a little young, my lord," said the beggar, "I am used to wine twenty years old." The host pretended to drink to his health; and the beggar pretended to drink and to be drunk.

My sister told it with great quietness, and in a voice I did not know she had, the voice of a hungry man being polite. I found that I had my hand over my mouth. I looked at the King, and he was not laughing now; he had turned on his side, with his head on his arm and his face towards my sister, and was listening as a child listens to a thing it has been told is true.

And then, said she, the beggar, who was drunk on nothing, rose up. He raised his arm till the white of his armpit showed and gave the Barmecide such a slap on the back of the neck that the palace rang with it; and a second. "What is this, you scum of the earth?" cried the Barmecide. "My lord," the beggar said, "you have been kind to your servant. You have taken him into your house, and given him of your food, and made him drink of your old wine, till he is drunk, and rude. But you are too noble not to forgive his ignorance." The Barmecide laughed and laughed. "Long have I played the madman among my intimates," he said, "but I never found one who had the wit and the patience to enter into all my humours but you. I forgive you. You shall be my boon companion, and never leave me." He called the servants, and they brought the table, and all the dishes he had named, and they ate; and they sat together, and drank, and had singers in; and for twenty years they lived thus together, in peace.

The King's eyes were wet again, but not for laughing. "He knew," he said.

"Yes, lord."

"The Barmecide. He knew the dishes were empty."

"He knew it was empty, lord. He was testing whether the man would play."

"He was hungry."

"He was hungry. And he said the bread was white."

"And he was fed." The King lay a long moment. "That is what you do," he said, very low, to my sister. It was not a question. And my sister, who sat in the lamplight with her hands folded and her face a little tired, said, in her own voice, as simply as if she had been asked the hour: "It is the only supper I have, lord."

I thought of the side gate, and of two hundred people with a name in the mouth like a coin under the tongue. I do not know what I thought.

The end of the sixth brother, said my sister after a while, was not good. The Barmecide died, and the Sultan took his wealth and squeezed the beggar of his savings, and he fled; and Arabs took him, and cut off his lips; and later, for a sin of which he was not guilty, cut off something else. He was found on a mountain by some who knew him, and the Barber brought him home. "And this is the history of my six brothers," said the Barber to the Caliph, "and now you know that I am not like them. I support the whole family." The Caliph laughed and said, "You are indeed a man of few words, O Silent Man. Now leave this city, and settle in another." And so he did.

Night 33. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Barber, who has finished the history of his six brothers and been banished from Baghdad by the Caliph al-Mustansir; the Sultan of China, who wishes to see this Silent Man for himself; four men with ropes.

On the thirty-fourth night the King said nothing at all, and my sister began, and told how the Sultan of China sent for the Barber to be taken out of the jail where the Tailor's party had put him; and how the Barber came, a man past ninety, with a vacant, conceited face, long ears, a great nose; and the Sultan laughed at the sight, and said, "O Silent Man, tell me something of yourself." The Barber asked what the tale of the Nazarene and the Jew and the Muslim and the Hunchback was, and why they were gathered. "To show you are no busybody, I take it," said the Sultan. "Tell him the case," and they told him; and the Barber shook his head and said, "A marvel of marvels. Uncover me the Hunchback."

They undid the winding-sheet. The Barber sat down and took the dead man's head in his lap and looked at his face, and laughed till he fell over backwards. "There is a wonder in every death," he said, "but the death of this Gobbo is worthy to be written in letters of liquid gold." The court was astonished. "I swear by your bounty, O King," said the Barber, "that there is life in him still."

He took out of his belt a barber's budget, and from it a pot of ointment, and anointed the dead man's neck; and then a pair of iron tweezers. He put them in the throat, and drew out the piece of fish with its bone, black with blood. And the Hunchback sneezed a great sneeze, and sat up, and put his hand to his face, and said, "I bear witness that there is no god but God"; and the King of China laughed until he fainted, and so did all the others.

"He was dead," said the King, in the dark. "Since yesterday."

"Yes, lord."

"And a barber, who talks, put a pair of tweezers down his throat." He was lying on his back, with his eyes shut, and the corners of his mouth were doing something. "It was in his throat the whole time."

"It was only in his throat, lord. Nobody had looked. They had all assumed."

The King lay for a very long time. Then he said, "Go on," and she went on: how the Sultan gave robes to the Tailor, and the Jew, and the Reeve, and the Nazarene, and to the Barber a pension and a seat at his table, and kept him by him, to the end of his days, in the greatest honour. It was not more wondrous, my sister said, than the story of Nur al-Din Ali and the damsel Anis al-Jalis.

I wrote the line. I wrote the stair, and the second book, in the margin; and I looked at the King, who had put his hand over his eyes, in the grey light, and lay quite still, so that I thought he had gone to sleep; but when I put out my hand to take back the Roll, he took it, and read it, slowly, and made his tally, and the little stroke, and then he did not put down the reed. He turned over the leaf, and looked at the margin of the margin. And in a space where there had been the word asked, and the word melon, and the word door, he wrote a new one, in small square letters. It was fed.

Night 34. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Sultan of China, who has pardoned four men and a Barber and has a hunchback alive at his feet; the damsel Anis al-Jalis, not yet begun; a book of names, which is in its second book and has a hundred and nine names in it.

Nights Thirty-five to Forty-four: Nur al-Din and Anis al-Jalis; Ghanim of Damascus

I knew on the thirty-seventh day. It was not that she was sick in the mornings, though she was; it was that she had stopped being sick in the way of a person who is afraid, and begun to be sick in the way of a person who is hungry. On the thirty-fifth night she had refused the dates, and on the thirty-sixth she had eaten eleven. She sat on the edge of the bed with her feet on the carpet and a basin by her knee, and I said, "How many weeks?" in the voice I used for reading prices; and she looked at me for a long while, and began to laugh, quietly, and put the back of her wrist against her eyes. "Five. Six," she said. "I have been counting in the wrong book."

I asked whether he knew. "He counts nights better than I do," she said. "He has written them down in the margin; I have seen it. But he has not counted this." She put her hand flat on her stomach, without looking. "I have not decided what to say. If I tell him, he has two things in his hand and not one, and I do not know what he does with two. If I do not, he finds out in a month, from some servant, and I do not know what he does with that." She took her wrist from her eyes. "Put it in the Open. Put it where he can see it, and say nothing. Let him read it as he reads the rest." "In which rung?" "I do not know. It is the only thing I am telling that I shall not be able to finish by morning."

Nights 35 to 37. Shahrazad. Present, present, present. Open: the damsel Anis al-Jalis and the Vizier's son Nur al-Din Ali, in Baghdad, in the Caliph's garden, and what the Caliph has seen from a tree; a book of names.

So at the thirty-eighth dawn, under the stair, and under the margin of the margin, I wrote the last line of the Open as it was to be written: a child, which has no name yet. I turned the Roll round. The King read it, standing. He read the rest, and arrived at the foot. He did not move. He had the reed in his fingers, and I saw the point of it shake very slightly, as the point of a reed shakes in a draught. "How long?" he said.

"My sister says two hundred and thirty nights, lord. From now. A little more."

He put the reed down. Then he picked it up again, and turned the first leaf, and at the foot of the margin, under the tally, where there were thirty-eight rows of strokes, he began to draw dots. They were very small. He drew them in rows of five, as the strokes were drawn, and he drew them one by one with his eyes fixed on the page, and he did not stop until he had drawn two hundred and thirty. It took a long time. The light came up while he drew. "I shall strike them out as they come," he said; and I do not think he heard what he had said, because it was only afterwards, in the passage, that I heard him stop, and say the word again, slowly, to the wall.

Night 38. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Caliph's garden, and the fisherman's coat, ended; Ghanim of Damascus, not yet begun; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

When he came back that evening there was a woman sitting on a stool in the corner of the room, in a plain brown veil, mending something. She was about seventy. Her hands were very quick. She did not look up. Nobody explained her. Later, when she had gone out to see to a pan of broth, I asked one of the maids who she was; and the maid said, in a whisper, as one names a sacred object, that she was the King's nurse. She had suckled him. She had, forty years ago, held down his arm for the physician when he broke it. "He sent for her this morning," the maid said. "No one has seen her at court for ten years. She lives in a house by the river with seven cats." I thought of the old woman in the tale of the portress, kneeling at the feet of a young man with a sword in his hand, saying: by the right of my nursing. And I thought: he knows what a nurse is for.

There was a brazier by my sister's feet, though the night was warm. There was a basin of dates under a cloth. There was a second cushion. A boy came with a tray of something hot that smelt of cardamom, and put it by her hand, and went out backwards. "Ghanim," said the King, when the lamp was low, and then, in a different voice, to my sister: "Are you tired?"

I think none of us had known that he could ask it. It was spoken almost casually, to the canopy, as a man asks the hour. She said, after a moment, "Yes, lord." "Then we shall wait for an hour," said the King. "Dunyazad will sit." And he lay with his hands on his chest, in the lamplight, and looked at nothing, for an hour by the sand-glass; and my sister slept, sitting up, with her head against the post; and I did not move. It was the first time in thirty-eight nights that anyone had told the lease it might be shorter. I did not dare write it down.

When she woke he said, as if nothing had happened, "Go on, then"; and she took up the tale where the hour had left it. It was the tale of Ghanim, who was a merchant's son from Damascus, and who went to Baghdad with a load of silk, and made his fortune, and was walking back from a funeral in the dusk, and was locked out of the city gate. He found a cemetery with a high wall and a garden of date palms inside, and climbed in, and lay down in a tomb to wait for the morning. And at midnight, said my sister, three men came to the gate of the garden, with a lantern and a chest; and the gate was locked, and one of them began to climb the wall with the chest on his head, and the others said: Quick, quick, and do not drop it.

I have forgotten all that passed after that, in detail. I can give the shape. It was a chest, and in the chest was a woman, drugged, or dead, or something between the two, whom three eunuchs had come to bury in a garden by night, on the order of a jealous queen; and a young merchant in a tomb who watched them do it, and who, when they had gone, took the chest home, and the woman with it, and nursed her, and learned that she was the first favourite of the Caliph; and from this came a love, and a sister, and a mother, and the anger of the Caliph, and three eunuchs' tales told in the dark to pass the time, which I will not give, because they are about the way the men came to be eunuchs, and my sister told them in the voice of a woman reading a bill. The Caliph found out. The queen was angry. The merchant and the woman and the mother and the sister were pursued, and hidden, and brought at last, all four, before the Caliph, who was not angry in the end; who married the sister himself, and gave the woman back to the merchant; and so it came right. It took seven nights. I fell asleep on four of them.

What I remember is not the plot but the King. For seven nights he asked questions. Where was the lantern? Did the woman wake? What did he say when she woke? What did she ask first? And my sister, who in the beginning had never been asked a question, answered each of them, as if she had always known; and in the course of the answers I saw that the story had begun to change. It was no longer a thing that she told to him. It was a thing that was built between them, the two voices going back and forth in the dark, he with the questions and she with the answers, like a man handing stones and a woman setting them. "What did she ask first?" "She asked, Where am I?" "And he?" "He said, You are in my house." "No," said the King. "He would say: You are with me." My sister was silent a moment. "Yes, lord. He said: You are with me." And I wrote nothing, because I had no column for it.

Nights 39 to 43. Shahrazad. Present, present, present, present, present. Open: Ghanim and the woman he took out of the chest; the Caliph's wrath; the Caliph's sister's wedding; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

The tale of Nur al-Din Ali and the damsel Anis al-Jalis had been told on the thirty-fifth to thirty-seventh nights, before the child, and I cannot give it, because I was too frightened that week to remember anything but my sister's face. But there is one part of it that he asked for again on the forty-fourth night, a thing he had never done: "The coat," he said, "tell the coat." And she said, with a straight face, that a thrice-told tale is of no use; and he said that it had been told once; and she told it again. It is the part with the fisherman, and I give it here, with what comes before it. Nur al-Din was the son of a Vizier, and the damsel was a slave-girl whom his father had bought for the Sultan of Basra for ten thousand dinars, a girl who could play the lute, and read, and sing; and the son had taken her, and been ruined by her, and sold her to pay his debts, and been robbed again; and the two of them fled by ship to Baghdad. There, in a garden by the Tigris belonging to the Caliph, an old keeper, Shaykh Ibrahim, let them in against all rules; and gave them wine against all his principles; and they sat drinking in a pavilion with a hundred lamps, and the damsel sang, and the Caliph, who was out walking in the dark with Ja'afar and Masrur, in the disguise of a merchant, saw the light on the water.

He climbed a tree to look in. The Vizier climbed after. They saw the old Shaykh, drunk as a lord, saying to the damsel: "O my lady, I am your slave." They heard her sing. And the Caliph, who was enraptured, said that he must go in and join them; but Ja'afar said: not as a Caliph; and a fisherman was passing, Karim, with a net on his shoulder, who knew the Caliph at once, and fell down on his knees. "Get up," said the Caliph, "give me your coat." The fisherman gave him a gaberdine of coarse wool, patched in a hundred places. The Caliph put it on. He wound his head-cloth round his face. He took the net on his shoulder; and into the pavilion he walked, in the character of a fisherman, with a basket of fish.

"Lice!" said the King, suddenly, from the pillow. "The coat. It had lice." He was shaking. "Lord, the fisherman said: Do not trouble about the lice; they are old inhabitants." "He said that!" said the King. "He said that, to the Caliph?" "He said, Commander of the Faithful, there are lice on this coat from before your reign." The King laughed so that the bed moved. I saw the old nurse, in the corner, raise her head for the first time, and look at him with an expression I do not know how to name; and bend over her mending again; and I saw that her hands were not quite steady.

The Caliph, in the coat, with a basket of fish, was received by Shaykh Ibrahim with an oath: out of here, you scoundrel! And Nur al-Din, who was hungry, and an honest soul, said: let him in. They had the fish fried. The damsel sang again. And the Caliph, who had come in a fisherman's coat to hear her, said afterwards, as they went home, that it was the best evening he had ever spent. It came right in the end: he sent for them, and for the evil Vizier of Basra, who was made to kneel; and made the young man Sultan of the city; and the damsel his wife. I give it as I have it, which is shortly, because I fell asleep before the end.

The old nurse was gone when I woke. In the morning the sand-glass was on the table beside the Roll, with a strip of cloth tied round the neck of it. "He tied it himself," said the maid. "Last night, after you had both gone to sleep. He sat there with it for a while, and then he tied it." I did not know what it meant. I know now. It meant that the hours in that room had begun to belong to someone.

That afternoon the King sent for my father. My father came, with his hands empty, and stood in the doorway of the room, and my sister, who was lying on the bed with her eyes open, turned her head. They had not spoken since the night of the supper. "Father," she said. He crossed the carpet in four steps, and went down on one knee beside the bed, and took her hand in both of his, and put his forehead against it. He did not speak. After a long time she said, in an ordinary voice, "I thought about your ass, Father." "My ass?" "In the tale. The ox and the ass. I thought about it on the fourth night. The ass was punished for advising the ox, and the ox got a day's rest by it. Someone pays. I think it was a true tale." "It was a bad tale," said my father, into her hand. "It was a true one," said my sister, "and I did it anyway." And they stayed so for a while, not saying anything, my father with his head against her hand, and the old nurse in the corner mending, and the sand-glass with its strip of cloth on the table; and I went out into the passage, because I had an idea I should not be there.

Night 44. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Ghanim and the Caliph's sister, ended; a tale of King Omar bin al-Nu'uman and his sons Sharrkan and Zau al-Makan, not yet begun; a book of names, which has two hundred and ninety-one names in it; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights Forty-five to One Hundred and Six: King Omar and His Sons, and What Changed in the Room

I am not going to give you the tale of King Omar bin al-Nu'uman and his sons, and I had better say why before I am asked. It took sixty-two nights. In the thirty volumes of the chroniclers it fills a good part of a volume, and the chroniclers got it from my sister's mouth at the end of the thousand nights, when she had told it, and the rest, a second time, to a table of scribes; and they got a good deal of it wrong, as I have seen, and I have a good deal of it wrong myself. I lost the thread in the second month. I could not name now the three Viziers, or tell you who put the poison in the sweetmeat. I can tell you what changed in the room. That I did not sleep through.

It began, my sister said on the forty-fifth night, with a King. He was Lord of Baghdad and Khorasan and the Isles of India and China, and he had three hundred and sixty castles, one for each day; and he had a son, Sharrkan, a great fighter, born of a free wife, and a younger son, Zau al-Makan, and a daughter, from a Greek slave girl called Sophia who had been the daughter of an emperor and did not mention it. There was a great hoard. There was a war, and a treachery, and a letter. I mean to say that the tale had everything. It had a hundred things, and each one of them had a hundred things in it, and the whole was a wheel. And in the first week the King sat bolt upright and said, "What is a sister to a King?" and "Where is the Greek emperor now?" and "How many men?" because it was a story about armies, and he had been a King of armies for twelve years.

Then Sharrkan went out to the border of the Greek country with ten thousand horse, and one night, being restless, he left the camp alone and walked down a wady, and came to a meadow with a stream in it, and in the meadow two women.

One was a girl, said my sister, about eighteen, and tall, with an arm like a sword; and the other was a very old woman, thin as a rake, with a face like a bit of dried hide, who was holding the girl by the girdle and saying: "Come, come, my lady Abriza, you said you would wrestle." Sharrkan hid behind a tree. The old woman stood up to the girl and the girl threw her; and she got up and went at the girl again, with her arms crooked like a crab's, and threw her again; and my sister gave the two bouts with the greatest care, the old woman's grunts, the girl's laughing, the sound of a body on grass; so that the King put his hand over his mouth, and the nurse in her corner put down her mending.

"Sharrkan laughed," said my sister, "so loud that they heard him."

"And they took him," said the King.

"They did not take him, lord. The girl called, Who is there? And he came out and said, I am a traveller, a Muslim, a soldier of the King of Baghdad, and I am looking for a hospitable place to spend the night. And the girl said: A soldier. Then you can wrestle." He said he could not wrestle with a lady. She said: You will wrestle, or you will give me your horse, and your sword; I will take them from you. And he wrestled her."

"Did he throw her?" said the King.

"No, lord. She threw him."

"Once?"

"Three times." My sister gave it very gravely. "He took hold of her round the waist, and his fingers sank into the soft of her. And he forgot what he was doing. And she took him by the thigh and the neck and tripped him, and he fell on his back; and she laughed, and said, Are you an eater of dead men's meat? Get up. And he got up, and the second time he got himself ready, and she threw him from a hold he had never heard of. And the third time he fought in earnest, and she threw him as a woman throws a basin of slops out of a window."

The King lay on his back and laughed until the tears ran into his ears. "Good," he said. "Good. That is a woman who knows what she is about." And my sister, with a perfectly straight face, said that Sharrkan had been of the same opinion, and had in the course of that night taken a wholly new view of the Greek nation; and that the girl's name was Abriza, and she was a princess, and the old woman who had held her girdle was Zat al-Dawahi, which is to say Mother of Calamities, and that he would hear a great deal of her.

I shall not give what followed. It was war, and a love, and a long journey; and it was a brother and a sister who lost each other at a gate in the dark, he going one way and she another, and were sold, as slaves, to different masters in different cities, and did not meet for seven years; and the seven years took forty nights.

"Seven years!" said the King. It was the sixty-eighth night. He had been listening to the brother and the sister for eight nights. "She is in Jerusalem and he is in Damascus, and the Greek has taken the town, and he does not know where she is." "No, lord." "Does she know that he is alive?" "She believes him dead." "Why does it take forty nights?"

I looked up. My sister had her hands in her lap. She was a good deal rounder in the face by that time, and had a smudge of fatigue under each eye, and she did not hurry.

"Because the years had things in them, lord."

"I do not want the things. A man comes in and says, Your brother is in Damascus. Why does that not occur to anyone?"

"Because no one knows, lord. The brother is a different man in Damascus than he was at the gate; he has a different name. The sister is veiled. There are two hundred miles of road, and it is a war."

"It is a war," said the King, "and it is forty nights."

"Yes."

"Forty nights to tell, or seven years to happen?"

My sister was silent for some time. The old nurse had stopped mending. "Both, lord," she said.

"I want them to meet on the third night," said the King; and then, after a pause, in a smaller voice, "and I do not want it to be the third night." I know what he meant. He wanted the end, and he wanted the thing that came before the end, and he knew now that he could not have the first without losing the second, and that the whole art of the business, which he had been getting to the bottom of for sixty-eight nights, was the keeping of that hunger exactly as it was. He knew it, and he hated it, and he would not have given it up. "Go on," he said. "No. Not tonight. Tomorrow. Let them be in Damascus another night." And he turned over on his side and slept; and my sister, who had been given a night off by the one man in the world who could not afford it, lay down beside him with her eyes open, looking at the canopy, and I saw her put her hand on her stomach.

Nights 45 to 60. Shahrazad. Present, sixteen strokes. Open: King Omar and his sons; Sharrkan and the girl Abriza; Zat al-Dawahi, who is old; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

It was in these weeks that my father began to bring news from the hall of audience. The King had gone back to it, in the second month; he sat in the morning, and judged, and in the evening came up to the room with the dust of it on him. My father, who stood behind the throne with the book of the day, told me what he saw. A man had come with his wife's brother to accuse her of a lover. The King listened to the end. "Have you asked her?" he said. The man said he had not. "Then go home," said the King, "and ask her; and come back tomorrow and tell me what she says." The court, said my father, gasped like a roomful of men who have seen a camel walk on the water. The man went; and came back; and the lover turned out to be her cousin, a boy of thirteen, who had brought her a letter from her mother. "He asks the second question now," said my father, in the voice of a man reporting a miracle in a small way of business. "He has begun to ask the second question, Dunyazad."

And on the sixty-first night something occurred which I think none of us noticed but I. As on every other night, I held the Open and was about to read it; and the King, from the pillow, said, before I had begun: "The Greek has crossed the river, and the old woman has not heard." My sister's mouth opened, and she said, "Yes." He went on: "And Sharrkan is in the tent, and the girl has not yet come." "Yes, lord." He had it all. He had it better than I. He had been carrying the stair in his head for a month. I let my hand fall, and the book with it, and from that night on I did not read the Open aloud. I want to say that it was the end of a duty and the beginning of something better. It was, I think, only that: she had told something to someone, and he had kept it; and I was no longer the only one.

Nights 61 to 85. Shahrazad. Present, twenty-five strokes. Open: the brother in Damascus and the sister in Jerusalem, who have not met; the war of the Greeks; a book of names, which is in its third book; and a child, which has no name yet.

I must also say that at about the eightieth night the cradle came. It was carried up the stairs by two men in a handcart, with a cloth over it, and they put it down in the corner where the nurse sat. She got up and took off the cloth. It was a small cradle of carved cedar, very old, a little scorched at one end, with the figure of a bird on the headboard. "He broke the bird's beak when he was two," said the nurse to nobody. "I kept it. I thought: someone will want it." She had kept it forty years in a house by the river, with seven cats, and the cats had slept in it. The King came in at dusk, and saw it, and stood for some time, saying nothing; and then he went across the carpet and stood over it, and did not touch it. "It is smaller than I remember," he said. "They always are, lord," said the nurse.

By the ninetieth night the side gate had begun to get presents. I had not expected it; it had happened first by accident, a woman laying a tiny shirt on the step beside the book while she waited, and saying nothing, as if she had left it by mistake. Then a wooden spoon. Then a rattle made of a gourd with seeds in it. By the end of the week there was a heap of them in the lee of the wall, small things, hand-sewn, a cap, a ball of knotted rag, a pair of shoes no bigger than a walnut, and a thin silver bangle with no name on it; and nobody would say who had left what. The stationer came and looked at them. My father looked at them for a long time. "What shall I do with them?" I said. "Take them up," said my father. "Give them to the nurse." I took them up. The King was in the room, at the table, with the Roll. He saw the arms full of little cloths, and he got up, and took the bangle from my hand, and held it in his palm, and weighed it, and gave it back. "Keep it with the book," he said. And the nurse took the cap and the shirt and put them in the cradle, folded; and nobody in the room spoke; and I remember that the lamp was low, and that there was a smell of cardamom.

On the hundredth night my father asked leave to speak. He had been standing in the doorway, as always; he had not got into the way of coming further, and the King had not, I think, learned how to ask him. "Lord," he said, "I have counted." The King, who was cutting a pear for my sister with his own knife, with a good deal of care, looked up. "How many?" "I have the number, lord." The King held the pear still. "Keep it," he said. "Not yet." And my father bowed, and went out to the passage, where he sat down on the floor, and put his head against the wall, and I do not think he moved for an hour; for he had made the number in his head three times, from the beginning, and every time it came out the same, and every time he had felt, as he said to me afterwards, the paper under his hand.

By the hundredth night the brother and the sister were in the same city, within a stone's throw, each one thinking the other dead; and I could not bear it any longer, and I do not think the King could either; and on the hundred and fifth night my sister, in a voice that I think was near to breaking, and not for the story, told how, in a market in Damascus, in front of a seller of perfumes, they met. The King made a sound I had not heard, and put his hand across his eyes; and she described it: how the sister saw a man who looked like someone she had loved, and could not speak; and how he saw a veiled woman with a particular way of holding her wrist; and how neither said a word; and how, from behind the veil, she said his name.

"After forty nights," said the King.

"After seven years," said my sister. "The seven years are the story's, lord. The forty nights are ours."

He took his hand from his face. "It was worth the time," he said, to the canopy, quite quietly. And I understood that this was what he had been waiting to be able to say.

Nights 86 to 106. Shahrazad. Present, twenty-one strokes. Open: the brother and the sister reunited in a market in Damascus; the war not yet ended; the tale of Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya, not yet begun; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights One Hundred and Seven to One Hundred and Twenty-four: Taj al-Muluk, and Aziz and Azizah

On the hundred and eighth day a letter came from Samarkand. It had been thirty days on the road. It was on a single sheet, sealed with a signet I had not seen since the evening of the garden, and addressed, in the hand of a scribe who had been told to take his time, to the King of the Coasts and Islands, my lord and brother. The chamberlain brought it up himself and put it into the King's hand, and went out backwards, as the boy with the cardamom had done; and the King read it standing at the window, once, and again, with his back to the room.

"He has heard," said the King. He did not say who. He said it to the glass of the window. "They talk of it in the bazaar of Samarkand, he says. He has a man who came by the caravan road, who says that the King of the Coasts is married to the Vizier's daughter and she has lasted a hundred nights. He writes: Is it true? And then he writes: Is it you?" There was a long silence in which I could hear the nurse's thread. "I do not know how to answer the second question," said the King.

He had never, in all those nights, said anything to me which I was not meant to take as a command. I did not know what to do with it. I said, "Lord, shall I fetch a pen?" He turned round. For a moment I thought he had not heard; then he went to the table and sat down, and pushed the ink toward me. "You write a fair hand," he said. "You ruled the page. Write: Brother. It is true. And then: Come." I wrote it. "And then?" "And then nothing," said the King. "He will know what else." And he looked at what I had written for some time with an expression I should find difficult to give a name to; and signed it, and had it sealed; and it went out that morning on the fastest horse in the stable, with a boy who was told to ride all day and take no rest.

By this time my sister could no longer lie on her back. The nurse had let out her gowns twice. She told the stories sitting up, propped on four pillows, with her knees apart and a hand under her stomach as under a loaf that might fall; and the King, who had never in his life arranged a pillow, had learned how. It was a thing to see, though I saw it every night: a man who had read a thousand names in one breath each, standing at the head of a bed with a bolster in his arms, tilting his head, asking, "Higher? Lower?" And my sister, with her eyes shut: "Lower, lord." And he would shift it a hand's breadth, and say, in the voice of a man trying a key: "Now?"

That night the King said, "The garden. The one with the cousin," and my sister, who had a hand under her breast as she sat up and moved with the care of a woman carrying a very full bowl, began on the tale of Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya. I shall not give it. A prince in a city behind the mountains of Ispahan who would not marry; a minister who found him a bride; a bride-train and a hunting trip and a caravan of merchants; and, among the merchants, a young man with a hand-kerchief of linen with two gazelles embroidered on it, who wept when he took it out, and who said that he could not sell it, nor show it, nor say why. And the prince, who was a person who always wanted to know, said: "Tell me." I shall give you his answer, which took seven nights, and which my sister called Aziz and Azizah. It is what I remember best of the first hundred and fifty. It is the one I cannot tell without a second lamp.

He had a cousin, said my sister, the daughter of his father's brother. They had been brought up in one house, on one carpet; they had been betrothed in the cradle; and on the Friday of the wedding, with the guests invited and the kadi coming, he went out to the bath, put on new clothes, and, turning into a street he did not know, sat down to rest on a stone bench in the heat, and a handkerchief fell on him from a window.

"Who threw it?" said the King. He was lying with his hands behind his head.

"A lady, lord, at a lattice. She looked at him. She put a finger in her mouth, and joined two fingers and laid them on her breast, and closed the shutter. And he did not go to his wedding."

The King took in a long breath. "He forgot."

"He forgot, lord. He sat on the stone until the sun went down, and went home at midnight, and his cousin was sitting in tears in the saloon; and she told him that the guests had come and eaten and waited and gone, and his father had sworn there would be no marriage this year. She asked where he had been. And he told her. He showed her the handkerchief."

"And she?" said the King, in the dark.

"She read what was written on it. And she cried. And then, lord, she wiped her eyes, and she said: Tell me what signs she made. He told her. And she told him what they meant."

There was a long silence. I looked at my sister. She was looking at the lamp.

It was the thing I found hardest to bear in the telling, and I find it hard in the writing: the cousin who loved him, sitting up with him through the nights, reading the signs of the other woman, a finger in the mouth, a mirror in a bag, a lamp on a pot of flowers, as one reads for a friend the letter of a man who is going to leave one. "It means that you are to her as her soul is to her body," said the cousin. "It means, come back in five days. It means, sit in the dyer's shop. It means, when the sun is down; and the hair over her face is the dark; and the pot of green things is the garden behind the street; and the lamp is the pavilion." She dressed him, and washed him, and put him on the road. She sat up with him when he was sick. She told him stories to make him sleep. On the fifth day he went, as the signs had said, to sit before the dyer's shop; and the shop was shut, and no one came, and the sun went down, and he walked home like a drunken man. She was standing in the saloon with one hand against the wall, and she asked him, smiling, why he had not stayed the night with his beloved; and he kicked her in the breast.

"He kicked her," said the King.

"He kicked her, lord. She fell. Her forehead hit the edge of the dais, and a wooden peg; and it was cut open, and bled. And she said nothing. She got up and made tinder of a rag and bound it, and wiped the floor, and it was as if nothing had happened. And she came to him smiling. She said: I said what I said because I had a headache, and I had meant to be bled; and now you have eased my head. Tell me what happened."

My sister stopped. I saw her breathe. She laid her hand on the side of her stomach. The King did not move for so long that I thought he had gone to sleep. Then I heard, quite clearly, in the dark, a sound I had not heard from him before, which was a man swallowing.

"Her head," he said.

"Yes, lord."

"She said it was her head."

"Yes."

"And he believed her."

"He believed her," said my sister. "And he told her all about the other woman."

"For seven nights," said the King; and I understood that he had been counting.

He went to the garden the next night, my sister said, and found a pavilion lit and a table laid and no one in it; and he was hungry from weeks of not eating, and ate, and slept; and in the morning he found on his stomach a piece of salt and a piece of charcoal. His cousin read them to him: salt, for the lover who is insipid; charcoal, for the face that must be blackened. The second night he ate and slept again, and found a cube of bone and a stick and a date stone and a carob pod; his cousin read: Thy body is present but thy heart is absent; and, a green date burns the vitals of the lover; and, the lover's heart is wearied. The third night he did not eat, but drank, ten cups, and was found outside the garden with a butcher's knife and an iron weight on his chest. "Her right eye," said the cousin, quietly. "She swears by it. She says: if you sleep again, I will cut your throat."

Each morning he came home like a man who has lost a battle, and each morning she stood at the door, and washed him, and fed him with her own hand, bite by bite, and sat by his bed with a fan until he slept, and wept into her sleeve where he could not see. Her wound did not close. It was in this part that my sister's voice began to change, I mean to say that it slowed, as the voice of a person slows who has come to a particular step on a stair. On the fourth night he was awake. He stayed awake, with his fingers on his eyelids. And at the last hour of the dark the lady came with ten maidens in green satin, and said, laughing: "Because thou hast watched, I know thou art a lover." And they were happy, my sister said, that night; I will not describe it.

"And he forgot," said the King.

"He forgot the couplet his cousin had taught him to say when he left her. He remembered it the next night. It was a verse about patience, lord. It was a verse about a woman who would not live to see the end of it. And the lady, when she heard it, put her hand to her mouth, and said: She who made those lines is dead. He said: She is my cousin; she is at home; she is not dead. And the lady said: Go and see."

I did not look at the King. I looked at the lamp. I could hear, in the corner, that the nurse had stopped breathing as one stops who is waiting for a blow.

"He went home," said my sister. "He heard crying in the street. He asked. And someone said: Azizah. We found her behind the door." She stopped. "Dead," she said. "She had been behind the door, lord, in the saloon, with her head on her knees. They found her when they came to take the carpets up. She had died of it, lord. Of that and the wound and the thing in between." Her voice was perfectly level. "His mother, at the door of the house, said: Her death is on your neck; and may God not acquit you of her blood."

The King was sitting up. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands over his mouth, and I saw that he was rocking, a very little, from side to side. The nurse, in the corner, had got up from her stool. She came across the carpet, with her mending still in her hand, and stood by the bed; and after a time she put out her free hand and laid it on the back of his neck, as a woman lays it on the neck of a grown boy who has not wept since he was seven. He did not move away. He said, through his hands, in a voice I did not know: "Behind the door."

"Yes, lord."

"Why behind the door?"

"Because she did not want to be found, lord," said my sister, very gently, "until it was over."

I never learned how long that lasted. I know that the lamp burned down, and that at some point the nurse took it up and trimmed it, and put it down; and that the King lifted his face at last and wiped it on his sleeve like a boy, and looked at my sister, and said: "That was the woman you promised me."

"No, lord," said my sister. "That was another."

"There is another."

"There is another, who is further on. She does not die. She is more patient than this one. I did not know I should tell you this one first." And she put her hand over his, where it lay on the sheet; and he let her.

The rest of Aziz and Azizah I shall give in a line, as I have heard that it must be given: that the young merchant was tricked by an old woman into marrying a girl he did not love, who made him swear by his oath of divorce to come home every night before morning, or lose her; that he kept it, as a man keeps the walls of his prison, a year; that he returned to the garden to find it empty, and the lady who had once met him in it so changed by what she had heard of the dead girl that she would not look at him; that he carried the cloth with the two gazelles from city to city, and was a merchant who could not sell it. It came right, in some fashion, with a prince at the end; I fell asleep. I have no gift for sequels. It was the cousin I remembered.

Nights 107 to 112. Shahrazad. Present, six strokes. Open: Taj al-Muluk, a prince of the mountains of Ispahan, and a young merchant with a handkerchief he will not show; a book of names; a letter that has gone to Samarkand; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights 113 to 120. Shahrazad. Present, eight strokes. Open: Aziz and Azizah; a woman behind a door; a King who has written the word behind; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights 121 to 124. Shahrazad. Present, four strokes. Open: Aziz the merchant, with a cloth he cannot sell, in the camp of a prince; the oath of divorce; the tale of the Beasts and the Birds, not yet begun; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights One Hundred and Twenty-five to One Hundred and Seventy: The Hashish Eater, the Wolf and the Fox, and the Brother's Arrival

The second half of Aziz and Azizah took eighteen nights, and I have given it to you in a line, and I should like to add to the line only that it was not a worse tale than the first half but a worse listening. The King heard it as a man hears a debt being read aloud. At the end of each night he would say, "And the cousin?" and my sister would say "She is dead, lord," and he would say "Yes," and turn his face to the wall. It was not that he did not wish to hear; it was that he had heard it. When she came to the oath, the young merchant's oath, by which he must be home in his wife's house every night before morning or lose her, the King said, "Before dawn," and nothing more; and my sister, for the first time that I can remember, did not go on at once.

It was the high summer by then, and the city had changed under it. In the dyers' quarter there were eleven men on crates, each with a rag on a stick, and no two of them told the Fisherman alike. The water-sellers had the Hunchback; the bakers the Barber; and a boy of ten at the corner of the street of the coppersmiths, with a drum, had a version of the Wolf and the Fox that I thought no worse than my sister's. And the news ran along with the tales as a dog runs along with a procession. On the hundred and twentieth day the dyers' storyteller added to the end of his Fisherman, to a roar of satisfaction, that the Vizier's daughter was with child. On the hundred and twenty-sixth, that it was a boy. On the hundred and thirtieth, that it was twins. My father came back from the gate with his face quite grey. "They are laying wagers," he said. "On what?" "On whether he will let it be born." I went up and told the King. He was cutting a pear. He cut a slice, and put it in my sister's hand, and cut another, and ate it himself, slowly; and he said, "Let them lay them." And after a time: "Who is giving the odds?"

By the hundred and thirtieth day ninety-two of the dots had been struck out; I counted them, with the Roll upside down, from the other side of the table. A hundred and thirty-eight stood. The King struck each one at dawn with the reed, and it left a small flat stroke across a small round dot; it was a shocking sight, a page of arithmetic, if you did not know. And in the margin of the margin, where the words were, the fifth, which he had written on the ninetieth night, was a word I had to ask him to read to me. It was cradle. And I had stopped writing the book of names in a single column at the gate; I wrote it in two, on both sides of the leaf, and in the evenings I carried it up, and he looked at the last page, and said, "Seven hundred and four." I had not told him the number.

On the hundred and thirty-third night something happened which I had not been told about and which, to the end of my days, I shall be unable to describe without wanting to leave the room. My sister had been sitting with her knees up and her hands folded on the swell of her stomach, in the middle of a sentence about a mule, and she stopped. She said nothing. She took her hands away from herself and looked down, and her face went completely blank, the way a face goes when it is listening to something too fine for the ears; and then she began to laugh, soundlessly, with her mouth open.

"What is it?" said the King. He had put down the Roll.

"Nothing, lord," said my sister. "It moved."

I do not know what he thought. I know that he stood up, and that for a moment he looked like a man who has been handed something extremely hot; and then he said, in a voice such as I had not heard him use to anyone, a voice that was very nearly the voice of a boy asking a favour, "May I?" My sister looked at him. "Yes, lord." He crossed the carpet. He knelt down by the bed, which he had never done, with the stiffness of a man who has not knelt to anything in many years, and laid his hand flat, as one lays it on a very fine horse, on the place she showed him; and waited. Nothing happened. He waited. His mouth was a little open. Then something under his palm gave a push, quite hard, like a heel; and he snatched his hand away as though it had been burnt, and looked at it, and looked at her; and put it back.

The nurse in her corner did not look up. But I saw her mend one stitch twice.

That was the hundred and thirty-third night. I did not write it down. There was nothing in the Roll to write it in. I put it in the book of names, at the end of the day's names, in the last line of the page, in letters so small that I have since had to hold the page to the light to find them: It kicked.

It was in the course of the nights that followed that the King asked me, one evening, not to let her tell a certain story. It had come up in the course of a long and rambling night, the hundred and forty-fourth, when my sister, tired, with her mind running along the stream of the Hashish Eater, a thin and silly tale about a man who ate a piece of hashish in a bath-house, and imagined that the bath attendants were bowing to him, and that he had been made a Vizier, and was carried off, in his mind, to a palace, and ate and drank and gave orders, and was beaten in the end for stealing a towel; she had said, as she finished, that there was one more tale of the kind, a story of a Badawi named Hammad. It was a story of a man who is taken prisoner in a fight in the desert, by a young man and the young man's sister, and given hospitality, and sworn to friendship, and shown a bed. "And on the third day," said my sister, "he said to Hammad: I would like to sleep, and I trust my life to you. And he laid his sword beneath his pillow, and slept. And—"

"Stop," said the King.

He had not raised his voice. He was lying on his back, and had not moved. My sister stopped. I saw the nurse look up. "Not that," said the King. "I know what comes next. I do not want it in the room." "Lord—" "He kills him. The host. In his sleep. With his own sword." My sister said, very gently, "Yes, lord." "I know that story." And I thought: he does know it. I think he knew a hundred of them, and that they were all a single one, with a different name each time; and that he had put that one away at the bottom of his head, with a shroud under it, some years ago, in the dark. "Tell me something with animals," said the King.

So for four nights there were animals. They were the old fables, and they are in the books, and I give only one; it is the one he asked for twice. It is the tale of the Wolf and the Fox.

A fox and a wolf, said my sister, shared a den. The wolf was a tyrant, and ill-tempered; he took the lion's share; and he struck the fox whenever the fox said a word. The fox, one day, said, "O Wolf, be gentle. The sons of Adam are cunning. By their craft they bring down the birds of the air and haul the fish from the sea; one day they will catch you." The wolf hit him so that he lay senseless. When the fox revived, he smiled at the wolf, and made his apologies; and the wolf, who was pleased, said that he forgave him. The fox lay down, and said to himself that the blow of the teacher is at first hurtful, but afterwards sweeter than honey.

Now one day the fox went by a vineyard, and saw a breach in the wall. "No," he said to himself. "Why is there a breach? A man who sees a hole in the ground and does not look at it is a man who wishes to die." And he looked, and it was a pit, covered over with matting and dust, which the owner had dug to catch the beasts that spoiled the vines. "Praise God that I did not go in," said the fox; "and I wonder whether my enemy, who beats me every day and takes the lion's share, will go in." And he laughed at the thought, and went and found the wolf and said to him: "God has opened a way for you into the vineyard without toil. The owner is dead, torn by wolves; the grapes are shining on every tree." And the wolf, whose greed had got hold of his wits, arose and went; and the fox lay behind him and pretended to be dead, and watched. The wolf stepped on the matting and fell through.

The King had turned on his side. "He laughed," he said.

"Yes, lord."

"The fox laughed. He looked down into the pit, and the wolf was weeping, and the fox wept with him."

"He did, lord. And the wolf said, Is it pity for me that you weep? And the fox said: No. I weep that you did not fall in before I met you, for then I should have had a quiet life."

"He wept," said the King, "because he was glad."

"It was both, lord," said my sister.

"Yes," said the King, after a moment; and I saw that he knew it. "Both." He lay for some time without saying anything. Then: "And the wolf said: Do not hate me for what I did. He who has power and forgives, his reward is with God. And the fox said: you hit me." "Yes." "And that was that." "It was not quite that, lord. The fox, in the end, grew careless. He thought he had the vineyard to himself; he went into it, and fell into the same pit, or another. The owner found them both there in the morning." "Both," said the King. He closed his eyes. "He should have thrown him a rope." "And then the wolf would have gone on hitting him." "Yes," said the King. "Yes, he would. But then there would have been no pit." I do not know what he meant. I think he meant: no pit for the fox either. I think he meant a number of things. I wrote down only the plain words of the Open, which were: the wolf, the fox, the vineyard, the pit.

I give the rest of the hundred and fifty nights in a heap, because they went by like a river in flood. There were more fables: the mouse and the ichneumon; the cat and the crow; the flea and the mouse; the hedgehog and the wood-pigeons; a weaver who was a fool; a thief with a monkey; and I recall that the King asked for the one about the sparrow and the peacock to be told a second time, and then a third. And then the long story of Ali bin Bakkar of Persia and Shams al-Nahar, the Caliph's favourite, a story of two lovers who were forbidden to meet and met in the houses of friends, and sent each other letters, and were found out; I gave it to the nurse once, who said that she had known a pair. It lasted eighteen nights. I cannot give it. I know that the King asked on the third night whether the lovers' letters were in verse or prose, and my sister said that they were in verse, and he said, "Of course," and smiled.

Nights 125 to 141. Shahrazad. Present, seventeen strokes. Open: the young merchant Aziz and an oath of divorce; the prince Taj al-Muluk; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet, and which has moved.

Nights 142 to 147. Shahrazad. Present, six strokes. Open: a man who ate hashish in a bath; a Badawi named Hammad, whose story was stopped; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights 148 to 152. Shahrazad. Present, five strokes. Open: the wolf and the fox, in a pit and out of it; the mouse and the ichneumon; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights 153 to 169. Shahrazad. Present, seventeen strokes. Open: Ali bin Bakkar of Persia and Shams al-Nahar the Caliph's favourite, who have been found out; a book of names, which is in its third book; and a child, which has no name yet.

The brother came on the hundred and seventieth morning. We had not expected him. I had thought, I believe, of a day, of a letter, of a message from the gate; and instead there was only the cough of the porter in the court, and horses, and a sound in the passage as of a man in boots who has learned to put them down softly. I was writing the line. The King was at the window with his back to the door, and I saw him go still. The door opened without a knock. The man who stood in it was tall, brown from the road, in a plain travelling coat; he had a face very like the King's, but older, I thought, though he was the younger; more tired; and he had a way of holding his shoulders as if some weight had been taken off them years ago and they had not quite learned the trick of standing without it.

He did not say anything. He looked at the room: at the bed, with its four pillows; at my sister, sitting up in it with her hair down and her hands on her stomach; at the cradle, with the baby clothes folded in it; at the nurse; at me. He looked longest at the table where the Roll was. "Shah Zaman," said the King, without turning round. "You came." "You said, Come." "I did." "So I came." The King turned. They looked at one another across the length of that room, two men who had walked out of two kingdoms together on a night long ago, and had come to a meadow by the sea; and I had never before seen on a face the look which each of them wore, which was the look of a man who has been wrong in one particular way for three years and finds that the other has been wrong in a different way, and has not died of it.

"Is it true?" said Shah Zaman. His voice was rough. He looked at my sister. "Is she—"

"Come and see," said the King; and then, in the smallest voice, "Sit down. You look as though you have not eaten since Samarkand."

Night 170. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Ali bin Bakkar and Shams al-Nahar, the story ended; a tale of Kamar al-Zaman, not yet begun; the King's brother Shah Zaman, who has come from Samarkand and stands in the door; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights One Hundred and Seventy-one to Two Hundred and Thirty-six: Kamar al-Zaman and Budur

The King's brother stayed. He was given a room along the passage with a window on the garden, and the first three days he slept in it, so that the servants began to say he had died; on the fourth he came to the door of the other room at sunset and stood in it, and the King, who was cutting a pear, looked up and said, "Sit," and he sat. He sat on the floor, on a rug the nurse brought, with his back against the end of the bed. He sat next to me. I had my green cushion and he had his rug, and between them there was a space of about a yard; and for the next sixty-six nights I think he did not move more than a hand's breadth from that place. I should like to say that we talked. We did not talk. Two people who have been at the edge of a thing for a long time do not need to; we sat, and listened, and now and then one of us turned a head very slightly toward the other when something was said, as a man looks at his neighbour in a mosque when the imam makes a mistake.

The King introduced them on that first evening, in the formal manner, with his brother standing in the doorway and my sister propped on her four pillows with her hair over one shoulder. "This is Shah Zaman, my brother, King of Samarkand," he said. And then, after the smallest pause, as a man steps on to a bridge that he has not yet tried: "This is my wife, Shahrazad. And this is Dunyazad, the Vizier's younger daughter, who keeps the Roll." It was the first time he had given either of us a name before another person. My sister inclined her head. "You are very welcome in this house, lord," she said. "I am told you have not eaten." "I am told so too," said Shah Zaman, with a curious little bow, as though to a judge; and he looked, for a moment, almost as shy as I was.

He was a quiet man. He ate what he was given. He watched the King as one watches a house that has been long shut and has just been opened and aired, and he said, to me, on the sixth night, in a voice so low I barely heard it: "He has put on flesh." "Yes." "He looks like our father." "I did not know your father." "He looked like this when my mother was ill." And he turned away, and said no more; and I did not understand until much later that he was telling me that the face the King wore now was not a new one but one that had been laid up under the other for a good many years.

He had brought presents, which he laid on the table in the morning in a heap, with the look of a man who has been asked to a house and has no idea what is wanted. For the child, a bolt of Samarkand silk, undyed, soft as breath, "for the cradle." For my sister a book, a small one, in a binding of green leather, which he said he had not known how to choose and so had taken off his own shelf; and she looked at the title and said, gravely, that she had read it, but never in his copy. And for me, because he had heard from the King that there was a book kept in the room, two reams of Samarkand paper, thin and hard, the best in the world, packed in sandalwood shavings. "I thought," he said, "that a modest book might want more leaves." I took it. I did not know what to say. He read the first page of the Roll, that morning, standing at the table, where the flyleaf says in the chief clerk's hand what it says; and then he turned to the margin of the margin and read that; and then he put it down and said to me, quietly, "He is keeping it." "Yes." "I did not think he could." "Nor did I," I said.

In the afternoons the brothers talked at the window. I could hear them from my cushion, if I did not move, and I did not. They spoke of ordinary things at first, the road, the price of grain at Samarkand, a horse; and then one afternoon the King said, without turning: "Do you still count?"

There was a silence. Shah Zaman put his hand inside his coat, and brought out nothing; he laid it flat on his chest. "Five hundred and seventy-two," he said. "Every time I see a ring." "That is what she said." "That is what she said. I had mine from our father. It was iron." "Mine was gold," said the King. "I gave it to her gladly." They stood a while. "She was in a glass box," said Shah Zaman. "I think of that. I think of the seven locks. She had five hundred and seventy-two rings and no house." "She had a Jinni." "He kept her very carefully," said Shah Zaman. And the King laughed, a short, shocked laugh, and put his hand on his brother's shoulder. It was a thing I had not seen him do to anyone. I looked at the carpet.

That night the King said, "Kamar al-Zaman," and my sister began.

There was a king, she said, Shahriman, lord of the Khalidan islands, who had four wives and no son, and who asked his Vizier what he should do. "Pray," said the Vizier. The King prayed; and a son was born, a son so beautiful that the midwives forgot what they had come to do. He was called Kamar al-Zaman, the Moon of the Age. At fifteen he was a marvel; and his father, who loved him beyond reason and was beginning to feel the weight of his years, said: "My son, I should like to see you married while I live." And the prince, bowing, said that he would never marry. He had read, he said, about women. He quoted a line of verse about what they do to a man's money and his head. His father said, "Think of it." He thought of it for a year. At the end of the year, in the middle of a grand audience, in front of the Emirs and the Viziers, his father put the question again; and the prince said, loudly, that the King was in his dotage.

A silence, my sister said. The King struck the Prince with the flat of his hand, and ordered him seized, and put in the old tower with the Roman well, and left there with a couch and a lamp and a bit of food; and went home and could not sleep for love and anger.

I saw Shah Zaman's shoulders move. "He locked him up," he said, almost to himself. "For not wishing to love." "For not wishing to marry," said the King; and then, after a long moment: "It is not the same." "No," said Shah Zaman. "But I wonder."

The prince, said my sister, sat in the tower, and ate a little, and prayed at the well; and in the deep of the night, as he slept, with the lamp burning at his head, a Jinniyah called Maymunah, a daughter of one of the kings of the Jinn, came up out of the well, as she did every night, to take the air; and saw a light in the tower. She stood over the bed. She looked at the sleeper for an hour without moving. He lay with his shirt open at the neck, and his hair across his face, and the lamp lit the line of his cheek. She said: Blessed be God, the best of creators. She said: How could they have the heart to leave him here? And she bent and kissed him between the eyes, and drew the sheet over his shoulder, and sat on the foot of the couch. She did not wish him any harm.

And then, said my sister, there was a beating of wings in the air; and Dahnash, an Ifrit, flew in through the window, and saw her, and was afraid. He was her inferior. "Do not strike me," he said, "in the name of the seal of Solomon, and I will tell you something extraordinary that I have seen." He had been in China, he said, in the realm of King Ghayur, and he had seen the King's daughter, Budur, who was the most beautiful thing in the world, and she was about to be married, and she would not marry. She had read, said Dahnash, about men. She had said her father was in his dotage. Her father had shut her in a tower, on an island in the sea.

I felt Shah Zaman go still beside me. I felt it as one feels a bird land on a roof.

"Show me," said Maymunah; and he took her through the air, over land and sea, to a tower on an island in the Inland Sea, and in the tower, on a bed of silk, with a lamp, the Princess. And Maymunah looked at her for an hour; and she bent, and saw what she saw; and said, "By God, they are like two halves of an apple." Then they began to quarrel. Dahnash said the girl was more beautiful. Maymunah said the boy. Each of them swore by the seal of Solomon, and by the Throne, and by their own mothers, who were not good oaths. In the end Maymunah said, "We will bring them together. We will put them side by side, and compare them, as one holds two pieces of silk to the light." And Dahnash lifted the Princess in his arms, still asleep, and flew with her, and laid her down on the couch beside the Prince, under one sheet.

I do not know that I have ever heard my sister tell a thing as she told that. She did not hurry and she did not slow. She let the picture be: the lamp, the two faces on the one pillow, the hair of the girl lying across the shoulder of the boy, the breath of the one and the breath of the other, which went in and out together, as if each were the other's tide. There was an Ifrit and a Jinniyah in the room; she let them be there, and fall silent; she let them stand, a little stooped, as people stand over a cradle. "Like two halves of one thing," said my sister, in the voice of Maymunah; and I heard, beside me, a noise. It was Shah Zaman. He had put the back of his hand against his mouth.

They called in a judge, a one-eyed hunchback Jinni, named Qashqash, who decided that they were equal, and that the only way to know was to wake each in turn, while the other slept; and see who loved the other more. So Dahnash, in the form of a flea, bit the Prince on the neck, and he woke. And there, in his bed, in the lamplight, was a girl. He looked at her. He did not speak. He looked at her for an hour, with his heart knocking, until it was dawn in his eyes; and he put out his hand, and touched her cheek. He tried to wake her. He spoke to her; he kissed her; she slept as the dead sleep. "I know you," he said, to her sleeping face, in a voice so low I felt it rather than heard it. "My father has done this. He has put you here to catch me." He was angry, and in love, in the same moment, and could not tell the two apart. And in the end, after hours of looking, he took her ring off her finger, and put it on his own, and put on her finger his; and he lay down beside her, and slept, because the Jinn had put it on him to sleep.

"Rings," said Shah Zaman.

It was one syllable, and he said it in the dark, quite softly, in a voice that cracked in the middle. The King did not turn his head. But I saw him put his hand across the space between the bed and the rug where his brother sat, and rest it a moment on the top of his brother's head, as one rests a hand on the head of a child who has said something true.

"They exchange rings," said my sister, evenly. "It is how they know, when they wake, that it was not a dream." And she went on.

They did the same with the Princess, on the next night, and with the same result: she woke, and found a young man in her bed, and took the ring off his finger, and put on her own, and lay down. In the morning each woke alone: he in the tower of the Khalidan islands, she in the tower on the Inland Sea, and each of them looked at a hand with a ring on it that was not theirs. And each of them, said my sister, lay sick from that morning, with a love that no physician could treat, for the one beloved whose name they did not know, and whose face they had seen in the dark once, and would not forget.

I give the rest as I have it, in my poor way, as it took sixty-six nights. The Prince's father found his son wasting, and sent for doctors, and took him out of the tower, and nothing helped; the Princess's father shut his daughter up again, and had four physicians hanged. Then the Princess's foster-brother, whose name was Marzawan, set out to find a prince with a certain face, and was shipwrecked, and was thrown up by the sea under the very palace where the Prince lay; and he was the first man in the tale to say, "I know her." There was a journey, and a lie about astrology told in a marketplace, and a ring folded inside a letter, and two people who had known each other for one night were married at once. And then, I am sorry to say, the tale went on for another thirty. A bird took a jewel out of the Prince's hand, and he ran after it. The Princess woke alone, put on his clothes, which fitted her, rode into the city of the Ebony Islands as a prince, was taken for one, and was married, in good faith, to the King's daughter, and had to be a husband for a year. The Prince dug in a garden, and found gold. They were brought together in the end, and he had two wives and two sons, Amjad and As'ad, and each boy was loved by the other's mother as no mother should love a son; there were two letters from two queens, and two boys who would not do what was asked, and a treasurer who could not do what he was told, and the boys were sent out into the world with nothing, and their father built them tombs. It was a tale in which people were always being taken for each other. My sister told it in the dark, with the nurse in her corner and the two men beside the bed, and my own heart in my mouth; and on the two hundred and thirty-sixth night, at the end of a night in which one brother lay in chains in a Magian's cellar, in a city where the other was Vizier, a crier went through the streets calling for a young man of a certain face, and the Magian's daughter, who had been told to beat the prisoner and had not, went down and told him; and he went out, and up to the palace, and the two of them fell on each other's necks and lay a long time as if dead.

I did not hear what came next. It is not that I fell asleep. It is that I looked round, at the end of that night, and the two of them, my sister's husband and his brother, were sitting side by side on the end of the bed, with their arms round each other's shoulders, not saying anything at all, and each of them with his face turned a little away, so as not to be seen.

Nights 171 to 190. Shahrazad. Present, twenty strokes. Open: the Prince of the Khalidan islands and the Princess of China, who have each worn the other's ring; a book of names; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights 191 to 236. Shahrazad. Present, forty-six strokes. Open: Amjad and As'ad, who have found one another in the city of the Magians, and their father, who has built them tombs; a book of names, which is in its fourth book and has more than nine hundred names in it; thirty-two dots to be struck; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights Two Hundred and Thirty-seven to Two Hundred and Sixty-seven: Ni'amah and Naomi, and Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat

Bahram was given his life on a condition, and he paid the first instalment of his gratitude by telling two boys a tale, to comfort them. That is how my sister began the 237th night: with a man she had not liked, doing a kind thing in the only coin he had. The tale was of Ni'amah and Naomi, who were brought up in one cradle at Kufa, he the son of the house and she a slave bought as a baby with her mother; and when they were old enough to be told what the law thought of them they were married, and for two years nothing happened, which tellers pass over in a clause. Then the Governor heard that the girl could sing, and an old woman came to the door in a coat of undyed wool, with a rosary of a thousand beads, to ask leave to pray in a blessed house. It is the oldest trick there is, and it works every time, because the people who open the door are kind. She came every day for a month. On the last day she took the girl to see the holy men, and the girl was not seen again, and the Governor sent her to the Caliph at Damascus with a letter to say that he had bought her.

The rest is the boy's, and it took four nights. He lay sick for three months. A Persian physician, who said that there was nothing wrong with him that Damascus could not mend, took him there, set him up in a shop among a great many glass jars, and called him his son; and an old woman of the Caliph's household came to the shop with the water of a sick girl called Naomi. He sent the medicine in a box with a paper folded in it. The girl drank it, and read the paper, and laughed, which she had not done since she was taken. Then he was dressed as a slave-girl, and taught to walk with the left shoulder forward and to sway, and was led into the palace and told to count five doors and go in at the sixth; and he counted wrong, and sat down on a couch in a room full of ambergris, and the Caliph's sister came in.

She was a quick woman. She took him for a girl, and then did not; and when he said, "I am Ni'amah, and I have risked my life for my slave," she said, "No harm shall come to you," and sent for Naomi, and the three of them ate and sang until the Caliph came in at midnight. She did not hide them. She said, "Brother, I have read a tale in a book," and told him, as a thing in a book, the story of a youth who left his house to find his slave, and found her, and had been with her a short time when the King who had bought her from a kidnapper came in and ordered them both killed, without asking, without waiting to learn how it stood. "What do you say of that King?" "It was an unkingly thing," said the Caliph. "When he had the power to punish he should have pardoned. He should have weighed three things: that they loved each other; that they were in his house and in his grasp; and that it is the part of a King to be slow in judging between people, and how much more when it is himself that is concerned." "Then," said his sister, "whoever has judged against himself must abide by it. Stand up, Ni'amah. Stand up, Naomi."

I watched Shah Zaman during that part. He looked at his brother, and then at the floor, as a man looks away from a window when a name is being read in the street. The King did not move. He had a pear on the board in front of him and the knife in his hand; the pear was in two halves, and the knife was still. When my sister reached the Caliph's three things he said, "The third." She said it. "Again." She said it again: that it is the part of a King to be slow, and how much more when it is himself that is concerned. He nodded once, as a man does when a sum comes out as he thought it would. "Go on," he said. She went on. The Caliph gave them to each other and sent them home to Kufa with presents; and I do not think anyone in the room ate the pear.

After that came four armies, arriving at one city from four sides in a single afternoon, each with a sovereign at the head of it, looking for someone. I can give you the dust, which rose four times, each cloud higher than the last, and the sovereigns: a Queen who wanted her slave back; Ghayur, who had lost a daughter; Kamar al-Zaman, a King now, who had built tombs with nothing in them for two sons; and last, under a black banner, an old man in a black coat whose beard came down over it, who had worn black for his son all those years, and whose son, being told, fell down on the road in a faint. They embraced in the dust. Marriages were arranged, as they are. There was a month of drums. At the end my sister said what the tellers say, "until there came to them the Destroyer of delights and the Sunderer of societies," which is what is said when the teller cannot bring herself to say died; and the King said, "Is that all they say?" "It is all they say, lord." "It is not very much," said the King.

Nights 237 to 249. Shahrazad. Present, thirteen strokes. Open: Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat, of Cairo, only begun; a book of names; nineteen dots to be struck; and a child, which has no name yet.

On the 249th night the King said that it was a wonderful tale, and my sister said that it was not more wonderful than another, and he said, "What is that?" before she had finished the sentence. She began it at once, without a breath. There was a merchant of Cairo called Shams al-Din, Consul of the merchants, who had been married forty years and had no child. One Friday he sat in his shop and saw that every merchant in the bazaar had a son beside him; he went to the bath, and looked in the barber's glass, and saw that the white in his beard had overtaken the black. He went home and would not eat, and he quarrelled with his wife; she said the fault was his, and he said it was hers, and both of them lay awake ashamed. What mended it was a confection of nuts and spices and opium, boiled up by a broker who had no business in the matter, which my sister gave in full, and which made the nurse put her mending down on her knee. In due course there was a boy.

On the seventh day the merchant went in to his wife and said, "Where is God's deposit?" and they brought him the child, with a mole on each cheek, and he said, "What have you named him?" "If it were a girl I should have named her," she said, "but this is a boy, so no one shall name him but you." It was the custom then to name a child by an omen: you waited for the first words that came in from the street, and what you heard was the name. They waited. A man in the road called to his friend, "Ho, my lord Ala al-Din!" and the merchant said, "We shall call him that"; and, for the moles, Father of Moles: Abu al-Shamat. "Is that how it was done?" said the King. "In my mother's village, yes," said the nurse, not looking up. "You stood at the door." "And if the first word was a bad one?" "You waited for the second."

The boy was kept under a trap-door until his beard grew, for fear of the evil eye, and got out by accident, and wished to be a merchant; and at his father's party the merchants' sons laughed at him because he had never travelled. He went home in tears. His mother gave him ten loads of stuffs; his father, who said that travel was a curse and that a man should eat his bread in his own land, gave him forty more, and warned him of a wood called the Lion's Copse. I leave out the road, which my sister gave in some detail. He lost everything to bandits in the wood his father had warned him of, and came into Baghdad at night in his shirt, and sat down in a doorway; and two men stopped in the street and looked at him.

They were an old merchant and his nephew. The old man had a daughter, Zubaydah, who played the lute better than anyone in Baghdad, and whom he had married to the nephew; and the nephew, in a temper, had said the word of divorce three times, which cannot be taken back, and the law allowed him to have her again only if another man married her and let her go. They needed a stranger who would be her husband from nightfall to dawn. They offered the boy a thousand dinars, a suit of clothes and a mule. He signed for a marriage-settlement of ten thousand dinars, which he would owe if he did not divorce her in the morning, and was taken to a house with a lute in it. That is as much as I shall tell of that night.

In the morning the Kazi's officer knocked at the door, and the boy, who had been told by his wife what to do, gave the officer five dinars and went to the court. He went up to the Kazi, and kissed his hand, and put fifty dinars in it, and said: "By what law is it lawful and right that I should marry at nightfall and divorce in the morning, against my will?" I was not looking at my sister. I was looking at the King's hand, which was on the arm of the chair, and which did not move. "Divorce by compulsion and by force," said the Kazi, "is sanctioned by no school of the Moslems." My sister did not change her voice. She did not slow, and she did not look at the end of the bed. I asked her afterwards whether she had known that it was there, and she said that she had not remembered; and I did not believe her and I did not disbelieve her, because she read that book at fifteen, and nothing she has read has ever stayed on a shelf.

The King said nothing that night. In the morning, when I turned the Roll round to him, he read it from the top, as he did, and came to the dots, and put the point of the reed beside the nearest, and said, "He paid the Kazi." "Lord?" "Fifty dinars. He put fifty dinars in the man's hand, and then he asked. A careful man, who was paid." "Yes, lord." "And he said it." He struck the dot. "It is not nothing," said the King, "that he said it"; and he went to the window, and Shah Zaman went and stood beside him, and neither of them spoke.

After that the tale went on, as tales do, with the Caliph in it. He came to the boy's house in a dervish's coat, with his Vizier and the poet Abu Nowas and Masrur, who in a dervish's coat looked more like an executioner than ever, and sat on the rug and listened to the girl play; and he left a hundred dinars under the prayer-rug every morning for nine mornings, and on the tenth sent fifty loads of Cairo stuffs with a letter in the name of the boy's father, so that the settlement was paid. The boy was made Provost of the merchants, and then the Caliph's companion, and then Chief of the Sixty. His wife cried out one night in the next room, and was dead, and they buried her. The Caliph gave him a slave-girl to console him, and he would not touch her, saying that what has been the master's should not become the man's; and then, being a man who did nothing by halves, he went to the slave market and bought a girl called Jessamine for ten thousand dinars, and freed her, and married her, and she was with child by him.

I give the harm in one breath, because my sister did. The Governor's son, who was ugly and twenty and had never been on a horse, had wanted Jessamine; his mother made a bargain with the mother of an arch-thief who lay in the Governor's prison; the thief was let out, and on the first night of the next month he climbed into the Caliph's sitting-room by a ladder and took the Caliph's robe and dagger and rosary and signet and a jewelled lantern, and hid all but the lantern under a marble slab in the boy's house. In the morning the Caliph said, "Search," and they dug it up. The boy was sentenced, and walked to the gallows with the crier in front of him. Ahmad the Calamity, captain of the Guard, whom he had made his father by a covenant before God, stopped the hangman and hanged another man in his place, the likest he could find, and took the boy to Alexandria, and bought him a shop.

Jessamine, who would not look at the Governor's son, was set to scour pots in the Governor's kitchen. It was on the 265th night that her child was born there, among the pots, and the women of the kitchen, who had been kind to her, asked her what she would call him. My sister told it plainly. "Were his father well," she said, "he would have named him; but now I will name him Aslan." It means lion. I heard the nurse's needle stop, and then go on. The King looked at the foot of the margin, where four dots stood. I do not know whether he was looking at the dots. Shah Zaman, who had been sitting with his knees drawn up, put his feet down on the floor.

The child crawled up a flight of stairs into the Governor's lap, and the Governor, who had done nothing in the matter but sign a paper, saw Ala al-Din in his face, and kept him, and called him his son. He grew into a horseman. At fourteen he drank in a tavern with the arch-thief, who had the Caliph's lantern in front of him and would not give it to him, saying that lives had been lost for it; and the boy, who could add, went to his mother, and to the Calamity, and then, on a polo field, put himself between a ball and the Caliph's face, and was told to ask a boon, and asked for his father's murderer. The thief was searched, and the lantern was found in his shirt. But the man they were sending to fetch was no longer in Alexandria. A sea-captain had bought a jewel from him, a jewel with five faces that he had found in the bottom of a leather bag and taken for onyx, and had paid a hundred thousand dinars for it and given him a drink that put him to sleep; and he woke in the hold of a ship bound for Genoa, where the King, who had been told he would die at the hands of a man from Alexandria, was killing prisoners one by one on the quay. An old woman of the convent came in at the last moment and said that she needed a servant for the church. He carried wood for the convent for seventeen years.

Nights 250 to 267. Shahrazad. Present, eighteen strokes. Open: Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat, in a convent in Genoa, with a jewel he does not know the use of; his son Aslan, who has a name; a book of names; one dot to be struck; and a child, which has no name yet.

Nights Two Hundred and Sixty-eight to Two Hundred and Seventy-seven: The Last Dot, the Birth, and the Name

On the morning of the 268th day the King struck the last dot. I had been counting them down for a week, upside down from the other side of the table, and I need not have; there was one left at the end of the last row of five, and the reed went across it, and the page was finished. It looked like a field after the harvest. He held the reed over it a long time, as though there might be one more, and then laid it in the groove of the box. "It is today," he said. "A child is not a dot, lord," said the nurse, from her corner, without looking up; she had said it before, on the 262nd day and on the 240th, and she said it as one says that the soup is hot. "I know that," said the King. He sat down on the floor beside his brother, with his back against the end of the bed, and said nothing for the rest of the day, which I had not seen him do since the first week.

That night my sister told the Princess in the church, and the music. The boy had been seventeen years in the convent, hauling wood and wheat for monks who did not know his name. One day the old woman told him to leave the church, because the King's daughter was coming to pray, and he hid in a closet with a window, because he wished to know whether she was like our women; and there beside her, with a lute, was his wife Zubaydah, who had been buried. She would not play for the Princess until the Princess kept her word, which was to give her back her husband. "He is in that closet," said the Princess, "listening." She played. He came out. They fell down together on the floor. "Who was buried?" said the King. It was the first thing he had said since morning. "A Jinniyah, lord. She took her shape, and lay down, and cried out; and in the night she broke out of the tomb." "And no one asked." "No one asked, lord. It was a very good likeness." "No one asked," said the King, as though he were setting it down beside something else.

Night 268. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat, who has heard a lute in a church in Genoa; a book of names; no dots; and a child, which is late, and has no name yet.

The 269th night held the rest of it, and I will give it in a line. The jewel had five faces, and each, rubbed, gave one thing: a couch that flew, a pavilion, trees and a river in a dry valley, a laid table, and a horseman who put an army to flight; and the man and his two wives sat on the couch and flew to Alexandria, and to Cairo, and to Baghdad, where a young man named Aslan was waiting for his father; and the Caliph held a feast. "Until there came to them the Destroyer of delights." My sister said it in the voice of a woman closing a door, and I think she was listening to something else. "It is only keeping the hours of the house," she said to the nurse, afterwards, of the child. "It is a guest, and guests are late."

On the morning of the 270th day Shah Zaman asked me, in the voice of a man asking the price of grain, whether it was usual. I said that I did not know; I had never had one. "Nor I," he said; and then, after a while, "I had thought I might be of use. It appears that there is nothing in the whole business that a man is for." "You turned the cradle," I said. "I turned it twice," he said, "and turned it back." The 270th night was Hatim of Tayy, which is very short: a dead host who, asked in jest for supper by a king asleep near his grave, came into the king's dream sword in hand and killed the king's camel, because he had nothing else to give, and whose son brought the king another camel in the morning. The 271st began with Ma'an son of Zaidah. On the afternoon of that day my father came to the door of the room and stood in it with his arm crooked in the old way, under nothing. The shroud had been in the chest at the foot of his bed since the twenty-ninth night; but the arm had not been told. I saw him look at it, and put it down. The King came and stood beside him, and they stood together facing the room, like two men at the edge of a river that they have been told is fordable.

The pains began that evening, as they say, without announcement. The nurse came and went with her sleeves rolled and said that it would be tonight, and that the men were to go out. The King said he would go out when the night's tale was told. "It will not be told," said the nurse. "It will," said my sister, from the pillows, in the voice of someone describing the weather; and so it was, with the door ajar the width of a hand and the two Kings in the passage on the other side of it, the elder with his back to the wall and the younger beside him, listening through the crack. The sand-glass stood on the table with its cloth tied round its neck. Nobody turned it. She told Ma'an and the Badawi with the cucumbers. You will know it. A man in the desert tells a stranger on a mule what he hopes to get from Ma'an: a thousand dinars; and if Ma'an says too much, five hundred; and too much, three hundred; two hundred; a hundred; fifty; thirty; and if it is still too much, he will tie his ass at the Emir's door and go home. She said the numbers between the pains. She would stop on a word and start again on the same word, and the nurse, who had delivered half the city, said she had never seen it done. At fifty she was breathing through her teeth. At thirty she said "Too much" in the Emir's voice and began to laugh, and I heard, through the crack in the door, Shah Zaman laugh once, helplessly, and stop; and the King say, in a low voice, "Thirty."

I will not tell you the rest, because it is not mine and she has never told it. I was sent for water and for cloths, and I was in the room when the room changed its size; that is all I can say of it. The nurse said a word that I will not write. There was a sound like a hinge. "There," said the nurse, "there," to someone, and then, to the door, "A boy"; and the door, which had been open the width of a hand, was open the width of a man, and the King was in it. He had his hands held out in front of him a little way, as a man holds a bowl that he has been told is full. Nobody stopped him. My sister was grey and very tired, and she said, clearly, "And he left the ass tied up where it was," which is the end of that tale; and she shut her eyes.

It was just light. I wrote the line standing, and gave it to the King to read, as I did every morning, and he read it standing, with the child on his arm, which I had not thought he would be able to do. He read down to the foot, and at the foot he laid his thumb beside the word born, as he laid it beside the strokes, and kept it there. He gave the Roll back to me, and sat down on the end of the bed with his son, and he sat there for the whole of the day.

Nights 269 to 271. Shahrazad. Present, present, present. Open: the city of Labtayt, not yet begun; a book of names; and a child, born at dawn, a son, who has no name yet.

My sister slept for most of two days, and woke on the third evening and asked me, as she asks every evening, what she had told. I read her the last lines of the Roll, and it came back to her in the order it had left. Then she said, "And where is he?" I said that he was with the King, and that the King had not put him down since the dawn of the 271st day, except to give him to the nurse and to Shah Zaman, and then not far. "Then it is going to be a long childhood," said my sister, and asked for the dates, which were under the cloth.

There were four nights after that which I can give you in a clause apiece, because I was not listening. The city of Labtayt, where a king shut a tower and put a lock on it, and every king after him a lock of his own, until there were twenty-four, and the last of them broke every one, against the advice of his grandees, and found a scroll. A caliph who was asked three times by his headsman whether the boy's head should come off, and said yes each time, and the boy laughed, and said a verse about a hawk that let a sparrow go because it would make a poor supper; "Does that work?" said the King; "Once, lord," said my sister. And a man called Ibrahim who hid in Baghdad with a hundred thousand dinars on his head. The King listened to all of them with his son on his arm, and when the child cried he said, "Go on," to my sister, and walked up and down the room with him, and the sentence went on above their heads. Shah Zaman held the cradle with the Samarkand silk in it, which no one else had been allowed to touch, and said to the wall that he had never seen his brother carry a thing so carefully.

On the 275th night my sister began the city of Iram of the Pillars; and the King, if you had asked him, would have said, I think, that she began it for him, and nobody asked. A man looking for a strayed camel in the deserts of Yemen comes upon a city with two gates inlaid with jacinths, and streets of gold and silver brick, and fruit trees, and running water, and no one in it. He fills his bags with pearls and musk and goes home; and on the way the pearls turn yellow. A Caliph asks a learned man, and the learned man says: Iram, which Shaddad built, who read an old book about Paradise and said that he would build the copy. He wrote to all the kings of the earth, and told them to gather everything of value in the world, and to leave nothing; it took them twenty years to gather and three hundred to build, and twenty to put a castle on it, and twenty for the king to get ready to move in; and when he was one day's journey from the gate, a Cry came out of the sky, and neither he nor any of his people ever saw the city. "And the road?" said the King. "God blotted it out, lord." "Then no one can go." "One man did, it is said, a companion of the Prophet." I saw the King turn the child a little on his arm, so that the window was behind his face and not in it.

Nights 272 to 276. Shahrazad. Present, five strokes. Open: Iram of the Pillars, and the King who gathered everything; a book of names, which is nearly full, with more than nine hundred and fifty names in it; and a son, who has no name yet.

On the seventh morning, which was the end of the 277th night, the nurse said, as one says that the bread is out, "He must have a name, lord. It is the custom." "I know the custom," said the King. He was at the window with the child, as he had been at that hour for six mornings, in the grey. "I have not named anything," he said, "in a long time." He said it to the glass. My sister, from the pillows, said, "It is yours to say, and mine to say after." "I should like to be told by someone," said the King, and did not say by whom. Nobody spoke. The nurse put her hands in her sleeves. And from the court below, loud, in a voice I had not heard raised in fifteen years of hearing it, my father called: "Abd al-Baqi! Abd al-Baqi, the water! Where is that boy?" A page ran across the stones with a copper jar. The King stood quite still. "What was that?" he said. "A page, lord," said the nurse. "What did he call him?" "Abd al-Baqi, lord." "It is a name," said my sister. "The servant of the Everlasting." The King looked at the face of his son. "Then he will be called that," he said.

The page's name was Hasan. I had known him four years. My father came to the door a little after, with the look of a man who has been shouting in a court, and was told, and bowed, and did not look at anyone. I have never asked him why, on that morning, in that court, in that voice, he called Hasan by another name, and he has never told me; and he has never given me the least reason to think that it was anything but what it looked like, which was an omen from the street, as the custom was.

The King wrote it down himself. He gave the child to the nurse, and went to the table and turned back the first leaf of the Roll, and at the foot of the margin of the margin, under the five words that were already there, the last of them cradle, he wrote a sixth, slowly, in the square hand: Baqi. Only the second half of it. Then he sat looking at it, and at the empty place under the tally where the dots had been. When I wrote the line for that night I left the child out of the Open, as one leaves out anything that has been answered; and I noticed that I had left a space where he had stood in every line since the thirty-eighth dawn, and I found that I could not close it up.

Night 277. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Iram of the Pillars, and the King who was one day's journey from the gate; a book of names.

Nights Two Hundred and Seventy-eight to Two Hundred and Ninety-six: Isaac of Mosul, the Mock Caliph, and Ali the Persian

The hair was cut that same morning, which is the custom. My father did the weighing, being the one man in the house who could be trusted with scales; it came to very little, and he gave its weight in silver at the gate, counting the coins into the hands of the people in the queue and writing down the name of each one who took one. He has never been able to give anything without writing it down. The nurse was to bury the hair, which is also the custom. "Give it to me," said the King. "It is not kept, lord, it is buried." "I know the custom," he said, for the second time that morning; and she put it in his hand. He laid it inside the front board of the Roll, in the thumb's-width of the binding, between the tally and the place where the dots had been, and closed the board on it. I have never seen him look at it. It is there.

The city knew by noon. The storyteller on the crate at the dyers' gate added a line to the Fisherman, and took it out, and put it in again with the sex of the child. The wagers on whether the King would let it be born were paid, by an arrangement that nobody could explain, to a stationer in the Copper Market, who had bet that he would, and who gave the whole of it to the poor at the gate, in dirhams, which my father was also writing down. Women came to the side gate, where I wrote the names at noon, with small things wrapped in cloth: a pair of little shoes, a lump of salt, a rattle made of three date stones in a gourd. I wrote down the givers. I asked the first of them what the salt was for, and she said that it was against the evil eye, and that I was to put it in a corner of the room where the King could not see it. I put it under the cradle. I do not know whether the King saw it.

The 278th and 279th nights finished Iram. There is a tomb in it, after the Cry: the son of Shaddad cut a cave for his father and laid him on a throne of gold under seventy robes, and set at his head a golden tablet with a verse on it, telling the proud to take warning, and saying that its owner had been lord of the east and of the west and had fallen like harvested grain. Two men came on the cave in a later age, and went down, and took the tablet, and as many bars of gold as they could carry. "Did they read it?" said the King. "It does not say, lord." "No," said the King. "It would not." And in the same breath, because she was tired, and because the sentence is the same in every mouth, my sister said, "And men also tell the tale of Isaac of Mosul."

Isaac was a singer, and the Caliph's favourite, and one night on his way home from the palace he was caught short in a back street, and found a great basket hanging down a wall, and, being drunk, sat in it, and was hauled up by four women who had been waiting for someone else. They did not send him away. A lady came in, as lovely as a moon, and asked who he was; he said that he was a merchant of the bazaar; and she asked whether he could repeat verses. They passed the night so. She said a piece, and he answered with one; she told a story, and when he fell silent she began another; he told her every tale he had ever heard from a neighbour who drank with kings, and she said that she had not thought to find such a memory in a bazaar. At dawn an old nurse came and said that the time had come, and the lady said: keep what has passed between us to yourself. He went three nights running, and on the third he left the Caliph's own presence to go, and was fetched back by runners, and told the Caliph everything in private; and the Caliph came the next night in the second basket, and was married to her by morning. Then the Caliph told Isaac to tell it to no one, and he told no one until the Caliph died. "That is a long time to keep a thing," said the King, to the sand-glass; and I could not tell whether he approved.

Nights 278 to 281. Shahrazad. Present, four strokes. Open: Isaac of Mosul and the lady in the house with the basket; a book of names, which has begun its fifth book; and a son, who has a name.

There was a sweeper, in the three nights after that, who took hold of the cloth of the Ka'abah in the middle of the pilgrimage and prayed aloud that a certain lady might quarrel with her husband again; he was seized, and was to be hanged, and told the Emir why. I shall not tell you why, and neither did my sister, in any detail; she told it quickly, with her eyes on the child; and the Emir let him go, and said to the people, pray for him, he is excusable. "He should have prayed for something else," said the King. "What?" said Shah Zaman. "I do not know," said the King. "That is why he is excusable."

Then the Caliph Harun al-Rashid could not sleep, which happens to him about once in thirty nights, and went down in a merchant's coat with the Vizier and Masrur to the Tigris, to hire a boat. The old boatman would not take them out. The Caliph comes down the river every night, he said, in his state-barge, with a man crying: whoever is found on the water after dark, I will strike off his head or hang him from the mast. They paid him two dinars and hid under a black cloth beneath an arch of the bridge, and the barge went by: two hundred white slaves in rows, men with cressets of red gold burning aloes-wood, a throne in the middle, and on the throne a young man in black embroidered with yellow, with a Vizier beside him who might have been Ja'afar, and an executioner who might have been Masrur. "By Allah," said Harun, under the cloth, "my reason is confounded." It was a very exact copy. I watched the King, who sat quite still at the crier; and then I watched Shah Zaman, who was watching the King.

They went again the second night, and landed behind the false Caliph's party, and were taken for merchants from abroad, and entertained. The wine went round. The young man had a gong; each time he struck it a door opened and a woman came out with a lute and sang one song, and at each song he cried out and tore his coat to the hem, and they let down a curtain and brought him another. Four times. At the fourth he fell down in a faint, and the curtain stuck, and the Caliph saw that his ribs were scored with the marks of whips. "A handsome youth," said Harun, "and a thief." He did not say it kindly. But Ja'afar asked, as he was made to, and the young man told them. He was a jeweller's son, Mohammed Ali, with his father's shop; a lady on a mule had come to buy a necklace that no king could match, and had taken him home to be paid, and had told him who she was, the Lady Dunya, the Vizier's own sister, and had married him that hour, properly, with a Kazi, rather than have him otherwise. He lived a month in her house and did not go out. One day she went to the baths and made him swear not to rise from the couch; and an old woman came from the Lady Zubaydah, the Caliph's wife (another woman than the lutist), to say that she wished to hear him sing; and he went, and sang, and came back, and his wife was awake. She had him blindfolded, and her women begged for him, and she had him beaten instead, and thrown into the street like a log. When he was well he sold the shop and bought four hundred white slaves and built a barge, and had gone down the Tigris every night for a year, dressed as the Caliph, with a man crying out that whoever was on the river would lose his head; and had heard no news of her.

The Caliph sent for him in the morning, and for the Vizier's sister, and asked her whether she knew the young man. She said that women could not be expected to know men. He said: this is your Jeweller. She said that it had been written. He renewed the contract before the Kazi and made the Jeweller one of his companions; and then my sister said, "until there came to them the Destroyer of delights." "Did he ever strike off a head?" said the King. "The Jeweller? No, lord. He cried it nightly for a year, and nobody lost one." "Then he was not much of a Caliph." I could not tell whether it was a joke. I do not think that he could. "He built a barge," he said, a little afterwards, "instead of going to the door." And Shah Zaman, at the window, did not turn his head.

Nights 282 to 294. Shahrazad. Present, thirteen strokes. Open: Ali the Persian, who has been sent for and has said that he hears and obeys; a book of names; and a son, who has a name.

On the evening of the 295th day my sister, who had slept most of the afternoon with the child on her arm, sat up and said, in the voice of the newly woken, "Where was I?" and looked about for me. I was at the side gate with the book. The nurse was out of the room. It was the King who answered. He was by the window with the sand-glass in his hands, and he did not turn. "The Jeweller is pardoned," he said. "The Caliph has asked the Vizier's sister whether she knows him, and she says that women do not know men. He renews the contract before the Kazi. You said the thing that is said, and went on at once to a man called Ali, a Persian, whom the Vizier has brought to the Caliph for his sleeplessness, because he has many tales; and he has been told to come, and has said that he hears and obeys. That is all he has said." He turned the sand-glass over. "He is going to tell what he has seen or what he has heard. The Caliph is to choose." My sister looked at his back for some time. "You have kept that," she said. "It was said," said the King. "It was said in the room." I have thought since that this was the evening on which I became, in part, unnecessary; and that he did not mean it so. I said as much to Shah Zaman, who had sat on his rug through all of it; he said that nobody is unnecessary to a Roll, and I said that was the sort of thing a man says who has never been kept by one. He considered this, and said that it was fair.

The Persian said that he would tell what had befallen him. He had gone abroad with a boy and a little leather bag, and in a strange city a man had fallen on him in the market, seized the bag, and said that it was his and everything in it; and they had been taken to the Kazi. The Kazi asked the man what was in the bag. He said: two styles for the eyes, a kerchief with two gilt cups, and two tents, and two spoons, and a cow and two calves, and a lioness and two lions, and a she-bear and two jackals, and an upper chamber and two saloons, and a kitchen with two doors, and a company of friends to swear that it was his. My sister said it all, down to the lioness, without a breath, in the voice of a clerk reading an inventory, and the King began to laugh. It was not the laugh at the Reeve's chest, which was surprise, nor the one at the Barber, which was hunger. It came up slowly from some depth where it had been kept for a long time, and when it arrived he had to put his hand over his face. The child on his arm opened his eyes at the noise and looked up, and then did a thing with his mouth that the nurse said was wind. "It was not wind," said the King, from behind his hand.

Asked in his turn, the Persian said that his bag held a coat of mail and a broadsword and a thousand fighting rams and gardens and statues and slave-girls and singing-women, and the Tigris and the Euphrates, and Iram of the Pillars, and a thousand sharp razors to shave the Kazi's beard unless he judged the bag to be the Persian's. The Kazi said that they were two pestilent fellows who made sport of magistrates, and told them to open the bag. In it were bread, a lemon, cheese and olives. The Persian threw it down in front of the other man, and went his way; and the Caliph laughed until he fell on his back, and gave him a present. "Whose bag was it?" said the King. "The Persian's, lord. Bread, a lemon, cheese, and olives." "How does the Kazi know?" "He does not say." "He did not know." "No, lord. He opened it." "He should have opened it first," said the King. "Before the lioness." My sister said that it would not have been half so good a tale, and the King said that was true, and that it would have been a better judgement; and they were both right.

Nights 295 and 296. Shahrazad. Present, present. Open: Harun al-Rashid and the slave-girl that the Vizier would not sell, only begun; a book of names; and a son, who has a name.

Nights Two Hundred and Ninety-seven to Three Hundred and Eleven: The Lover Who Feigned a Thief, and the Fortieth Day

The tale that the 296th night had left open was finished on the 297th. The Caliph and his Vizier had been drunk together, and each had sworn, on the divorce of his own wife, that he would neither sell nor give the other a certain slave-girl; and when they were sober they found that they could do neither, and sent at midnight for the Imam Abu Yusuf. He came on his mule. He said that the Vizier should sell half of her to the Caliph and give him the other half, and that both oaths would be kept; and when the Caliph, who could not wait the legal days, asked what was to be done, he said that she should be married to a slave for the space of a sentence and divorced. The slave refused to divorce her, for a hundred dinars, for a thousand. So the Imam said that the Caliph should give the slave to the girl, since no one can be married to what he owns, and the marriage was void. The Caliph filled the Imam's mule's nose-bag with gold. My father, at the door, looked at the nose-bag, and then at the floor.

On the 297th night my sister told the lover who made himself a thief. He was a young man of Bassorah, very handsome, whom a crowd brought before the Emir Khalid for having been caught in a house at night. He confessed. He would say nothing else. The Emir, who did not believe him, had him put in irons and sent a crier through the city to say that the hand would be cut off in the open place in the morning; and then, in the dark, had him brought to his own room, and fed. "You have a story that is not a thief's," said the Emir. "The Prophet says, in cases of doubt avoid the punishment. Tomorrow the Kazi will ask you; deny it." And sent him back to the cell. But in the morning, before the whole city, the young man was asked whether the thing he took might have been worth less than a quarter dinar, and said no, more; whether he had a share in the goods, and said no; and the Emir, in a rage, struck him across the face with his whip. The butcher laid the knife to the wrist. A girl came through the crowd in torn clothes, and threw herself on him, and unveiled, and said: read this first.

He had thrown a stone against her window, as lovers do, to tell her that he had come; her father and brothers heard it and ran out; and he had snatched up what lay about the house so that it should look like a robbery and her name be kept out of it. I will not give you the girl's letter, which was in verse, as such letters are. "He gave him the night," said the King. "Lord?" "The Emir. He had him fed, and gave him till morning, in case there was a story." "Yes, lord." "In case," said the King; and he looked at me, I thought, though it may have been at the Roll; and he did not say in case of what.

The 299th night began with the Bean-seller, and with a thing I had not known was in it. When the Caliph Harun crucified Ja'afar the Barmecide, he ordered that whoever wept for him should be crucified also, and the people kept away. An Arab of the desert, who had brought Ja'afar an ode every year in return for a thousand dinars, came with this year's ode and did not know. He found the body, and knelt his camel, and wept, and recited the ode, and fell asleep; and Ja'afar came to him in a dream and said: go to Bassorah, to a certain merchant, and say that I salute him and ask for a thousand dinars, by the token of the bean. The merchant wept when he heard it. He gave the Arab a thousand and five hundred more, and said he should have a thousand every year; and he told the story of the bean. He had sold hot beans in the streets of Baghdad, in the rain, with hardly a coat, and Ja'afar had called him in and told his household to buy, and each had filled the measure with gold; and at the end there was one bean left, and Ja'afar split it, and sold one half to a girl for twice the gold already given, and bought the other half himself for twice the sum of the whole. I looked at my father, who stood at the door. He did not move; he never does at that name. I thought it a hard thing to hear in one's own house, a Vizier killed by a king and a city forbidden to weep for him; and my sister, who did not look at him, told it in exactly the voice she used for the beans.

Nights 297 to 299. Shahrazad. Present, three strokes. Open: Abu Mohammed Lazybones, of Bassorah, and what he was sent for to bring the Caliph; a book of names; and a son, four weeks old, who has a name.

The six nights after that were Lazybones, and I will give them in a breath, because they are long. There was a man in Bassorah so idle that he would not get up out of the sun; his mother gave him five dirhams and sent him after a shaykh who was going to China, and by some turn of that voyage, which my sister gave in its full number of turns, he became so rich that the Caliph sent for him because he alone had a jewel big enough for the crown of the Lady Zubaydah; and he came to Baghdad with trees of gold and an enchanted tent and a way of making the palace battlements bow. On the three hundredth night, at the dawn, the King counted the strokes in the margin of the first leaf, five to a row; there are sixty rows; he put the point of the reed to the last and said, "Three hundred." Then, after a time, "That is a number." "It was my father's word," I said, "once." "Yes," said the King. "He said that if he had counted it would have been a number." My father was not in the room. I have not told him. Then there were Yahya the Barmecide and a debtor to the Caliph, whom Yahya paid out of his own family's gold, and who thanked him with a couplet about having feared their arrows; and Yahya said, when he was told it, that a man in want and sick at heart is not to be blamed for what falls from him, for it does not come from the heart. "Say that again," said the King. My sister said it again. "Put that in the margin," he said, which he had never asked me to do with a word that was not his own; and I wrote it, small, under the sixth, because there was nowhere else.

The 307th night held a very short one. The Caliph Mamun, at a council of the learned, raised a stranger in a ragged white coat from the lowest seat to the highest by the quality of his answers, and then, at the wine, offered him the cup; and the stranger stood and asked leave to say one word. He said that the Commander of the Faithful had lifted him out of his littleness by the little reason he had, and that if he drank it would leave him, and he would sink to what he had come from; and he hoped the Commander of the Faithful would not rob his slave of that small jewel. The Caliph gave him a hundred thousand pieces. "He asked to be let keep it," said the King, who had a cup of pear-juice in his hand. He looked at the cup for a time, and did not drink, and I think that he did not know that he did not.

On the 308th night she began Ali Shar and Zumurrud, which is long and which I shall tell in its place. It begins at a bed: a merchant of Khorasan, who had his son at sixty, dying, gives him the last of what he knows. Do not be over-familiar with anyone. Do good while you are able. Keep your wealth and do not waste it. Take counsel of those older than you. Beware of wine. "I have heard you," says the son, at each, "and I will obey you. What more?" The King had the child on his arm. He asked my sister to say the list again, and she said it, and he said, "He asked what more." "Yes, lord." "He did not ask why." "No, lord." "No one does," said the King, "at a bedside."

Nights 300 to 310. Shahrazad. Present, eleven strokes. Open: Ali Shar of Khorasan, who has buried his father and kept his shop for a year; a book of names; and a son, who has a name.

The fortieth morning, which was the end of the 310th night, my sister got up. It is the day when the forty are over, and a woman may bathe, and put on a clean dress, and be a person again in the street. The nurse had been counting too. She had her in the bath before the light, and she came out in the green dress, thinner, with her hair wet over one shoulder, and stood a long time at the window with her hands on the sill, like a woman looking at a country she has been told about. The King was at the table. He had written something in the margin and was blowing on it. "You are up," he said. "It is the day," said my sister. "There is a custom," said my father from the door, who had not been asked, and who had been listening with his whole body, "that on the fortieth day a child is shown." "To whom?" said the King. "To the people, lord." "Which people?" "The ones in the court," said my father. "They have been in the court since dawn."

He took the child himself. He went out onto the gallery over the great court at noon, in the plain coat, with Shah Zaman a step behind him and my father a step behind that, and I behind my father with the book of names, because I had been told to bring it and did not know why. I had not seen the court full since the first morning. It was full. They stood in rows as far as the gate and out of it, in the sun, men and women and children on their fathers' shoulders, and nobody was talking. I have never heard so many people make so little sound. Shah Zaman, behind the King, took off his cap, which in Samarkand is a thing a man does at a burial; I do not think that he knew he had done it. The King said nothing. He held the child up a little, as a man holds up a cup, with the hand under the head; and the child, who had been asleep, opened his eyes at the light and looked at the sky. Nothing happened. Then in the third row from the front a woman in black, whom I knew, because I had written her daughter at the gate in the second book, took one step forward out of the rank. "What is his name?" she said. She said it in an ordinary voice. It carried to the end of the court. "Abd al-Baqi," said the King. She said it after him, once, to herself, to get it right; and the man behind her said it, and the woman behind him; and it went back through the court like a bucket along a line, until it reached the gate. "Mine was Salma," said the woman. And the King, who had not looked at the book in my hand, who had not looked at anything, said: "Salma. The weaver's daughter. She was left-handed, and sang over the washing, and had a green shawl. She was the four hundred and second." There was a long silence. "Yes," said the woman. She turned and went back to her place in the rank. Nobody moved. He held the child for some time longer; I could not tell how long; and then he took him in.

I asked my father afterwards whether he had known that the King knew them. He said no. He said that he had thought the King read each one for a breath, as he had said at the beginning, and no more. I looked in the book that night. The entry says: Salma, a weaver's daughter, left-handed, sang over the washing, a green shawl; four hundred and second. In my hand. He had not been shown it that day. I do not know when he had read it, nor how many others he has by heart, and I have not asked him that either. My sister, who had watched from behind the screen in the passage, asked me only what they had done. "Nothing," I said. "They did nothing." "Good," said my sister. I think that she had been afraid of the cheering.

Night 311. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Ali Shar of Khorasan, who has asked himself to whom he shall leave it if he does not spend it; a book of names, which is in its fifth book; and a woman in the court, who said Yes.

At the side gate the next noon there were forty-one names, which was more than on any day since the first month. The first was an old woman's, for a niece whom nobody had remembered to give. She did not say why she had come that day. I did not ask.

Nights Three Hundred and Twelve to Three Hundred and Twenty-seven: Ali Shar and Zumurrud, and a Letter to Samarkand

The letter from Samarkand had been on the table for three days. It came on a camel, in a message-bag of boiled leather, and the King read it twice and laid it under the sand-glass, where it stayed; and on the forty-first morning Shah Zaman took it out from under the glass and read it standing, and folded it, and said to the room, which is how he asks for things, that his Vizier at Samarkand wrote that the governor of Bukhara had been collecting taxes in the King's name and in his own, and that the caravans had begun to go round by the south. "How long is it to Samarkand?" said the King. "Thirty days, if the road is dry." "It is not dry." "No." The King looked at the child, who was on the nurse's knee. "Go," he said. "Come back before the winter." And that was the whole of it between them, as it had been at the window; I think they had said what they had to say in the afternoons, and neither would have known how to say it again at the gate.

He packed in an hour. He had come with a saddle-bag and he left with a saddle-bag. But he had brought ten reams of Samarkand paper, thin and hard, in sandalwood shavings, and hidden them in the cedar chest under the silk for the cradle, so that I should not be embarrassed by being given them at once; and he took me to the chest, and opened it, and went out of the room. On the top ream there was a slip in his hand which said: for the Open, and for anything that is not. I have not shown it to anyone. I stood over ten reams of paper for some time. When I came out he was at the gate with the horses, and the King was there already, holding the bridle of the nearest as though to see that it was sound. "Will you write to me?" said Shah Zaman, to me, over the horse's neck. "What shall I write?" "The Open." I said that it was in the Roll. "Copy it." "Why?" "Because I shall not be in the room," said Shah Zaman, "and I should like to know what he has not finished." I looked at the King, who was looking at the horse's mouth. I said that I would.

"Do you still count?" said the King, quite low, as the groom took the bridle. I do not think that he meant me to hear. "I stopped on the fortieth day," said his brother. "Why?" "I do not know. I took off my cap in the court, and when I put it on again I was not counting." The King nodded, as though that were an answer, and did not ask the other thing; and Shah Zaman got up on his horse and went out through the gate with six men behind him and did not turn round, which is the manner of the people of Samarkand. The rug was left by my cushion. The nurse put her foot on it that evening and said that it was in the way, and went on putting her foot on it, and did not move it. In the morning the King asked her to turn the rug so that its worn edge faced the wall; she did; by noon it faced the cushion again, and nobody had touched it.

The room was larger that night. My sister began the evening's tale and kept looking toward the end of the bed, where the rug was, and the King sat with his back against the foot of it, in the place where he had sat for a hundred and forty nights with his brother on his left, and kept his left hand on the floor a little away from his body, palm down, as a man does who has been in the habit of a shoulder. At the second watch he moved it. He put the sand-glass there instead. I do not think that he knew.

She brought Ali Shar to the slave-market, where the bidding was for a girl called Zumurrud, the Emerald, who could write the seven hands and recite the Koran in the seven readings and made silk curtains that sold for fifty dinars. Her owner had sworn to sell her only to the man she herself chose; and the broker, who had never been given such a thing, went down the ring of merchants asking her, one by one: this one? An old man with a grey beard, who bid a thousand dinars, she would not have; she said, in verse, that she did not care for a man brought to such a state by his years. A man with a dyed beard she mocked in verse too, the same afternoon. A one-eyed man she waved away. A short one, with a beard to his navel. And then her eye came to a young man at the back of the ring, who had not eaten that day and was only watching to see what she would fetch. "That one," she said. "His cheek is smooth, and his breath is sweet." "They asked her," said the King. "Yes, lord. Her owner had sworn it." "And the broker asked her again, for each." "For each, lord." "For each," said the King. I did not write it down. It is not a thing that one writes.

He had no money. The young man stood with his head down, ashamed to say that he could not buy a girl he had come to stare at; and she saw it, and said to the broker, "Take my hand, and walk me to him." She dropped her price from a thousand to nine hundred, to eight, to a hundred, laughing, and he said that he had not a hundred; and when she understood that he had nothing at all she asked him to lead her aside into a lane, as if to examine her, and drew out of her dress a purse with a thousand dinars in it and put it in his hand. "Pay nine hundred for me out of that, and keep a hundred for provisions." He bought her with her own money. She gave him another thousand to furnish the house, and when the house was furnished she told him to buy silk and gold thread and coloured silks, and every eight days she made a curtain, and every eight days he sold it for fifty dinars, to a merchant, never to a stranger: "for we have enemies, and a stranger would be the cause of our parting." He kept to it for a year.

At the end of the year a man who was not a merchant offered a hundred dinars for the curtain, and the broker was bribed with ten, and the young man sold. I shall not give you what came after in detail, because it is the worst thing in the story and my sister gave it in a short way. The stranger followed him home, and asked for water, and for bread, and put something in a banana, and the young man slept; and the stranger was the brother of the old man whose beard she had made the verse about; and she was taken to that old man's house, and told what she would be, and said no. They were not kind to her. That is all I will say. I did not look at the King. I looked at the child, and did not look at the child, and the nurse said that she would take him to the other room, and the King said, "No," and put his hand over the child's ear, the one that was uppermost, as a man puts his hand over a candle in a draught.

She was got out of that house by a mistake. An old woman had told Ali Shar to stand under her window at midnight and whistle, and she would let herself down on a rope; and he fell asleep on the bench; and a thief who came by took the turban off his head, and she, seeing a man in the dark under her window, let herself down to him with a pair of saddle-bags full of gold, and by the feel of his beard knew that it was not her lord. He took her to a cave, where his old mother sat. Zumurrud asked the mother if she might louse her in the sun, and the old woman, who had not been out of the cave in a month, said yes; and when the old woman was asleep Zumurrud put on the clothes of a trooper whom the thief had killed, and girded his sword, and got on his horse, and rode ten days into the empty country, and on the eleventh came to a city. At the gate the troops were drawn up, and the Emirs and the Grandees; and as she rode up they got down and kissed the ground and cried: God give you victory, O our lord the Sultan. For it was the custom of that city, when the King died without a son, that the army should go out to the suburbs and wait three days, and whoever came from a certain quarter they would make King. "They did not ask her," said the King. "No, lord. She did not give them time." "She said she was a man of rank, who had quarrelled with his family." "Yes." "That was quick." "She was very quick," said my sister, "and very tired."

So she was a King for a year, and a good one, as the story says: she took off taxes, and let out prisoners, and mended wrongs; and she kept to the palace with two small eunuchs and let no man near her. On the first day of each month she had a banquet laid for the whole city on the race-course, and ordered the shops shut; and she had a dish of sweet rice put before an empty seat, and sat on her throne and watched the gate. The first to take that seat was a man with blue eyes who said his name was Ali, a weaver; and she had a table of sand brought and struck a figure with a pen of brass and said: your name is not Ali. Then the thief, with another name. Then the old man. Each told her a false name, and each was found out by the table of sand, and each was told to speak the truth; and I shall not tell you what she did to them. My sister told it in the voice of a woman reading out a bill, the nurse left the room, and the King, who had put his hand over the child's ear again, said: "She asked their names." "Yes, lord." "They lied." "Yes." "And she knew." "She knew, lord." "Then why ask?" "To see whether they would lie," said my sister, who had thought about it. "That is a reason," said the King. He did not say what it was not.

In the fifth month she watched the gate of the race-course for a young man who was thin and wasted and looked as though he had been ill for a year, because he had; and he sat down opposite the dish of sweet rice because it was the only place free, and ate it, and the people who knew what it meant said: young man, do not eat that. He said that he did not mind what was done to him. She let him finish. She could have had him taken at the first mouthful, and she sat and watched him eat the whole dish, as a woman watches a child who has not eaten for a long time; and then she had him taken to the bath, and clothed, and brought to her at night. She teased him that night, my sister said, as a woman does who has had a year to think of it; I shall not give you that either. In the morning she told her Emirs that she had a mind to travel into this man's country, and that they should choose a viceroy till she came back, and she went with him, with camels, and gold, and presents for his friends; and he gave alms to the poor in his own city, and they had children, and lived the gladdest life, "till there came to them," said my sister, "the Destroyer of delights." And she stopped, a little before her time, and looked at the cradle; and she said, in her ordinary voice, that she was tired. "Then stop," said the King. It was the first time that he had said it to her, in the middle of a night, and the dawn was an hour and a half away. She stopped.

Nights 312 to 327. Shahrazad. Present, sixteen strokes. Open: Jubayr bin Umayr and the Lady Budur, not yet begun; a book of names; and a son, who follows the lamp with his eyes.

To Shah Zaman, King of Samarkand, from Dunyazad, who keeps the Roll. You asked for the Open, and here it is, copied from the Roll as it stood at dawn on the 327th night; the column does not change much from night to night, and I do not think that you are a man who needs it all. Ali Shar and Zumurrud: ended, "till there came to them the Destroyer of delights." Jubayr bin Umayr and the Lady Budur: not yet begun. A book of names, in its fifth book. A son, who follows the lamp. What is not in the Open: on the 322nd night he asked me where you would be by now. I said, at the river, if the road was dry. "The road is not dry," said the King. He was right; the rain has been on the whole of this country and, I suppose, on yours. It was the first time that he has asked after anyone. I have not told him that I am writing to you. I do not think that I need to. The nurse has brought two of her seven cats to the house. The King has said nothing. The child has been seen to look at one of them for a very long time. The rug is still by my cushion. The nurse says it keeps out the draught. She is wrong, and she knows it. The paper is very good. I have used two sheets for this letter, and I am keeping the rest for the Open.

Nights Three Hundred and Twenty-eight to Three Hundred and Forty-six: Jubayr and the Lady Budur, and Letters

The Caliph Harun could not sleep, which my sister said happens to him more often than the Barmecides could bear; and Masrur, who is the man who has to do something about it, offered him in turn the garden and the stars, the three hundred concubines walking about their rooms unwatched, the doctors of law in dispute, the poets, the wits, and the pretty boys; and to each the Caliph said, "My soul inclines not to this." "Then, my lord," said Masrur, "strike off my head." And then, having run out, he went to the door, and found the Wag waiting, Ali bin Mansur of Damascus. "Shall I tell you," said the Wag, "what I have seen with my eyes, or what I have only heard?" "If you have seen anything worth the telling," said the Caliph, "let us hear it; for hearing is not like seeing." It was the second time in thirty-odd nights that the Caliph had said it. The King said it with him, very quietly, half a beat behind. The child, on his arm, looked up at the sound, and the King stopped, and looked down at him, as one looks at a dog that has understood a word.

The Wag was in Bassorah for his pension, and walked out alone to see the town, and lost himself, and came to a great door with two brass rings, and a trellis of vine over the bench, and heard a woman singing in a voice that had been unhappy for some time. He raised the curtain a finger's breadth. A girl looked up and sent her maid to ask if he had no shame at his age, and he said that he was thirsty. They gave him water in a golden tankard, and he was a long time over it, looking; and when he could drink no longer he said that he was troubled in mind. "At what?" "At the turns of Time." She told him she was Budur, the daughter of a jeweller of that city, and when he gave her his own name she came down from her seat and said: now I will tell you my case. I am a lover parted from my beloved. The beloved was Jubayr bin Umayr, Emir of the Shayban, who had come into her room one day while her maid was plaiting her hair, and had seen something he did not like, or did not understand, and had gone out saying a line of verse, and had not written since. She wrote him a letter in verse, and she offered the Wag five hundred dinars if he brought an answer, and a hundred for his trouble if he did not.

Jubayr was out hunting. He came back at evening, and embraced the Wag, who said afterwards that he felt that he had embraced the world; and he laid a table with verses cut into it, and begged him to eat. "I will not eat a mouthful," said the Wag, "till you grant me my desire." He gave him the letter. Jubayr read it and tore it in pieces and threw it on the floor. "I will grant you anything but that; I have no answer to her." But when the Wag rose in a temper he caught his skirt, and said: "Did she not tell you, if you bring me an answer you shall have five hundred, and if not, a hundred? Stay with me, and you shall have the five hundred." So the Wag stayed, and ate, and a girl sang, and Jubayr fell down in a fit at the second verse; and in the morning a page came with the five hundred dinars and a message, that he should not go back to the girl who had sent him. He went back. She was standing behind the door. She knew everything, from the tearing of the letter to the fit; and when he asked her how, she said that the hearts of lovers have eyes; and she gave him his hundred, and raised her face to heaven and asked God to do to Jubayr what He had done to her.

The Wag came again the next year for his pension. Budur's house had servants at the door, and the street was swept; Jubayr's had its bench broken and no page. He thought that someone had died, and stood in the road and wept for the house, and a slave came out and said that the master was alive, and had been struck with love of a certain lady, and sat like a rock, and did not ask for food or water. They had to say verses to him to bring him round. "Welcome, son of Mansur," he said. "The jest has become the earnest." And he wrote her a letter. She answered it. But what she wrote was hard, line upon line, and the Wag read it before he gave it, and said, "He will die of this"; and tore it in pieces, and asked her for another; and that was hard too, and he tore that. The third she wrote in a different hand, and wept while she wrote it, and sealed it, and told him to say: she will be your guest tonight. Jubayr read it and fell in a faint. They heard the tinkle of her anklets in the passage. He was on his feet. They were married before the morning, with a Kazi and two witnesses, for a hundred thousand dinars, which she took out of the bag and handed back to him, apart from a handful for the Kazi. And he told the Wag how the love had passed from her to him: it was New Year's Day, and she was in a boat on the river with ten girls and a lute, and he had said, sing me that again, and she would not; and he had told the boatmen to pelt her with oranges, and they pelted her till he thought the boat would sink. "That is how the love went across," said Jubayr.

"He tore up two letters," said the King, when my sister had done. "The Wag?" "Yes." "To spare them, lord." "Whose were they?" "Hers; he carried them." "He read them first." "He had to, to know." "And decided what Jubayr could bear." "Yes, lord." "She wrote the third in a different hand," said the King. "She wrote what he could bear." "Yes, lord." "Is that a lie?" I had my reed in my hand and I looked at the Roll. My sister said, "It is the same woman on the same day." "That is not what I asked," said the King; but he asked no more, and I have been thinking since about what it is that a person who carries letters for two people is to do, and about my own.

From the seventh week my sister told with the child at her breast, and did not break a sentence when he took it; the nurse said that it was an unnatural talent, and the King said that it was the only one that was needed. My sister said it was only the same as telling in the dark. But I noticed that she had begun to keep her eyes on his face and not on the King's, and that when she lost a word it was now the child who gave it back to her, by making a small noise in the right place; and that the King, who had never once been in doubt of whom she was telling to, sat very still when this happened, as a man sits who has learned that the house has another door.

Nights 328 to 337. Shahrazad. Present, ten strokes. Open: the six slave-girls of Al-Yaman, not yet told; a book of names; a letter from the river, not yet read to the King; and a son, who has begun to look for his father's voice.

On the 337th night the post came from the river. It is a small leather bag, with a seal in the shape of a cap, and it was handed in at the side gate by a rider with six days' mud on him, and the porter, who has been told, brought it to me and not to the King. The letter was on a single sheet of the Samarkand paper, folded in four. It said: "From the post-house at the Oxus. The road is not dry. The grey horse went lame on the fourth day and I have a bay, whose name is Patience, which I did not choose. The river is high and we wait two days for the ferry. The keeper of the post-house asked me to write my name and rank in his ledger, and I wrote traveller, and he looked at it for some time and said that it was the first time. There is a bird here that sits on the roof and says one word, which I have not been able to find in any dictionary. I count nothing. I have found that I walk past rings without seeing them, and then I stop and look to see if I am seeing them, and that is a sort of counting too. Does the boy's hair grow? Send the Open. Tell my brother the road is not dry." I read it to the King. He had the child asleep on his chest, and did not move. "I know that it is not," he said. And then, after a while: "Write to him. Come before the winter." "He knows, lord." "Write it." I wrote it; and I thought of the Wag with the two torn letters, and of the fact that both of them now spoke through me, and that neither of them knew what the other had been told.

Nine nights I will give in a breath, since I was not much listening to them. The Man of Al-Yaman and his six slave-girls, white, brown, plump, lean, yellow and black, whom he made praise their own colours to him in verse over a cup, and made peace between them, and clothed them all in robes; the Caliph Mamun bought them for sixty thousand dinars, and sent them back to their master, who could not bear to be without them, with the sixty thousand. The Caliph Harun and the damsel in the chamber, and Abu Nowas, who was in pawn at a tavern for a thousand dirhams spent on a boy in three coats. The man who stole the golden dish a dog had eaten from; the sharper of Alexandria and the police; the three chiefs of police, each of whom told a tale of how he was fooled; the thief and the money-changer; the sharper of Kus; Ibrahim the Caliph's uncle and a merchant's sister. They were all about men who were taken in, and the King said so, on the 344th night, with the child laughing at the sound of his voice; and my sister said that he was right, and that she had noticed it herself, that the people most easily taken in were the ones who were quite certain that they were not.

That month Hasan brought me a small book at the side gate. It had come from a stationer in the Copper Market, who was selling the tales written out for a quarter dirham, in a hand that was none of ours, with the Fisherman and Aziz and Azizah and the Hunchback, and it was wrong in several places that I will not tell you. It ended each tale with a line across the page and the words: and so the matter was concluded. I took it to the King, because I did not know what else to do with it. He looked through it for some time with the child under his arm. "Does it have the Open?" he said. "No, lord." "Then how do they know where she stopped?" "They do not, lord. They put a line." "A stroke." "A line across the page." "Let them," said the King, as he had said of the crate at the dyers' gate; but he did not give it back to me, and it is in the cedar chest now under the silk, with the paper from Samarkand.

Nights 338 to 346. Shahrazad. Present, nine strokes. Open: the Woman Whose Hands Were Cut Off, who is not yet begun, and who was promised to the King on the nineteenth night, for tomorrow; a book of names; a letter from the river, answered; and a son, who laughs at his father's voice.

To Shah Zaman, King of Samarkand, from Dunyazad, who keeps the Roll. Your letter came on the 337th night and I read it to him. The Open is enclosed, from the 328th night to the 346th, and is very much shorter than it looks. The King says: come before the winter. I wrote it in his words, not mine, and have put it at the end where he can find it if he asks, which he has not. The boy's hair grows. It is a thing I cannot show you, and neither will he. I have a confession, since you asked for the Open and nothing else. It is that I leave things out. I do not tear up what I am sent to carry, like the Wag; I simply do not write it. I did not tell you that he put his hand over the child's ear at the cruel part of Zumurrud, and that he said, of a justice done on three men, that it was a reason. I did not tell you that he has asked me twice whether you had a good horse. I have put these on a separate sheet, which is folded inside this one. You may burn it unread. I find that I do not, after all, know what a person ought to do who carries letters between two people, and I should like to know what a King does. The bird on the post-house roof, my father says, is saying "not yet" in the speech of the river people; he did not say how he knew; I have not told the King. Tomorrow is the 347th night. She has not forgotten, and I think that he has not either. Write when you can. The paper is very good.

Nights Three Hundred and Forty-seven to Three Hundred and Fifty-six: The Woman Whose Hands Were Cut Off

In the afternoon of the 346th day my sister, who had slept, sat on the edge of the bed with the child asleep against her shoulder and said to me, without preface, "The book does not say it." I knew which she meant. I said that I had been afraid it would be this. "The woman praises God," she said. "That is the whole of it. She does not say anything to him; she is not asked; the tale ends at the river. If I give him the rest, it is mine, and not the tale's." "It is yours either way." "If I leave it out it is the tale's." She looked at the child's ear. "He asked me, on the nineteenth night, if she said it, and I said that I was not told. I said that a woman further on would. I did not know that I had made a promise until he counted." I said that she could tell him what the book said, and then say that she was going on. I said that I would have written them in two inks. She said that that was a clerk's answer, which it was. "Is that a lie?" she said. It was what the King had asked, some nights before, of Budur's third letter, and I did not know that she had heard it. "Not if you say it," I said. She thought. "No," she said. "Not if I say it." And she gave me the child to hold, which she does not often do, so that she could put up her hair.

On the evening of the 346th day the King said to me, as soon as I came in, "Is it the night?" He had not said the number aloud once since the nineteenth night, and I had not said it to him. "It is the night, lord." He nodded. He had washed the child's face with his own hands, which the nurse had allowed for once, and sent the nurse away to see to her cats; and he had put the sand-glass on the floor, where his brother used to sit. Then he said, to the door, in the voice in which he asks for things: "Vizier." My father had been standing there, as he stands, with his arm a little crooked. "Sit," said the King. "It is the night of the woman." My father had never sat in that room. He looked at the floor, where there was nothing but the rug and my cushion; and he sat down, with his back against the wall, awkwardly, as a man sits who has not sat on the floor in front of anyone for forty years; and I moved my cushion an inch toward him, for no reason, and he did not look at me.

"I said the three hundred and forty-seventh, lord," said my sister, from the pillows. "I said I thought. The tellers do not agree about the numbering. It may be the night before, or the night after." "It is tonight," said the King. She looked at him a moment, and she did not say anything else about it.

The first part of the night was the end of a tale begun on the night before, of Ibrahim, the Caliph's uncle, who was asked by the Caliph Mamun for the most remarkable thing he had ever seen. He had been riding, and had smelt food, and looked up and seen, behind a lattice, a wrist, lovelier than anything; and he had got into the house by telling two strange gentlemen that their friend was waiting for them, so that the master of the house took him for a guest of the guests and the guests took him for a friend of the master; and he had eaten, and drunk, and sung, and the master, who had learnt his name, had sprung to his feet. "Now of the food I have had my will," said Ibrahim, "but of the hand and the wrist I have still to win my wish." The master had called down every woman of the house, one by one, to show him; the last was his sister, and it was her wrist; and he had given her to Ibrahim that night, with ten thousand dinars, and sent her to his house with an equipage too large for the house. My sister told it very quickly, and without looking at the King; and I thought, as I think she meant me to, that she had put a hand and a wrist before the woman who had none.

Then she began. A certain King made a proclamation that anyone who gave alms of anything should lose his hand; and everyone stopped giving. A beggar came to a woman who was hungry herself, and asked her for something, and she said: how can I give you anything, when the King cuts off the hands of all who give alms? He adjured her in the name of God, and she had pity, and gave him two scones of bread. The King heard of it, and sent for her, and her hands were cut off, and she went home. She went with her sleeves hanging, and I think that nobody in the street looked at her, because it was the one day when they were all careful not to. Now after a while the King said to his mother that he wished to marry, and his mother said that among the slave-girls there was one of unsurpassed beauty, who had a blemish; and he asked what, and she said that both her hands had been cut off. He asked to see her. He was ravished, and he married her, and he did not know her; and she bore him a son. "He did not know," said the King. "No, lord." "He had cut them off himself." "Yes." "And did not ask her name." "Her name is not said, lord." "He did not ask," said the King. The other wives, being envious, wrote to the King that the woman was unchaste, and the boy hardly born. He wrote to his mother and told her to take the woman into the desert and leave her there. "He wrote," said the King. "Yes, lord." "He did it by letter." My sister said that he had.

So the old Queen took her, with the child at her neck, and abandoned her; and she walked, and wept, and came to a river, mad with thirst, and knelt to drink, and the child slid from her neck into the water. She had no hands to catch him. She sat on the bank. Two men came, and asked what she wept for, and when she told them they asked if she wished them to bring the child out, and they prayed, and the child came out of the water, safe and sound. Then they asked if she wished to have her hands given back as they had been, and she said yes; and they prayed, and her hands were given back, goodlier than before. "Do you know who we are?" they said. "God knows." "We are your two scones of bread, which you gave in alms to the asker, and which were the cause of the cutting-off of your hands. So praise God for giving you back your hands, and your child." And she praised God.

"That is where the book stops," said my sister. "The tellers stop there, and say praise be to God. I said that I would not stop there." The King did not move. My father, against the wall, had put his hand flat on the floor beside him, as one steadies oneself on a boat. The woman, said my sister, got up, with her son and her hands, and washed in the river; and she looked at her hands for some time, the way a person looks at a thing she has been lent. Then she went back. She did not go to her own people, for she had none. She went to the city, and the palace gate, and said to the guard: tell the King that his wife is here, with her hands. They took her in. The King was at his table. He looked at her as men look at one they have been told is dead; he stood up, and sat down, and could not speak; and she stood in the doorway with the boy on her arm, and held out her hands, open, as one does to show that they are empty. Then she said it. I saw my sister, in telling it, look not at the King but at the wall above his head, where there is a stain the shape of a bird. "You cut off my hands, and I do not keep it. You sent me into the desert on a letter, and I do not keep that. I have come to say so. I do not need you to say anything." And she stood there. That is all that my sister said that she said. It is, I think, the shortest speech she has ever given anyone, and she gave it in a woman's voice and not her own.

"Again," said the King. My sister said it again: "You cut off my hands, and I do not keep it." "Again." She said it a third time, in the same voice, and I could not see her face, for the lamp was behind her. "Did she stay?" said the King. "I do not know, lord." "Say." "I cannot, lord. I was not told." "No," said the King, after a long time. "It is enough that it is said." And then, to the room, not to anyone: "It is said." My sister put her face for a moment against the child's head. My father's mouth had come open. He looked, I thought, like a man about to speak who has had the words for years and has never once been able to find which of them comes first. "Vizier," said the King, very low. "Not yet." My father shut his mouth. I have thought a good deal about that. It was the old word; it was not the old voice.

At the dawn he did not take up the Roll at once. He turned back the first leaf, and at the foot of the margin of the margin, after the six, he wrote a seventh word, in the square hand: hands. It was the word in the guard's message. He did not say why. I did not ask him. Then he sat looking at it, and at the lock of hair inside the board, and at the dots which were struck; and he took the Roll from me and read it from the top and arrived at the foot.

That morning, in the passage, my father put into my hand a paper, folded small, that he had kept in his sleeve. It had seven names on it, in his writing: seven of the brides who had no one left in the city to give them, who had been strangers brought in from the provinces, with nobody to say a mother's name or a trade. He had known them. He had carried them to the door himself. He had not written them down, because he had not been asked, and had not been able to ask whether he might. I wrote them that noon at the side gate, on a page by themselves, in the fifth book. It is the only page in the books with no mother's remark on it, and I left the line under each name empty, in case. I did not ask him how long he had had the paper. He said, "Not yet," quietly, as if to himself, and then, "Now."

Night 347. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Devout Israelite, not yet begun; a book of names; and the Woman Whose Hands Were Cut Off, who is told, and of whom it is not known whether she stayed.

Nine nights, which I give you in a breath, because my sister gave them in one. The Devout Israelite, who gave away the price of his yarn, and exchanged his trencher and jar for a stinking fish, and found a pearl in it, and when a beggar asked for a share gave him half, and the beggar said he was a messenger sent to try him. Abu Hassan al-Ziyadi, who was deposited ten thousand dirhams by a man on his way to Mecca and spent them the same day, and when the man came back the next morning ran out of the house and was sent for by the Caliph, to whom the Prophet had appeared four times in the night and said, Succour Abu Hassan; and the Khorasani, when he heard how it had been, said, "Had you told me the fact at first I should not have pressed you; I will not take any of it; you are quit." "That is the second," said the King. "Lord?" "The second who did not keep it." The poor man who was lent five hundred dinars by a friend, and found three strangers who said they had a deposit of his father's, and found at home that the friend had arranged them all. The ruined man of Baghdad who was told in a dream to go to Cairo and was beaten for it, and the Wali who told him he had dreamt of a treasure in Baghdad under a fountain, and did not go; and the man went home, and dug under his own fountain. The Caliph Mutawakkil and Mahbubah, whom he had forsaken for her arrogance, and who each dreamt the same night that they were reconciled, and woke and made the same verse; and when he died all his four thousand concubines forgot him but one, who mourned him until she died, and was buried at his side. "She kept it," said my sister, who did not often say anything of her own at the end. "Lord." "Yes," said the King. He did not say it with any particular tone. And on the last of the nine nights she began the King's Daughter and the Ape, and did not finish, because the dawn caught her, which is the only honest reason for not finishing.

Nights 348 to 356. Shahrazad. Present, nine strokes. Open: the King's Daughter and the Ape, only begun; a book of names; and a son, who has begun to know the name that he is called, and does not yet know that it is his.

Nights Three Hundred and Fifty-seven to Three Hundred and Eighty-one: The Ebony Horse, Uns al-Wujud, and the First Snow

On the 357th night my sister began the horse of ebony. A King of Persia called Sabur, at the feast of the New Year, was brought three gifts by three sages of three countries: a man of gold with a trumpet, which would blow upon any enemy who came in at the city gate and strike him dead; a silver basin with a peacock of gold and twenty-four chicks, which at each hour of the day and night pecked one chick and cried out and beat its wings; and a horse of black wood inlaid with gold, which would carry its rider where he willed, a year's journey in a day. The King said that he would give them whatever they asked, and what they asked was his three daughters. The youngest saw her husband through the curtain: a man of a hundred, with a dyed beard and eyes the colour of raw meat; and she went to her room and put dust on her head. Her brother, Prince Kamar al-Akmar, the Moon of Moons, came in from a journey and heard her weeping, and went to his father to say that this was not right; and the sage, who had heard, said to the King that if the Prince did not believe in the horse he should try it. He showed the Prince one pin, on the right shoulder, and said, "Turn this," and went away. The horse rose with him into the air, and went up, and up, and did not stop.

"He was shown the one pin," said the King. "Yes, lord." "By a man who bore him a grudge." "Yes." "And he was not shown the other." "No, lord. But he thought, in the sky, near the sun, that a man who made a pin to go up must have made one to come down; and he felt along the horse with his hands, every part of it, and found on the left shoulder a screw like a cock's head, and turned it, and the horse began to come down." The King had the child's hand in his, and was running his thumb over the knuckles, one by one, as one feels for a pin. "Someone should have told him that there is another," he said. "He found it, lord." "That is a different thing." My sister said that it was. "Is there always another?" said the King. "In the tale there was, lord." "And outside it?" She was silent so long that I thought she had not heard. "I do not know, lord," she said. "I have not been outside a tale for a very long time." The King said nothing. After a while he put the child's hand back into the blanket, fold by fold, and said that it was cold.

Thirteen nights I will give you in a breath. The Prince came down on the roof of a palace in Sana'a and went down through the dark to find food, past a eunuch asleep with a sword by his head, and kissed the Princess Shams al-Nahar on the cheek, and she woke and said that her father had lied about the man who wanted her, since he was not ugly; and in the morning the King of Sana'a, who had a drawn sword, said that the Prince should have asked for her in the usual way, before witnesses; and the Prince said that he would fight forty thousand horse for her, and sat on his horse on the roof and rose before their eyes. She grieved. He came back for her, and she said, take me wherever you go, and he did; he took her to the gardens outside his father's city, and left her in a summer-house, to go and prepare a procession for her entry, and a palace, and to let her see the greatness of his father. "He went to prepare a show," said the King. "Yes, lord." "For her to be shown." "Yes." "He did not bring her in as she was." While he was gone the Persian sage, gathering herbs in the garden, found the horse and the Princess, and told her that the Prince had sent him, and flew away with her, and a King of the Greeks took her, and the sage was beaten and jailed; and the Prince went about the world for a year asking after a girl and a horse of wood, and was thought mad. When he found her she was feigning madness herself, tied up, so that no one should touch her; and he came to the Greek King as a physician from Persia and cured her, on condition that the King should take the horse and the troops out to a meadow, and let him exorcise the demon from the princess by putting her on the horse; and he set her behind him on it and turned the pin, and they rose, and the King and his army stood in the meadow until the evening.

On the 365th night it snowed. It was the first snow that any of us in that house could remember; I had seen it twice in my life in the hills, but never in the city; and in the morning, when I came in with the Roll, the room was full of a new white light, and the King was at the window with the child in his arms. The child was five months old, and he had a particular look of outrage that he gave to things he did not know. He gave it to the snow. "Take him down," said the King; and the nurse said that it was cold and he would catch his death, and the King said that he would catch snow. We went down. He walked out into the middle of the court in his plain coat, in the unmarked white, up to his ankles, with the child in a quilted blanket against his chest, and stood. The nurse stayed in the doorway. My sister was at the window above; I saw her hand on the glass. I stayed with the Roll under my arm. He bent, and took a handful of the snow in his free hand, and held it near the child's face; and the child, after a time, put out a finger and touched it, and withdrew it quickly and looked at the finger. Then he did it again. The King laughed. It was not the laugh that comes from far down; it was a short one, like a man's who has been given something he did not expect. Then he looked back at the place where we had come out, and saw the marks that he had made: a single line of footprints from the door to where he stood. "They will be gone by noon," said the nurse. "Yes," said the King. And he walked back to the door in his own footprints, one foot at a time, setting each boot in the print it had left, as a man does who does not want to make a second set.

On the 369th night, which was a Tuesday, I was sixteen. Nobody had said so. The King, cutting a pear after the evening meal, asked me my age as he might have asked the price of salt, and when I told him, said, "Since when?" "Since the morning, lord." "Why did you not say?" "I did not think it was a thing that was kept." He did not answer. He cut the pear in two, and gave me the half with the stalk, which is the better; and I did not know until I had eaten it that he had cut it for me. My sister, who had said nothing all day, gave me a cup of glazed clay from the potters' street, with a blue fish inside it, and said that she had meant to wait until the Roll was done.

Nights 357 to 370. Shahrazad. Present, fourteen strokes. Open: Uns al-Wujud and the Vizier's daughter Rose-in-Hood, not yet begun; a book of names; a first snow; and a son, who touched it twice.

The 371st night was the beginning of Uns al-Wujud and Rose-in-Hood, which is long, and which my sister told in the order of the letters. The daughter of a King's Vizier, who loved wine and verse and was called Rose-in-Hood, watched the ball-game from her lattice, and dropped an apple on a young guardsman called Uns al-Wujud, and asked her nurse his name. The nurse carried their letters. One of them, by mischance, was dropped in the passage, and a eunuch picked it up and took it to the Vizier; and the Vizier read it, and knew his daughter's hand, and went to his wife and wept until his beard was wet. I looked at my father. He was on the floor with his back against the wall, where he sits now. He did not weep; he looked at his hands, which he turned over, one and then the other, as though he had been told that there was something on them. "He wept," said the King. "He was afraid for her, lord. He said it was for two reasons: that she was his daughter, and that the King was his master." "He built her a castle," said the King, who knew that part of the tale already, because it is the part that is always told. "On a mountain in an island in the sea, lord, with guards and a garden; and he took her there in the night, in a ship, and said that it was a pleasure-trip." "And he did not ask her." My sister said that the tale did not say. "No," said the King. "It does not." My father turned his hands over again. That night, in the passage, I asked him whether he would have built it. He considered. "In the city," he said. "So that I could see the door." It is the only thing he has said to me about the matter, and I think it was an honest answer, and I had not known until then that he had one.

The rest I give you in the order in which it was done to me, which is to say a little at a time and with the dawn always in the wrong place. Uns al-Wujud found the door of her house shut and a line of verse written on it, and wandered mad through the night; a lion, whom he flattered in verse, led him down to the shore; a hermit who had not seen a man for years prayed for him and sent him out on a raft of reeds; and he came to the island, where an eunuch who had once been a merchant of Ispahan let him into the castle: a garden round a tank, and cages hung in the trees, and in every cage a bird, and every bird, when he wept, answering him in its own voice. But she was gone. She had let herself down from the castle on a rope of her dresses, and walked to the shore, and got into a fisherman's boat, and been carried to a King, Dirbas, who took her in, and swore that he would find the young man, and sent a Vizier round the world with presents. The Vizier found him, and did not know it: he brought him home as a fakir, in rags, on the deck of his own ship. I will not give you the recognition, which my sister gave at some length, and which went a little faster than the beginning.

On the 373rd night the post came from Samarkand, in the leather bag with the seal like a cap, and I took it to the King myself, since it was addressed to both of us. "From Samarkand. I came on the thirty-fourth day. The governor of Bukhara had been taking in two names, mine and his. I did not behead him; I made him come to Samarkand and sit in the room where I sit and watch me keep accounts, for forty days, in silence; and at the end of the forty days he gave me back what he had, and a great deal more, and asked me to send him home. I find that there is nothing more punishing than watching a man read a ledger aloud. The caravans are going through again. I have opened the room that I shut after my wife, three years ago. It is only a room. I read the second sheet. I did not burn it. I want to be told things like that; tell me always. The horse is called Patience and has grown fat. It is snowing here; it has been for eleven days. I will come at the first snow on your side of the mountains. I have your Open pinned over my table; there are two columns now, yours and mine. Mine is shorter. S." The King listened with his eyes shut. At "tell me always" he opened them, and looked at me; and I looked at the Roll. "Write to him," said the King. "Write that it has snowed. Write that the boy took it in his hand."

I wrote it that night, on the Samarkand paper, in the second hour. "It has snowed. The boy took it in his hand and touched it twice. The King walked back across the court in his own footprints, one foot at a time. You said always, and I am keeping this in." On the first of each month I make my copy of the Open for him, on two sheets: one for the Open, and one for what is not in it. I have begun to write the second sheet first. I did not put in the last thing, which is that the boy, on the 378th night, said "ba" to the lamp, and that the nurse, my sister and the King each said at once that it was the beginning of his name, and that he looked at all three of us with the contempt of one who had meant only the lamp.

On the 380th night my father did not come to stand at the door at dusk. The nurse said that he was in the lane of the weavers. I asked what for, and she said that he had not said, but that he had gone with a paper in his hand, and looked at the paper at every door; and she said it as one says that it will rain. He came back after the second watch with snow on his shoulders and his shoes wet to the ankle, and went to the King and said something low; the King nodded; my father went to bed. I do not know what he said.

Nights 371 to 381. Shahrazad. Present, eleven strokes. Open: Abu Nowas and the three boys, only begun; a letter from Samarkand, answered; a book of names, in its fifth book; the first snow, which is gone; and my father, who has gone out with a paper.

Nights Three Hundred and Eighty-one to Four Hundred and Twelve: Daniel's Question, Shah Zaman's Return, and the Second Child

The nights after the Wazir's castle I give you as my sister gave them, quickly, like a woman paying out a rope. Abu Nowas, who shut himself up with a feast and prayed to be sent someone fit to eat it with. A man of Bassorah who spent everything on a slave-girl he loved, and she told him to sell her, since he needed the price. The wife of Mutalammis, who was pressed by her family to marry again when her husband had been so long away that people thought him dead, and who said no for as long as she could, and was married at last, reluctantly; and on the night of the wedding the husband came home, and stood among the women, and she sighed the first half of a verse, and he answered her with the second, from the crowd; and the bridegroom, hearing it, went out improvising, and left the two of them the house. A simpleton whose ass was stolen by two sharpers, one pulling it off by the halter while the other put his own head in. Harun and three poets; Harun and Zubaydah at her bath. They were told, most of them, with my sister's eyes on the child. He was seven months old and had four teeth, or rather four places where the teeth meant to be, which he showed to everyone as evidence.

On the 388th night the first snow came on the mountains, and on the morning of the 389th, at the gate, there was a rider with ice in his beard and a bay horse that had grown fat. The porter ran for me, and I ran, I think; I remember that I went down the stairs with the Roll under my arm because I did not know how to put it down. He had already dismounted. He stood with the reins in his hand and looked at me, and I at him, and neither of us said anything for as long as it takes a horse to blow. "You are early," I said at last, which was the sort of thing I had meant to say, and had not meant to say first. "The snow came early," said Shah Zaman. He took a parcel out of his saddle-bag, wrapped in oilcloth, and put it in my hands. It was a book. It was bound in green leather, a hand's breadth by two, and when I opened it, it was my own writing: the second sheets, all of them, in the order in which I had sent them, which I had folded inside the letters and told him to burn. On the first leaf he had written, in his small upright hand: What is not in the Open. "I could not keep them in Samarkand," he said. "I thought you should have them. In case you wanted to know what you had left out." I did not say that I had kept no copies; I do not think that I could have spoken. The King had come down, behind me. He looked at the two of us, and at the green book, and at his brother's beard, and said, "You have grown a beard." "It is the road," said Shah Zaman. And the King, who had not touched anyone for eighty days except a child, put out both his hands and took his brother's face between them, and held it, and looked at it, as one looks at a thing in a shop that one has decided to buy.

That night the child screamed at the beard. It took four days for them to be on terms. I will not say that Shah Zaman minded; he sat with his rug beside my cushion, as before, and held his nephew at arm's length like a man holding a vessel that may still be hot, and said to him, in Persian, in the voice of a general, that he had come a long way. On the third night the child took hold of the beard with both fists, and would not let go, and the King said that this was to be expected in a family that did not let go of things; and Shah Zaman, whose eyes were watering, said that if it was a family characteristic he had got it from the other side.

On the 391st night the King laughed at the fisherman and the fish. It is a small tale. Khusrau of Persia was given a great fish by a fisherman and ordered him four thousand dirhams; and his wife Shirin said that he had done ill, since the next courtier he gave a like sum to would feel it a slight, and the next he gave less to would feel insulted; and the King said that a King cannot go back on his gift; and she said, call him back and ask him if the fish is male or female. The fisherman said it was an hermaphrodite, and got four thousand more. Then, going away with the bag on his shoulder, he stooped for one dirham that had fallen, and Shirin said, see the meanness of the man; and the King, in a temper, called him back, and the fisherman said that he had stooped because the coin has the King's face on one side and his name on the other, and he could not bear that any man should tread on it; and got another four thousand, and the King made a proclamation that no man should take a woman's counsel, for it will lose him his one dirham and another two beside. "He did not pay once and stop," said the King. "No, lord." "A King does not take back a gift." "No, lord." "Not even the price of a fish," said the King; and he looked, I thought, at my father, who was on the floor with his back to the wall, and who said nothing at all.

Nights 381 to 393. Shahrazad. Present, thirteen strokes. Open: the Devout Woman and the two elders, not yet begun; a book of names, in its fifth book; a boy with four places for teeth; and Shah Zaman, who has come with the first snow on this side.

The 394th night was a short one, and in the books it is told in a paragraph. There was a virtuous woman among the Children of Israel who went every day to a garden to wash before prayer; and two old men who kept the garden fell in love with her, and told her that unless she yielded to them they would swear that they had found her with a young man. She said that God would preserve her from them. They opened the gate and cried out, and said what they had said they would say; and since it was the custom of those days, they cried her name in the streets for three days, and the two elders came to her each day, and laid their hands on her head, and thanked God for sending His anger down on her. On the fourth day they took her out to be stoned. And a boy of twelve called Daniel, who had followed them, said, do not stone her yet; and he sat on a chair, and had the old men taken apart, and asked the first what he had seen, and where. Under a pear-tree, said the first. He asked the second. Under an apple-tree. "Three days," said the King. My sister said that it was three days. "They cried her name for three days." "Yes, lord." "And nobody asked." "A boy asked, lord, on the fourth." "Why not on the first?" "I do not know, lord. It is not said." "Nobody asked where." "No, lord." He was silent. "It took him a moment," he said. "A moment, lord." "A moment, to ask where." The child on his arm turned his face against his chest. I saw my father's hands, flat on the floor, press a little, as a man presses a floor to see whether it will take his weight.

On the 395th night, and the two after it, the Caliph Omar sat judging, and two young men brought before him a third, by the collar, and said that he had killed their father. He did not deny it. He was a Bedouin, whose stallion the old man had killed with a stone, thrown over his garden wall when one of the camels strayed in; and he had picked up the same stone, and thrown it back. "It is just," he said. "The law is the law." But he had a younger brother, for whom his father had left money that he alone knew where to find, and he asked for three days to bury it with a guardian; and when Omar asked who would stand surety, he looked round all the faces, and chose a stranger, Abu Dharr, who had never seen him. Abu Dharr said yes. The three days went. On the third the young men said that he would not return, having once fled; and Omar said that if he did not, Abu Dharr would suffer what the law prescribed. The court was in tears. And in the last hour, sweating, and saluting, the Bedouin came in. "I have given the boy to his mother's brothers," he said, "and let them into the secret of the money, and braved the heat of noon, and kept my word as a free man. That it be not said that good faith is gone from among men." Abu Dharr said that he had stood surety for a man he did not know because he had been chosen, and had not been able to bear that it should be said that generosity was gone from among men. And the two young men said: "We forgive him our father's blood, that it be not said that humanity is gone from among men." They would not take the blood-money from the Treasury either. They said they had forgiven him for God's sake, and that whoever does so does not follow his kindness with reproach.

Three times, then: that it be not said. The King was silent a good while. Then he said, without moving, "He came back." "Yes, lord," said my sister. "He did not have to." "He had given his word." "And a stranger had stood for him." "Yes." "Vizier," said the King. My father lifted his head. "I am told that you go out in the evenings with a paper." My father said that it was so. "How many houses?" "Forty-one, lord." "And?" "Thirteen opened." There was no expression in his voice at all; he was giving an account, as he has always given accounts. "I said my name. I said what I had done, and that I was the man who came to the door. I did not say that I was sorry; I thought that was a thing for them to refuse, and not for me to ask. At the fourth house a woman threw a shoe at me. It missed, and she said that she had not meant it to hit. At the nineteenth an old man let me in and sat me down and gave me a cup of water, and said nothing for a quarter of an hour, and then told me where I might find the grave. I went." "Is it that it should not be said?" said the King. "No, lord. I go because there is a paper, and the paper has names." "And is it said?" "What, lord?" "That the Vizier is gone from among men." My father considered it, as he considers everything. "I do not think they are saying it, lord," he said. "I think they are saying a good many other things." The King nodded, as though that were the correct answer to a different question. He did not tell him to stop.

On the 400th night, when the lamp had been trimmed, my sister said, "Lord, I am going to tell you something, and I would like to be the one who does it." He put the child down on the rug between two cushions. "I am with child again," said my sister. "Since the end of the harvest, by my count and the nurse's. I do not know yet whether it is a son." He said nothing for some time. "The first time," said my sister, "I told you by the Roll. I wished to tell you with my mouth." "How long?" said the King. "A little under two hundred and sixty nights, lord." He drew a breath. "I shall not draw the dots." "No, lord." "A child," said the King, "is not a dot." The nurse, in her corner, did not look up from her mending, and I saw that she was smiling at it. He laid his hand on the coverlet beside my sister's, as he had on the twenty-fourth night, and left it there. And when I wrote the Open at dawn I wrote the last line as it had been written once before: and a child, which has no name yet. I found that my hand knew the way.

On the 404th night my sister told a very short tale about a King. He went out in disguise and asked for water at a woman's door, and was so struck by her face that he asked for her favours. She knew him. She led him in, and sat him down, and gave him a book to read while she saw to something; and the book was about the Divine prohibition, and the punishments prepared for the adulterous; and the King read it, and trembled, and gave it back, and went away repenting. When the husband came home she told him, and he said in himself that he feared the King's desire had fallen upon her, and he did not go near her after that. Some time went by, and her kinsfolk complained to the King that the man had hired a field and ploughed it awhile and then neither tilled it nor gave it up; and the King asked him what hindered him from sowing, and he said, "It reached me that the lion had entered the field, and I stood in awe of him, and dared not draw near." The King understood the parable. "The lion did not trample the field," he said. "It is good for seed. Sow it." My sister stopped. "Who told the husband?" said the King, after a moment. "The King did, lord. In the end." "It should have been sooner," said the King; and my father, on the floor, closed his eyes, and I do not think he was asleep.

Nights 394 to 404. Shahrazad. Present, eleven strokes. Open: the King and the woman with the book, ended; Abd al-Rahman and the feather of the Rukh, only begun; a book of names; a second child, which has no name yet; and a Vizier, who has been to forty-one houses.

Eight nights I give you in a breath, because there is not much in them that is not the weather. The feather of the Rukh, which was big enough to hold a gugglet of water, brought from an island by a man of the west; Adi and the Princess Hind, who met at a church on a feast-day, she eleven years old and he come with presents; Di'ibil and the lady at the gate of Karkh; Isaac of Mosul and a merchant; three lovers who died of it; the mad lover in the monastery; the prior who became a Moslem. The first snow lay on the roofs for nine days and then went to water; and on the tenth Shah Zaman, whom we had not been able to keep from the cold, went out in his coat and stood in the court looking at the place where the child had put his finger in it, and the King came down and stood beside him, and neither of them said what they were looking at.

Nights 405 to 412. Shahrazad. Present, eight strokes. Open: Abu Isa and Kurrat al-Ayn, only begun; a book of names; a second child; and a bay horse called Patience, who is fat.

Nights Four Hundred and Thirteen to Four Hundred and Thirty-five: The Caravan from the North, and a White Book

I give you the first eight of those nights in a breath, since I was learning to write a new column and was not listening as I should. Abu Isa, a prince of the Caliph's house, who loved a singing-girl in the house of one of his brother's captains and told no one; and the Caliph Mamun, who made a round of his captains' houses by surprise, and sat to be sung to by ten girls, and ten more, and ten more, until the one came out whom the prince could not look at, and wept when she sang; and the Caliph, who might have kept her, said that if he had had a mind to her he would have preferred Abu Isa before himself, and gave her to him. "Did he ask her?" said the King. "She sang it in front of the Caliph, lord, in verse: that she loved him." "Then she was asked," said the King. "It is the kind of asking there is." Al-Fath and the Caliph Mutawakkil; Abu Suwayd and a pretty old woman; the Emir Ali bin Tahir and the girl Muunis. There was a preacher of Baghdad, Sitt al-Mashaikh, who disputed with a man for three nights about a question I will not give you, and beat him with the Koran, and the Traditions, and his own words. The King asked who won, and my sister said that she had never been able to remember the terms, only that the woman did. She had a new way of sitting, in those weeks, with a cushion at the small of her back and one hand where the child would be, and she told the whole of Abu Isa with that hand lying quite still.

Nights 413 to 420. Shahrazad. Present, eight strokes. Open: Ali of Cairo, not yet begun; a book of names, in its fifth book; a second child, which has no name yet; and a Vizier, who has been to sixty-three houses.

On the 421st day, at noon, Hasan the page, whose name was never Abd al-Baqi, came up the stairs two at a time and said that there was a caravan at the north gate with a sealed paper, and that the porter did not know what to do with it. I went down with him, since it was my office to meet strangers at the side gate with the book. At the foot of the stair I met my father, who had been sent for by the porter; and I saw, for the first time in my life, that my father could go grey. It was not the colour of his face, which is always the colour of his face. It was a stillness that came down over him, as a cloth comes down over a cage. He had the sealed paper in his hand. I read it over his arm. It said that, in obedience to the Vizier's order of the nineteenth month for the supply of maidens to the capital, the governor of the northern marches sent ten daughters of good families, with their dowries, and an escort, to arrive before the feast.

"I wrote it in the nineteenth month," said my father. He said it to the paper. "When the city had no more to give. I wrote once to every province. I never wrote again." "Lord," said the sergeant at the gate, who did not know whom he was speaking to, "it is a twenty-six days' march from the marches, and they set out at the new moon." "Yes," said my father. "I understand that." And the King was behind us. I do not know who had told him; no one had; I think he heard it in the way that the house sometimes tells him things. He did not say anything to either of us. He went out through the side gate in his plain coat, and stood in the road.

There were ten of them. The youngest was fourteen; the eldest, I think, seventeen. They were in good wool cloaks, in two lines, with the dowries on a cart behind them, which was copper pots, and a bolt of linen, and some jars; they had been told to bring cloaks, because it was cold at night in the capital, and they had brought them. One had a pot on her head, which she had forgotten to put down. The youngest was holding the hand of the girl beside her, and the girl beside her had her eyes shut. Nobody was crying. They were standing as they had been taught to stand when a great man is looking at them. "How many set out?" said the King, to the sergeant, in the voice in which he asks for things. "Twelve, lord. Two died of the fever on the road. They are buried at the third station, and I have their names." "Give them to the Roll," said the King. He said nothing else for what seemed a long time. Then he took one step forward, to the first of the girls, who was standing nearest, and said, "What is your name?"

He asked it of every one. He did not say that they were safe, and he did not say that he was sorry; he stood in front of each of them with his hands at his sides and asked her name, and her village, and listened to the answer, which was several times a name I could not follow, and several times a place he had never heard of; and I wrote, on a loose leaf, standing, as fast as I could. Then he said, "Do you wish to go home?" nine times, and nine times they said yes, with a kind of terror, as though it were a question that might be taken away. The tenth was a girl called Sumayya, who was fifteen, and could write her name, and nothing else. She looked at the Roll in my arm the way a person looks at a river she has been told about. "I would like to learn to write," she said. "Not to go home?" "I would like to go home after." "After," said the King. My sister had come down by then, with a hand on the wall; she stood a little behind him, and when he had done she walked past him and said to Sumayya, who was nearest, only, "Can you carry a book?" "Yes, lady." "Then you are the one we were waiting for," said my sister, which was not true, and was kind, and I have not asked her whether she knew.

My father wrote the paper that afternoon, on his knee, in the passage. To the governor of the northern marches. The supply of maidens to the capital is suspended. The maidens are returned with an escort and their dowries, and the cost of the journey home to be paid from the Treasury. "Suspended," said the King, who was reading it over his shoulder. My father stopped. "Not ended, lord?" he said, very quietly, with the pen in his hand. "Suspended," said the King. My father wrote it. I noted the word. It was the word of a man who has not yet found the other.

That evening my father said to me, in the passage, that he had not written a second letter in the nineteenth month because to write it he would have had to say what the first was for, and that he had thought it safest for everyone to let the first one lapse. I said that letters do not lapse. "No," he said. "I have since learned."

They slept that night, the ten, in the long room above the stables that is kept for the wives of visiting governors, with the doors open. My father had the key brought and laid it on the sill outside, so that anyone could see that it was not turned. Shah Zaman sat up on the stair with the sergeant and a lamp, because, he said, he was a man who knew what it was to be sent for. Nobody slept. At the second watch my sister, who is not supposed to be on stairs, went up with a lamp, and I behind her with the cushion, and she sat on the end of a bed among the cloaks and told them the Fisherman, because it is the first story she ever learned to tell and it ends with the Jinni in the jar. The youngest of them, the one who held the other's hand, asked in the middle, without lifting her head: "Is it true the King kills?" My sister did not stop at once. "It was true," she said. "And now?" said the girl. My sister looked at the lamp. "Not yet," she said. "What does that mean?" "It means that you should ask me tomorrow, and I will tell you what I know then." Nobody said anything. Then someone laughed, once, in the dark, at nothing, as people do who are too frightened to cry; and my sister went on with the Fisherman; and the Jinni, who had promised a hundred things from the bottom of the sea, came out of the bottle in the usual way, in smoke.

There had been four letters in the nineteenth month, not one. North, south, east, and the hill country; and the King, who had not known that, asked my father in the morning whether there were others, and my father, who has never lied to him, said that there were three. Riders went out that day, on the best horses, with the same paper. The south caravan was met at the second station, and turned back; it had eleven in it, and it had been on the road for sixty days, and nobody in it had thought to ask whether there was a reason to go on. The east one was met at the river, and sat down on the bank, and some of the girls wept for the first time, with the relief of it, because they had been told to be brave and had been. Of the fourth, from the hill country, which has no road to speak of, no word came back. The riders were gone eleven days and said that there was no caravan to be found. My father said that it was possible that it had not set out. He said it in the voice of a man giving the best account he had; and he put it in the Open himself, in his own hand, as he has never done before: a caravan from the hills, which is not found.

That evening I went to the stationer's in the Copper Market and bought a book of plain white paper, with a hundred leaves, and on the first page I wrote: Came to the gate, and went home. I wrote under it the ten names, and the villages; and I found that my hand wrote them without needing a different pen. I had thought it would feel different. The King asked for the page, when I took it up. He sat with it on his knee, and then he said, "Read them." I read the ten names aloud, in the room, one after the other, which no name had been, in that room, since the first book was begun; and after each he said the name again after me, once, low, as a man repeats a word in a language he is learning. When I came to the end he said nothing, and then he said, "Again," and I read them again.

The nine left on the 425th day with the sergeant and a purse of silver apiece, in the cart with the pots. At the wheel the youngest said to my sister, "You said to ask tomorrow." "I did." "I am asking." My sister, who had a hand on the wheel, said, "He asked your name. That is what I know." "Is that much?" "It is more than the nineteenth month," said my sister. The girl thought about it, and nodded, as one nods to a price, and the cart went out through the north gate, and the youngest waved. The tenth stayed. She asked, the first evening, whether she might write the nine names in her own hand, in the white book, under mine; and I said she might; and she wrote them very badly, with the tongue between her teeth, and I did not correct them. They are there now, the two lines, one above the other, mine and hers, so that anyone turning the page can see that someone was learning. The two who had died I wrote in the fifth blue book, with the station at which each is buried; they are the only two names in the five books of the brides who were not struck, and they are in the same book. I do not know what else I should have done. My sister, who understood by then, said that it was not a question that can be answered by doing it correctly.

The rest of that month I can give you in a breath. Ali of Cairo, the merchant's son, who buried his father and spent the whole of the house, down to the marble and the woodwork, and went to Baghdad, where a house stood empty that no one would lodge in, and he said he would lodge in none other; and there were forty nights of it. The pilgrim man and the old woman. Haunted houses, and a treasure, found in the end by a man who had lost everything else and could no longer be frightened by a house, which is, my sister said, the only way that such treasures are found. Sumayya sat on the rug beside my cushion, which had by now two occupants, learning to hold a reed, and wrote the first letter of the alphabet two hundred times, and was ashamed, and did it again. On the 430th night the King came to look at the page. He did not say anything. He held it up to the lamp, and turned it over, and looked at the back, where the ink had come through; and gave it to her, and said, "It is straight."

Nights 421 to 435. Shahrazad. Present, fifteen strokes. Open: Tawaddud, the slave-girl of Abu al-Husn, not yet begun; a white book, with ten names in it, and the fifth blue book, with two; a girl who is learning to hold a reed; a paper to the governor of the northern marches, with a word in it that is not the last; and a caravan from the hills, which is not found, in my father's hand.

Nights Four Hundred and Thirty-six to Four Hundred and Sixty-two: Tawaddud, and a Boon Not Yet Asked

On the 436th night my sister began Tawaddud. A rich merchant of Baghdad had a son at last, after long prayers, and named him Abu al-Husn on the seventh day; and when the father died the son was visited by friends who said that mourning is for maidens, and took him to the bath, and in a year the money was gone, all but a slave-girl that his father had left him, Tawaddud, who was five feet tall and played the lute and knew every book. She told him to take her to the Caliph and ask ten thousand dinars; and if the Caliph found her dear, to say: try her. The Caliph asked her what she was skilled in. She said syntax and poetry and jurisprudence and the Koran in the seven, the ten and the fourteen readings, the number of its chapters and verses and letters; and medicine and logic and the exact sciences; and the lute; and added, "If I sing and dance I seduce, and if I dress and scent myself I slay." He sent to Bassorah for the best prosodist in the world, and for readers of the Koran, and doctors of the law, and physicians and astrologers and mathematicians and philosophers, seventy of them, and they came into the room not knowing why. The seventy looked at one another; the youngest of them, a mathematician, blushed to the ears. She sat on a golden stool and unveiled, and said, "Which of you is the doctor of the law?"

"Seventy," said the King. "And one girl." "Yes, lord." "She asked which of them." "She asked which was the doctor of the law, lord, and then began. She would have the questions in the order of her own choosing." "That is a fair thing," said the King, who sat with his chin on his hand. Shah Zaman, on the rug, was asleep with his mouth a little open; the child was asleep on the King; my father was in the corner, awake. My father said that ten thousand dinars was more than the Treasury paid in a month to the garrison of the north. "And she was worth it?" said the King. "We shall hear," said my father, which is the nearest to a joke that he has made in my hearing. "Go on, then."

For five nights the doctors of the law and the readers of the Koran put to her the questions on which a Moslem is examined: what are the obligations, how many prostrations, what must be done on waking, what are the conditions of the Pilgrimage, what is the last verse revealed. I will not give you them. By the fifth night the youngest of the doctors was sitting with his hands in his lap like a boy who has been told to wait. She answered them as one pours water from a jug into a cup, never spilling and never looking at the cup. One answer only the King asked to have again. "What are the ordinances that cannot be changed?" said the doctor. "They are four," said Tawaddud: "night and day and the sun and the moon, which build up life and hope; and none knows whether they will be destroyed." The King said, "Again." My sister said it again. "Night and day," he said. "And the sun and the moon," said my sister. "Which build up hope." "Yes, lord." He said no more of that.

On the 441st night my sister could not speak. It was not the fever, though she had been warm for two days; it was that the words, when she opened her mouth, sat in her throat like cold bread. She was in her third month, and the nurse, who had said nothing for a week, said that she would not tell tonight, nor tomorrow, nor the day after, and that anyone who said otherwise would find her in the doorway. The King had been told. He said, "Then stop." It was the first night since the first that there was no tale in the room. He sat with the child, and the sand-glass beside him on the floor, and the lamp; and I wrote the Roll at dawn, Night 441, Present, Open: Tawaddud, the doctor of the law cut off, the physician not yet; and I made the stroke, and he came and looked at it. "It is straight," said the King. It was the first time that he had said it of a stroke of mine.

There were three nights like that. They were quiet, and the child did not cry once, and nothing was missing from them that I could name, and on the fourth the King said, at the hour when the tale would have begun, without turning his head, "Dunyazad. Who comes next?" I said that it was the physician. "What does he ask?" I said that I did not know. "You were in the room." "I was, lord." "You have heard every night." I said that I wrote the Roll, and did not keep the tales; I kept what was left of them. He said, "Is that all that is left?" I looked at my sister, on her pillows, who had her eyes open and was looking at the ceiling with the face of a person who is not going to help. "I could try," I said.

I will tell you how it was, since I have promised to leave nothing out. I sat on my cushion, and I opened my mouth, and what came out was the voice in which I read the Open: level, quick, with the stops in the wrong places. "The physician rose," I said, "and asked her to describe the configuration of the bones." I stopped. I could hear it. My sister, from the pillows, without turning her head, said, in a low voice, "Do not tell it as if you were reading it. Tell it as if you were there." "I was there." "Then tell it." And I did. I told the bones, which in man's frame number three hundred and sixty, and the veins, which are as many; the humours; which baths are best, those with sweet water and wide space and good air, so that the atmosphere in them has all four seasons; and the tongue, which God has appointed as the interpreter of the thought, and the eyes to be lanterns, and the nostrils to smell, and the lips as the doorkeeper. I told it for an hour and a half, and left out a great deal; and when I stopped, the King said, "That was told like a clerk reading a list." "Yes, lord." "It was a good list." And Shah Zaman, whom I had thought asleep, said from the rug, "Do it again tomorrow."

Night 444. Dunyazad. Present. Open: Tawaddud, the physician answered, the astrologer not yet; a book of names; a white book; a second child, which has no name yet; and my sister, who is in bed.

I had written it at the head of the line, where it had always said Shahrazad, before I understood what I had written, and I would have scratched it out, and then I did not. In the morning my sister took the Roll off the table, and read it, and said nothing; she turned the page a little towards the window, as one does with a thing one wants to see more clearly, and gave it back. The King read it standing. He came to the head of the line, and stopped; and then he put his thumb beside the name, as he has put it beside the strokes. I do not know what that means. I have not asked him.

I told Tawaddud for seventeen nights. I told the astrologer, with the seven planets and the twelve houses and the courses of the moon; and a question about what becomes of the night when the day comes, and of the day when the night comes, to which she answered, He causes the night to enter in upon the day, and the day to enter in upon the night. I told the spot of lowland on which the sun shone once and will not shine again until Judgment-Day, which is the bottom of the Red Sea where Moses struck with his staff. I told the five that are in Paradise and are neither men, nor jinn, nor angels: Jacob's wolf, and the dog of the Seven Sleepers, and Esdras's ass, and Salih's camel, and Duldul the mule of the Prophet. "A wolf," said the King. "Jacob's, lord. The one that was accused." "That it did not eat the boy." "That it did not." "And so it is in Paradise." "Yes, lord." "For not having done it," said the King. I had no answer to that, and did not try to give one. On the 453rd night I noticed that the child, who had turned his head to his father's voice since the autumn, turned it now to mine; and I stopped, in the middle of the mathematician, and the King said, "Go on." But I went on a little differently, I think, after that. Sumayya, who had sat on the rug beside my cushion for eleven nights with her reed idle in her hand, said to me afterwards, in the passage, in a whisper, "Is it always like it was?" I said that it was not. I said that I changed it, in telling, to what I could carry. "Then how will anyone know?" she said. I said that they would not; that this was why one kept a Roll. She considered this, with her tongue between her teeth. "Then you have to write the other thing," she said. "What you changed." I had not thought of it. I have begun to do it on the second sheet.

I told the chess. The Caliph sent for the best player in Baghdad, who played her once, and lost, and played again, and lost, and was offered a handicap, her queen and her right castle and her left knight; and he took it, and she moved little by little until one of her pawns was a queen, and set a piece in his way, and he took it. "The measure is meted and the loads balanced," she said. "Eat till thou art over-full; naught shall be thy ruin, O son of Adam, save thy greed. Knowest thou not that I did but tempt thee? See: this is check-mate." And he gave her his clothes, leaving himself his trousers, and swore that he would contend with none, so long as Tawaddud abode in Baghdad. "She let him take it," said the King. "Yes, lord." "And then showed him what it cost." "Yes." He was silent. "It is a thing that one can do to a greedy man," he said, "once." I told the backgammon. I told the lute, which was brought in a bag of red satin, an old worn lute, polished by use; she laid it in her lap and bent over it as a mother bends over a child that she is suckling, and preluded in twelve modes, till the whole assembly was swaying like a sea; and sang. I told it on the 460th and 461st nights. I did not say that I was nervous; but I found that I told the lute with my hands in my lap, like hers. My sister, with a hand on the curve under her dress, listened to me tell it the way one listens to a person walking about in one's own house.

On the 462nd night my sister was up. She sat on the end of the bed with the cushion at her back, and said that she would tell the last of it, and that nobody should say that she should not; and the nurse, in the doorway, said nothing. The Caliph paid Abu al-Husn a hundred thousand dinars for her, and said: Tawaddud, ask a boon. She said: I ask that you restore me to my lord who sold me. He did; he gave her five thousand dinars for herself, and he made Abu al-Husn his companion for as long as he lived, with a thousand dinars a month; and my sister said, "Marvel then, O King, at the eloquence of this damsel and the hugeness of her learning, and consider the generosity of the Commander of the Faithful, in that he said to her, Ask a boon, and she besought him to restore her to her lord." And she stopped. The King said nothing for a little. "She asked for him," he said. "Yes, lord." "She did not ask for herself." "No, lord." "That is not the same as asking for nothing." "No, lord," said my sister. "It is a different list." And then he said, still looking at the lamp, "Dunyazad."

"Lord." "Ask a boon." I said that I did not understand. "You have told seventeen nights," said the King. "I am the Caliph. Ask." I did not know what to say. I want to be exact: I did not have any answer. I had wanted so few things, for so long, and always for other people, that when I tried to think what one of my own might be, it was like putting a hand into a purse that has been given away. I thought of the Roll; I thought, absurdly, of the cup with the blue fish; on the rug, Sumayya let her reed fall, and picked it up. "I do not know, lord," I said. "I do not know what I want." "That is allowed," said the King, quite kindly. "May I ask you at the end?" "The end of what?" "The Roll, lord." He thought. "That is a long way," he said. "Yes, lord." "I shall count." My father, in the corner, closed his eyes; Shah Zaman, on his rug, looked very hard at the wall; and my sister said, "It is a good answer," which she does not say. And the King took up the pen, and in the thumb's-width of the binding, where the tally is, and under the last of the strokes, he wrote, in the square hand, a small mark that I have not looked at closely, since it is his: but I think it is a date.

Nights 445 to 461. Dunyazad. Present, seventeen strokes. Open: Tawaddud, ended, who asked for him; a book of names; a white book; a girl who is learning to hold a reed; and a second child.

Night 462. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Angel of Death and the Proud King, only begun; a book of names; a boon, which is not yet asked, and which a King has said he will count to.

Nights Four Hundred and Sixty-three to Four Hundred and Eighty-two: The Angel's Tales, and a Woodcutter Left Open

From the end of the 462nd night my sister told tales of the Angel of Death, and she told them for twenty nights. I will not give you all of them. The Roll has them as a column of kings and graves, and when I read it back to myself on the nights I cannot sleep, it looks like a street in which every house has been sold. She was in her fourth month, and told them from the bed with the big cushion at her back, under the nurse's rule, which was that when the sand-glass had run twice she stopped, whatever the King was waiting for. The first was a king who rode out in state, in a collar of rubies, so proud that he gave no glance to a man in rags who stood in his road. The man took the bridle and put his mouth to the King's ear. The King asked for a little time, to go home and take leave of his people. "Thou shalt never return nor look on them again." Then she told of the other man, the devout one, who said, Welcome, I have been weary of waiting for thee, and asked only to be taken in the middle of his prayer, with his forehead on the ground; and was.

On the 463rd night it was the rich king, who had built a palace with strong doors and set guards on every one, and sat down to the first meal in it, saying to himself, O soul, thou hast gathered all the wealth of the world, now take thy leisure. Someone knocked, and the whole palace shook. The servants ran at him with staves. "Bide in your steads," said the man at the door, "I am the Angel of Death." And the King said to his people, "Tell him to take a substitute in my place." She stopped there, for the length of one breath. Nobody looked at anybody. My father looked at the floor, which is where he looks when the rest of us have the manners not to look at him; he was for a long time the man who found the substitutes. "I will take no substitute," said my sister, in the Angel's voice, which was not a voice but only her own, made flatter, "and I come for thee alone, to part thee from what thou hast gathered." Then the treasure spoke. The King cursed it, and it asked him why, since it was made of the same dust as he was, and had been put into his hand to be given away. "It spoke," said the King. "Yes, lord." "The treasure." "Yes, lord." He said nothing more that night, and my father, in his corner, was counting something on his fingers, which I knew to be houses.

There was a king of the Children of Israel who begged the Angel for a day, then for an hour, and was told that the hour had been in the account and had gone, and that one breath remained. "Who will be with me in the tomb?" "Naught but thy works." "I have none," said the King. There was Iskandar of the Two Horns, who came upon a tribe so poor that they dug their graves in front of their doors, to see them every morning, and swept them. Their King took out a skull, and then another, and laid them before the conqueror, one of a king who had dealt tyrannously with his people and one of a king who had dealt justly, and put his hands on Iskandar's head. "Would that I knew which of these two you are," he said. Iskandar wept, and offered him the vizierate and half of everything. He refused. All men were Iskandar's enemies, he said, because of the worlds he had won; all men were his own friends, because he had nothing. That was the whole of it. It took half a night, and the sand-glass was turned once.

Then came Anushirwan the Just, who pretended to be ill, and sent his stewards through the provinces to find him a mud brick thrown away from a ruined village, as a medicine; and after a long time they came back and said that there was none, neither a ruin nor a castaway brick in all the realm. He thanked God. He had only wanted to know. The King listened to this with his chin on his hand, and said nothing. In the morning he stood at the window with my father, and said, without turning, "A brick." "Lord?" "From a house that has been thrown away. For my medicine." My father looked at his own hands. "It may take a little time, lord." "Yes." He was back before dark. He had been to the Tanners' Lane, and he came in carrying it in both sleeves, the way he used to carry the shroud: half a brick, grey on the broken side. The King looked at it for a time that I did not count. "The Tanners' Lane." "Yes, lord." "How many are standing?" "Four, lord. Two of them are only the door-frame." "Put it by the door," said the King, and went to his bed.

It stayed by the door. The nurse put her foot against it when the door swung. Shah Zaman set his tin of saddle-grease on it. I held the loose sheets down with it when the wind came in under the shutter; and the boy, who could sit by then if he was propped, was pulled away from it twice with grey on his mouth. Nobody moved it for the rest of the winter, and nobody said what it was for.

On the 465th night my sister looked at it before she began the Kazi's wife. A Kazi of the Children of Israel went on pilgrimage and left his brother to judge in his place and his wife in his brother's charge; the brother wanted her, and she said no, and he had her accused. I leave out what was done to her then, and what was done in the village where she was taken in, because my sister told it in four sentences and I cannot do it in one. She came to a cell by a road and prayed there, and the sick came to her from the whole breadth of the earth; and one morning there stood at her door, each with a different illness and none of them knowing her, the brother, and a thief, and a peasant's wife, who had each wronged her once. She stood in the doorway, veiled, and told them that they would not be relieved of what was upon them until each had said what he or she had done. They said it, one by one. Then she asked God to heal them, and He did; and the Kazi, who had come with his brother, looked at her too long and said, "I had a wife, and were she not dead I would say that you were she"; and she told him who she was. "She forgave them," my sister said. "All three." The King said, "She made them say it first." "Yes, lord." He said nothing about the second part.

The tray-maker and his wife, on the 469th night, were people who fasted by day and sold what they made at night; he was the one who came home without bread, because a rich man's wife had shut the door on him, and he had found a way out of that house which only a man in a tale can find. I will not give you the way. His wife did not ask where the bread was. She said that if the neighbours saw no fire in their oven that night they would know that the two of them were poor, and that to be grateful to God was to hide it; and she filled the oven with wood and lit it. A neighbour came to borrow a coal, and called through the door that their bread was burning, and it was; it was the whitest bread in the street. They ate it and thanked God. Then they asked Him to excuse them the weariness of work, so that they might serve Him all their days, and the roof opened, and a ruby fell through it and lit the house. In the night she dreamed that she was in Paradise, where the chairs of the prophets stood in rows and the stools of the righteous behind them, and she found her husband's stool, and saw a hole in the side of it. "What is the hole?" "It is the place of the ruby that fell on you from your roof." She woke weeping. She told him to pray that it go back: "for the hunger and poverty of our few days here are easier to bear than a hole in your seat among the just." He prayed, and the ruby rose, as they watched, through the roof, and was gone. Sumayya said, "I would have kept the ruby and had the stool mended." The nurse laughed, for the first time in a month. "It is not that kind of stool," said my sister. The King said, to nobody, "She asked for the stool." And he turned the pen over in his fingers for a long while.

There were others, and some I give you only by their edges. Al-Hajjaj had a man chained in a cage that was built over him, and in the morning the chains lay on the floor and the cage was empty; and the gaoler went to the governor with his shroud and his sweet herbs in his sleeve, and the governor smelt them, and asked what they were, and said, "Did you not know that He on whom the man called in your hearing delivered him in your absence?" My father put a hand to his crooked arm and held it. There was a blacksmith who could take red iron out of the fire with his bare hand; a pious man came to ask how, and he said that there had been a hungry woman at his door once, and a night on which he had not done a thing that he meant to do. That was all he said, and he said it as if it were small.

There was a hermit who lost his cloud, which had followed him in the mountains and rained on him as he needed, and who was sent to find a king who could pray it back; and the king, who sat to hear petitions one day in seven, lived the other days in a ruined room behind the palace, in a gown of wool, with his cousin, weaving palm mats, and had done so for forty years. "Forty years of mats," said Shah Zaman. "I lasted forty days with the accounts at Bukhara, and thought myself a hermit." The King's mouth moved; it was not a laugh, but it was on the road to one. There was a captive soldier who shut his eyes and recited while his enemy's daughter laid the table, and she fell in love with the recitation and then with the man; and they fled on a horse too tired to go on, and the army that came after them turned out to be angels, come to the wedding. "Was the horse tired?" the King asked. It was the only question that he asked all night.

On the 478th night she told the Prophet on the mountain. He kept himself on a height above a spring, and in the daytime he watched who came there to drink. A horseman came, and drank, and rode off, leaving a bag of gold on the ground. A second man came, and drank, and saw the bag, and took it, and went. Then a woodcutter came with a load on his back and sat down to drink; and the horseman rode back, in a great state, and asked him where the bag was, and the woodcutter said that he knew nothing of it, and the horseman killed him, and went through his clothes, and found nothing. My sister did not describe it. The Prophet cried out, "One man has a thousand dinars, and another has been killed unjustly." And God said to him, "Busy thyself with thy devotions; the ordering of the universe is no affair of thine. The horseman's father had taken a thousand dinars by force from the second man's father, and so I gave the son what was his father's. And the woodcutter had killed the horseman's father." And the Prophet said, There is no god but Thou; Thou knowest what is hidden. My sister stopped, and put her hand where it goes, and said nothing.

Sumayya, who had been given the corner of a blanket and her third reed, said into the quiet, in the voice she uses for questions that she thinks nobody will mind, "Did anyone ask the woodcutter?" "Ask him what, little one?" said my sister. "If he did it." "God knew." "God didn't ask him." Nobody said anything. The King had his hand flat on the front board of the Roll, where the lock of hair is. "Put it in the Open," he said. I asked him which, the question or the tale. "The woodcutter." "He has no name in it, lord." "Then put that." So I wrote, in the column where I put what is not finished, a woodcutter who was not asked, and who has no name in the tale. It is not a thing that anyone can do anything about, a woodcutter in a tale; I know that. I wrote it the way I write everything.

Night 478. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Prophet on the mountain, who was told that it was not his affair; a woodcutter, who was not asked, and has no name in the tale; a brick, by the door; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

The next night was the ferryman, who took an old man across the Nile for the love of God and fed him, and was told by him that he would die the next day, at noon, under a tree on the far bank, and that the ferryman should wash him and shroud him in the shroud he would find under his head, and keep his gown, his gourd and his staff for someone who would come and ask for them. The someone was a young man known to everyone for loose living, who had been at a wedding all night and still had henna on his hands, and who said that a person in a dream had told him where to go. The ferryman gave him all three. He wept that night, and in a dream he was asked whether it grieved him that God had granted one of His servants a way back to Him. I did not look at my sister, and she did not look at me. In the morning, on the sheet in the corner where Sumayya is allowed to practise, there was a word in her hand, as big as a thumb and leaning to the left: Present. Under it she had made one stroke.

The Island King took two nights. A rich man's son kept his dying father's one command, which was never to swear by God, truly or falsely, and so he paid every claim that was made upon him, on the claimant's word alone, until there was nothing left; then he took his wife and his two small sons to sea, and the ship broke. He came ashore alone on an island, and washed, and called the prayer, and creatures came up out of the sea and prayed behind him. A voice told him where the treasure was. Ships came; in ten years it was a kingdom, and he was its King. His wife and each of the boys had been taken up by different strangers, and years later each of them, by a long road, came to the island: the sons as the King's secretary and steward, the mother as the guest of a merchant on a ship. The King set the two young men to watch the ship by night, and to keep awake they told each other the stories of their lives, and one of them said, "What was your mother's name?" and the other told him; and they fell upon one another. The mother, in the cabin, heard it all, and said nothing until morning. At the question about the name my father stood up and walked out of the room, which I have not seen him do in a tale, and was back in the time it takes to count a hundred; and the King did not turn his head.

The last, on the 481st and 482nd nights, was Abu al-Hasan, who had been to Mecca so many times that others followed him for the water-stations, and who set out one year to go alone. At the first mosque on the road a leper sat in the prayer-niche, and said that he wanted his company; he said no. At the next mosque the leper was sitting in the niche before him. So it went as far as Arafat, where he threw himself at the man's feet and begged for what he had refused, and was told that it could not be, and that tears would not help. At every station after that the leper was a stage ahead, and at Medina he lost him, and the old sheikhs there told him who it had been, in whose name they prayed for rain. At Arafat the man pulled him by the sleeve from behind, and told him to ask for a thing; and he asked for three prayers: that he should love poverty; that he should never lie down at night on provision that was assured; and that he should see the Face. The man prayed them, and went. The first two, said Abu al-Hasan, had been granted, and the third he trusted for. My sister gave this in the voice of someone handing over a key. Shah Zaman said, from the rug, "The second is the hard one. I have managed it three nights at a time." "Which of the three would you ask, Dunyazad?" said the King. I said that I did not know. "You have time," he said. He looked at the binding, and I looked at my hands.

Night 482. Shahrazad. Present. Open: the Queen of the Serpents, only begun, and a sage of Greece called Daniel, who has no son; a brick, by the door; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a white book; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Four Hundred and Eighty-three to Four Hundred and Ninety-eight: The Honey Cistern, and Another Wolf

Daniel the Greek had no son, and one night, lying awake over it, he remembered that God hears those who come to Him; he prayed for a son to inherit his learning, and went home and knew his wife, and she conceived that night. So my sister began the Queen of the Serpents on the 482nd night, and went on with it on the 483rd, and I will say now that it is the longest tale she has told, and that it lives inside itself like a nest of bowls: a Queen telling a woodcutter about a king who listened to a prince, so that on some nights she was four voices down. Daniel took ship; the ship broke; he came home with five leaves of all his library, locked them in a box, and gave the key to his wife, and said that if she bore a son she was to call him Hasib Karim al-Din, and give him the leaves when he asked what his father had left him. Then he sighed once and died. The astrologers cast the child's horoscope and said that he would live long, and be given the knowledge of all the exact sciences, but not before a great peril, early in his life. He would not learn. They put him to school, and he read nothing; they put him to a trade, and nothing came out of his hands; they married him, and he sat.

The woodcutters of the quarter told his mother that if she bought the boy an ass and cords and an axe, they would take him up the mountain with them and he would earn his share; and she was so glad that she bought the ass that day. In a rainstorm they took shelter in a cave, and Hasib, who sat apart, struck the floor idly with his axe and heard it sound hollow, and dug, and found a flagstone with a ring in it, and under the stone a cistern full of honey. They told him to stay and guard it while they fetched jars. For some days they came and went, and sold honey by the jarful in the streets, and he guarded; and when little was left one of them said, "It was Hasib who found it, and he will come down to the city and say, It was I," and they all agreed what to do. They asked him to go down and bale out the last of it. He did, and passed it up, and said, "Draw me up, there is nothing left." There was no answer. He heard the asses go.

They went to his mother weeping. They said that a storm had come on while they were in the cave, and that his ass had broken loose and he had gone after it into the valley, and that a great wolf had come out and torn him in pieces and eaten the ass. "A wolf," said the King. "Yes, lord." "Another wolf." I had not known till then that I was waiting for it. "Jacob's sons said it," said Shah Zaman from the rug, "to Jacob, about Joseph. It has not gone out of fashion." "It is a patient animal," said my sister. "It does not argue." The mother beat her face and put dust on her head and mourned him; and the woodcutters opened shops, and became merchants, and ate and drank and laughed; and every day they brought her meat and drink, and she lived on what they brought, and thanked them. "They fed her," said the King. "Every day, lord." "The ones who did it." "Yes, lord." He did not turn his head. "How many houses is it now?" My father, in his corner, had been looking at his hands. "Sixty-three, lord, and the sixty-fourth is a roof only." "Does it count?" "I do not know, lord," said my father. "I count it so that I shall not be idle." The King nodded, once, as he nods at a stroke that is straight; and the nurse bit off her thread.

Hasib sat on the lip of the cistern and wept and said what one says, and a scorpion fell on him from above and he killed it. Then, because he was a young man who had never learned anything but could still think of one question, he asked himself how a scorpion had come into a cistern full of honey. He found the crack it had fallen through, with daylight in it, and widened it with his woodman's knife, and crept out into a gallery, and came to an iron door with a silver padlock, and in the padlock a golden key. Whoever locked that door left the key in it, and I have thought about that since. Behind it there was a lake of something that shimmered like silver, which was small snakes; and a hill of green jasper with a golden throne on it, and twelve thousand stools around the throne, and on every stool a serpent a hundred cubits long, with eyes like live coals. A serpent the size of a mule came up bearing a tray of gold, and on the tray another, clear as crystal, with a woman's face. "Have no fear of us, O youth," she said, in his own speech. "I am the Queen of the Serpents." And she had them bring him fruit, because it was all that they ate.

He told her his story, from the school where he had learned nothing to the rope that nobody held. "Nothing save good shall betide thee," she said. "But I would have thee abide with me some time, that I may tell thee my history." And Hasib, who had been a night in a cistern and was now in a hall under a mountain with twelve thousand serpents, said, "I hear and obey," which was all there was to say. "She kept him," said the King. "For two years, lord, in the tale." "To tell him a story." "Her own, lord." Shah Zaman, from the rug, in the voice that he uses when nobody has asked him: "It is a very old method." "Be quiet," said the King, without heat; and the nurse made a noise into her mending that was not a cough.

Her own story was Bulukiya's. A king of the Children of Israel in Cairo died, bent double with poring over books, and left his son Bulukiya the throne, and in an inner closet of the treasury a column of white marble, and on it a box of ebony, and in that a box of gold, and in that a book. Bulukiya read the book. It described a prophet who would be sent in the latter days, and the young King fell in love with the description (that is how my sister put it), and sent for the elders and the priests and told them that he would have his father taken out of the grave and burned, because his father had hidden the book from him. The elders said that his father was dead, and his affair in the hands of his Lord, and that he should not. So he went to his mother, and put on a gown of goat's hair and sandals, and set out on foot to find the man in the book. "He wished to dig up his father," the King said, "for not telling him." "For hiding it, lord." "They were sensible, the elders." "Yes, lord. They were elders."

I will give you the rest by its edges; my sister gave it over eleven nights, and the Roll is not long enough. He came to an island where serpents the size of palm trees were praising God, and they told him that they were of Hell, and that Hell breathes twice a year, out in the summer and in in the winter, and that they were the small ones, blown out by her breath. He came to Jerusalem and met a learned man named Affan, who had read in his books that whoever wore the ring of Solomon would be obeyed by men and jinn and birds and beasts, and that a herb grew which, rubbed on the feet, let a man walk dry-shod over any sea, but that it would speak its name only to someone who carried the Queen of the Serpents in a cage. So they caught her. They set milk and wine in a cage on her island and hid, and she came down off the back of her serpent and drank the milk, and then the wine, and slept; and they took her up the mountains on a man's head, and the plants spoke as they passed, and one said, "I am the herb you seek." "She was tricked with milk," the King said. "Yes, lord." "And then she let them go." "She told them they would not have the ring. She said they had better have asked for the other herb, the one of which whoever eats shall not die till the First Blast." The King was silent for a time. "Would you eat it?" he said. My sister put her hand where she puts it. "If they did," she said. "Not otherwise." "Yes," said the King.

They went on over the seven seas, walking on the water with their feet anointed, and came to the mountain where Solomon lay on a golden throne in green silk, with the ring on his middle finger and a serpent under the throne. Affan told Bulukiya to say the conjurations and not to stop. The serpent breathed fire and said, Go back, and Bulukiya went out of the cave, and Affan did not, and he put out his hand and touched the ring and the serpent breathed on him once more, and he was a heap of ashes. Bulukiya fell down in a swoon. Gabriel came and woke him, and told him to go his ways, for the time of the Prophet's coming was yet far off; and Bulukiya wept and remembered what the Queen had said to them, that it was far, far from their power. I leave out the dust of Affan. My sister did not leave it out, but she told it in a plain voice, and the King looked at the child.

Then Bulukiya wandered, alone, and I give you only what stayed with me. An island of saffron earth and carnelian gravel, where beasts of the sea came up in the night, each holding a jewel for a lamp, to talk with the beasts of the land until daybreak. An island where the trees bore fruit like men's heads hanging by the hair, and others that laughed and wept, and the daughters of the sea came ashore with jewels in their hands and danced. A giant forty cubits high under an apple tree, who forbade him to touch it: "Because thou art a son of Adam, and thy father forgot the covenant, and ate." The Jinn of the White Country, who fight a war every year against the unbelieving Jinn, and whose King, Sakhr, set him on a mare and said, Do not get down, do not strike her, do not cry out in her face; and bound two roasted camels on her crupper to steady her, because she knew him for a son of Adam and was afraid. Two days on her carried him seventy months. Sakhr told him of the seven stages of Fire, and what is in each. I will not give you those. My sister gave them in one night, quickly, with her eyes on the boy, and the King put his hand over the boy's ear, and that was all anyone did.

He met an Angel who sat with a tablet before him, writing the shifts of night and day, and another on Mount Kaf whose hands were opening and shutting, bending and stretching, all the time, and who said, "My hands lay hold upon the roots of the earth. When He wishes to visit a land with earthquake or famine or plenty, He tells me, and I do it, without moving from my place." Sumayya, who has the corner of the blanket and her fourth reed, said into the pause, "Does it make his hands tired?" "I do not know, little one." "Does he know what it is, when he does it? Whose it is?" "No," said my sister. "He is told the land, not the people." The King said, "That is a mercy," and I looked at him, because he does not say that; and he said nothing else. There was the fish under the world, so large that the head of it took three days to pass the prophet Isa, who fainted; and every day, said the voice, I make forty like it.

By the 497th night the Queen had said it all, and Bulukiya had come to a gate between two seas, and walked over the face of a sea that was half sweet and half salt, and met four great angels going to seize a dragon that had eaten a thousand cities, and had come at last to an island where a young man with light on his face sat weeping between two built tombs. Hasib had begged her twice by then to let him go home. She said she knew what he would do: he would see his mother, and then he would go to the baths, and the moment that he finished his washing would be the last she saw of the world, for the bath would be the end of her. He swore that he never would. "I would not believe thee though thou swore a hundred oaths," she said. "Thou art a son of Adam, and thy father swore, and forgot." He wept ten days. On the 498th night he begged her a third time, and the serpents wept for him, and went to their Queen and begged for him, and she took his oath, and called a serpent to carry him up to the earth. The serpent had made ready, and was about to go with him, and Hasib turned back. "I would have thee tell me the story of the young man between the tombs," he said.

"He asked for one more," said the King. "Yes, lord." "At the door." "Yes, lord." "They do," said Shah Zaman. "I have." On the 490th night the almond in the court had flowered, and the King had carried the boy out in the morning and held him up to it, and the boy had tried to eat a petal; and all through those days the brick lay by the door, and the boy, who could sit by himself now, had got to it and pulled himself half upright by it, and been taken away from it, and got to it again. Nobody said anything about that either.

Night 498. Shahrazad. Present. Open: a young man between two tombs, who is about to tell his story; Hasib Karim al-Din, under the mountain, who is about to be let go; a woman who was told it was a wolf; a brick, by the door; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Four Hundred and Ninety-nine to Five Hundred and Twenty: The Feather-Vest, and a Small Fish

My sister began the young man's story on the 499th night, with her back against the cushion and the sand-glass turned beside her, and I remember that before she began the nurse said, "Not more than two," and she said, "I will see." The young man was Janshah. His father, Teghmus, was King of Kabul, and ruled more cities than I will count, and had no son; the astrologers told him that he would have one, but only by the daughter of the King of Khorasan. He sent his Vizier, Ayn Zar, with fifteen hundred loads of silk and stones and a letter that was nine parts courtesy and one part threat, and the marriage was made by proxy, and a boy was born like the moon on the night of its fullness. The astrologers cast his horoscope and said that in his fifteenth year he would meet with perils and hardships, and that if he lived through them he would be greater than his father. He was taught to read and to ride. In his fifteenth year he was hunting, and started a gazelle of a strange colour, and chased it with seven of his father's white slaves down to the sea, where it leaped into the waves and swam to a fishing boat and sprang aboard; and the Prince and the seven went after it, and the boat put out, and an evening came, and a wind, and in the morning there was no land.

I give you the islands as she gave them, which was quickly. On the first there was a man by a spring who spoke in a voice like the whistling of birds, and who, as they watched, split himself in two and went off in two directions; and out of the hills came a crowd of men like him, and each, when he reached the spring, split in halves and ran at the strangers to eat them. Three of the slaves were lost on the beach. On the third island there was a castle with walls of white marble and a palace of crystal, and a garden and a basin and a throne of red gold with stools about it, and nobody in it; and they sat there, the Prince on the throne and the three slaves on the stools, and he wept for his father's city; and out of the sea came the apes, in their thousands, and stood round in a circle with their paws on their breasts, and killed gazelles, and laid a table of gold, and kissed the earth before him. They told him by signs that the island had been Solomon's, and that he was now their Sultan. In the morning he found his boat scuttled. They had sunk it in the night, said the four Wazirs of the apes, because they had known that he would be their Sultan, and had feared that he would go. The same morning the four Wazirs brought their troops before him, rank on rank, and asked by signs that he do justice among them; I suppose he did, since they were content. "They sank his boat," said the King. "Yes, lord." "To keep him." "They were afraid he would leave, lord." "And they fed him." "Gazelle and fruit, on gold. And he shot the Ghuls for them from the river bank, and they won their war." "Was he happy there?" "For a year and a half, lord. Then he took his three men and ran away in the night."

The apes came after them through the valley, and the valley was full of ants as big as dogs, who rose out of the earth and fell on the apes, and in the dusk Janshah and his three fled along the floor of the valley with the apes behind and the ants beside. By morning there was one slave, and then none, and Janshah took off his clothes and swam a river, and held a branch, and came out alone on the far bank and wrung out his shirt and wept until it was dark. Then he walked, eating the herbs of the earth, to another river, which dries on every seventh day; and he waited, and crossed on its dry bed, and came to a town where nobody in the streets said a word. In the first house at which he knocked the people sat round a room in silence and signed to him to eat and drink and not to speak; and on the next day the master of the house greeted him and asked who he was, and Janshah wept, and told him.

I do not give you the people of the town beyond the river by their name. My sister gave it, and it is written on my second sheet, under what I changed, that I have not. They were hospitable. One of them, a merchant, had had it cried in the streets for three months that he would give a thousand pieces of gold and a slave-girl of rare beauty to whoever would do half a day's work for him, and nobody would, because nobody believed that half a day's work could be worth so much. Janshah thought, as anyone would, that a man does not offer so much for half a day unless the half day is dangerous; and said that he would do it, because he had nothing left that could be taken. The merchant fed him and gave him the gold and the girl, and next day took him on a mule to the foot of a mountain whose height had no limit, and gave him a knife and a cord, and told him to throw the mule, and cut its throat, and skin it, and slit the belly and creep in, and be sewn up. Janshah did. A great bird took the carcass up to the top of the mountain, and when it began to feed he cut his way out, and the bird flew off, and he stood among the sun-dried bodies of other men, and looked down, and the merchant was very small at the bottom, calling up for stones. The mountain was all rubies. He threw down two hundred, and asked to be shown the way down; and the merchant gathered them, and put them on the mule, and went away.

He crossed the mountain in two months, on hill herbs, and came to a valley with a castle in it, and at the gate an old man with a staff of carnelian, who gave him bread, and heard his story, and said that his name was Shaykh Nasr, King of the Birds, and that the castle was Solomon's, and that once in the year all the birds in the world came to be counted; and that he would give Janshah to one of them to be carried home. Meanwhile he gave him the keys of the castle and told him he might open any door in it but one. Sumayya put her hand over her mouth, and took it away again. "I would have too," she said. "He opened it," said the King. "He was told not to, lord, and he did." The room had a pavilion of gold and crystal, and a fountain, and figures of beasts and birds that sang when the wind blew in at their ears, and the carpet of Solomon folded in a closet. He sat down on a stool before the door, and three birds like doves, as big as eagles, came down out of the middle of the sky and lit by the basin, and took off their feathers and were three girls, and went into the water and played; and he, who had seen no woman for years, forgot his own name.

When he spoke to them the youngest said that they were from the invisible world and had come to amuse themselves; and he said what a man says, and she told him to leave off and go; and he wept; and they ate his fruit and stayed until the morning, and then put on their feathers and became doves and were gone. He fell down in a swoon, and lay all day. Shaykh Nasr, back from the Parliament of the Fowls, found him, and heard it, and said that they were daughters of the Jinn who came once a year, and that if his heart was set on one of them he should wait out the year; and on the day, he should hide under a tree, and when they had gone into the water, he should take the feather-vest of the one he wanted, and not give it back until the old man returned from the Parliament.

On the 509th night, in the middle of the doves, my sister stopped, and put her hand to the side of her belly, and her face did what a person's face does when the floor moves. The nurse said, "Is it?" and she said, "Yes." The King had been looking at the lamp. She held out her hand, without looking at him, and he did not at first know what it was for; then he got up from the floor, with the boy asleep on his arm, and sat on the end of the bed, and she took his other hand and put it where hers had been. I looked at my own. I do not know how long it was. "It is like a fish," he said. "Which?" said my sister. "Not the one under the world." "No, lord. A small one." He did not take his hand away until the glass had run out, and the nurse, who has seen everything and says nothing, turned the glass, and said nothing.

The year went by, and on the day he hid under the tree and the three came and took off their feathers and went into the water, and the youngest said, laughing, that if there was anyone lying in wait he would take none but her. He ran and took her vest. Her name was Shamsah, the Sun-maiden. She asked him from the water why he had done it, and he said that if he gave it back she would fly, and he would die; and she laughed, and so did her sisters, and she said, "Be of good cheer. I must needs marry thee." The sisters lent her clothes, not enough to fly in. She sat down by him and wiped away his tears with her sleeve. When Shaykh Nasr came back he made her swear by God that she would never betray him, and she swore it, and they stayed three months. Then she said that she wished to go with him to his own country, and Shaykh Nasr told Janshah to give her vest back. He gave it. She put it on and said, "Climb on my back and shut thine eyes and stop thine ears, so thou mayst not hear the roar of the revolving sphere," and she flew. She flew him thirty months' journey in a day and a half, and set him down in a meadow outside the walls of Kabul, and sat with him by the river until his father's men came out.

"He had given it back," said the King. "To fly home, lord. She had kept her oath." "And she did not go." "She sat down by the river." Teghmus came out with the army, and wept for joy; the Queen came, and the women of the city; and the King had a palace built in a garden, for the bride, with running water under it. And while it was building, Janshah had the masons cut a block of white marble and hollow it like a chest, and he put Shamsah's vest in it, and sealed the lid with lead, and had it buried in the foundations, and the arches of the palace built over it. I thought of the front board of the Roll, and did not look at it. "And then he buried it," said the King. "Under the arches, lord." He said nothing for the length of a breath, and my sister did not fill it. They were married with great splendour, and she was brought to the new palace in a procession, and when she went in, she smelt the scent of her feathers.

She waited until midnight, when Janshah was deep in sleep, and went to the place, and dug beside the arch till she came to the marble, and pulled off the lead with her hands, and took out the vest and put it on. Then she flew up, and perched on the roof, and called to the people in the palace, "Fetch me Janshah, that I may bid him farewell." He came out, and saw her there, in her feathers. "Why hast thou done this?" he said. "O my beloved," she said, "I love thee passing dear, and I rejoice that I have restored thee to thy friends and to thy country, and that thou hast seen thy mother and thy father. And now, if thou love me as I love thee, come to me at Takni, the Castle of Jewels." And she flew away. "She told him where," said the King. "Yes, lord." "After she had taken it." "After." "Go on."

He fell down in a swoon, and for two months his father asked every merchant and traveller in the kingdom where the Castle of Jewels might be, and there was not one who had heard of it, and the King sent him singers and slave-girls to cheer him, and Janshah sat among them and could not be cheered. Now King Kafid of Hind, who had a feud of blood with King Teghmus, heard that the King of Kabul was so taken up with his son's sorrow that he had neglected his army, and he marched, and the two kings fought for seven years. I do not give you the battles; my sister gave a good many of them, and I wrote the names of the places and not the rest. Janshah stayed shut in the palace two months, and saw nobody, and then asked what ailed his father that he did not come; and was told that the King was at the war; and said, "I am taken up with myself and my love," and called for his horse, and took a thousand horse as an escort, and in the night, in a meadow, when the men were asleep, he rode away alone. "He left his father in the field," said Shah Zaman. "For a girl." "For a place," said my sister. "Nobody knew where it was." The King said, "Did the father know where he had gone?" "No, lord. He knew that the thousand horse had come back without him."

Night 520. Shahrazad. Present. Open: Janshah, riding alone in the night to a place that nobody has heard of, who has left his father at the gates; a King of Hind, outside them; a Sun-maiden, in a Castle of Jewels, who has told him where; a brick, by the door; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a woman who was told it was a wolf; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Five Hundred and Twenty-one to Five Hundred and Thirty-six: The Castle of Jewels, and a Woman Who Was Not Asked

I give you the search quickly, because it took my sister five nights and almost nothing happened in it but distance. Janshah asked in every town for the Castle of Jewels, and nobody had heard of it. He went with a caravan to the east, and then to Khorasan, and then to Khwarazm, and then fifteen months to the river that dries on the seventh day, and crossed it, and went to the house in which he had lodged, and was fed. The next morning he heard the same cry in the street, a thousand pieces of gold and a girl for half a day's work, and he took it, and the merchant did not know him. This time it was a mare. This time, on the top of the mountain, when the merchant called up for stones, Janshah said, "Thou art he who didst with me thus and thus five years ago, and by thee I suffered hunger and thirst and sore toil; and now thou hast brought me back, and thinkest to destroy me. By Allah, I will not throw thee aught." And he turned his back on him and went to Shaykh Nasr. "He knew him," said the King. "He knew him, lord. The merchant did not." "And he did not throw him anything." "Not one stone." The King said nothing more of that.

The old man had never heard of the place either, and nor had any bird that came to him in the year; and one of the great birds took Janshah on its back to carry him to his own country, and lost the way, and set him down in the country of the beasts, and he said, "Go thy ways and leave me here; until I die on this spot or find Takni, I will not go back." So the King of the Beasts, who was named Shah Badri, gave him tablets to learn, and had every beast that came to him asked, and none knew it; and Shah Badri sent him on the back of a beast to his elder brother Shimakh, who had been a prisoner of Solomon's, and who had never heard of it either, and who sent him on a bird with four wings, each thirty cubits long, to a monk named Yaghmus, who lived in a Hermitage of Diamonds, and who said that he had been alive in the days of Noah and had never heard of it. Then, on the day of the oath-taking, when all the birds and beasts and Jinn came to the monk, there came last of all a black bird, large and late, who said that when he and his brothers were chicks, behind Mount Kaf, on a hill of crystal, their father and mother had gone out one morning for food and been caught by a Marid and carried to a castle called Takni, before a King named Shahlan, who had let them go because they said they had young. The bird took Janshah to the Hill of Crystal, and then on, seven nights and eight days, and set him down on a mountain; and there, in the evening, far off, he saw something shining like lightning across the sky. It was two months away. It was the castle.

At Takni a Marid of King Shahlan's, sent that very day on an errand, found a mortal on the road, and asked his name and was told it, and took him on his shoulders; because the Princess had told her father and mother everything, and the King had given orders that any mortal found should be brought to him. The King of the Jinn rode out to meet him and put him on a mare and brought him to a castle whose walls were rubies and whose floor was crystal; and Shamsah's mother, who came to him in the hall, said, "Welcome, my son. Our daughter has sinned against thee, but do thou pardon her misdeed for our sakes." And Janshah cried out, and fell down in a faint. "The mother asked it of him," said the King. "Yes, lord." "Not the girl." "The girl came after, lord, and kissed his hands, and hung her head." "Go on."

They were married with great splendour, and lived two years at Takni, and then he said that her father had promised that they should spend one year at his home and the next at hers; and the King of the Jinn had a litter of red gold made, with a canopy of green silk, and four of his Marids to carry it between earth and heaven, and they went, thirty months' journey in a day. They came down on Kabul at the worst moment of that war. The city had been shut for seven years, and King Teghmus had taken leave of his ministers and his household, because he saw no way out; and the whole city was weeping when the litter came down in the middle of the palace. I do not give you the rest of that night. My sister told it in a few sentences, and said that the Marids fell on the camp of the besiegers in the dark and that in two days there was no army, and she said it as one reads a figure from a Roll. I wrote on my second sheet that she told it short. The tale does not. The tale puts the King and his son and the Sun-maiden on the roof together, to watch it, and calls it a high pleasure. The King had not looked up. The nurse, who was sitting by the brick with the boy, began to tell him something about the almond.

King Kafid of Hind, who had been taken in his bed by a Marid and hung in the air in chains to see his army, was let go on a lame mare, because Shamsah interceded; and Janshah and Shamsah lived on in their two countries, one year and the next, for a good many years. Then, one year, on the road to Takni, they came down to rest on an island by a river, and she took off her clothes and went into the water with her women; and Janshah walked along the bank, and something in the water took her, and she was dead in a moment. I do not give you more, and my sister did not give more. Her women brought her out. Her father and mother came, and washed and shrouded her, and buried her by the river, and would have taken Janshah home with them; and he asked for a grave dug beside hers, so that when he died he might be put in it, and the King had a Marid dig it, and went; and he sat down between them. That was the young man weeping between the tombs. Nobody said anything. Sumayya said, in a very small voice, "He didn't go home?" "No," said my sister. The nurse took the boy, who was awake and had been watching the lamp, and walked him up and down the room as far as the brick, and back.

Bulukiya heard it, and said that he had thought he had been to every corner of the earth, but that now he forgot all he had seen after hearing this; and Janshah put him on the right road, and he went. All this the Queen of the Serpents told to Hasib. And Hasib asked how she knew it, and she said that twenty-five years before, she had sent a serpent to Egypt with a letter, and Bulukiya had read it and come to her mountain, and found her away at Mount Kaf for the winter, and her deputy there; and he had asked the deputy for the herb that keeps a man from dying, and the serpent had said she did not know where it was; and a serpent had carried him back with his eyes shut, and he had found himself on the mountain of Mokattam. And what became of him in the end? Hasib asked. He walked over a sea, she said, and came to an island with a tree whose leaves were as big as the sails of a ship, and under it a table spread with food, and a bird of pearls and emeralds on a branch, which had followed Adam out of Eden; every Friday night, the bird said, the saints came and ate at the table, and when they had eaten it was taken up to Heaven. And while he was there Al-Khizr came. Bulukiya asked how far it was to Cairo, and Al-Khizr said five and ninety years' journey; and Bulukiya wept; and Al-Khizr said, Take hold of me with both your hands, and shut your eyes. He took one step, and said, Open them. Bulukiya was at the door of his palace. He turned to thank him, and there was no one there.

"One step," said Shah Zaman. "Ninety-five years' journey in a step. I could have used that on the Oxus road." "His mother was alive," said my sister. "She swooned for joy. They sprinkled water on her face." "And the other?" said the King. "The other, lord?" "The one who was told it was a wolf." "Hasib's," said my sister. "He went up, in the end. The serpent took him, and left him on the platform of a cistern, and he walked into the city at sunset and knocked at his own door." His mother opened it and screamed, and threw herself on him; his wife came out and kissed his hands. And when they had sat down he asked about the woodcutters, and his mother said that they had come and told her a wolf had eaten him, and that they were merchants now, with houses and shops, and every day they brought her food. He sent her to tell them that her son was back and would see them. They changed colour. They each sent a suit of embroidered silk; and the next day, having taken advice from the merchants of the city, who told them that each one of them should give him half of what he had, each of the seven came to him with half his money and his slaves. And Hasib said, "What is past is past. What befell us was decreed of God, and destiny is stronger than cunning." He went to each of their houses, and ate there for a night and a day, one after the other, for a week.

"He forgave them," the King said. "Yes, lord." "He took half." "From each of the seven." The King's hand was on the front board of the Roll. "Did anyone ask his mother?" My sister opened her mouth and closed it. The sand-glass was nearly out. "No, lord," she said. "The tale does not say that anyone did." I wrote on the Open that night, under the woodcutter who was not asked, a woman who was not asked; and I crossed out, in the line above it, the woman who was told it was a wolf, since it was the same woman and I had two lines for her.

He did not keep his oath. It was not much of a failure: a man in the street, and the keeper of the baths running up to him with his arms open, begging him to come in and be washed at his expense; and Hasib said that he had sworn never to go into a bath, and the bathman swore by the triple divorce of his wives that he must; and Hasib, who could not bear to be the ruin of another man's house, went in. The keeper of the bath was one of the seven. My sister said so, and then said that the tale does not say whether he knew. Hasib had hardly sat down when a score of men came and said that he must come with them, to the Sultan, who was his debtor; and the Sultan's Vizier, Shamhur, took him to the palace in a splendid robe, and in a bedchamber at the end of seven doors was King Karazdan, who was dying of a leprosy, with his face in a cloth. The books said that the Queen of the Serpents would cure him. The Vizier had set men at the door of every bath in the city to look at the belly of whoever came out, because whoever had lived two years with the Queen would have a black belly when he washed. Hasib said that his belly had been black from the day his mother bore him. They did not beat him for long. My sister did not tell me how long. He took them to the cistern, and Shamhur burned incense and said the conjurations, and the water of the well went down and a door opened in its side, and out came a serpent as big as an elephant, with the Queen on a golden dish on her back. Her face was fair and young, and she looked at Hasib, and she said, "Where is the covenant thou madest with me, and the oath thou swarest, that thou wouldst never enter the bath? But there is no fighting against Fate. God has appointed the end of my life for thy hand to hend." And she wept, and Hasib wept to see it.

"She knew," said the King. "She told him at the beginning, lord, and again at the end. She said, I would not believe thee though thou swore a hundred oaths." "And she let him go." "The serpents wept for him, and went to her, and begged." "Knowing." "Yes, lord." He was silent. "Go on." On the dish, on the road to the Vizier's house, she told Hasib what he must do. He must say that he did not know how to kill, and let the Vizier do it with his own hand. I do not give you that. The Vizier laughed at him for weeping, and said, "How canst thou weep for a worm?" He set the pieces to boil in a brass cauldron and went off to the King, and left Hasib two phials, and told him to drink the first scum that rose and to keep the second. The Queen had told Hasib to do the opposite: to drink the second and to give the first to the Vizier, and to watch. When the Vizier came back and asked for the second phial, Hasib gave him the first, and the Vizier drank it, and swelled, and fell dead; and Hasib, remembering what she had said, and thinking that the Vizier would never have saved the second scum for himself had it contained harm, drank the second.

"And the waters of wisdom," said my sister, "were made to well up in his heart, and the fountains of knowledge were opened to him." He went out with the flesh on a dish, and saw as he walked the seven heavens and the Lote-tree beyond which there is no passing, and the courses of the spheres and the causes of eclipses, and the virtues of every herb and mineral, so that in a moment he was a physician and a chemist and an astronomer; and over three days he gave the King what she had said that he must give, and covered his face, and the King sweated, and his skin scaled, and he was whole. He made Hasib his Chief Vizier, and gave him three hundred slaves, and five hundred mules laden with treasure, and the house of the Vizier who had died. Hasib asked his mother for what his father had left him, and she brought the five leaves, and he read them and said, "These are part of a book. Where is the rest?" She said, "Lost with the ship." He lived on in all delight, my sister said, until there came to him the Destroyer of delights and the Sunderer of societies. "And the five leaves?" said Sumayya. "He kept them, little one." "Even when he could have written the rest?" "Even so."

"And yet, O King," my sister said, in the voice that she keeps for the end of a night, "is not this tale of Bulukiya and Janshah more wondrous than the story of Sindbad?" "Who is Sindbad?" said the King. "A porter, lord," said my sister, "who put down his load on a bench at the gate of a rich man's house, one hot day in Baghdad, and heard a lute." And the sky in the window was the colour of a lamp being turned down, and she stopped there, and the glass was out.

Night 536. Shahrazad. Present. Open: a porter in Baghdad who has set down his load at a gate and heard a lute, only begun; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a brick, by the door; five leaves of a book; a young man between two tombs; a second child, which has moved; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Five Hundred and Thirty-seven to Five Hundred and Fifty: Three Voyages, and a Boy Who Stood

At the end of the 536th night my sister had put a porter down at a gate, and on the 537th she took him up again. It was a hot day in Baghdad, in the reign of Harun al-Rashid, and a man named Sindbad, who carried other people's goods on his head for his bread, set his load on a bench outside a rich man's house, in the shade, where the ground had been swept and watered. A cool air came out of the door, and the smell of food, and the sound of lutes and singing, and of birds glorifying God in different tongues. He looked in at a garden and servants, and was moved to say in verse that some are weary and others at rest, and that he did not rail at God's ordinance, but that the difference between his origin and the rich man's origin, which was the same, was as the difference between vinegar and wine. A page came out and took him by the hand. In a hall he found lords at tables, and in the highest place an old man with white at the sides of his beard, who gave him food and asked him his name, and when he said, "Sindbad the Porter," smiled and said, "Thy name is even as mine. I am Sindbad the Seaman. Say me again the verses thou recitedst at my gate." The Porter was ashamed. "Be not ashamed," said the Seaman. "Thou art become my brother." I thought of the Roll, which is a load that nobody pays for, and went on writing.

He told them his voyages, one a day for seven days, and at the end of each he gave the Porter a hundred pieces of gold. In the first his father had died and left him money, and he spent it with young men until it was gone; and he remembered a saying of Solomon's, that three things are better than three, the day of death than the day of birth, a live dog than a dead lion, and the grave than want; and sold all that he had, even his clothes, for three thousand dirhams. He went down to Bassorah, and sailed, and they came to an island like a garden of Paradise, and went ashore and made fires to cook; and the captain cried from the ship that it was no island, it was a great fish asleep in the sea, with sand on its back and trees grown on the sand, and that it had felt the fire. Those who ran got to the ship. The island sank. The nurse put down her mending. "My brother," she said. She is not a woman who says that kind of thing. "He went down off Bassorah when I was a girl, and I was told it was a whale." "Were you told it was a whale?" said the King. "I was told it was something. I have always thought it was a sandbank." The King considered. "It is a better story if it was a whale," he said. "Yes, lord," said the nurse. "That is why I have never been sure."

Sindbad found a wooden tub that God threw in his way, and floated on it a night and a day, and was cast on an island where a mare stood tethered on the beach, and a man came up out of the ground and took him down into a vault. He was one of King Mihrjan's grooms. Once a month, he said, at new moon, they tether their best unserved mares by the sea, and hide, and the stallions of the sea come up out of the water and cover them, and try to drag them off, and cannot for the ropes, and the grooms run out with swords on shields, and the stallions plunge back; and the foals are worth a mint of money. So Sindbad was brought to King Mihrjan, who made him registrar of his port. He saw, in that king's seas, an island where drums are beaten all night, and a fish two hundred cubits long, which the fishermen frighten away by knocking pieces of wood together; and the Indians at the court told him that their people are divided into seventy-two castes, at which he marvelled. Years went by. One day a ship came in, and he stood on the quay taking note of the bales, and the captain said that there were some in the hold whose owner had been drowned at an island that was a fish, and that they meant to carry his price to his people in Baghdad; and Sindbad asked the name, and the captain said it, and Sindbad cried out that it was his. The captain did not believe him. "Verily," he said, "there is neither conscience nor good faith left among men." It took Sindbad some time to say what he knew, matters that had passed between the two of them on the voyage, and nobody else, before the captain gave him the bales, and wished him joy. He went home rich. "And I forgot," said my sister, in Sindbad's words, "all that I had suffered."

I counted it on my second sheet, because Sumayya had told me to count what I changed and I found that I had begun to count what was repeated: the sentence comes at the end of each voyage, the same sentence, in the same words. "He forgets quickly," said the King. "Yes, lord." "It is a gift." "It is how he can go again," said Shah Zaman, from the rug, "a merchant who stops is a man waiting to die." "Does he forget the apes?" said Sumayya. "He forgets them first," said the nurse. The King said nothing. His hand went, as it goes, to the blue book at the side of the bed, and rested on it, and did not open it; and the boy, who was awake on his arm, put out his own hand to the book, and the King moved it a little out of reach, and gave him a finger to hold instead.

On the 543rd night my sister's voice was gone. It was not as before: it was the voice of a person who has used it five hundred and forty-two nights. The nurse said that she would tell the first glass and I the second, until the child came, and that nobody was to say that she should not. The King looked at me. "The second voyage," I said. I told it as one who had been there. Sindbad was bored at home, and went, and at an island fell asleep by a spring after he had eaten, and woke to find that the ship had sailed without him. He was alone, and he wept, and blamed himself for having left a house full of food; he climbed a tree, and saw a great white thing in the middle of the island, and went to it, and it was a dome without a door, fifty paces round; and then the sun went out. I stopped there, I think, longer than I should have. I put my hand over my eyes, as one does when a light goes. It was a bird, so big that its wings were a night. It came down on the dome and settled over it, and slept; and Sindbad, who had heard of such a bird, took the cloth from his head and made it a rope and tied himself to its leg. He did not sleep. In the morning the bird went up and up, until he thought they had come to the edge of the sky, and came down on a mountain, and he undid himself and ran. It had come for a serpent, and carried it off.

He stood on the peak of a valley deeper than any he had seen, with mountains round it that no one had climbed; and the floor of the valley was diamond, which cuts stone and cannot be cut, and the valley swarmed with snakes the size of palm trees, which came out at night, and hid by day from the eagles. He found a cave, and rolled a stone to the door, and saw at the back of it a great serpent brooding on her eggs, and sat the night out looking at her, and she at him, I think. In the morning a slaughtered beast fell at his feet. That was how he knew the device. The diamond-merchants cut up a beast and throw the pieces down into the valley, where the diamonds stick in the blood, and the eagles pick up the meat and carry it to the tops of the mountains, and the merchants run at them and make a noise. Sindbad filled his pockets and his girdle and his turban, and when a second piece fell he tied himself under it, with the cloth, and lay on his back, and an eagle came down and took the meat with him on it, and flew up. And I said the rest in a voice I did not know I had. The merchant who had thrown the meat, who found a man standing by it covered in blood, shook with fear; and turned over the meat; and there were no diamonds; and he struck one hand on the other and cried, "Harrow, my disappointment!" Sumayya laughed out loud, and put her hand over her mouth, and the boy laughed because she did. Sindbad said, "Fear not; I am a man, and a good man, and a merchant; I have plenty of diamonds, and will give you more than you would have got." And he did.

When I stopped there was no sound but the glass. "When the sun went out of the sky," said the King, "I felt it." He said it to the lamp. The nurse said, from her corner, that she had seen the sun go once, as a girl, in an eclipse, and had not wished to see it again. "You told it as if you had been there." "I had my hand over my eyes, lord." "It showed." That was all he said, and it was more than he had said of any of my strokes; and my sister, on her pillows, closed her eyes, and I think she smiled, but I did not look long enough to be sure. I wrote it that morning: Night 543. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present.

On the third voyage the ship was blown out of its course to the Mountain of the Apes, which are four spans high and black-faced and yellow-eyed, and come in thousands, and no man had ever come back from them. They did not hurt anyone. They swarmed up the cables and gnawed them through, and the ship ran on the shore, and they took the merchants and put them on the island, and took the ship and its cargo and went off. In the middle of the island was a castle with a gate of ebony, and in the courtyard a stone bench and a great many bones; and at nightfall a creature as tall as a date-tree, black, with eyes like coals, came down from the roof, and picked them over one by one, and took the stoutest, which was the captain. I leave out what he did with a spit. I told it in four sentences and my sister, on her pillows, with her eyes shut, nodded, as she does at a stroke. They put out its eyes and ran for a boat they had built; and it and two like it threw rocks at them, and most of them died, and the three who were left came to another island, and a serpent like a dragon swallowed two of them, one at night, one in a tree. Sindbad bound five boards about himself like a bier, and lay down in the sand on his back, and the serpent came all night and went round him and could not come at him. In the morning he went to the shore and made signs with a branch to a ship far out, and they took him in, and clothed him, and fed him. It had put in at an island of sandalwood.

The captain said to him that a merchant had been lost who had left bales aboard, and that Sindbad, being a stranger and a pauper, might sell them and take a share. "What name shall I write on them?" said the clerk; and the captain said, "Write on them the name of Sindbad the Seaman, him who was with us in the ship and whom we lost at the Rukh's island." "He watched them write it," said the King. "Yes, lord. He said to himself, By Allah, I am Sindbad the Seaman." "And said nothing." "He waited until the merchants were all gathered." "Why?" "So that they would all hear," said my sister, "lord." The King said, "That is a long time to stand and watch your name written on the goods of the dead." Nobody answered him. One of the merchants had been in the valley of diamonds and swore that he knew him, and the captain, hearing the bale-marks, was convinced, and kissed him. Sindbad sold his goods in the isles, and in Hind, and bought cloves and ginger, and came home with more than he could count, and gave alms to the widow and the orphan; "and I forgot," said my sister, "all that I had suffered." Sumayya, who counts, held up three fingers. The nurse said, "There will be a fourth." "Yes," said the King.

On the 548th night the boy stood. He had been at the brick for a month, pulling himself half up and sitting down, and that night, when the second glass was beginning and I was on the Rukh's egg again (the King had asked to hear it a second time), he got both hands on the edge of it and put his feet under him and rose, with his face hot and astonished, and stood. Nobody moved. The nurse had her needle in the air. Shah Zaman, on the rug, did not breathe, which for him is a great deal. Then he took one hand off the brick, and looked at it, and put it back. "Do not tell him he is standing," said the King, very low. We did not. He stood until his knees went, and sat down hard, and cried a little, and was picked up; and in the morning the King came to the Roll and put his thumb beside the stroke, and beside the word Present.

Night 550. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: the fourth voyage of Sindbad the Seaman, only begun; a boy who has stood, once, at a brick; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a second child, which has moved; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Five Hundred and Fifty-one to Five Hundred and Sixty-six: Four Voyages More, and a Boy Who Came

The fourth voyage began at the end of the 550th night, and I told it in the second glass, from the plank. A squall tore the sails, the anchor-cable parted, the ship went down with her goods, and Sindbad and some others got on to one plank and rode it like a horse for a day and a night to an island. There they were taken by naked men, who brought them to their king and set before them a food that none of them knew. His companions ate, for hunger; he could not; and from the moment they had eaten, their eyes turned in their heads and their reason went, and they were given oil to drink and rubbed with it, and led out every day to pasture like cattle, and grew fat. I do not give you what the food was for. I said it in six words. Sindbad, who had not eaten, wasted with fear, and was forgotten by the naked men, and walked out of their place one day, and was shown the road by the old herdsman who tended his friends, with a movement of one hand. He walked seven days on roots. On the eighth he came to men gathering pepper, and they took him to their king; and he made the king a saddle, for nobody there rode with one; and the carpenter and the smith made more, and the Vizier wanted one, and the grandees; and in a short time he was rich and loved, and the king married him to a lady of high family, in a house of his own.

On the 553rd night my sister told the first glass sitting up. Sindbad loved his wife, and a neighbour of his lost his, and he went in to condole, and found the man in a worse state than grief explained. "I have one day left to live," said the neighbour. "This very day they bury my wife, and they bury me with her in one tomb; for it is the custom with us, if the wife die first, to bury the husband alive with her, and in like manner the wife if the husband die first, so that neither may enjoy life after losing the other." Sindbad cried that it was a most vile custom and not to be endured of any, and went to the King, who said that it was the custom of his forefathers from time out of mind, and that a foreigner was buried by it as a native. "It is the same for both," said the King. "Yes, lord." "That is more than," he said, and stopped. The glass ran for some time. Nobody finished it for him. Shah Zaman, who finishes everything, looked at the wall; and my sister said, in Sindbad's words, that God had never made it lawful to bury the quick with the dead.

The wife died. They put her on a bier in her finery and carried her to the end of the mountain, and lifted a rock from the mouth of a pit, and threw her in; and tied a rope of palm fibre under his arms and let him down after, with a jar of water and seven loaves. "He said that they would not hear him," my sister said. The cave was full of the dead and of the dying, and the smell. He lay on the bones and cursed the day he took a wife in that city, and ate a little bread, and drank a little water, and lived. What he did when the next living person was let down, and the next, to keep their bread and water, he told the Porter in plain words, and my sister gave it in nine. I will not give you the nine. The King had his hand over the boy's ear before she began, and I do not know how he knew. At last something scratched among the bodies, and Sindbad went after it with a leg-bone and saw, at the end of the cave, a light no bigger than a star; it was a hole in the back of the mountain, widened by the beasts that came to eat the dead. He went through it, to a slope above the sea where no one from the city could come, and carried out the food, and the jewels from the necks of the dead women, and waited with a strip of white shroud on a stick, until a ship passed. The captain asked how he had come to a mountain behind which stood a great city, on which in his life he had never seen anything living but beasts and birds. Sindbad told him a story, and did not tell the truth of it, for fear there should be one of the islanders on board. He went home, and gave alms to the widow and the orphan, "and I forgot," said my sister, "all that I had suffered." The nurse said, "That is the fourth." "He forgot the cave," said the King. "The tale says, all that he had suffered." "It would," said the King.

The fifth voyage he made in his own ship, which he bought. They found a white dome on a desert island, and the merchants broke it with stones, and the young Rukh was inside, and they took its flesh. Sindbad called to them to stop. Then the sun went out, and I put my hand over my eyes, and the King said, "Not again," which was a joke, and I did it again. The two birds came back with boulders in their claws; the first fell wide of the ship and the sea opened and showed the bottom, and the second, bigger, fell on the poop; and Sindbad, on a plank, was cast up on an island like a garden, and met an old man sitting by a well-channel, who made signs that he wished to be carried across. Sindbad took him on his back, and the old man wound his legs round his neck, and would not get off. He rode him day and night, and beat him with his heels when he stopped, and made water on him, and Sindbad said that he had done a kindness and been paid with an ill turn, and swore that he would never again do any man a service as long as he lived. "Did he keep it?" said the King. "No, lord," said my sister. "He is a man who forgets." He made wine in a gourd, and the old man drank it, and fell; and Sindbad got loose of him. I give you that he got loose. Sindbad gives what he did next, and I do not. There was a city of apes, where the townsfolk go out in boats at night and sleep on the water for fear of them, and Sindbad filled a bag with pebbles and threw them at the apes in the trees, and the apes threw down coconuts, and he made his living so. There were pearls, and a fifth home-coming. Sumayya held up five fingers. The nurse said, "And a sixth."

On the 560th night I asked for the lamp to be turned down. I had not meant to. I was at the part of the sixth voyage where Sindbad is alone on an island of wreckage and jewels, with every one of his companions buried, and makes a raft of aloes-wood and lets the river carry him under the mountain, and I found that I could not tell the dark with a lamp in the room. I had told the beach first, because it is the loveliest thing in the voyage: rubies lying like gravel in the bed of the stream, and crude ambergris that runs like wax down the banks in the heat and sets again at night, and the monsters of the deep that swallow it and cannot keep it down. The King got up and turned it down himself, to a bead. Sumayya moved nearer to me on the rug. The boy slept. I told the channel narrowing, until the rock scraped his head and he had to lie on his face; and the days he could not tell from the nights; and the sleep. "And when he woke," I said, "he was in the light of Heaven," and the King, without a word, put the lamp up. Nobody spoke. I think my sister had her eyes open.

He had come out among husbandmen, who took him to their King, who was the King of Sarandib; and the King lodged him in his palace, and asked him about the Caliph Harun al-Rashid and the justice of his rule, and sent by him a letter on yellow skin in ultramarine ink, and a ruby cup a span high lined with pearls, and a couch covered with the skin of the serpent that swallows elephants, and a slave-girl like a moon. Sindbad told the Caliph how the King of Sarandib goes in procession on an elephant eleven cubits high, with a thousand horsemen in gold brocade; at his head a man carries a golden javelin, and behind him another a mace of gold whose head is an emerald a span long; there is no Kazi in his city, because every man there can tell truth from falsehood; and before him goes a man who cries out his praises, "This is the King of great dignity and high authority"; and when he has finished, another behind the King cries, "He will die! Again I say he will die!" and the first answers, "Extolled be the Perfection of the Living, who dieth not!" "Again," said the King. "He will die," said my sister. "Again I say he will die." "Again." She said it a third time, and did not wait to be asked. The King looked at the sand-glass at his side. "I have a glass," he said. And after a time, to nobody, "It does not say it so loud."

My sister told the seventh voyage twice, for it is told two ways, and on my second sheet I wrote down the difference. In the first, the ship is blown into the Sea of the Clime of the King, where Solomon's tomb is, and three fish rise out of the sea, each bigger than the last, the third with a mouth wider than the gate of a city; a squall breaks the ship on a reef; Sindbad, on a plank, tells himself that he does not repent, and that if he says he renounces, he lies in his renouncement. He makes a raft of sandalwood and goes under a mountain, and comes to a city, where an old man buys the raft and gives him his daughter. The townsfolk, at the first of every month, grow wings and fly up. Sindbad begs one of them to carry him; and as he rises he hears the angels praising God, and cries, "Praised be God!" and a fire comes out of heaven, and they drop him on a mountain, cursing. Two young men give him a golden rod; a serpent has a man in her jaws to below the waist, and he strikes her on the head, and the man is his friend for the rest of the tale. He goes home with his wife. He had been away seven and twenty years. And he swore never to travel again. In the second telling, which differs in essential form, the Caliph sends for him, to carry a letter and gifts to the King of Sarandib. He says that he has sworn, and that when he hears the word voyage his limbs tremble. "For our sake," says the Caliph, "thou wilt go." He goes. Pirates take the ship, and he is sold to a rich man, who puts him in a tree with a bow to shoot elephants; and one morning the elephants tear the tree up by the roots, and the biggest of them puts him on its back and carries him to a place full of the bones of elephants, where they come to die. His master wept for joy over the heaps of ivory. He freed him.

"He had sworn," said the King. "Yes, lord. In both." "And the Caliph sent him." "In the second, lord." "A Caliph sends, and the man goes." My father, in his corner, said, "He goes, lord." Nobody said anything after that. The King looked for a time at the lamp, and then at the boy, who was on the floor by the brick with one hand on it, and who looked back at him with his mother's face; and my sister, in the first glass, with a small cough, said what the Porter said when it was over: "Allah upon thee, O my lord, pardon me the wrong I did thee." "What wrong?" said Sumayya. "The verses, little one. He thought the Seaman's life was easy." They went on in friendship until the Destroyer of delights came to them; and glory be to the Living, who dieth not. "Which is true?" said the King. "Both, lord. They are told two ways."

Then, on the 566th night, the boy let go of the brick. He had been standing at it for some time with one hand, as he does now, listening; and he took the hand away, and looked at it, and took a step, and another, and a third; and he sat down. The King, who was five paces off on the floor with his arms out, did not know that he had put them out. The boy looked at him. Nobody moved. Then he got up, holding his hands high like a man on a wall, and came the rest of the way. The King took him up, and said nothing, and nobody said anything to him; and in the morning, before the Roll was read, he turned back the first leaf, and at the foot of the margin of the margin, after the seven, he wrote an eighth word, in the square hand. It was: came.

Night 566. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: the City of Brass, in which, my sister says, nobody lives, only begun; a boy who has walked, five paces, from a brick to a King; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a second child, which has moved; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Five Hundred and Sixty-seven to Five Hundred and Seventy-eight: The City of Brass, and Seven Years of Grain

My sister said at the end of the 566th night that the City of Brass is a city in which nobody lives, and began it on the 567th. A Caliph at Damascus, Abd al-Malik bin Marwan, was sitting with his lords talking of Solomon, and of the copper bottles in which Solomon shut up the Jinn that rebelled against him, and sealed them with lead and with his ring, and cast them into the sea. A man named Talib bin Sahl, who sought treasure for his living and had books that said where it lay, told how his grandfather's ship had been blown for a month off its course to a mountain, where a people who had no Arabic but their King's took the strangers in, and on the fourth day showed them a fisherman drawing up his net with a copper bottle in it, sealed with the seal of Solomon. They broke it open. A smoke went up, blue, to the zenith, and a voice cried out of it: "I repent! I repent! Pardon, O Prophet of God! I will never return to that which I did aforetime." The smoke became a giant whose head was level with the mountain-tops, and went. "To whom?" said the King. "To Solomon, lord." "He is dead." "Yes, lord. They do not know it. Whenever a net brings one up, the one inside begs his pardon." The King looked at his hands, which were empty. The boy was asleep on the nurse, and she did not move.

The Caliph wished to see the bottles, and sent Talib with letters to his Emir in the west, Musa bin Nusayr, who sent for the oldest man on that coast who had travelled, a Shaykh named Abd al-Samad. It was, the Shaykh said, a journey of two years going and two coming. They took a thousand camels laden with water in earthen jars, because the hot winds dry up skins and leave jars alone. They travelled a year. One dawn the Shaykh found that he did not know where they were. "The stars were clouded," he said. They came to a castle of black stone, with a dome of lead a hundred cubits high and a gate of China steel, and nobody in it; and over the door, in gold, in the old Ionian letter, were verses, which the Shaykh read aloud to the Emir, who had asked him to. They ended: "As had they only set their burdens down to rest awhile, and then had rode away." I stopped there. I did not mean to. "The porter," said Sumayya. I said that I had thought so too.

Inside there were four hundred tombs of yellow marble round a pavilion, and in the largest lay Kush, son of Shaddad, who ruled a thousand years. He had four thousand bay horses, and a thousand daughters of kings to wife, and a thousand sons like lions, and treasure in a thousand cisterns; and when death came he said to his soldiers, "Can you ward this off?" and they could not; and he had his treasures brought and said, "Can you ransom me with all this, or buy me one day of life?" and they could not. That was graven on a tablet at his head. In the palace there was a table of yellow onyx, with words on it: "At this table have eaten a thousand kings blind of the right eye, and a thousand blind of the left, and yet other thousand sound of both eyes, all of whom have departed the world." The Emir took the table, and nothing else.

They went on for three days to a hill with a horseman of brass on it, with a lance, and a writing: If thou know not the way to the City of Brass, rub my hand. Musa rubbed it, and the horseman turned like lightning and stopped, and they went the way that he faced. They came to a pillar of black stone with a creature sunk in it to the armpits, with two wings and four arms and a third eye in his forehead, who cried, "Glory to my Lord, who hath adjudged me this grievous torment!" He was an Ifrit named Dahish, who had spoken from the belly of an idol of carnelian in the court of a sea-king when Solomon sent to ask for the King's daughter and the breaking of the idol; and the King had refused; and what came after was the war of Solomon, with a thousand thousand men and six hundred thousand thousand devils, and the birds and the beasts, and I leave it out, because my sister did, in one breath, and my father looked at the floor. Dahish had fled for three months and been caught. Solomon had the pillar hollowed and sealed him in it, until the Day of Judgment. He told them where the City of Brass was. "It is near."

It had walls of black stone, and two towers of brass that shone from far off like twin fires, and five and twenty gates, none of which could be seen from outside, because they open only from within. On a hill above it the Emir found seven tablets of white marble, and the Shaykh read them. I will give you one. "O son of Adam, what hath seduced thee from the service of the Ancient of Days, and made thee forget that one day thou must defray the debt of death? Where be the kings who peopled Irak? The Summoner of Death summoned them and they answered him, and the Herald of Destruction hailed them and they replied, Here are we!" "Here are we," said the King. "Yes, lord." "That is what you write." I said that it was. He turned his head and looked at the Roll on the table. "Present," he said, and nothing else; and my sister, on her pillows, with her hand where she puts it, looked at the ceiling.

They built a ladder in a month, banded with iron, and set it to the wall, and it reached the top as if it had been measured. A man went up, and looked down into the city, and clapped his hands and cried, "By Allah, thou art fair!" and went over. Another went up, and laughed, and did the same. There were twelve. The Emir said that they had no business with the city. The old Shaykh said that it was his; and he went up, saying the name of God and the Verses of Safety, and at the top he clapped his hands, and those below begged him not to; and he laughed for a long while, and sat, and said the names of God; and then he stood and called down that there was no harm, that God had kept the wiles of Satan from him. He had seen ten maidens like Houris calling to him with their hands, and below them a lake; and when he had thought to throw himself in, he had seen his twelve companions lying dead on the stones. It was an enchantment of the people of the city, to turn back whoever would look. I told it with my back to the wall. I do not know why I say so; it is true. He found a horseman of brass on a golden gate, with a pin of gold in its navel, and turned it twelve times, and the gate opened with a noise like thunder.

Inside there was a guard-room with dead men sitting on benches, their shields above them and their bows strung; and at the belt of the oldest, the keys; and the great gate, which the Shaykh opened to those outside, who cried Allaho Akbar. I give you the markets only by their scales. Every shop in the city was open, with the weights hung out and the brass vessels in rows, and in every shop the merchant sat on his shop-board with the skin dried on his bones, looking as if he would speak: the silk market, the jewellers, the money-changers, with gold in their shops and nobody to count it, and the perfumers' with bladders of musk and ambergris. There was no food in any of the shops. My sister said that twice. Over the door of the palace there were verses in gold and ultramarine: The tombs aloud reply to the questioners and cry, Death's canker and decay those rosy cheeks corrode.

In the middle of the palace, in a pavilion with a dome of alabaster, there lay on a couch a damsel in a body-robe of pearls, with a crown of red gold, and two jewels on her forehead that gave light like the sun; her hair was black and her cheeks red, and she seemed to look at them to the right and to the left. "Peace be with thee, O damsel," said the Emir. "She is dead, lord," said Talib. "She has been embalmed with great art, and her eyes taken out and quicksilver put under them and set back; and when the air moves the lashes she seems to look at you." Two slaves of copper stood on the steps, one with a mace and one with a sword. Between them lay a tablet of gold with letters of silver, and the Shaykh read it. "I am Tadmurah, daughter of the Kings of the Amalekites. I possessed what no king possessed, and was righteous in my rule, and gave largesse and freed bondsmen. Then there came upon us seven years of drought, in which no drop of rain fell and nothing green sprang from the earth. We ate what we had; then the cattle; then there was nothing. I had my treasures brought and measured, and sent trusty men to every land to buy food, and they came back after a long absence with the treasure, and said that they had not been able to barter fine pearls for poor wheat, bushel for bushel, weight for weight. So we displayed our riches, and shut the gates of the city and its strong places, and resigned ourselves to the decree of our Lord. Then we all died, as thou seest us. After the substance naught abideth but the trace."

"Bushel for bushel," said the King. He did not say it to my sister. "Vizier." "Lord." "How many years of grain are there in the granaries?" My father had been looking at his hands. "In the city, four, lord, and some months. In the north, less than one." "Make it seven." "Lord, the north," my father began. "Seven," said the King, in the voice in which he had said a brick. My father put out his finger and wrote it on his palm, as he does for the houses; and in the morning, before the audience, he went out with two clerks and a measuring-rod, and I saw his back from the window, going down towards the granaries by the river, where I have never seen him go.

Talib bin Sahl said that the damsel would have no need of the jewels on her, which were the ornament of the world, and that one garment of cotton would cover her; and that they had more right to them than she. The Emir said that she had written: Touch not what is on my body, for it is the covering of my shame and the outfit for my last journey; and that she had given it to them in trust. "Because she is dead," said Talib, "shall we leave these?" and went up the steps; and the two slaves of copper moved, and he did not come down. "Greed of gain degrades a man," said the Emir, and had the troops carry out the gold and the vessels, and leave her as she was, and shut the gate again as it had been. "He was told," said the nurse. "She said not to." "Yes," said the King. Sumayya said, "He didn't need them," and nobody asked her who.

They went on along the shore for a month, to a mountain full of caves by the sea of Al-Karkar, where lived a people who had been taught to pray by Al-Khizr when he came up out of the sea, and who knew no other words than the ones he had given them, and said them every evening before the Friday. Their King had his divers bring up twelve of Solomon's bottles, and gave the Emir some of the creatures of the deep who have the shape of men, and the Emir took some of these to the Caliph, who put them in cisterns of planks, and they died of the heat. I tell you this because my sister told it, and Sumayya cried. The Caliph opened the bottles one after another in his hall, and out of every one came a devil saying, "I repent, O Prophet of God; I will never go back to it"; and he marvelled, and said that God had never given anyone what He gave Solomon. The Emir Musa gave up his government to his son, and went to Jerusalem to worship, and died there. "That is all that has come down to us of the City of Brass," said my sister, "and God is all-knowing." "And those not brought up?" said the King. "They are saying it, lord." He nodded.

At the end of the 578th night my sister said that she had another tale, of the craft and malice of women, and of a King of China who had grown old without a son, and of the son he got, and a concubine, and seven Viziers. "Seven," said the King, and looked at my father. "Seven, lord," said my father. "I am told that I count for several, on my better days." "On your better days," said the King; and that was all, and it was a good deal.

Night 578. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a King of China who has grown old without a son, only begun; seven years of grain, of which there are four; a city in which nobody lives, shut again as it was; a boy who walks to the door and back; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a second child, which has moved; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Five Hundred and Seventy-nine to Six Hundred and Six: The Seven Days of Silence, and a Jar Without a Cloth

For twenty-eight nights my sister told one story, and inside it twenty-seven more, and I will give you the first and the last and the middle only by their doors. There was a King of China who had grown old without a son. His Queen told him of a dream: a voice had said that if she bore a daughter she would be the ruin of the kingdom, and if a son, that he would meet with trouble in his youth and pass through it without loss of life; and that it could be conceived only when the moon stood in Gemini. So it was, and the child was born like the moon on its fourteenth night, and the astrologers who cast his nativity said that a danger waited for his youth, and that he would escape it. The King gave him to nurses until he was seven, and then gathered three hundred and sixty of the learned, to choose the one who should teach him everything; and they chose a Sage named Sindibad.

The Sage asked three things of the King, before he would begin. The first was that he should not do to another what he would not have done to himself. The second was that he should do nothing in haste, without asking the experienced. The third was that where he had power, he should show pity. The King had these written, and swore them before the court. "I submit myself to thy conditions," he said. Three years went, and the boy had learned nothing, for his mind was on play; and the Sage said that he would teach him in seven months what no one could teach him in seven years. He had a house built, with the walls whitened with stucco, and painted on them every thing that he meant to teach; and he locked the Prince in it with seven padlocks, and came every third day to explain the pictures, and to bring food. When the boy was lonely, he looked at the walls. Sumayya said, "On the wall?" and looked at the plaster of our room, as though it might begin; and I saw her mouth move.

When the Prince was ready, the Sage looked in his horoscope, and found it barred by a conjunction that would last seven days, and said to him: "Be silent. Not one word for seven days, though thy father scourge thee. If thou pass this week thou shalt rule after him." The Prince went in to his father and would not speak; and the Sage hid himself, and none could find him. The courtiers said that the boy was shy of women, and the King sent him to the palace of the women, where there was a stream, and forty chambers with ten girls in each who played instruments, so that the whole palace danced. The King's favourite saw him, and was taken with love, and threw herself upon him, and said that if he would take her she would poison his father and set him on the throne. He signed to her that when he could speak he would tell the King. She tore her clothes, and her hair, and went to the King, and said that this son of his, who was said to be dumb, had required her of herself and tried to kill her when she refused. The King, who had waited all his life for him, called his seven Viziers, and bade them put the Prince to death.

They talked together in the corridor. If they did what he said, he would repent it the day after, and turn on them for not stopping him. The first said, "I will warrant you for today," and went in, and told the King that he had heard great store of tales of the malice and craft of women. "Tell me some of that which hath come to thy knowledge," said the King. A King of the Kings, the Vizier said, saw a woman on a roof, and fell in love with her; and sent her husband, who was his Vizier, on an errand to the other end of the kingdom, and went in his place to her house. She kissed his hands and feet, and said that she was not worthy to be the handmaid of one of his servants, and asked him to take patience and abide with her that day, so that she could make him something to eat. She brought him a book to read; it was moral instances, and exhortations, and broke his courage. Then she set before him ninety dishes of many colours, and he tasted each and found the taste of all of them one; and she said that in his palace were ninety concubines of many colours, but their taste was one. He was ashamed, and rose, and left, and in his haste forgot his signet-ring under the cushion.

The Vizier, returning, found it. He did not speak to his wife for a year. At last her father complained to the King, in the Vizier's presence, that he had a garden, which he had planted with his own hand and given to the Vizier, who had eaten of it and then neglected to water it, so that it withered. The Vizier said that it was true: he had cared for it, and eaten of it, till one day he went and saw the footprint of the lion there; and he had been afraid, and left it. The King understood that the footprint of the lion was his own ring. "Return to thy garden," he said, "and fear nothing. I have heard that the lion went there. By the honour of my fathers, he did it no harm." The King in our room did not look at anyone. "A lion's footprint," he said. "He did not go near it," said my sister. "Yes," said the King. My father, in his corner, was looking at the brick.

It went on, a Vizier a day, and for each Vizier the favourite, who came the next morning and said that the King had been turned from justice by the prate of his ministers, and told a tale of the malice of men. I give them you only by their shapes. There was the parrot that told the confectioner what his wife did while he was away, and the wife who made a storm over its cage with a hand-mill and a candle and a fan, so that when it spoke of the deluge the man tore its head off; and there was the fuller who was drowned with his son. The egg-white that a rake spilled on a merchant's bed, so that he would think his wife untrue, and the little boy who fried it and ate it. The miser, who learned what his two loaves a day had been made of. The woman who came home from the rice-seller with earth and stones in her napkin and said that she had dropped a dirham, and made her husband sift the dust for it until his face was grey. Over a drop of honey that fell in a shop, a fly, a bird, a cat, a dog, and a man who killed another, the people of two villages destroyed one another; "none knoweth their number save Allah." "Over a drop," said the King. "Yes, lord." He looked for some time at his own hands. "Who began it?" "The drop, lord." "The man who let it fall." "He did not mean to." "No," said the King; and that was all.

On the fifth day, the Vizier told the tale of the man who never laughed again. A rich man's son wasted what his father left, and at the last hired himself to an old man who needed a servant in a house of eleven old men, who wept and wailed all day, and who made him swear not to ask why. They died one by one, and he buried them in the garden behind the house, until there was only the one who had hired him; and the old man said, on his deathbed, "There is a door in that wall. If thou open it, thou shalt know why we wept; and thou shalt repent when repentance will avail thee naught." The young man found the door in a dark corner, with spiders' webs over it, and four steel padlocks, and let it be for seven days. On the eighth day he said that nothing can avert what is fore-ordained, and broke the padlocks. "He held off seven days," said the King. "Seven, lord." "And on the eighth." "On the eighth." The nurse looked up from her mending. "It is a long time to hold off a door," she said. Behind it was a passage, and a sea, and an eagle which carried him to an island, and a ship of ivory and ebony, with ten maidens, who called him King, and a country of women who ruled while the men tilled; and a Queen who gave him everything in it, and told him not to open one door. He was seven years there. Then he opened it, and the bird was behind it. "No welcome to a face that shall never prosper!" He did not laugh again as long as he lived.

On the fifth day the favourite came in with a bowl of poison, and on the sixth with a naked knife, and on the seventh she lit a great fire and made as if to throw herself in it, and said she would accuse the King on the Day of Resurrection. Each time, my sister said, the King looked at the thing in her hand for a long time. "She threatens herself," said the King. "Yes, lord." "That is a way to ask." He did not say what he meant. That was the day the Vizier told the tale of the man with three wishes, which I shall not give you because the first of them was foolish and the second was a joke and the third was undone; and she told the necklace. A pious woman who had been given a necklace to keep by a Queen was put to the question by fire and blows when it vanished, and confessed nothing, and was put in prison. A magpie had taken it to a crevice in the wall; the King saw it fly out and fetch it. He sent for her and kissed her head and wept and begged her pardon, and gave her treasure, which she refused. She forgave him, and went away into the mountains, and swore never to enter another man's house. "She forgave him," said the King. "Yes, lord." "She would not take the treasure." "No, lord." He said nothing more.

I leave the long tales, which came on the seventh day and filled five nights: Prince Behram, who rode against the Princess Al-Datma and lost himself for her; the house with the belvedere, in which a lover is hidden in a chest; the King's son and the Ifrit's mistress. On the last of them, a King's son lost his ring to a woman's trick, and his father ordered him put to death, and the Viziers prevailed with the father again; and the next morning, the eighth day, the Prince came into the audience hall with Sindibad holding his hand, and praised his father and the Viziers in the most eloquent words, and thanked them for saving his life. Nobody had known he could speak. The King kissed him between the eyes. Sindibad said that he had told the boy to keep silent, because he had read in the stars that if he spoke in that week he would die. The King said, to the court, "If I had killed my son, whose would the fault have been: mine, or the damsel's, or the preceptor's?" And no one answered; and Sindibad said, "Answer thou, my son."

The Prince said that a merchant, whose guests were with him, sent a slave-girl to the market for a jar of clotted milk; and a kite passed over her, holding a serpent in its claws, and a drop of venom fell into the milk; and the merchant and his guests drank it, and died. "Whose was the fault?" Some said the guests', who drank without looking, and some said the girl's, who left the jar uncovered. "It was neither," said the Prince. "Their hour was come, and their appointed portion was spent, and God had fore-ordained that they should die thus." Sumayya said, "She should have put a cloth on it." My sister said, "The kite was overhead, little one." "She should still have put a cloth on it." The King said, "Yes. She should." He said it as if she had asked him something. "And so should the merchant have looked at it before he drank," he said, "and the boy has been silent seven days, and has had time to think what he would say." The Prince added that the blind Shaykh, and the child of three, and the child of five were wiser than he, and told their tales: the sandalwood merchant and the sharpers; the profligate man who went to another city to sin and was put to shame by a three-year-old with rice in his eye; the four merchants and the stolen purse, which a five-year-old solved with a dirham's worth of sweets. I give you the child of three because I told it, in the second glass, with my chin on my knees, and the boy laughed at it, and I let him.

Then the Prince told his father what the favourite had done. "She required me of love, and I refused; and she promised to give thee poison, and make me King; and I signed to her that when I could speak I would requite her." The King sent for her. "How shall we put this damsel to death?" he asked, and some said, cut out her tongue, and others, burn her. She said that her case was like that of the fox and the folk. A fox got into a currier's storehouse and spoiled the skins, and the currier beat him with the hides until he lay for dead, and an old woman took out his right eye, for a charm against weeping in children, and a boy cut off his tail, and a man took out his knife to slit his belly for the gall that cures dim eyes; and the fox sprang up and ran, and said that he had borne the eye and the tail but not the belly. "I excuse her," said the King, "and in my son's hands be her doom." The Prince said, "Pardon is better than vengeance, and mercy is of the quality of the noble." He set her free. "Depart from our neighbourhood," he said, "and God pardon what is past."

"He did not say that he pardoned her," said the King. The glass had run out. My sister, on her pillows, looked at him. "No, lord," she said. "He said, God pardon what is past." "That is not the same." "No, lord." "He sent her out of the neighbourhood." "Yes." "Alive." "Yes, lord." "It is not done," said the King, to nobody; and the nurse said, "It is done, lord, she has gone," and the King said, "She has gone. It is not done." I wrote it that morning in the column where I put what is not finished: a favourite, sent out of the neighbourhood, whom nobody has pardoned. The King gave the kingdom to the Prince, and crowned him with his own crown, and said that he was old and would give the rest of his days to worship; and the Prince reigned in justice, and his power was magnified, until there came to him the Certainty.

Night 606. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: the sons of a merchant named Omar, of whom the youngest is loved, only begun; a favourite, sent out of the neighbourhood, whom nobody has pardoned; a jar, which should have had a cloth on it; seven years of grain, of which there are five; a boy who walks to the door and back; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a second child, which has moved; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Six Hundred and Seven to Six Hundred and Twenty-four: Judar and His Brothers, and a Baker Whose Name Is to Be Found

A merchant of Cairo named Omar had three sons, Salim and Selim and Judar, and loved the youngest the most; and when he was old he divided his goods in four before witnesses, a share for each son and a share for their mother, so that after he died there could be no dispute. There was one. The two elder said that their father's wealth was in Judar's hands, and went to the judges; and the judges, who had been bribed by all three, found for Judar twice, and by the end of it the three of them had given everything they had to the courts, and were poor. The brothers beat their mother and took what she had. Judar took her in. "Do not curse them," he said. "Allah will requite each according to his deed. Come and live with me, and the scone that I eat I will share with thee." He comforted her with a verse: If a fool oppress thee, bear it patiently, and from Time expect thy revenge to see; shun tyranny, for if mountain oppressed mountain, it would be shattered by it. He got a net and went fishing at Bulak, and some days he made ten coppers, and some twenty; and his brothers came to the house when he was out, and his mother gave them stale bread, and said, "Eat quick and go before your brother comes." One day he came in while they were eating. He smiled in their faces. "Welcome, my brothers," he said. "A blessed day. I thought you had forgotten me." They said that it was Satan's doing. He made peace with them, and they supped, and lodged with him, and ate his fish.

Then there was a day when his net came up empty, and the next, and for seven days he caught nothing, and he took bread each night at the baker's on credit, and went home. The baker, when he offered his net in pledge, would not take it. "The net is the gate of thy livelihood," he said. "If I took it I should close the door of thy subsistence." He gave him twenty coppers' worth of bread, and said that if there were no fish tomorrow there would be bread tomorrow. "A baker," said the King. "Yes, lord." "Is there a baker who does that?" My father said, "There is one in the Coppersmiths' Row, lord, who has done it for four of the houses." "Which?" "I did not ask him, lord. He did it before I came." The King looked at his hands for a time, and said, "Find out his name."

On the eighth day Judar went to Lake Karun, to cast there. A Moor came on a she-mule with golden saddle-bags, and said, "Peace be upon thee, O Judar, O son of Omar!" and asked him to say the Fatihah with him, and to bind his elbows behind him with a silken cord, and push him into the lake, and wait; and if his hands came up above the water, to cast the net over him and haul him out, but if his feet came up first, to take the mule to a Jew in the bazaar, who would give him a hundred dinars. The Moor's feet came up. The Jew gave Judar the hundred dinars, and said, "This is the reward of the covetous." The next day a second Moor came, who knew everything the first had said, and asked the same; and his feet came up. Judar, who thought that they were mad, said that he hoped Moors would come to him every day. "He said that?" said the King. "He said that, lord. He was getting a hundred dinars a head." "He did not know what he did." "He knew that he was tying a man's hands, lord." The King said nothing to that. The third Moor put his hands up out of the water with a red fish in each, and told Judar the history, which was that the first two had been his brothers, and the Jew a third, and the fourth was himself, and that their father had taught them magic and left them a book of the secrets of the world, which they had quarrelled over; and the old man who had reared their father had said that whichever of them brought him the four treasures of the sorcerer Al-Shamardal might have it: a sword, a seal-ring, a phial of kohl and a celestial planisphere. It could be done only by Judar. I cut the fish short, because they were the sons of the Red King, and the Moor kept them in two caskets until they were forced to open the door.

He fed Judar on the way. "What wilt thou have?" "Bread and cheese." "O my poor fellow, bread and cheese befit thee not; wish for something good." Four-and-twenty dishes the Moor named, till Judar said, "That will do; thou makest me long for all these meats, and I see nothing"; and the Moor put his hand into the saddle-bags and took out a golden dish with two hot browned chickens, and then another, until the whole four-and-twenty were on the ground. When they had eaten, he threw away what was left, and put the empty dishes back, and it began again at the next meal. "Nothing was kept," said my sister. "No, lord. Whatever was left he threw away, or gave to the poor; and the bags filled again." "Nothing was kept past the meal," said the King. I looked at the Roll. They crossed in four days, on a mule that was an Ifrit and did a year's journey in a day, to Fez, where a girl called Rahmah opened the upper room; and there Judar ate for twenty days and was clothed every morning in a new dress, until the day came to open the hoard of Al-Shamardal.

There were seven doors under the river-bed. At the first he was to knock a light knock, and wait, and a louder knock, and wait, and then three together; and a voice would ask, "Who knocketh at the door of the treasure, unknowing how to solve the secrets?" and he was to say, "I am Judar the fisherman, son of Omar." At each of them something stood to kill him if he resisted, and would fall down and be a body without a soul if he did not: a figure with a sword, who said, Stretch forth thy neck; a horseman; an archer; a lion that he must give his hand to; a slave; two dragons; and at the seventh door, a woman in the shape of his mother, who said, "I am thy mother who bore thee and suckled thee and reared thee," and he was to make her take off her clothes. He had been told that she was not his mother, and she called him my son, and as he threatened her, one garment after another, she begged him, and he went on; and when she was left in her trousers, she said, "O my son, is thy heart stone? Wilt thou dishonour me?" And he said, "Thou sayest sooth," and let her keep them. Then she cried out, "He has made default; beat him!" and they came from nowhere and beat him, a beating that he did not forget in all his days, and threw him out, and the river closed. "He was sorry for her," said the King. "Yes, lord." "She was not his mother." "No, lord. The Moor told him that, and told him again." "And it had her face." "Yes." The Moor made him wait a year. It was the year that he ate from the saddle-bags, and was clothed in a new dress every morning; and then he went down again, and when she had nothing left on, she fell, and he took the sword and the ring, the phial and the planisphere, and music sounded for him. He gave them to the Moor. He asked for nothing but the saddle-bags, and the Moor gave him them, and a second pair filled with gold and jewels, and sent him back to Cairo on the Ifrit mule.

Outside the Gate of Victory his mother was sitting begging. "Alms, for the love of God." She had given his brothers what he left her, and they had taken it, and put her out, and she slept on an empty stomach. "In the name of God," she said, when he began to name what he would give her to eat, "Yauh! Yauh! art thou daft? Who can pay for such dishes, and who knows how to dress them?" He told her to bring the saddle-bags, and she felt them, and they were empty, and he put in his hand and drew out stuffed ribs, and she wept. "The mother," said the nurse. "The mother," said the King, and said nothing more of that. It was on the 615th night that my father said, after the tale, that the granaries held five years and some months, and the north a year; and the King said, "Good." He did not say anything else. I wrote it.

Judar fed his brothers, and they learned the secret of the bags from their mother, and arranged to sell him to the Captain of Suez for forty dinars. They asked the Captain and two of his men to a supper in Judar's house, and fell on Judar in his sleep. He worked a year in the galleys. A ship was wrecked on a rock; he swam out; a Bedouin camp, a merchant of Jiddah who took him on, Mecca, and on the circuit of the Ka'abah, the Moor. The Moor gave him the seal-ring, in which there lived the Marid Al-Ra'ad al-Kasif, and told him to rub it; and Al-Ra'ad took him on his back to Cairo between noon and midnight, and left him in his mother's courtyard. "I will bring my brothers," said Judar; and the Marid brought them out of the King's prison, where the King had put them for the bags, and they thought that they were to die. He said, "Weep not. It was Satan and covetousness. How could you sell me? I comfort myself with Joseph, whose brothers did worse, for they cast him into the pit. But repent unto God, and He will forgive you; and as for me, I pardon you." "He forgave them," said the King. "Yes, lord." "That is twice." "Yes, lord." Shah Zaman, on the rug, said, "I have a brother." "You have," said the King. And they looked at each other for the length of a breath, and neither said what he meant.

Judar had the Marid build him a palace in a night, and furnish it, and bring him slaves, and empty the King's treasury into it, since it was the King who had taken the saddle-bags; and the Treasurer fell down in a fit. The King sent an Emir with fifty men to bring him, and an eunuch in a chair of gold at the gate beat them, and a hundred, and two hundred; so the King sent his Vizier alone, in a white habit with a rosary in his hand, who sat down beside the eunuch and said, "Peace be with thee." "And on thee be peace, O mortal," said the eunuch, and the Vizier knew what he was. Judar kept the King standing for some time in his own hall; and when the King said that greed had impelled him and that if there were no offending, there would be no forgiving, he said, "God pardon thee," and let him sit. The King, afraid of a man who could do that, gave him his daughter, the Princess Asiyah. When the King died the army made Judar Sultan, and he built a mosque over him, and made his brothers his two Viziers. A year later the brothers asked him to a feast.

I did not tell the end. My sister told it, in the first glass, and she told it fast. The first brother poisoned him, and took the ring, and rubbed it, and told the Marid to kill the second brother, who was to have been his Vizier of the left, and to throw both bodies down before the generals at dinner. "Eat and make merry," he told them, "for I am your Sultan; and if you will not have me I shall rub the ring and the Marid shall kill you, great and small." They said they would have him. He sent to Judar's widow that he would go in to her that night. She received him with joy, and gave him poison in a cup of water; and when he was dead she took the ring and broke it, and tore the saddle-bags, so that nobody might have them again, and sent to the Shaykh al-Islam and the officers, and said, "Choose you out a King." "She broke it," said the King. "And tore the bags." "Nothing was left." "No, lord." The lamp had burned low. He sat for some time looking at it, and I wrote nothing.

The boy had been awake all this time, on the King's arm, looking at the lamp. He turned his head to his father's face and said, quite clearly, "Ba." "Again," said the King. "Ba," said the boy, and put his hand flat on the King's mouth. And the King put his own hand over the boy's, and shut his eyes, and did not move for a long time; and my sister, on her pillows, said that she would tell another tale, of Gharib and his brother Ajib, and a King of might named Kundamir, who had grown old.

Night 624. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: Gharib and his brother Ajib, and a King named Kundamir, who has grown old, only begun; a broken ring; the baker who would not take the net, whose name is to be found out; seven years of grain, of which there are five and some months; a favourite, sent out of the neighbourhood, whom nobody has pardoned; a boy who has said Ba, twice; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a second child, which has moved; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Six Hundred and Twenty-five to Six Hundred and Fifty: Gharib, and a Son Born Before Dawn

There was in olden time a King of might named Kundamir, who had been a brave man of war and had grown old and decrepit; and it pleased God in his extreme old age to give him a son, whom he named Ajib, the Wonderful, because of his beauty. The boy was taught by a priest of his father's faith, and then to ride and to fight; and by twenty he was the best horseman of his day and a tyrant, who rode out with a thousand riders to cut off caravans and carry off the daughters of nobles. The nobles complained to his father. The old King had him seized and beaten, and shut in a dark room for two days. Ajib bore it ten days. Then he went in at night to the room where his father slept, and cut his throat, and in the morning took the throne, and told the Emirs, who stood in front of him with drawn swords, "You see what your King has gained. Whoever obeys me I will honour. Whoever does not I will do with him what I did with my sire."

My sister told it quickly, and the King did not stop her. Five months later Ajib had a dream. He saw his father standing before him, and out of his father came a thing the size of a bee, and it grew into a lion with claws like hangers and ran at him and ripped him open. The interpreters said that it meant a child of his father's who would be his enemy and would win. He had them beaten for it. "I have no brother whom I should fear," he said. Then he went to his father's house of women and found one of the concubines seven months gone with child, and ordered two slaves to take her to the sea and drown her. "Stop," said the King.

My sister stopped. It was the middle of the 625th night, in the first glass, and she had her hand where she keeps it. The King was not looking at her. He had the boy on his knee, who was awake, and he had turned the boy's face into his coat. "They did not," said my sister. "Lord. They did not drown her." "Say that first." "The two slaves took her to the sea, lord, and they could not do it, and they took her to a forest; and she is alive in the next word." "Say it." "She is alive, lord, and her child is alive, and he is called Gharib, and he is the hero of the tale." The King looked at the lamp. "Go on," he said. The nurse put down her mending and said nothing, and put her hand on my sister's knee.

She was alone in the forest, among fruit trees and streams, when the slaves were killed by raiders in a quarrel of their own, and she gave birth to a boy, brown and clean-limbed, and named him Gharib, the Stranger, because of her strangerhood, and cut the cord, and wrapped him in her clothes. Hunters came into the forest, with hawks and hounds and gazelles, and found her with the child at her breast, and asked her whether she was a mortal or a Jinniyah, and she said that she was a mortal. Their chief, Mardas, who was Emir of the Banu Kahtan, took her to wife, and she bore him a son called Sahim al-Layl, Arrow of the Night. They grew up together like twins, and learned the sword, and the spear, and the bow; and when they were fifteen each of them could stand against a thousand horse.

What I give you of the next twenty nights I give by the people. Mardas's tribe was raided in his absence by the lord of the Banu Nabhan, who wanted Mardas's daughter Mahdiyah and was refused; and Gharib took a hundred horse and brought her back and the captives with her. He was thanked. And he fell in love with Mahdiyah, the way a man does who has just seen her taken, and could not eat or sleep; and Mardas, when it was told to him, thundered and said, "This is the reward of him who reareth the sons of adultery!" and took a hundred and fifty of his men into a valley to wait for the boy he had raised, and kill him on the road home. "He reared him," said the King. "Yes, lord." "And would kill him for wanting his daughter." "For wanting her without a dower." "It is the oldest quarrel there is," said Shah Zaman from the rug, "between the man who raised a boy and the boy." The King looked at him. "It is not the oldest," he said.

The ambush was itself ambushed, by Amalekites, who were after Gharib for the man he had killed; and they trussed up Mardas, and would have taken him away to be put to death, and Sahim, who had been wounded, went to Gharib to warn him, and Gharib went into the valley alone in the dark, and brought him out. Sumayya asked how he could. "He was his father," she said. "No," said my sister, "he was the man who had brought him up." "That is what I said." My sister smiled; it was the first time that month that she had smiled in the first glass. "He did not do it for that," she said. "He did it because the man was in a ditch." Mardas asked the youth to forgive him. He forgave him, and the old man said that the dower for his daughter should be the head of the Mountain-Ghul, who had held that country for a hundred years, and had eaten a good many of it. I leave out what the Ghul ate. In his mountain he was keeping a King's daughter, Fakhr Taj, the daughter of the King of the Persians; Gharib went up and fought him, and instead of killing him he spared him, and the Ghul, who had never been spared, became his man and went with him to the end of the tale; and he took the Princess home to her father, who said that he would marry them. That is a thread that I shall lose now and take up again. Mardas, who had not meant him to come back, packed up his tribe in the night and went to Cufa with his daughter, to give her to King Ajib.

I did not tell this part. My sister told it, in the first glass, on the 635th night, with her eyes on the ceiling and her hands folded on the arc of her dress. Ajib asked Mardas who the youth was; and Mardas said, a youth whose mother was in his tents, called Nusrah. Ajib said, "It is she." He sent for her. He asked her where the two slaves were that he sent with her, and she said, "They slew each other on my account." And Ajib drew his sword. "He killed her," said the King. "Yes, lord. She had no name for ten nights, and then she had that one." "Nusrah," said the King. "It means aid." "Yes, lord." "In front of Mardas." "Yes, lord." "And Mardas gave him the daughter." "He married the daughter to him, lord, and Ajib gave him thirty thousand dinars." The King did not move. He said, "Is there more of that?" "No, lord. The rest is war." "Then tell the war."

I told the war, in the second glass, and it was long; and I will give it you as I gave it to him, which was in the shape of what was the same. Gharib marched on Cufa to take the blood-wreak of his father and his mother and his betrothed, with the Ghul at his side and a great many Arabs and Persians; and Ajib met him with a great many more. There was a day, and a night, and a day; and Gharib was taken in his sleep and put in irons in Ajib's tent; and his brother Sahim put henbane in the lamps and carried Ajib out in a cloak, and Gharib had him stripped and whipped and set a guard over him, and in the morning went to the aid of his uncle and left no guard. Ajib's page crept in and carried him away on his back. "He left no guard," said the King. "Lord?" "Gharib. He had him, and he went to help his uncle, and left no guard." "He was in a hurry, lord." "Yes." He looked at the boy. "He did that on purpose," he said. I do not know what he meant; I put it on my second sheet, under what I do not know.

It was the 640th night when my father said that he had found the baker's name. He said it from his corner. He had been to the Coppersmiths' Row on four evenings, in the dress of a clerk, and bought bread of the man who was not the baker, and the fifth evening bought of the baker, who is called Hamid and is sixty, and has fed eleven houses on credit for six years; and when the Vizier asked him why, he said that bread is a thing that goes off. The King said, "Hamid." He said it twice. "Hamid," said Sumayya, "is the praised one." "Does he know that?" said the King. "No, lord." He did not say anything about sending anything; my father said that he had thought of it, and had not done it, because the baker would then know, and the thing would be a payment. "No," said the King. "Do not send." I wrote it in the column where I put what is not finished: a baker named Hamid, to whom nothing has been sent. On the 645th night my father said that the granaries held six years.

On the 650th night, in the middle of the first glass, my sister stopped. She was telling how Gharib and Sahim, asleep, were taken up by two Marids and carried to the King of the Jinn, who has four heads, one of a lion, one of an elephant, one of a wolf and one of a man, and she stopped between the second head and the third, and put both hands under her belly, and her face did what it had done on the 509th night, but longer. "This is not a fish," said the nurse. "No," said my sister. Then she turned her head to me, and said, in the voice that she had used to me when I was six, "Dunyazad. Go on," and the nurse and the two women who had been waiting in the next room since the 640th night took her under the arms and carried her behind the curtain, and the lamp went with them, and there was only the small one by the bed.

The King did not follow her. I want to say what he did, because I do not think that he knew it. He sat on the floor by the brick, with the boy, who was awake and astonished at the dark, and his back against the wall; and my father stood in his corner with his hands at his sides, and Shah Zaman, on his rug, sat up, and began to count something on his fingers, and when he came to the end of one hand he began again; and Sumayya came and sat against my knees. And from behind the curtain there were sounds. "Go on," the King said to me. I said that I did not know where. "Anywhere," he said. "Tell the beginning." So I told it. I told a woman alone in a forest among fruit trees and streams, with nobody to help her, and a child at her breast whom she called the Stranger. I told it through the first glass, and when it ran out the King took it and turned it himself, and I told it through the second. I told it as though I had been there. I told it three times. Sumayya, against my knees, was saying something under her breath; I listened, and it was the nine names in the white book, one after another, and then again from the beginning. The King did not move, except that when there was a noise behind the curtain, he put his hand on the boy's back and kept it there until the noise was over; and my father said the names of God very quietly, not the same ones twice, and at some hour sat down on the floor, which I have not seen him do in his life.

The window had gone from black to the colour of ash, and I had come, for the third time, to the place where the hunters find the woman in the forest with her child, when a voice said from behind the curtain, "A son." It was the nurse. I stopped. Nobody moved. Sumayya was weeping into my sleeve and said that she was not. "Is she," the King said, and could not finish it. "She is tired, lord," said the nurse. "She says that you may come." He gave me the boy. I have not held him for a long time; he is heavy now, and warm, and smelt of his father. The King went behind the curtain, and I heard nothing; and then, after a space of time that I did not count, I heard him speak, one word, and I could not hear what it was. When he came out he went to the Roll, which was lying on the table, where I had written, by the small lamp, as soon as the nurse spoke, in the column for what is not finished: a child, born, a son. He read it. He took up the pen and put the point of it in the ink, and I saw that his hand was not steady; and he put it down again, and put his thumb beside the word born, as he had done once before.

Night 650. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: the King of the Jinn, who has four heads, only begun; a baker named Hamid, to whom nothing has been sent; six years of grain, of seven; a child, born, a son; a boy who has said Ba, and walked; a favourite, sent out of the neighbourhood, whom nobody has pardoned; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Six Hundred and Fifty-one to Six Hundred and Eighty: A Name in the Margin, and a Son Set Free

For seven nights I told both glasses, and the Roll says Dunyazad alone, in my own hand, and I did not scratch it out. The nurse had ruled it, and nobody had to be reminded of what she meant, and my sister lay with her face to the wall and the child at her side and listened to me tell the King of the Jinn. He has four heads, those of a lion, an elephant, a panther and a lynx, and he sat on his throne like a mountain when the two Marids put Gharib and his brother down before him. "Ye have slain my son," he said. I gave each of the four heads its own voice, and the older boy, on the floor by the brick, laughed at the elephant. They had been in the Valley of Springs and had seen a bird and shot at it with wooden bolts, and it had been his son. Gharib said by the Great God that he had not known. I will not give you the fire, in which the King of the Jinn kept a goddess, nor how it went out. When it did, he said that the Truth had been displayed to him, and kissed them both, and gave them a banquet, and for a month he and Gharib fought together against a cousin of his called Barkan, who was a rebel; and after that Gharib could not go home.

There was a girl in the palace of the rebels, Star o' Morn, the daughter of a King called the Blue King, whose mother, a King's daughter of China, he had carried off and ravished, and who died when the child was forty days old. She hated her father and was glad of his death. Gharib looked at her and loved her with exceeding love, "forgetting," said the tale, "Fakhr Taj the Princess, and even Mahdiyah." He married her that night. "He forgot them," said the King, who had the boy on his knee, with the hair standing up at the back of his head. "For a night, lord," I said. "That is the sentence that was written." "Another who forgets quickly," said the King. "It is a gift." But it was not the way that he had said it of Sindbad, and Shah Zaman, who had heard it both times, looked at the wall. The nurse said that he was a man. "He is a King," said Shah Zaman. "It is not the same." "No," said the King.

On the seventh morning, after the 656th night, my father and Shah Zaman and the nurse and Sumayya and I stood round the bed, and my sister sat up against the cushions, in a clean shift, with her hair down, and the child in her arm. He was dark, and small, and had a great deal of black hair, and his eyes were closed against the light, and he looked, my sister said, like a man who had been spoken to rudely. The King came in from the court with the older boy on his shoulder. He did not say anything. He asked me for the Roll, and I gave it to him, and he turned back the first leaf and at the foot of the margin of the margin, after the eight, he wrote a ninth word, in the square hand: Yusuf. "Joseph," said the nurse. "The wolf," said Shah Zaman. "The grain," said my father, and then, as if surprised at himself, "the seven years." "The pit," said Sumayya; and the King looked at her. "Which?" said the nurse. The King said nothing. I do not know which he meant. I think he did not choose. From the bed my sister said, "All of them," and he said, "Yes." Sumayya asked me afterwards how it was written; I wrote it on her sheet, and she copied it four times, and the fourth was straight.

The older boy, who had been put down, walked to the bed holding his hands out in front of him like a man crossing a stream, and stood and looked at the other. He put one finger out and touched the black hair. "Ba," he said; and then, so clearly that nobody breathed, "Ba," and put his whole hand on the head, flat, and left it there. My sister's eyes filled. "No," said the King, when someone moved. "Leave it." We left it. When the child woke and made the sound that they make, the older boy took his hand off at once, with his mouth open, as one who has done something and is not sure what, and looked at his father. "Again," said the King; and the boy put the hand back.

On the eighth night my sister told the first glass, sitting up, as she had said that she would, and I the second; and I will give the rest of Gharib to you the way that it came, in a hurry, because it was a hurry in the telling. The King of the Jinn would have given him his winged horse, but it would have died on the earth of men, so he gave him a horse of the sea, which was not to be matched in Al-Irak; and he wept at the parting, and said, "If aught befall thee wherein thou art powerless, send for me." And a thousand Marids carried Gharib and Star o' Morn and his share of the spoils to his own country, fifty years' journey in two days and a night; and they came down by his city of Oman and found it beleaguered by a host as numerous as the surging sea. I leave out the battles. They are in the Roll as place-names: Oman, Cashmere, Karaj, Isbanir. On the 660th night my father said, after the tale, "Seven years, lord. In the north, seven, and in the city, seven and some months." "Good," said the King. "Now do not touch it." My father said that he had not meant to. "That is what I mean," said the King. I wrote it down. It is one of the few things in the Roll that is finished.

Gharib heard at Cashmere from a Persian officer that Fakhr Taj, the Princess of the Persians, whom he had freed from the Ghul and sent home to her father, and who was to have been his wife, had been drowned in the river by her father's order; and the world waxed wan before his eyes. He swore by Abraham the Friend that he would go to the dog and have his life for hers. Two men were brought, who had been told to drown her, and said that they had not been able to; that they had let her go and told her to flee, and had left her on the bank of the Jayhun; and Gharib had his astrologers strike a board of geomancy, and they could not find her. A Marid, an enemy, caught him as he slept and took him to the Jayhun and meant to throw him in it, but, finding it hard, made him a raft and pushed it out into the stream, which carried it a long way. "That is another island," said Sumayya, who counts. "The sixth," said the nurse. "The seventh," said Shah Zaman, "if you count Sindbad's twice." They argued about it in the second glass. It was a restful argument.

A ship took him, and its sailors knew who he was, and bound him, and carried him to a city called Karaj, where an Amalekite had set up in each gate an idol of carnelian with a Marid inside it, to whom they sacrificed strangers; and Gharib got out of it, I will not say how. A Marid took him up and flew with him, and he got free of that one also, in the air, and came down on a great island in the middle of the sea, full of all the fruit that lips and tongue could ask, with fish that he caught; and there he lived alone, for I do not know how long, my sister did not say. She said that it was a pleasant place. "He was not in a hurry," said the King. "No, lord. He had stopped." "Why?" "There was nothing there that he could do, lord, until the ship came." "I have been on that island," said Shah Zaman. "It was called Samarkand."

Fakhr Taj had not drowned. The two men, when they let her go, told her to run; and she went on, from country to country and valley to valley, saying, "Where is thine eye, O Gharib, that thou mayst see my case?" until she came to a wady with a castle in the middle of it, and a hundred damsels in the castle, who took her for one of the Jinn and asked her who she was. She told them. They wept, and said, "Be of good cheer; here shalt thou have meat and drink and raiment." Five days later she bore a boy, as he were the moon, and called him Murad Shah. The castle belonged to a King of the Jinn named Salsal, who came once in the month on a white elephant, and was told her story, and said that when her son was a man he would take her father's head. The boy was brought up among the Jinn's children, hunting lions, until his heart was harder than the rock. When he was fifteen he said, "O my mamma, who is my papa?" and she told him; and he said, "By the claim thou hast on me for rearing me, I will bring thy father's head into thy presence."

He took two hundred Marids and rode out. He took Shiraz, and Balkh, and Samarcand of the Persians; he divided the booty among his soldiers, who loved him; and when he had an army of a hundred thousand horse he sat down before Isbanir al-Madain, which was Gharib's city, and sent for his mother. The city did not fight for three days. On the third, a Marid named Zalzal, who owed Gharib his life, came down on the roof of the palace at midnight with forty thousand Marids and Gharib on his arm, and Gharib cried out for Star o' Morn and Mahdiyah, and they ran to him and wept. He sat on his throne, and the officers told him that an army had sat down before the walls three days before, with Jinn in it, under a commander called Murad Shah; and that it had not yet fought.

The next morning Murad Shah rode out between the two armies in his armour and called out that none should come to him but their King; that if the King overthrew him, he should be lord of both armies, and if he overthrew the King, he would kill him as he had killed others. Gharib heard it and said, "Avaunt, O dog of the Arabs!" and went out. They broke their lances on each other, and then their swords; and when the horses fell down under them they dismounted and gripped each other. The boy lifted his opponent in the air to dash him down; and Gharib caught him by the ears, and pulled with all his might, until it seemed to the boy that the heavens were falling on the earth; and he cried, with his heart in his mouth, "I yield myself to thy mercy, O Knight of the Age!" The King of the frame had stood up. I had not seen it. He was on his feet by the brick, with his hand on the wall, and he sat down again when my sister, who was telling it, put out her own hand, without looking, as one puts out a hand to a child in the dark.

Gharib bound him, and sat on his throne, and had him brought, shuffling in his fetters, and hanging his head, and said, "Who art thou, that thou shouldst ride out against kings?" And the boy said, "Reproach me not, for I have an excuse. I came out to avenge my mother and my father on Sabur, King of the Persians; for he would have killed them; but my mother escaped, and I do not know whether he killed my father or not." "By God, thou art excusable," said Gharib. "But who were thy father and mother?" And the boy said, "My sire was Gharib, King of Al-Irak, and my mother Fakhr Taj, daughter of Sabur." Gharib gave a great cry and fell down in a swoon. They sprinkled rose-water on him. When he came to himself he said, "Art thou indeed Gharib's son by Fakhr Taj?" "Yes," said the boy. "Thou art a champion," said Gharib, "the son of a champion. Loose my child!" "Loose my child," said the King, in a voice that I did not know. "Yes, lord," said my sister. She had her hand on the baby, who was awake, and looking up at the lamp.

I leave out what was done to Sabur. My sister said it in a sentence, and I did not look at the King, and I have not written the sentence. She said that Gharib crowned his son with the crown of the Chosroes and made him King of the Persians and Turks and Medes, and set his uncle on the throne of Al-Irak, and reigned in justice, and all the peoples submitted to him; and that he and his wives and his companions lived in every comfort, until there came to them the Destroyer of delights and Sunderer of societies. "That is every thing that has come down to us," said my sister, "of the history of Gharib and Ajib." And she said that there was a man named Abdullah bin Ma'amar al-Kaysi, who had gone on pilgrimage one year, and told a tale of a woman called Rayya and her lover Otbah.

Night 680. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a pilgrim who went one year to the Holy House, and a woman called Rayya, only begun; a son named Yusuf, thirty days old, whose name is in the margin; a boy who has put his hand on a head and been told Again; seven years of grain, of which there are seven, which are not to be touched; a baker named Hamid, to whom nothing has been sent; a favourite, sent out of the neighbourhood, whom nobody has pardoned; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Six Hundred and Eighty-one to Six Hundred and Ninety-eight: He Who Mends the Stumbles of the Noble, and a Woman Who Was Asked

A man named Abdullah bin Ma'amar went one year on the pilgrimage, and when he had done it he turned back to visit the Prophet's tomb, and one night, as he sat in the garden between the tomb and the pulpit, he heard a low moaning in a soft voice, which said: "O night, thou art longsome for love-sick sprite, complaining of love and its ecstasy." He got up and went towards it and found a youth of the utmost beauty, with the down not yet on his cheek and tears worn into it like two trenches. The youth said that his name was Otbah, that he had gone that morning to a mosque to pray, and that a company of women had come, like moons, round a girl of passing loveliness, who had stopped in front of him and said, "O Otbah, what sayest thou of union with one who seeketh union with thee?" and gone. He had not seen her since. He was distracted, and did nothing but move from place to place.

So Abdullah went with him, and the Ansaris with them, a whole party, and they found out that the girl was Rayya, daughter of a man of the Banu Sulaym, and rode to ask for her. Her father went in in a rage. "They are noble chiefs," she said, "and the Prophet intercedes for them with God. For which of them do they ask me?" and when she heard, said that she had heard of Otbah that he performs what he promises, and told her father to make the dowry so heavy that they would go. He asked for a thousand bracelets of red gold and five thousand dirhams and a hundred pieces of Yemeni stuff and five bladders of ambergris. Abdullah said, "Thou shalt have that much." They sent to Medina for it, and abode forty days feasting, and then the father said, "Take your bride." Thirty camel-loads of her things, and a litter; and a day's journey from Medina some horsemen fell on them, and Otbah drove at them and was killed. "And the damsel," said my sister, "hearing it, cast herself from the camel and threw herself on him, and cried out grievously; and she sobbed a single sob and gave up the ghost." "Forty days," said Sumayya. "They had forty days of the feast." "They had no night," said the nurse. "No," said my sister. They dug one grave for them. Seven years later Abdullah came back, and over the grave there was a tall tree, and on it fillets of red and green and yellow stuffs; and the people called it the tree of the Bride and the Bridegroom. The King said nothing about that one at all.

Hind, the daughter of Al-Nu'man, was the fairest woman of her day, and Al-Hajjaj married her, and one day went in and found her looking at her face in a mirror and saying that she was a thoroughbred filly that a mule had covered; and I give her to you by that line, which is as much as my sister gave. Then, on the 683rd night, my sister told of a man called Khuzaymah, of the Banu Asad, who had been famous for bounty, and who had grown poor, and whose brethren, on whom he had lavished favour, had helped him a while and got tired of it. He told his wife, who was the daughter of his uncle, that he was going to shut his door until he died. And he did. And in Mesopotamia a Governor named Ikrimah, who was called Al-Fayyaz, the Overflowing, heard his name one day in the audience-chamber and asked how he did; and was told that he had shut his door. "This comes of his generosity," said Ikrimah. "And has Khuzaymah bin Bishr found no comforter and no requiter?" That night he took four thousand dinars in a purse and a single page and rode to Khuzaymah's house, and sent the page away, and knocked.

Khuzaymah came to the door, and Ikrimah gave him the purse and said, "Better thy case herewith." He felt it heavy and held on to the bridle. "Who art thou? My soul be thy ransom." "I come not to thee at a time like this desiring that thou shouldst know me." "I will not let thee go till I know thy name." "I am hight Jabir Atharat al-Kiram," said Ikrimah, which is, he who mends the stumbles of the noble; and he rode away. Khuzaymah spent the night handling the coins in the dark, for there was no oil in the lamp, and knew by the roughness that they were gold, and could not believe it. In the morning he paid his creditors and went to the Caliph, and told him the story; and the Caliph, who wished very much to know the man, made Khuzaymah Governor of Mesopotamia in Ikrimah's place. When he came to the city Ikrimah came out to meet him. And Khuzaymah, taking up the books, found Ikrimah short of money, as all the governors are; and said that it must be paid; and Ikrimah said that he had not got it; and Khuzaymah put him in irons. He kept him a month. "He did not know," said the King. "He did not know, lord." "He put in irons the man who had come in the dark to his door." "He did not know it was he." "No," said the King; and he said it a second time, to himself.

Ikrimah's wife heard how he was, and sent her freedwoman to Khuzaymah's gate, to say, "Hath Jabir Atharat al-Kiram deserved of thee no better reward than a strait prison and hard irons?" Khuzaymah cried out, "Alas the baseness of it, was it he?" and went to the prison with the honourable men of the city, and found Ikrimah wasted and hanging his head. He knelt, and kissed his face. "The generosity of thy dealing," he said, "and the vileness of my requital." And he had the irons struck off him and put on his own feet; and Ikrimah said, "What art thou about? I conjure thee by God." They went out. Khuzaymah took him to his own house and to the bath, and washed him himself, and gave him a robe, and money, and made his excuses to his wife; and they went together to the Caliph at Ramlah, and Khuzaymah said that he had found Jabir Atharat al-Kiram, and the Caliph made Ikrimah Governor of Armenia and Azerbaijan and Mesopotamia, and ten thousand dinars more than he had asked, and said that Khuzaymah's case was in his hands. Ikrimah said, "I restore him to his office." My father had been very still in his corner. "Vizier," said the King. "Lord." "The baker." "Lord, I have not sent him anything." "That is not what I meant. See that no one puts him in irons." "Lord?" "The Governors," said the King. "They do it by mistake." My father said that he would see to it; and wrote on his palm, under the houses, with his finger; one word, short, which I think was irons.

I give the next few by their edges. Yunus the Scribe had a girl, and gave her to the Caliph Walid, and then regretted it; and the girl, when she was brought in, sang verses of her own to the Caliph so elegantly that he asked her if they were her own, and she said, "They are my very own." Harun al-Rashid asked Al-Asma'i for the best thing he had heard, and he said that he had heard much and been pleased by three pairs of couplets sung by three girls of Bassorah. Ibrahim of Mosul asked leave of the Caliph for a Saturday to be private, and an old man in white came in, with a silver-handled staff and a scent, and said that he was not hungry and asked for a pint of wine and said, "Wilt thou sing us somewhat?" and then, "Well done, O Abu Ishak"; and Ibrahim did not like it that a stranger had his name. The old man said that he would sing; and he took the lute, and the strings spoke Arabic, and the doors and walls of the house sang with him, and Ibrahim could not move. "Sing it after me," said the old man. "Repeat it to me," said Ibrahim. "There is no need of repetition. Thou hast it by heart." And he vanished; and a voice from a corner of the house said, "'Tis I, Abu Murrah, who have been thy cup-companion this day." That was the Devil. He had come only to sing. Ibrahim sang it to Harun, who drank to it, though he was not a drinker.

"He sang it once," said the King, "and the man had it." "Yes, lord." "And did not forget." "He never did, lord. He had it by heart till he died." "That is a thing the Devil does well," the King said; and Shah Zaman said, in the voice that he uses when he is going to be rude, "And a King." The King turned his head. "What?" "He does not forget either." The King looked at him for the length of a breath. "No," he said. "I do not." On the 690th night, which was the fortieth day, my sister got up. She walked to the window with the older boy hanging on her skirt, and stood there, and the King gave her the younger, and she held him up to the grey light, and nobody said anything about the forty days, and the nurse, who had counted them, said that they were done.

Then there was Jamil the poet, who told Harun on a sleepless night how a young man had come to him by night, to ask him to help his cousin and himself to flee from a house that would have parted them, and he did; and there were the lovers of Bassorah, and of Medina, and Ishak of Mosul with his mistress and another Devil; and I tell you only that on the 692nd night my sister told of a wild Arab who came on foot at noon to the palace of Mu'awiyah in Damascus, limping, in the sun. The Caliph saw him from his window and said, "Hath God created any miserabler than he who needs must hie abroad at such an hour?" and told the page, "If he seeks me, forbid him not." The Arab said that he came complaining against Marwan, the Caliph's deputy at Medina. He had had a wife called Su'ad whom he loved with a love that none came near; a bad year had killed his camels, and her father, finding him poor, had taken her away. He went to Marwan, who sent for her, and the moment that he saw her he fell in love with her, and became the man's rival, and had him tortured until he divorced her; and kept him in prison until the days of her purification were over, and married her. "He required of him," said my sister, "to divorce her. He said, I will not put her away. And they tortured him." "They tortured him," said the King. "Until he did it. And she was asked nothing." "No, lord."

Mu'awiyah wrote to Marwan a letter which my sister gave in full, and which was not kind: it said that the Wali who governs people should keep his eyes from their lusts and his flesh from its delights. Marwan obeyed, and wrote back, praising the woman; and the Caliph, who said that he was exceeding in his praise of her, sent for her, and saw such beauty as he had never seen, and talked with her, and found her fluent. And he sent for the Arab, and said to him, "An thou wilt give her up to me, I will give thee three slave-girls, high-bosomed maids like moons, with each a thousand dinars, and an annual sum from the Treasury." The Arab groaned one groan and swooned, so that the Caliph thought him dead; and when he came to himself, he said: "With heavy heart and in sore need I appealed to thee from the injustice of Marwan; but to whom shall I appeal from thine?" "Make me not one of the betrayed," he said, in verse, "who from the fiery sands to fire must sue for help." And the Caliph said, "Thou confessest to having divorced her, and Marwan owned the like. So we will give her free choice."

"He asked her," said Sumayya. It was the first thing that she had said in the room in a long time that was not a question. "He asked her," said my sister, "and he said, Which dost thou choose, O Su'ad: the Commander of the Faithful, with his honour and glory and dominion and palaces; or Marwan with his violence and tyranny; or this Arab, with his hunger and poverty?" And she made two couplets: "This one, whom hunger plagues and rags unfold, is dearer than tribe and kith and kin I hold; than crowned head, or deputy Marwan, or all who boast of silver coins and gold." And she said, "By Allah, I will not forsake him for the shifts of Fortune. There is old companionship between us, and it is just that I bear with him in his adversity as I shared with him in his prosperity." The Caliph ordered her ten thousand dirhams, and delivered her to the Arab, and he took his wife and went his way. "After he had offered to buy her," said the King. "Yes, lord." "He asked her after." "Yes." "That is better," said Sumayya, "than not asking." "Yes," said the King; and he did not say anything else, and he sat with his chin on his hand for some time looking at the Roll.

The last of them, on the 698th night, was Al-Malik al-Nasir, the Conquering King, and his Wazir. The Wazir, Abu Amir, was given a boy, a Christian, of great beauty, and the King saw him and said, "Whence cometh this boy?" "From God," said the Wazir, and the King said, "Wilt thou terrify us with stars and make us prisoner with moons?" And the Wazir, who knew what he meant, sent the boy to him as a present, with two couplets. Then he was given a slave-girl of the loveliest in the world, and feared that the King would hear of it and the same would happen, and sent her to him also, with a costlier gift. An enemy told the King that the Wazir still gnashed his teeth for the boy, and the King wrote him a letter in the boy's name, asking him to demand him back; and the Wazir wrote on the back of it, "Shall man, experience-lectured, ever care, fool-like, to thrust his head in lion's lair?" "A lion again," said the King. The nurse said that she was getting tired of the lion. "He is a patient animal," said my sister; and the King laughed, once, aloud, and put his hand over his mouth, and the boy on his knee looked up at him.

Then she said that there was a man called Ahmad al-Danaf, Calamity Ahmad, who came from Cairo as a fugitive and became Captain of the Watch of the right hand in Baghdad, and another called Hasan Shuman, of the left; and that in the city there was an old woman called Dalilah the Wily, who had a daughter named Zaynab the Coney-catcher, and that Dalilah said she would play off higher-class rogueries in Baghdad than ever either of them had. "In the city," said the King, to nobody. "In the streets." He was quiet for some time. "Vizier," he said. "Lord." "I want to see the lane." My father did not ask which. "I want to see the lane," the King said again, "the one the brick came from." "Lord," said my father, "when?" "Not yet," said the King. "Soon." It was the old word, and not the old voice.

Night 698. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a woman called Dalilah the Wily, and her daughter, only begun; a King who wishes to see a lane, soon; a baker named Hamid, whom nobody is to put in irons; a son named Yusuf, forty-eight days old, who has been held up to the window; a boy who puts his hand on his brother's head; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Six Hundred and Ninety-nine to Seven Hundred and Eighteen: The Wily Old Woman, and a Shutter in the Tanners' Lane

My sister began it on the 699th night, and I give you the beginning as she gave it, because she liked it. There were in Baghdad, in the time of Harun al-Rashid, two rogues, Ahmad al-Danaf, whom they called Calamity, and Hasan Shuman, whom they called the Pestilence, and the Caliph, who could not beat them, made them Captains of the Watch, one of the right hand and one of the left, with a thousand dinars a month apiece and forty men each. An old woman named Dalilah the Wily, whose dead husband had held the same post, heard the crier, and told her daughter Zaynab, who is called the Coney-catcher, that she would play higher rogueries than either of them. She put on white wool, hung a rosary the size of a load of firewood from her shoulder, carried a pitcher with three dinars in its mouth, and stopped under the window of the wife of the Chief of the Ushers. That lady had quarrelled with her husband that morning because he had seen the Emirs with their sons. He had called her barren. She had called him a mule. Each was sorry by noon. The old woman whirled her pitcher in the porter's sight, the dinars fell out, and the porter, who was owed three months' wages by his master, took it for a miracle. Then she told the wife of a saint she knew, the Father of Burdens, who cures the barren, and led her out of the house for the first time since her wedding. "Not once?" said Sumayya. "Not once," said my sister.

I will not give you the whole of that day, which has seven people in it and one pitcher. It has a young merchant who was promised a bride, and the bride, who was promised a saint, and a dyer who lent his keys to a woman whose house was being propped up; and it ends with the merchant in his shirt in one room and the wife in her shift in another, each waiting for the old woman's daughter or the old woman's son, and the old woman three streets away with their clothes. One thing was left, and she did it: she told a donkey-boy that the dyer was bankrupt, borrowed his donkey to carry off the customers' goods, and told him to break the vats so that the Kazi's men should find nothing. When the dyer came back with a meat-pie, there was the donkey-boy with a saw in the ruins of the shop, saying how glad he was that his master was safe. The dyer cried, "Alas for my goods and the people's goods!" and the donkey-boy cried, "Alas for my ass!" and they took each other by the throat and wept both alases at once. The King laughed aloud, and the boy on his knee looked up at him. For the rest of that week Shah Zaman said "Alas for my ass" when he came in at the door, as other men say peace be upon you.

On the 703rd night she took a child's clothes. She did it with a brass counter and a nursemaid who was a simpleton, in a street laid with carpets for a betrothal: she took the Provost of the Merchants' little son out of the maid's arms, stripped him, and left him in pledge with a goldsmith for a thousand dinars of jewels. The book gives the goldsmith a faith, as it gives one to nearly everyone who is made a fool of, and I leave it out here and later; he was a goldsmith, his name was Azariah, and he was robbed. The Provost found his son sitting bare in the shop and was so glad that he let the clothes stand for the ransom. The five she had robbed went looking. She gave a barber a dinar and a story, that the donkey-boy had lost his wits and cried "My ass" sitting and standing, and the barber took two of his teeth and burned his temples to cure him; I leave out the how, because my sister told it with her eyes on the baby. At last the five caught her and brought her to the Wali's house, where they all waited under his window and slept; and she walked into his wife's room and sold the five of them to the lady, as Mamelukes, for a thousand dinars. "Free men may not be sold," said the King, as the five said to the Wali. "It is a very old rule," said Shah Zaman. "Yes," said the King. "It is."

They tied her to a post on the bank of the Tigris and set ten men over her, and the ten slept. I will not say how she was tied; the book does. Now a man from the desert, who had heard a neighbour say that he broke his fast in Baghdad on honey-fritters, and had never seen the city or a fritter, was riding in, saying, "On the honour of an Arab, I will eat honey-fritters and nothing else." He found her at the post. She told him she was bound for spitting on a cook's fritters, and that the Governor had ordered ten pounds of them to be eaten at her post and her stomach could not bear sweets. He said he would eat them for her. She said nobody might, unless he were bound in her place. So he unbound her, and she took his clothes and his horse; and in the morning the Wali came and found a man in his shirt asking whether they had brought the honey-fritters. "Did he eat any?" said the King. "No, lord." "None at all?" "Nobody brought them." The King turned his head. "Vizier." "Lord?" "Fritters." My father wrote a word on his palm. They came the next night under a cloth, hot, and the cook had been told nothing; the boy got honey up to his ears, Shah Zaman ate seven, and the nurse said she did not know where the honey had come from, and ate two.

The Wali took them all to the Caliph, and the Caliph said, "I take upon myself all that you have lost," and gave Dalilah to Calamity Ahmad to bring in. Zaynab, who had promised her mother the clothes of all one-and-forty of his men, took a saloon with two doors, set out trays of meat and wine, stood in the door with her face unveiled, and said she was a vintner's daughter from Mosul who wanted the Captain's protection. Every man who came in to be kind to her was put to sleep on the carpet, Ahmad last, and that evening they sat in their barrack in their shirts, waiting for dark. Hasan Shuman told Ahmad to shake his collar before the Caliph and say he did not know her. Ahmad shook it, and Hasan was charged with her instead. He went to the Caliph and asked for the kerchief of pardon, saying she had done it for no greed, but to show her cleverness and her daughter's, so that the stipends of the dead husband and the dead father should be continued to them; and the Caliph gave it. "Somebody asked for her," said the King. "Hasan, lord." "He put his own neck in it." "Yes." Sumayya was looking at the lamp. I knew which line of the Open she was reading.

The Caliph said to her, "Ask a boon of me, O Dalilah," and I stopped writing. She asked for her husband's post for herself and her father's for her daughter, and then to be portress of the Khan the Caliph had built for merchants, with its forty slaves and its forty dogs, and a pavilion over the gate for her pigeons; and he wrote her the patent. "She had the price ready," said the nurse. The King did not look at the nurse. He looked at me. "You have not," he said. "At the end, lord," I said. "I shall count," he said. Then, at the end of the 708th night, when the glass had run, he said to my father in the voice he uses for ordering a horse, "Tomorrow. Before the city is up." "Lord, the guard." "Ten, a hundred paces behind, in porters' coats. My brother will arrange it." "I will," said Shah Zaman, "and I am coming." The King turned to me. "And the Keeper of the Roll." "Lord?" "You have written the Open for two years and not seen a street."

We went out by the gardeners' gate in brown coats, my father in front with nothing in his sleeves, the King behind him, Shah Zaman at the King's elbow with the face of a man carrying a rug, and I last, in the nurse's old brown veil, which smelt of cats. I had not been in a street since the first night. It was longer than I remembered, and louder: the bakers' boys, the first water-seller, a dog asleep in the middle of the way with everybody going round it. Nobody looked at us twice. The Tanners' Lane is at the bottom of the town where the river bends, because the smell has to go somewhere; we smelt it two streets off, lime and wet bark and under them the sweet sour smell of a skin thinking about going off. It is not a long lane. On the left side, four places that were still standing, with nobody in them: two houses with the roofs fallen in at the middle and the shutters nailed, and two that were only a door-frame with the morning showing through. On the right, houses with washing and bark in the doorways, and a boy up to his knees in a pit, who looked at us and went on stamping.

My father did not need telling which was which. He stopped before the first, and said, with his eyes on the nailed shutter, a name, a trade, a daughter, and the daughter's age, not loudly, the way he reads the Roll. The King stood. My father went to the next and did the same, and to the next. He had not written them on his palm; I saw that he had them all by heart. He said the fourth one twice, as if the King had asked for it a second time, which the King had not. At the first of the door-frames the King walked in. It opens on a courtyard with a fig tree grown up through the floor of what was a room, and one wall still a wall. He stood among the leaves with his hands at his sides, as he stands at the window when he has asked for a count and is waiting for it. Then he laid his palm flat on the wall, as the boy lays his on the baby's head, to see that it is there. He took it away. Nobody spoke, not even Shah Zaman. When we came out a shutter across the lane was open, and a woman was in it with her arms on the sill; she looked at the tall man in the brown coat for as long as it takes to count ten, and then she closed the shutter. She did not slam it. She closed it all the way, and I heard the bar go down. "Yes," said the King, to the shutter, and walked on.

At the bottom of the lane a man with forearms the colour of strong tea was lifting a skin out of a vat with a hooked pole. The King asked him what it was. "Goat." "How long does it take?" "To do it right? Fourteen months. A skin will go off in three days if you let it, sir. That's what the lime's for. Then the bark. Bark's the keeping." "And then?" "Thirty years, more if the owner's decent." The King watched the skin go back into the pit. "I have a boy who has begun to walk," he said. "How old?" "Fourteen months." "Then he wants kid," said the tanner, "soft, and not too stiff in the sole. They like to feel the floor." He cut a strip from a pile and held it to the light, and said to bring the foot on Thursday. "I cannot bring it," said the King. "I will send it." "Draw it on a bit of paper, then. A boy won't stand." The King paid him in silver, and the man bit one coin, and was not ashamed of his own habit. At the palace gate Shah Zaman, who had not said a word since the fig tree, said, "I am not going to ask," and the King said, "Thank you." That night he said to me, "Put it in the Open." "What shall I call it?" "A shutter." I wrote it. On the second sheet I wrote the rest.

On the 709th night my sister turned to Cairo, and to Mercury Ali, called so because he went through every net like quicksilver. His heart was heavy one day and he drank until he lost his senses, and on the Red Road he asked a water-carrier for a drink, shook the cup and poured it on the ground, three times, and drank the fourth. The water-carrier, who was poor, said that little folk are one thing and great folk another; and Ali drew a dagger to ask what he meant. The man said he had known a braver and more generous, Calamity Ahmad of Baghdad, to whom he had come in debt and flight, and who had given him five dinars, a mule, and at last a letter for Ali of Cairo. "And I have not delivered it," said the water-carrier, "because I do not know where he lives." "He carried it about," said Shah Zaman, "not knowing to whom." "And it came to the man," said the King. "In the road, lord." Ali said, "I am he," and set out. He killed a lion and put a robber tribe to flight on the way, which I give you in one sentence, since the book gives a page and my sister gave a breath. In Baghdad a boy took a dinar to show him Calamity Ahmad's door, and kicked a pebble at it so that he would know it. Then Zaynab met him in the street in her best, and led him to a house with a lock that she opened with her veil and the name of the mother of Moses, and dropped a ring in the well and asked him to go down for it; and she was out of the door with all his clothes while he was still falling. The master called four doctors of the law to read over the well, and Ali hung under the bucket until it was near the top, and sprang out among them, and they beat one another crying Ifrit. "And they believed that?" said Sumayya. "The Emir made him tell the truth," said my sister, "and then gave him an old gown."

Hasan Shuman told him how to have it back, and I leave out the part where the book has him paint his skin to look like the Khan's cook and makes a joke of the cook's colour; he took the cook's coat and basket, and the cook slept. At the Khan, Dalilah knew him at the gate and cried that he was the captain of thieves; the forty slaves said he was their cousin Sa'adu'llah, and she said, "In with him, and if he knows the kitchen and the larder he is your cousin; if not, kill him." The cook had a cat that sprang on his shoulders whenever he came in. It sprang on Ali; he threw it off; it ran before him to the kitchen door and stopped, and then to the larder, and stopped; and he took the key with feathers on it and the key with grease on it. "Cats know," said the nurse. "Mine would have." He put sleep in every dish, went up and took the one-and-forty suits and the forty pigeons, and left a paper on Dalilah's neck: None did this save Ali the Egyptian. In the book he kills the dogs as well. "Do they die?" said the nurse. "In the book," said my sister. "Then they sleep," said the nurse, and I wrote it so on the second sheet. Dalilah woke to a sponge held to her nose and told her daughter that he had had it in his power to do worse, and had refrained out of courtesy. "He could have," said the King. "Yes, lord." "And left a paper." Hasan Shuman had the pigeons cooked among the men, and when Dalilah came to ask for hers, she tasted one and said, "This is none of the carrier-pigeons' flesh, for I fed them on grains of musk." The King laughed until he had to put the boy down.

The price was her uncle. Zurayk the fishmonger, who had been the greatest rogue in Iraq and had repented, hung a purse of two thousand dinars at his shop door with bells tied to it, and cried that it was the property of any sharper who could take it by his skill, and when a hand touched it he threw a cake of lead. Ali made seven attempts in seven coats. I give you the snake-charmer, who threw his snakes on the floor of the shop, and I leave out the one where he came as a woman, because my sister did not wish to tell it so soon after, and told it fast. There was a child in the last part, who was taken for an hour and given back. In the end Zurayk gave him the purse as a gift for his niece's sake, and said he had no command over Zaynab but affection, which her mother had said in the same words. "Then she asked herself," said Sumayya, "since nobody could." "She set her own price," said my sister. It was a dress: the dress of Kamar, the goldsmith's daughter, brought from an enchanted treasure, which her father hung every morning in a golden dish in the window of a castle, crying, "Where are the sharpers of Cairo?"

The castle could be seen only while the goldsmith was in it. He made Ali an ass, a bear and a dog, one after the other, and the ass part has a thing in it that I leave out. Three women took Ali's side for terms of their own: the goldsmith's daughter, who fell in love with him, and a broker's daughter and her maid, who had read the goldsmith's books. What was done to the goldsmith in the end, and why, the book is proud of, and I am not; I give you that he was a goldsmith, and that Ali came out with the dress. A sweetmeat-seller met him in the road and gave him a sweet with sleep in it, and took the dress, and was himself given a sweet by a Kazi, who was Hasan Shuman; and the sweetmeat-seller was Ahmad al-Lakit, Dalilah's grandson, the boy who had kicked the pebble at the door. "Go back to your grandmother," said Ali, "and tell her and Zurayk to meet me tomorrow at the Caliph's Divan, to receive Zaynab's dowry." Next morning he went up with Calamity Ahmad and the Forty and kissed the ground before the Caliph, and my sister saw the dawn and stopped.

The shoes had come two nights before, on the 716th, while she was in the goldsmith's castle; I put them here because it is where they belong. A boy from the lane brought them in brown paper, with a bill for four dirhams. I had drawn round the boy's foot on a leaf of the Samarkand paper on the Thursday, while he tried to eat the pen. They were kid, soft, with a cord that the nurse tightened, and they squeaked. The boy stood still. He lifted one foot and put it down, listening, and looked at his father, and walked four steps, and the shoe said so; and he stopped, and went back, and did it again. "Again," said the King. "Gain," said the boy. The King did not say it a third time, which for him is the loudest thing there is.

Night 718. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a dress, carried to a Divan, and a Cairene who is to be paid for it; a woman who set her own price; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a baker named Hamid, whom nobody is to put in irons; a son named Yusuf, sixty-eight days old; a boy in shoes that squeak; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Seven Hundred and Nineteen to Seven Hundred and Thirty-eight: The Hawk Is the Wazir's, and a Eunuch Who Told the Truth

Mercury Ali ended on the 719th night, and he ended well. He went up to the Caliph with the dress, and the Caliph said "Ask a boon of me," and Ali asked to stand on the Caliph's carpet and eat at his table. He was given a hall with four daises and forty sleeping-closets for the lads he sent for from Cairo, and four marriage contracts, which I leave there; the dowry of Zaynab was the dress, and Dalilah took it from the Caliph's own hand. On a night when he was on guard, the Caliph asked him to tell all that had befallen him from the beginning, and had it written down and laid up in the store with the other histories. "Who wrote it?" said the King. "It says they did, lord." "From his mouth?" "From his mouth." The King looked at the Roll, and did not say what he had been going to say. After that night he had the Open read to him from the top at the end of the second glass, every night before the Roll was struck, and when I came to "a shutter" I read it as I read any other line, and he said nothing, and I thought that was how to read it.

Then my sister began Ardashir. There was in Shiraz an old King, Sayf al-A'azam, who after many years of physicians had one son, Ardashir, and when the son was fifteen he fell in love by report with Hayat al-Nufus, the daughter of Abd al-Kadir of Iraq, who hated men so much that no one dared say the word before her. Kings had asked for her, and she had told her father that if he forced her she would kill herself. Ardashir's father sent a Wazir; the answer was no; and the old King called out his army and swore to blot out the traces of Abd al-Kadir's dominions. His son went in to him and kissed the ground and said, trouble not your soul, for when she hears what has been done to her father and his people because of her, she will kill herself, and I shall die. "He stopped it," said the King. "A son stopped a father." "It is rare," said Shah Zaman. The Prince put on a merchant's clothes, and his father's Wazir went with him, and three hundred thousand dinars.

They took a shop in the stuff-bazar of the White City and he sat in it like the moon at the full, and the crowd was so thick that nobody could pass. The Princess's old nurse came for a dress, and he gave her the best he had, worth ten thousand dinars, for nothing, and a purse for the washing of her clothes, and in the end he told her. She told him what the wise say, that a merchant who wants a king's daughter should ask for a Kazi's, and then she took his letter. There are nine letters in the book, in verse, five his and four hers, and each of his went with a purse a little larger than the last. "That is the postage of a lesser prince," said Shah Zaman, who keeps accounts. I will not read you the verses. Hers began with a threat to crucify him on the gate of the bazar, and ended with a threat to give his flesh to the birds of the wild. "She answers every one," said the nurse. "I would have answered the first," said Sumayya. "You did," said the nurse, "in your head, and a good deal worse."

When the Princess lost her temper, the old woman said what I should call a careful thing. If you tell your father, she said, and he hangs the merchants over their shops, the people will ask why, and they will say, they sought to seduce the King's daughter; and then they will say she was with them ten days; for woman's honour is like curded milk, the least dust fouls it. So the Princess wrote another letter, and another. At the last, when she saw that the letters were not stopping, she had the old woman beaten and put out of the palace by her feet, and I leave out how, and then she sent a physician after her. The old woman went to Ardashir's shop as soon as she could ride, and he asked her what the Princess's hatred was, and she told him the dream. The Princess had dreamed that in her garden a fowler spread a net, and a male pigeon fell in it, and the others fled, but his mate came back and pecked through the mesh until he was free; and then she fell in it herself, and the others fled, and he fled with them; and the fowler woke and cut her throat. "Thus do men with women," the Princess had said, and since that day she had hated them.

The Wazir had an idea. He bribed the old keeper of the Princess's garden, a man of seventy with eight children, who earned a dinar a month, and repaired and stuccoed the ruined pavilion at the end of it, and then called the painters and told them he had had a dream: a fowler, a net, a pigeon freed by his mate, and her caught; and the male flying off; and a falcon that seized him and ate him. They painted it on the wall of the pavilion, and the falcon was his. It was not in her dream. I wrote that on the second sheet, in the margin, in small letters: the hawk is the Wazir's. "That is cheating," said Sumayya. "A thing painted is not a thing that happened." "It is a very old method," said Shah Zaman. My father, from his corner, wrote something on his palm, and it was not the hawk; when the King asked, he said that the rains were nine days late in the north. "Nine days is nothing." "Yes, lord." He rubbed it out with his thumb and wrote it again.

The Princess wanted to go to her garden, as she did every year when the fruit was ripe, and had nobody to take her, because she had had her old nurse beaten; and two of her women, Bulbul and Siwad al-Ayn, went to the nurse's house and asked her to her face. She said she would not go back to the woman who had had her dragged out by the feet like a dead dog. They said, "Think who it is that comes to you." Then she went. "She went for the two who came to her door," said the nurse, "not for the one who sent them." The Princess said, "The fault was mine," and the nurse took her into the garden and showed her the pavilion, and the wall, and said the angels had known the male pigeon was wronged and had shown it. Then she talked to her of men and women, and I give you only the end of it: a King whose wife died, who buried himself alive with her; a wife who threw herself into the grave of her husband. The King put his hand over the boy's ear. Shah Zaman looked at the wall.

When the Princess's hatred was gone, the old woman said the words they had agreed, "O Thou whose boons are hidden," and Ardashir came out from among the trees swaying, and they both fainted. The old woman carried them into the pavilion and sat outside it. After that the Princess gave her three days to bring him to her and swore to tell the King that she had corrupted her if she did not, and the nurse plucked his face with tweezers and painted his eyes and his hands and dressed him as a bride, and taught him to advance the left foot and draw back the right, and took him through seven doors, past thirty eunuchs, and hid him in a cistern behind the last until dark. "Are you a Jinn-mad old woman?" said the Princess, when she saw a girl and not him. "I have brought you his sister." Then she uncovered his face. They were together for some time. I leave out what the book calls their nights, which it gives in verse.

One of the Kings sent the Princess's father a necklace of twenty-nine pearls, and the King sent it by the eunuch whose back teeth she had knocked out. He knocked at the door, and the nurse, asleep on the threshold, said she would fetch the key and ran away; and the eunuch, whose name was Kafur, pushed open the door, and passed seven doors, and drew back the curtain of the bed, and saw the Princess asleep with her arms round a young man handsomer than she. She woke. She took the hem of his robe and put it on her head and kissed his feet, saying, "Veil what Allah veileth." "May Allah not veil thee," said Kafur, "nor him who would veil thee. Thou knockedst out my grinders." He locked the door on them and went to the King, and asked for immunity before he spoke. "He told the truth," said Sumayya. "With a grudge," said Shah Zaman. "It is still the truth," said the King.

The King of Iraq took a sword, and sent for them, covered, and when they came he tried to cut Ardashir down, and the Prince threw himself on his breast and said the fault was his alone, and the Princess threw herself on her father and said, not him, for he is the son of a great King. The Wazir of that court, whom the book calls a gathering-place of all that is evil, said that those in such a case have need of lying, and that there was nothing for it but to cut off both heads. "It is the easiest advice to give, lord," said my father, from his corner. "I have given it." The King did not look at him. The King said to the Sworder, "Take this and strike off his head, and do the same with her, and consult me not a second time." The Sworder put the Prince on the carpet of blood and bound his eyes with a piece of his skirt, and swung his sword three times, and raised his hand; and a cloud of dust went up from the plain, and the dust was a host like locusts, of the Great King of Shiraz, who had come himself to find his son. The King did not move. The boy was asleep on his shoulder. My father had stopped writing. I counted, and I do not know what I counted.

The Wazir of Iraq went out to the host and kissed the ground twenty times, and was told that if the Prince was in the city he would be taken away, and if harm had come to him the land would be laid waste. He went back as pale as a man can be, and the King cried, "Fetch me the Headsman, lest death fall on him!" The Headsman said, "I have smitten off his head, as thou badest." "O dog," said the King, "if this is true I will send thee after him." Then the Headsman said, "O King, he is yet in the chains of life." "He said he had," said the King. "Why did he say he had?" "He had been told not to ask a second time, lord," said my sister. "So he said it, to see what the King would answer," said the King. "It is the only way he could ask." "That is how it reads, lord." "And the other King answered." "Yes." The King was quiet; the boy on his shoulder woke and slept again. I do not think anyone breathed in that room but the boy.

King Abd al-Kadir kissed the Prince and begged his pardon and begged him to say nothing to his father that would lower him. The Prince said he would not move until his honour and the Princess's had been cleared, and the King sent women to prove it by a way that the book thinks conclusive and I think is nobody's business, and I leave it out. Then the King robed him and sent him to his father, and the Great King sent his Wazir with a gift to ask for the Princess for his son. The King of Iraq said he had no objection, but that the girl was of full age and reason and her affair was in her own hand, and she should choose. He told the chief eunuch to tell the Princess. The Princess said, "I hear and I obey." "He asked her," said Sumayya. "Through four people," said the nurse, counting on her fingers. "The Prince asked his father, who sent his Wazir, who asked the King, who sent the eunuch." "It counts," said Sumayya, looking at the King. "It counts," said the King.

They were married with a feast, and the Great King sent to ask whether his son wanted anything before they left, and Ardashir said that he wished to take his wreak of the Wazir who had counselled the sword and the eunuch who had told a lie about them. King Abd al-Kadir sent both. The eunuch had not told a lie. They were hanged over the city gate. "The eunuch told the truth," said Sumayya, "and he is hanged." "Yes," said the King. "Put it in the Open." Sumayya took the reed from me before I could reach for it, and wrote it herself, on the leaf under the line about the shutter, a eunuch who told the truth, with her tongue between her teeth; and the King took the leaf and looked at it for a long time. "It is straight," he said. The old woman, who had come back after her flight, went with the Princess to Shiraz, and they celebrated the wedding again, and lived, as the book says, until the Destroyer of Delights.

On the 738th night my sister began a King of Khorasan named Shahriman, who had a hundred concubines and no child. The rains in the north were nine days late, then eleven, and my father said so, and wrote it down; I heard him say, to nobody, "It will come."

Night 738. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a King of Khorasan with a hundred concubines and no child, only begun; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains late in the north; a baker named Hamid, whom nobody is to put in irons; a son named Yusuf, eighty-eight days old; a boy in shoes that squeak; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Seven Hundred and Thirty-nine to Seven Hundred and Fifty-six: A Year Without a Word, and Nine Men in the Jails

My sister began Julnar on the 739th night, and I give her to you the way my sister gave her, from the outside. There was a King in Khorasan named Shahriman, who had a hundred concubines and no child, and one morning a merchant came to his door with a slave-girl as straight as a Rudaynian lance, wrapped in gold-bordered silk, with seven tresses to her anklets. The merchant said she had cost him five thousand dinars in all and he gave her for nothing. The King gave him ten thousand and a robe, and had the girl put in a room above the sea, whose latticed windows looked on the water, and shut all the doors upon her. She did not speak. He asked her name and she looked at the floor. He had the women play every instrument and sing to her, and she looked at them without a smile; he fed her by mouthfuls; he put away his hundred and kept her for a year. "Did he ask her name?" said the King. "He asked, lord." "And she did not answer." "For a year." "He kept her above the sea," said Sumayya, "with the doors shut." "The book says all the doors," said my sister.

At the end of the year he said to her that he had given up everything for her, and begged her to speak, or if she was dumb to tell him by a sign; he was old and had no heir. She bowed her head and then smiled, and said that God had answered his prayer: she was with child, and had she not conceived by him she would not have spoken one word. He sent a hundred thousand dinars to the poor. Then he asked what her silence had been, and she said that she was a wretched exile, far from her mother and her brother. She was Julnar the Sea-born; her father, a King of the sea, had died, and another King had taken the kingdom; she had quarrelled with her brother Salih and sworn to put herself in the hand of a man of the land, and had come out of the water and sat on an island in the moonlight. A man had found her and asked of her what such men ask, and she had struck him on the head; and he had sold her to the merchant, and the merchant to the King. "If your heart had not loved me," she said, "I would have thrown myself from this window into the sea. But I was ashamed to go back to them with a child by you." The King said nothing. The boy on his knee pulled at the cord of his shirt. On the second sheet I counted the times she had been sold and the times she had been asked, and wrote the two numbers side by side.

She told Shahriman to hide in a closet while she brought her family. She burned two pieces of lign-aloes and whistled, and the sea foamed, and a young man came up out of it as handsome as she, and an old woman with speckled hair, and five girls, all walking on the water. They wept. They said, how could you leave us four years, and her brother said, come away with us now. And Julnar, with her husband in the closet, said that she was in the utmost ease and honour, that he was good to her, that if she left him he would die and she would too. "She put him in the closet," said the nurse, "to hear it." "Did she mean it?" said Sumayya. "Both," said the nurse. "Both," said the King. Her family had eaten his food and not seen him, and fire came out of their mouths like lamps in cressets; she fetched him from the closet, and he saluted them and ate with them for thirty days. "A man who hides in a closet to hear his wife," said Shah Zaman, "and is then asked to dinner." "It happens," said the King.

The child was born, a moon, and on the seventh day her mother Farashah and her brother came and named him Badr Basim, the Smiling Full Moon. Salih took him in his arms and walked about the room with him, and out of the palace, and down to the salt sea, and into it. Shahriman gave the child up for lost and wept; Julnar said, "Fear not, I love him more than you." The King had Yusuf on his knee. He held him closer, and my sister, without a word, held out her hands, and he gave him to her; I do not think either of them had decided it. The older boy, who had been listening to his shoes, stood still, and said "Ba" as if it were a question. In an hour the sea went turbid and Salih came out with the child, quiet and shining. They had put an eye-powder on him and said over him the names on the ring of Solomon, so that he could not drown in any ocean of the world, and Salih laid down a casket of jewels as big as ostrich eggs, of which the King said one was worth his realm. The boy grew and was taught writing and archery and horsemanship. At fifteen they set him on the throne with his father standing, and his father fell sick and died, and was mourned a month. The Grandees told the young King that over-mourning is for women, and took him to the bath. "Is it?" said Sumayya. "For women?" "The Grandees said so," said my sister. "Grandees do," said the nurse.

A year after, on a night when Salih was visiting, he said to Julnar that the boy was seventeen and unmarried, and named a hundred sea-princesses, and she refused them all; and then he asked whether the boy was asleep. Julnar felt him and said that he slept, and Salih named the Princess Jauharah, daughter of King Al-Samandal, who was a fool and a violent one. Badr was awake. He lay on his elbow with his eyes shut and fell in love by hearsay. Next day in the garden he wept; and Salih, who had heard him, said, let us tell your mother and ask her leave. "If I tell my mother," said the boy, "she will not let me. I will not tell her. I will go with you, and tell her after." "He did not ask his mother," said my sister. My father had been writing on his palm; his hand stopped. My sister looked at him. "Go on, daughter," he said, and she went on. Salih gave the boy a ring with the names of God on it that would keep him from drowning, and they dived into the deep.

Salih took two bags of jewels to Al-Samandal and asked for the Princess for his nephew, and the King laughed until he fell backwards, and called them dogs, and told his pages to take Salih's head. Salih's mother had sent a thousand horsemen to the gate; they took the King and pinioned him. Jauharah ran to an island and climbed a tree. Badr, who had run away thinking that all this was on his account, came to the same island and lay down under the same tree and looked up. She asked if he was Badr Basim, and said that if he loved her a span she loved him a cubit, and came down and kissed him; and then she said words and spat in his face and made him a white bird with a red bill. She told her slave Marsinah to carry him to the Thirsty Island and leave him to die. Marsinah carried him there and thought that a man so beautiful should not die of thirst, and took him to an island with trees and a stream, and told her mistress that she had left him on the Thirsty Island. "She said it was done," said the King. "Yes." "And it was not." "No." "That is two." "Lord?" "Someone told to, who said it was done." My father wrote nothing.

Julnar went down to her mother to ask for her son, and was told about the war, and was angry with Salih for taking him without her leave. She went back to her kingdom, to keep it, and said to them, "Do not forget him, for if he is harmed it will kill me; I see the world only in him." My father laid his other hand over the words on his palm. The bird was caught by a fowler and sold to a King on an island, whose wife knew him for a man the moment she saw him, and veiled her face, and with a cup of water and some words made him a man again; and the King fitted him a ship. On the eleventh day a rock broke her in pieces and everyone drowned but Badr, who rode a plank for three days to a white city on a tongue of land. Mules and asses and horses came down to the beach in their hundreds and drove him off the shore, striking at him. "They were men," said my sister. "Every one a young man who had landed. They were warning him."

A grocer named Abdallah, who was a magician and a Moslem and was feared by the Queen, took him in and told him that the Queen kept a young man for forty days and then made him a mule, a horse or a bird. The book makes her a fire-worshipper, and I leave that out; she was a queen who turned strangers into animals. She took Badr home for forty days of wine and music. One morning he followed her into the garden and saw a white bird at the stream and a black bird that had been her Mameluke, and then he saw her a woman again; I leave out the rest. Abdallah gave him a pound of parched barley and told him what to say. She gave him her own to eat, and he pretended to eat it, and offered her his; she ate a mouthful, and he threw water in her face and said, "Take the shape of a dapple mule." She wept. He put a bit in her mouth and rode her out. "He did what she did," said Sumayya. "It is a reason," said the King. "It is not an answer." "No, lord," said my sister.

On the third day an old man asked him to dinner, and an old woman wept at the mule and said it was like her son's that had died, and offered a thousand dinars for it. Badr said he was jesting, he would not sell. "In this city none may lie," said the old man. "They put to death whoever lies." "That would be a quiet city," said Shah Zaman. "I should not like to live in it," said the nurse. "No," said the King. Badr gave up the mule, and the old woman drew the bit and sprinkled water on her, and she was Queen Lab, whose mother this was. The old woman whistled up an Ifrit like a mountain, and they flew back, all three; and Lab made him the foulest of birds and put him in a cage and cut off his meat and drink. One of her women pitied him and gave him both in secret, and when she could, went to Abdallah, who sent her by an Ifrit to Julnar. Julnar and her mother and Salih gathered the tribes of the sea and the Jinn and flew to the city, and in the twinkling of an eye it was taken; I leave out what the book is glad of. She took her son out of the cage and sprinkled him, and he was a man, and wept. Abdallah was married to the woman who had come, and made King of the city.

Badr said that none would content him but Jauharah. Julnar had Al-Samandal fetched, and Badr asked him for his daughter, and the King said, "She is your handmaid." He sent for her. She came, and threw her arms round her father's neck. He told her that he had given her in wedlock to King Badr Basim, who befitted her as she befitted him; and she said, "I may not gainsay you, my father; do as you will; chagrin and despite are at an end, and I am one of his handmaids." "He asked her," said Sumayya. "He told her," said the nurse. "She turned him into a bird," said Sumayya, "and now she says she is his handmaid." "That is what it says," said my sister. "What became of Marsinah?" said Sumayya. "The book does not say." "Then it is not finished," said Sumayya, and I put her in the Open that night without waiting to be told: a slave-girl, who said it was done. They made a feast, and showed the bride in nine dresses, and released all who were in the jails. "How many are in the jails?" said the King. "Three hundred and eleven, lord." "For what?" "Debts, mostly. And some for words." "What words?" "About you, lord." The King was quiet. "How many?" "Nine." My father looked at his palm. "Put it in the Open," said the King. I wrote it: nine men in the jails for words.

On the 756th night my sister began a King of Khorasan named Mohammed bin Sabaik, who went on a raid every year. The rains in the north were twenty-three days late, and then twenty-six. My father had stopped saying it aloud. He wrote the number on his palm each evening, and each evening it was larger, and I saw the King watch him do it, and neither said anything.

Night 756. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a King of Khorasan who goes on a raid every year, only begun; nine men in the jails for words; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains twenty-six days late in the north; a baker named Hamid, whom nobody is to put in irons; a son named Yusuf, one hundred and six days old; a boy in shoes that squeak; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Seven Hundred and Fifty-seven to Seven Hundred and Seventy-eight: Five Conditions, and a Story Heard for the Room

My sister began on the 757th night with King Mohammed bin Sabaik of Khorasan, who raided the lands of the unbelievers every year and loved tales above anything, and gave a robe, a thousand dinars and a horse to anyone who told him one he had not heard. His Wazir was an envious man who said that this fashion ruined the land. One day the King sent for a merchant named Hasan, learned and a poet, and told him to bring a story such as he had never heard, and if it pleased him he would make him Chief Wazir, and if it did not he would take all that was in his hand and banish him. Hasan asked for a year, and was given it. He sent five Mamelukes to five quarters of the world, with five thousand dinars apiece; four came back empty at the end of four months, and the fifth, in Damascus, followed a young man who was running to hear an old man tell tales on a stool. The old man had the story of Sayf al-Muluk, and sold it for a hundred and ten dinars on five conditions. "Which are these," said my sister, counting them on her fingers: "that it is not told on the beaten road; that it is not told before women and slave-girls; that it is not told before servants or feather-heads; that it is not told to boys; and that it is read only before Kings, Emirs, Wazirs and men of learning." Nobody said anything. The nurse put her hands over her ears and took them off again. On the second sheet I wrote that the third condition, in the book, names the servants by a colour, and that I had written servants.

"There are two Kings in this room," said Shah Zaman, "and a Wazir. I will hear it for the room." "I will hear it for the room," said the King. "Lord," said my sister, "there is a nurse, and the Keeper of the Roll, and Sumayya, and two boys." "The boys are not listening," said the King. The elder one, in his shoes, was marching round the baby's cradle and the shoes said so. "Then I am a feather-head," said Sumayya, "with a reed." "You are a feather-head with a reed," said the nurse, "and so am I, without." My sister took a breath and told it. Hasan copied it out and read it to the King and the Emirs ten days before the year was up, and was given a city and the right hand; and the King had the tale written in letters of gold and laid up in his privy treasure, and whenever his breast was straitened he sent for Hasan to read it to him.

There was a King in Egypt named Asim, who was a hundred and eighty years old, and had no child. One day, seeing his Emirs come in with their sons, he got down from his throne and sat on the floor and wept; and his Wazir Faris, who was older by a hundred years and also childless, told him of Solomon, who could ask a thing of God. Faris went to Saba. Solomon told him why he had come before he spoke. He told him to kill two snakes with golden collars at the foot of a tree, and to give the flesh to their wives, and both wives conceived on one night, and on one night both bore sons, Sayf al-Muluk and Sa'id. And when the child was born King Asim opened the prisons, both criminals and debtors, and forgave three years' taxes, and set up kitchens round the city walls. "Did we open the jails when Yusuf was born?" said the King. "No, lord," said my father. "Why not?" "You did not say. For the first boy you did: ninety-one." "How many now?" "Three hundred and eleven. Two hundred and four for debts. A hundred and fifty-eight of those owe less than a hundred dinars." "How much?" "Six thousand one hundred, near enough." "Open them. I will pay it." "I will pay half," said Shah Zaman. "Half," said the King. My father wrote on his palm. "And the nine, lord?" said my father. The King did not answer for as long as it takes to count ten. "Not yet," he said. It was the old word, and I could not tell the voice.

When the boys were twenty-five the old King gave his throne to his son, and the Wazir gave his office to his, and each of the boys was told to choose two things from four: a ring, a sword, a seal, and a wrapper. Sayf al-Muluk took the ring and the wrapper. That night he opened it in a closet by a candle and found a tunic, and inside the lining, worked in gold, the portrait of a girl, with writing over her head: Badi'a al-Jamal, daughter of Shahyal, King of the Jinn who live in the garden of Iram. He fell down in a swoon. He was sick for three months. The physicians told King Asim that his son was in love and had no way to the one he loved, and Asim said to the Sworder, "Take Sa'id, bind his eyes and strike his neck"; and Sa'id asked for immunity before he spoke. "Kafur did that," said Sumayya. "They all do," said Shah Zaman. "They learn it," said the King. Asim said that if she had been a daughter of men they could have found a way, and Sayf al-Muluk said he wanted no other. "Nobody asked her," said Sumayya. "It was a picture." "Yes," said my sister. "It was on a tunic her father sent to Solomon, who sent it to Egypt without opening it."

He had forty ships made ready, and twenty thousand armed Mamelukes, and sailed to China, where King Faghfur gave him forty days of feasting, and then to the islands of India, until a storm broke all the ships and left him in a boat with a few men. They came to an island where a creature who looked like an old man called one of them by his name and leapt on his shoulders and rode him like a donkey, and they fled. They came to an island of Ghuls, and to a mountain where men of enormous size put them in cages like birds and ate two of them; the book gives these their colour, and I did not. They hung the cages at the King's head because they liked the sound of the weeping. He gave Sayf al-Muluk to his daughter, who was married on another island, and she liked him, and he said he was in love with another; and she made him and his men fetch wood and water for four years, and in the end for five. "She did not kill him," said the King. "No, lord." "She could have." "She made him carry wood." "It was her kitchen," said the nurse. "Four years," said the King. "And he did not change his mind." "No."

They made a raft and left. Crocodiles took his men one by one, and he came alone to an island of apes, who brought him to a castle with bricks of gold and silver, and a young man who offered him the island. He walked on four months and came to the High-builded Castle of Japhet son of Noah, where on a golden throne sat a girl, Daulat Khatun, daughter of the King of Hind, whom the Blue King's son, a Jinni, had taken from her bath in her father's garden and shut up there. He came every Tuesday, she said, and kissed her, and embraced her, and did nothing else, and left on Friday. "He did not touch her," said the King. "No." "He took her out of her bath and kept her in a castle that nobody could come to, for years." "Yes, lord." "And did nothing else." "So she says," said my sister. The nurse made a noise in her throat. The Jinni had hidden his soul, because the astrologers had said that a king's son would kill him: in a sparrow, in a box, in a casket, in seven caskets and seven chests, in an alabaster coffer, buried at the edge of the sea. "Where would you hide yours?" said Sumayya, to nobody. "In a cat," said the nurse. "In a ledger," said Shah Zaman. "Where would you, lord?" "I do not think I would put it anywhere." "Then anyone could find it." "Yes," said the King. My father put down his reed.

The older boy came and put his hand on the baby's head, and said "Yu." It was the first time. He looked round at us all, and said it again, and the baby, who is the one it was about, looked at the ceiling. Sayf al-Muluk put the ring of Solomon on the surface of the sea, and the coffer came up, and he broke it and strangled the sparrow, and the Jinni fell at the palace door a heap of black ashes. He and Daulat Khatun made a raft of ten doors of sandal-wood and lign-aloes with nails of gold, and sailed four months, he sleeping with a drawn sword between them, to the city of Amariyah, whose King was her uncle. Her father came for her. And Sayf al-Muluk rode through the streets, and saw a young man selling a tunic for fifteen dinars, and knew him for Sa'id, who was thin and changed; and he said to his attendants, "Take him to my palace." They heard "prison." They put him in irons, and no one remembered him for a month, and he cut ashlar with the other prisoners in the quarry. "He said palace," said Sumayya. "They heard prison," said my sister. "Servants hear what they think the master means," said the nurse. "It happens, lord," said my father. "I have the eleven." "Then open them," said the King.

I will give you Sa'id's tale in a breath. The creatures who rode him like a donkey for years; the wine he made in a pit of grapes, and the skulls they drank it from; the fire he lit in the vine-stalks round them while they slept; the cave of the blinded men, and what he did to the creature who had blinded them, which the book tells at length and I do not. He sold his tunic in the market to eat. The two friends sat at the table of Taj al-Muluk, and Daulat Khatun went to her foster-sister Badi'a al-Jamal, daughter of the Jinn, and told her how he had suffered for her. And Badi'a al-Jamal blushed and said that this could never be, for man does not agree with the Jinn. Daulat Khatun begged her by the milk they had sucked together; and she said, "For thy sake I will show him my face once." She saw him from the window, wandering in the garden and saying verses to himself, and it cost her a thousand sighs. When he came up she said, "And who keeps faith? There is no true love in men." He said that all men are not created alike. She made him swear, on his hand in hers, that neither would put another before the other, man or Jinn. "She asked him for an oath first," said Sumayya. "That is how it should be," said the nurse. "Yes," said the King.

She sent him to her grandmother in the garden of Iram, on the back of her maid Marjanah, and told him how to behave: take the sandals at the foot of the couch, kiss them, put them on your head, and stand silent. The grandmother said, "How shall there be accord between man and Jinn?" and then, when he had promised, said that she would send for her son. While he walked in the garden, five Jinn of the Blue King, who had seen him, asked him whether he was the one who had killed their master's son, and he said yes, with this ring; and they gagged him and flew with him to their King. The Blue King's ministers advised cutting off his limbs, one a day, and beating him, and crucifying him; I leave out the rest. An old Emir said, "Do nothing now. He is the betrothed of Badi'a al-Jamal, and King Shahyal will seek his blood." The King put him in prison. "There is always one old Emir," said Shah Zaman. "Who says wait." "Not yet," said the King, and looked at my father, and my father looked at his palm.

Shahyal went to war on his mother's order, for a mortal, and beat the Blue King and took his sons; and the Blue King gave up the prisoner and signed a paper clearing him of his son's death. I leave out the numbers. Sayf al-Muluk was married to Badi'a al-Jamal in Sarandib, and asked King Taj al-Muluk for the Princess Daulat Khatun for Sa'id, and they were married on one night. After forty days she asked if he had any regret, and he said he wanted only to see his father and mother, and she had her slaves carry them to Cairo and back, and from that time they went to see them whenever they longed to. They lived, said my sister, until the Destroyer of Delights; and this is all that has come down of the story of Sayf al-Muluk, "and Allah alone knows the truth." "All that has come down," said the King. "It does not say it was all of it?" "No, lord." "It says that was what they had." "Yes."

On the 778th night my sister began another, Hasan of Bassorah, whose father was a merchant, and who had a brother. The rains in the north were thirty-eight days late, then forty-three, and tonight forty-eight. My father had begun to write it in two lines. I saw the King look at his palm across the room, and look away, and I saw the nurse, who has seen a great many things, fill the water-jar by the cradle without being asked.

Night 778. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a merchant of Bassorah with a brother, only begun; nine men in the jails for words; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains forty-eight days late in the north; a baker named Hamid, whom nobody is to put in irons; a son named Yusuf, one hundred and twenty-eight days old, whose brother has said the first half of his name; a boy in shoes that squeak; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Seven Hundred and Seventy-eight to Seven Hundred and Ninety-eight: The Door That Was Forbidden, and Three Tombs With Nobody in Them

On the 778th night my sister began Hasan of Bassorah, the elder son of a merchant, who spent his father's money on friends until there was none, and none of the friends knew him, and he and his widowed mother were three days without bread. A friend of his father's put him to a goldsmith, and in time he had a shop of his own. One day an old stranger with a great white beard and a white turban stood in the doorway and said, "Thou art a comely youth. Thou hast no father and I have no son, and I know an art than which there is no better in the world." Next day, in Hasan's shop, he cut a broken platter into the crucible, took a folded paper out of his turban, shook a pinch of yellow powder on it, and told Hasan to blow the bellows; and out came a lump of gold that sold for fifteen thousand dirhams. "Fifteen thousand," said Shah Zaman, "for a lump the size of a mortar." Hasan went home and told his mother, who said that men who profess to make gold are sharpers who take people's money. She was right, and he did not hear her. He never saw the gold made; the powder was in the turban, and the gold was in the powder.

The next day he took the stranger home, and sent his mother to a neighbour, and fetched sweetmeats, and the stranger put a pinch of something in a piece of one and gave it to him, and said that he had a daughter whose like had never been seen, and that Hasan was the only man for her. He fell down where he sat. The stranger locked him in a chest with the gold in another, and had both carried to a ship that was waiting, and sailed; and Hasan's mother came home to an open door and two chests gone, and built a tomb in the middle of the house, and wrote her son's name and the date of his loss on it, and sat by it. "She built it before she knew," said the nurse. "She knew," said my sister. The stranger was named Bahram. Every year he took a young Moslem and cut his throat for his purposes, and had a thousand, all but one. The book makes him a worshipper of fire and a hater of Moslems; I leave out the fire, and I leave out what was done to the boy on the ship for three months because he would not kneel to it, until a storm came and the sailors said it was on account of the youth, and rose against the stranger and killed his servants. He loosed Hasan then and said that he had only been testing his patience. "And he believed him," said the King. "He was alone on a ship," said my sister. "He had no one else to believe."

They sailed three months more, to a shore of coloured pebbles, and went inland, and Bahram beat a copper drum with a silk strap and three she-dromedaries came out of the dust. They rode fourteen days to a mountain so high the clouds split on it. Bahram sewed Hasan into a camel's skin with three cakes and a bottle of water, and the vultures took him up to the top, where he cut himself out, and saw on the summit rotten bones and wood. "Throw me down six bundles," called Bahram, "and then do as thou wilt: stay, or jump." And he went away. The bones were of the boys before him, whom he had sent up the same way. Hasan stood a while and then threw himself into the sea behind the mountain, and the sea carried him to the land by God's grace. He found a palace, and in the doorway two girls playing chess, who knew him at once for the boy the stranger had brought the year before. The younger said to her sister, "Bear witness that this is my brother by the covenant of God, and I will die for his death and live for his life." They were the daughters of a King of the Jinn, seven of them, whom their father had shut away on the Mountain of Clouds because he would not give them to anyone. Hasan lived with them a year. When the stranger came again, with another boy bound hand and foot, Hasan went out to him and struck him once between the shoulders, and took his drum and his dromedaries, and put the boy on one and told him to go home. I give that in a sentence, as the book gave it in less.

The sisters were called to a wedding for two months and left Hasan the keys and told him not to open one door. He opened it. "Why do they always forbid one door?" said Sumayya. "To see who opens it," said the nurse. "It is always the one door," said the King. Behind it was a stair of onyx, and at the top a pavilion with a basin, and ten birds flew in from the desert and put off their feathers, as one takes off a coat, and were ten girls; and they went into the water, and the chief of them was the most beautiful that God had made. The book gives her to Hasan at length, and I give you her face, and that the others did not dare touch her. At dusk they put on their feathers and flew away. He went down the stair and lay ten days and ate nothing. When the sisters came back the youngest found him and asked, and he told her. She said she would help him, and told him how: wait for the first of the month, hide, take the dress of the chief girl and no other, and when the rest have flown, seize her, and keep the dress where she can never find it. "Take her by the hair," the book says, and I leave out the hair. "Whose idea was that?" said the nurse. "Hers," said my sister. "The youngest." The nurse said nothing for some time.

He took the dress, and the rest flew away, and she stood alone on the roof and said, "O thou who hast taken my dress and stripped me, restore it to me and cover my shame, so may God never make thee taste my tribulation." He brought her down to his room. When the sisters told her the man loved her, she said, "Do folk like you do such a deed to the daughters of Kings?" and wept until morning. Then the youngest sister dressed her and sat with her, and told her about him, and the next day he kissed her feet and said that he had taken her only that he might be her servant until the Day of Judgment. One of the sisters stood deputy for her in the contract, and the book says it was by her consent, and does not say whose. "Whose?" said Sumayya. "The book says hers," said my sister. They kept him forty days. My father, in his corner, was writing very small.

Hasan dreamed of his mother thin as a pen, and woke weeping, and the sisters let him go, with five-and-twenty chests of gold and fifty of silver and the dromedaries; and the youngest clung to his neck until she fainted. They went to Baghdad. He bought a house for a hundred thousand dinars. In three years his wife bore him two sons, Nasir and Mansur. Then he thought of the sisters, and bought them presents, and before he went he took his mother to the closet, and showed her where the feather-dress was buried in a chest, and said, "Watch over it. Do not let her see it. She is of the Jinn, the daughter of a great King; do not let her go out of the door, nor look out of a window, nor over a wall; for I fear the air for her when it blows." His mother said she would. And the book says, in one line, that his wife heard it, and neither of them knew. "He told his mother not to let her out," said Sumayya. "And not to say where it was." "She heard." "Yes," said the King. "She heard and she waited." "Three years and two boys," said the nurse. "She had two," said the King. "She did not go while she had no dress." The old nurse, who is seventy, looked at the lamp.

The wife waited two days after he left, and on the third said to his mother, "Have I lived with him three years and shall I never go to the bath?" and wept. His mother said, "We are strangers here, and he is abroad." And she said, "Men are excusable, because they are jealous. But women are not all alike, mother, and if a woman has a mind to a thing, none can guard her or keep her from it; nothing restrains her but her reason and her religion." So the old woman took her to the bath, with the boys. Every woman in the Hammam stopped to look at her. One of them was Tohfah the lutanist, a slave of the Caliph's, who forgot to wash her head, and followed her home, and told the Lady Zubaydah that she had seen a woman whose husband the Caliph would kill to have her. Zubaydah sent Masrur the eunuch to the house. He said, "The Lady summons you." The old woman said that her son had told her to let no one see the girl. "If I thought it dangerous," said Masrur, "I would not ask you to come." My father got up and went as far as the door, and stood there with his back to us, and came back when Masrur had taken them. "The Lady's eunuch," he said, to nobody. "No one refuses him, lord." "No," said the King.

Zubaydah looked at her and stood her up and kissed her and put her own necklace on her, and asked what she could do. The wife said that she had a dress of feathers and would show her a wonder if she had it, and it was in a chest buried in the store-closet of her husband's mother's house. The old woman swore she had never seen such a dress. Zubaydah took the key from her and sent Masrur to dig it up. The wife put it on, in front of them all, and was a bird. She flew once round the palace with the boys on her breast, and said some verses, which I will not read you, and said, "O mother of my husband, tell him when he comes that if he wants to meet me, let him come to the Islands of Wak." She went up through the dome. Zubaydah said she had not known. "Words profit nothing," said the old woman. "Do thou acquit me." The King had been holding Yusuf upright against his shoulder for some time. He had a cough, which had begun on the 790th night with the first yellow dust out of the north, and by the 796th his breathing had a sound in it that the nurse did not like.

Hasan had said goodbye to the seven sisters, each with two lines of verse, the youngest last: "I did not say farewell, for fear that saying it would melt your heart." He came back with five loads of gold and found his mother thin as a tooth-pick, and the house open, and the chest broken, and no one in it. "Where are they?" he said. She said, "They are in three tombs." And my sister read: she had dug in the house three graves, for the wife and the two boys, and sat by them weeping. "Stop," said the King. He said it as he said it on the night Ajib ordered the concubine drowned, softly, with the child's head under his chin, and my sister did not stop to think. "They are not in them, lord," she said. "They are alive. They are in the Islands of Wak. She dug them because she did not know." "Go on," said the King. She went on. Hasan fell down in a faint from morning to noon, and when he woke he took his sword to his mother's throat and said, "Tell me the truth or I will kill you and myself." She told him. He went round the house five days without eating. Yusuf was hot. The nurse put cold cloths on his chest and the soles of his feet and said nothing, and my father brought cold water from the court well in the dark, and the well was lower than I had ever seen it; and the King walked with him, and walked, and at the end of the second glass he lay down on the floor beside the cradle with the child on his chest, and slept. I listened to the baby's breathing until I could hear that there was nothing in it.

My sister told the rest of that night, the five days, and the mother's tears, and Hasan's verses, quietly, to the room, as one speaks in a house with a sick person. At dawn Yusuf slept in the cradle and the King slept on the floor, and nobody woke him. Sumayya took the reed from me because my hands were not steady, and wrote the Roll line in her own hand. It was straight. Under it she wrote, because I had told her what we write for that: child, a fever; gone at dawn. The north was sixty-eight days without rain. My father said that wheat was dearer in the lower market by a tenth, and the merchants were asking whether the King's granaries were full. "What do you say?" said the King, from the floor, without opening his eyes. "That the King keeps his granaries, lord." "Good," said the King, and slept.

Night 798. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Child, a fever; gone at dawn. Open: a man of Bassorah whose wife is in the Islands of Wak, only begun; nine men in the jails for words; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains sixty-eight days late in the north; a baker named Hamid, whom nobody is to put in irons; a son named Yusuf, one hundred and forty-eight days old, who coughed; a boy in shoes that squeak; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Seven Hundred and Ninety-nine to Eight Hundred and Sixteen: Reckon Them Dead, and Bread That Goes Off

On the 799th night my sister took up the tale as if the 798th had not been, which was how she meant it. The child was well. The King said that Sumayya should read the Open that night, since she could, and she stood and read it with her finger under the lines, slowly, and when she came to "a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand" she stopped. "Go on," said the King, and she went on, and read her own name in the voice she used for the others. After that she read it every night, and I kept the Roll.

Hasan went to the sisters on the Mountain of Clouds, a month after the bird flew, and told them, and they looked at one another and looked at the floor. Then they said, "Put forth thy hand to heaven, and when thou reachest it, thou shalt win thy wife." He wept. The youngest told him to be patient: "the son of ten years does not die in the ninth." She said she had meant to tell him to burn the feather-dress, and the Devil made her forget. He stayed a year, and his eyes could not keep their tears; and the sisters had an uncle, Abd al-Kaddus, who came once a year on an elephant and would do whatever the eldest asked, and she burned a perfume and called him. He sat and shook his head and bit his finger and made marks on the ground, and said, "He may not reach the Islands of Wak. Between him and them are seven wadis and seven seas and seven mountains. Let him reckon his wife and sons as dead." "Reckon them dead," said the nurse. "That is what they all say." The King put his hand over the elder boy's ear, and the boy, who was holding a shoe, looked up.

Hasan said, "How shall life be sweet to me unless I win my wish?" The old man took him on the elephant three days to a blue mountain with a door of Chinese iron, and gave him a black stallion and a scroll, and told him to wait at a cavern for five days, and on the sixth a black Shaykh in black would come out and take the letter without speaking, and then wait five days more: if he comes himself, you will win; if a page comes, he means to kill you. It was Abu al-Ruwaysh, who sent him in on the sixth day, among four elders in a hall with fountains, and told them his tale; and they said, "Never saw I any who loathed his life as this youth does." He wrote a second letter and gave him a pouch of incense and sent him by an Ifrit named Dahnash, on whose back he was not to say "Glory to God" or both would die, to a land white as camphor, to King Hassun, who read the letter and shook his head and put him in a guest-house for a month, until the ships came from the Islands. Then the captain put him in a chest and carried him aboard like cargo. "Each one told him to go home," said Sumayya, "and each one sent him on." He made verses all the way; I give you one couplet, the one my sister read twice: "Their image stays with me and will not fly; but for the hope of meeting, I would die." "Letters are how a thing gets done, lord," said my father. "Yes," said Shah Zaman, who keeps the accounts. "At four doors, and a ship."

On the 805th night my father said that two hundred and forty people had come in from the north and were sitting outside the north gate, women and children and a few goats, and more were on the road. The wells in their villages, they said, were mud. They had walked eleven days. "What do they ask?" said the King. "Bread, lord, and water." "Kitchens," said the King. "Round the gate. Soup and bread, twice a day." "From the granaries, lord?" "Not the granaries. Buy flour." "The flour in the lower market is a fifth dearer than it was." "Then buy it from the one who sells at the old price." My father was quiet. "Hamid, lord. On Coppersmiths' Row. He is out of flour by the third day of the week, and he says the millers will not sell to him." "Send to him," said the King. "Not a gift. An order. Twelve hundred loaves a day for the north gate, at the old price, and the flour from my mill." He had once said "Do not send" about this baker, and I think we all remembered. My father wrote on his palm. The next night he reported: Hamid said he would do it, but that he would bake each day at dawn and the bread would be eaten by noon, and he would not bake for tomorrow, because bread is a thing that goes off; and that it was not to be called the King's bread. "He said it was bread." "Good," said the King.

On the 808th night a loaf came up from the lower town in a cloth, with no message. It was Hamid's, baked that morning, with a crust that cracked when the nurse tapped it. "He sent one so that you would know what the gate is eating, lord," said my father. The King broke it and gave Shah Zaman half, and the boy the crust, which he held in both hands and did not eat but carried round the room. "It goes off by tomorrow, lord," said my father. "Then we shall eat it today," said the King, and we did, all of it, and the nurse gathered the crumbs.

My sister, meanwhile, had Hasan under a settle on the shore of the Islands of Wak, in the dark. The women came off the ships in thousands, in mail, and one sat on his settle, and he took her hem and laid it on his head and asked for her protection. She said, "Get up, before they kill you." She told him to wait until the next night, and brought him armour. She was the commander of the army of virgins, an ancient dame blue-eyed and pock-marked and gap-toothed, Shawahi, Mother of Calamities, and she told him he would be killed, and took him anyway. He told her his tale, and she said that love like that had brought him, and that it was the truth of his purpose that had saved him. They went seven months' journey to the Seventh Island, over the Land of Birds, where one cannot hear one another speak (my sister did the noise with her hands, and the elder boy put his shoe over his ear, and the nurse said that she had been to the Land of Birds, it was her cousin's wedding), and the Land of Beasts, and the Land of the Jinn, where no one looks behind or he dies, and came to a river under a mountain where the heads of fruit on a tree cry "Wak! Wak!" when the sun rises. On the bank she had every girl in her army go into the river to wash, so that he might see his wife. The book has a great deal to say about this, which I leave out. On the second sheet I wrote that the book is very anxious, a dozen times, to tell us that the army were virgins, and I wrote it once. He looked at each face and said, "Not her."

Last of all came a damsel with ten slave-girls and thirty women, who ducked them in the water and ruled them, and Hasan said, "She is like her, but she is not she." The old woman asked him to describe his wife; he did, and she bowed her head, and raised it, and said, "That is a daughter of the Supreme King, who rules all the Islands of Wak. Wake up. Reckon her dead. Choose another, and I will give you wealth, and go home." Hasan said that if he were cut in pieces he would only love her the more. Shawahi looked at him a long time, and said that she would risk her life for his. So she took him into the city and hid him in her house, and went to the Queen, Nur al-Huda, and told her, trembling, that a man had hidden under a settle and asked her protection. "Art thou so lewd," said the Queen, "that thou bringest men into the Islands of Wak? Bring him here, or I will strike off thy head."

He came before her with the old woman beside him, and gave his name, Hasan, and his city, Bassorah, and his sons' names, Nasir and Mansur; he did not know his wife's name. The Queen asked what she said at leave-taking. He told her: "let him come to the Islands of Wak." Nur al-Huda said, "Had she not wanted thee she had not said this." Then she said that she would show him all the girls in the city and the provinces; if he knew his wife she would give her to him, and if not she would crucify him over the old woman's door. He said he accepted. They brought him every girl in the city, a hundred at a time (the nurse counted to twenty hundreds and stopped), and then every girl in the palace, and he said, "Not her." "Take him," said the Queen, "drag him on his face and cut off his head." They threw him down and covered his eyes with his skirt, and stood over him with their swords. The old woman threw herself on the ground and said, "He has eaten of our meat and entered our land, and he has a claim on thee." "What did she say?" said the King. "That he had eaten of their bread, lord," said my sister. "Yes," said the King. My sister told this part quickly, and he did not look at the Roll.

Shawahi said there was one girl he had not seen, and that was the Queen. Nur al-Huda said, "How can he be my husband that I should show him my face?" But she unveiled; and Hasan gave a great cry, so loud that the palace shook, and fell down. When he came round, he said, "This Queen is either my wife or the likest of all folk to my wife." The Queen laughed until she fell on her side. She asked what in his wife was like her, and he said everything, the shape, the voice, the brow. She smiled, and her cheeks reddened, and she told Shawahi to take him back to her house and look after him. Then she told the old woman to arm herself and take a thousand horse to the city of her father, the Supreme King, to the palace of her youngest sister, Manar al-Sana, and tell her to put her two sons in their mail and send them. "Say her sister longs for them," she said. "And bring them to me by another road than their mother's." The book says that the Queen swore by every oath that if the woman was his wife and the boys his sons she would not hinder him; and the book says in the next line that she meant to kill him if they were not. "She had already decided," said Shah Zaman. "She had decided one thing or the other, and set a test to see which," said the nurse. "Which is deciding," said the King.

The old woman came to Manar al-Sana, whose father was the Supreme King and who had never let anyone look at her sons: "from the time of their birth none hath looked on their faces, neither Jinn nor man, male nor female, and I am jealous for them of the zephyr when it breathes in the night." "Nobody had looked at them," said Sumayya. "In seven years." "Four," said my sister. "Nobody had looked at their faces," said the nurse, and looked at the cradle, where the younger boy was awake with his fists in his mouth, and at the elder, who was standing at my father's knee in his shoes, looking at my father's palm. The nurse said that in her day a child's face was not shown for forty days either, and nobody called that jealousy. "They called it caution," she said. The Princess gave way. The old woman took the two boys in the little coats of mail their aunt had sent, and went off like a bird by another road. At her sister's palace the Queen set them on her knees and said, "Fetch me Hasan."

On the 815th night they brought him in, thinking he was to be killed, and he saw them on the Queen's knees, the two of them, and gave a great cry and fell. They knew him. The book says that God made them speak, and they said, "O our father!" The elder boy in my father's room, who has had three words, put down the shoe, and said the first one. "Ba," he said, and looked at the King. The King did not say anything, and he picked him up. The shoe lay on its side on the floor, and nobody picked it up. On the Queen's knees the boys wept. Nur al-Huda saw that they were Hasan's sons and that her sister was his wife, and she raged against her sister beyond measure, and screamed in Hasan's face, and kicked him in the chest. "Arise, and run for thy life! Were it not that I swore no harm should come to thee, I would kill thee with my own hand." She told them to put him out, and they threw him out of the palace on his face; and when he came round he was lying in the road, and he knew nobody, and did not know how to go home. The north was eighty-six days without rain.

Night 816. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a man of Bassorah, thrown out of a palace on his face in the Islands of Wak, with his sons inside; kitchens at the north gate, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; nine men in the jails for words; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains eighty-six days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, one hundred and sixty-six days old; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Eight Hundred and Seventeen to Eight Hundred and Thirty-one: The Fault Was Mine, and Eight Men Let Out

Hasan lay in the road where they had thrown him, and my sister left him there for a night and told us about his wife. Manar al-Sana, the Supreme King's youngest, had been about to start for her sister's when a chamberlain came and said that her father wanted her. He had dreamed that he went into a treasure-house of jewels, seven of them the finest, and chose the smallest and the clearest, and as he came out and opened his hand a strange bird, not of their country, swooped and snatched it. The interpreters told him that of his seven daughters he would lose the youngest, by force and against his will. "He chose the smallest," said the King. "Yes, lord." "Do not go," he said. She said that her sister had made ready a feast and would be angry, because it was four years since she had seen her; that no mortal could come to their islands, past the White Country and the Black Mountain, the Island of Birds and the Valley of the Jinn; that she would be a month. He let her go. "He told her the dream," said the King, "and she went." "She said no one could reach them," said my sister. "She was sure," said the nurse. "They were all sure," said the King.

Her sister met her at the door and did not salute her. "O whore," she said, "whence haddest thou these children? Hast thou married unbeknown to thy sire, or committed fornication?" Manar al-Sana said that she was lawfully married, and appealed from her to the Lord of the Heavens. "She said she was married," said the King. "Yes, lord." "And nobody believed her." "Her sister had the boys in her lap an hour before, lord, and knew whose they were." "Yes," said the King. Nur al-Huda had her put in irons, and beaten, and hung up by the hair; I leave out the ladder and the whip, which the book describes, and what was said to the old woman Shawahi when she tried to leave. She wrote to the Supreme King, who wrote back, "I give thee command over her life; if the matter is as thou sayest, kill her without consulting me." "Without consulting him," said the King. "Yes, lord." "He did not say, kill her." "No. He said, if the matter is as thou sayest." "It is easier in a letter," said my father, from his corner. The King looked at him. "Yes," he said. "It is." Nur al-Huda read the letter, and sent for her sister, and I leave the rest out.

On the 821st night, before the glass, my father said that one of the nine had died in the night. The oldest. A cobbler, seventy-one, who had been two years and a month in the jail for saying, in his shop, "May God take him by the throat." It was a fever; the nights in the jail had been cold; the other eight had washed him. The King did not move. "How long?" he said. "Two years and a month, lord." "The eight." "Lord?" "Today." "All eight?" "Today, before noon. And bring him to his house, with a shroud." "He had a daughter, lord. In the lower town." "Find her." My father wrote on his palm, and his hand did not shake; I noticed that. The King said nothing else that night. Sumayya read the Open at the end of the second glass, and when she came to "nine men in the jails, for words" she read it, and stopped, and said "eight" to nobody, and went on. When my sister began Hasan again, he did not look at her, but at the brick by the door.

Hasan got up out of the road and walked beside the river. On a tree there was a scroll which said: "In thy mother's womb I cast thy case the best, and I will suffice thee in whatever troubles thee." Beyond it two little boys, sons of a magician, were fighting over a copper rod and a leather cap that their father had worked a hundred and thirty-five years to make, which the rod gave command of seven tribes of the Jinn, and the cap hid whoever wore it. Hasan said he would judge between them, and threw a stone, and told them the one who ran to it first should have the rod, the other the cap; and put the cap on his head and the rod in his hand while they ran. The younger boy came back first with the stone and found nobody. "Where is the man who was to judge between us?" he said to his brother. They looked for him a long time, and he stood beside them. "Did he steal them?" said Sumayya. "Their father had said that a stranger would take them," said my sister, "and that they would not know how." He went into the palace and stood before Shawahi and shook a shelf, and she thought it was a devil. Then he went to his wife.

She was bound by her hair to the ladder, and her sons played under it. They saw him when he lifted the cap, and cried, "O our father!" and their mother looked right and left and saw nobody. Then he took it off in front of her. She screamed. She said, "Save thyself, for she has hosts that none can withstand." And then she said, "All this befell me because I rebelled against thee, and went out without thy leave. Women never know a man's worth till they have lost him. Blame me not." And Hasan said, "It was not thou that wast in fault; the fault was mine, and mine only; for I went forth and left thee with one who knew not thy rank, nor thy worth, nor thy degree." "Again," said the King. My sister said it again: "The fault was mine, and mine only." He said nothing more. The nurse blew her nose. Shah Zaman looked at his hands. Then Hasan asked her. "Wouldst thou have me carry thee to thy father's house," he said, "or depart with me to my country, now that relief is come?" "He asked her," said Sumayya. "He asked her," said my sister. "And what did she say?" said the nurse. "She said, go to thy country and put away false hope, for thou knowest not the perils." "And he stayed," said the King. "He said he would not leave this place nor go but with her."

At night he loosed her, and they carried the boys to the gate of the Queen's harem, and it was locked from outside. A voice said, "I will not open to you unless you swear to take me with you." It was Shawahi, on a red earthenware jar with a palm-fibre rope round its neck, which ran like a Najdi colt. They swore. Outside the city Hasan struck the earth with the rod and ten Ifrits stood up out of it with their heads in the clouds, seven Kings of the Jinn, and said, "What dost thou bid?" He asked to see their tribes. "Some of us are heads without bodies," they said, "and some are bodies without heads." He thought better of it. "He thought better of it," said the nurse. "I would have." He said, "Take us to Baghdad." They said they could not: they were of the covenant of Solomon, and had sworn not to carry any son of Adam on their backs. They brought horses of the Jinn. It was seven years' journey, they said, and he had come in less than one because God had softened the hearts of His servants, and the Shaykh's elephant had gone three years in ten days and the Ifrit three years in a night. "Seven years," said Shah Zaman, "and he did it in the better part of one." A Moslem Ifrit, tall as a column of smoke, met them on the road: he wished to leave the land of the magicians, and would guide them if he might come by night. For a month they rode the sea-shore; on the thirty-first day a dust-cloud walled the world.

It was the Queen's army. The Seven Kings said, "Go up the mountain with thy wife and children and leave us," and he went up, with the old woman, and watched. The Jinn threw fire from their mouths, and heads flew from trunks, and the blood ran in rills; I give it as the book gives it, in dust and flame, and I leave out the count. It lasted three days. On the third the army of Wak was broken, and the Queen was taken, pinioned, with her chief officers. The old woman said what she would do to her, with two bitches and two mares, and I leave that out also. Hasan commanded that the prisoners be put to the sword; the old woman cried, "Slay them all and spare none." Then Manar al-Sana saw her sister bound, and wept, and said to Hasan, "What wilt thou do with her?" "Her torturing of thee was misdeed enow," he said. And she said, "She has an excuse for what she did to me. It is thy doing that my father's heart is on fire for the loss of me. What will he do if he loses my sister also?" "It is thine to decide," said Hasan. "Do what thou wilt." "It was hers to decide," said Sumayya. "Yes," said the King.

She unloosed her sister and the rest, and embraced her, and they wept together a long while; and Nur al-Huda said, "Bear me no malice for what I did with thee." "This was foreordained to me," said Manar al-Sana. "Foreordained," said the King. He said it as he says "Present." "Is that a pardon?" said the nurse. "The book says they sat on the couch and talked," said my sister, "and that she made peace between the old woman and the Queen." "She was asked," said Sumayya. "She was asked, after." My sister looked at her, and at the Roll, and I wrote nothing, because nobody had told me what to write.

The Queen and the old woman took the left-hand road and Hasan and his wife the right. At the house of the Princesses, the youngest sister embraced him and wept; and she turned to Manar al-Sana and said, "O daughter of the Supreme King, was there no pity in thy bosom, that thou partedst him from his children and set his heart on fire? Didst thou want him to die?" Manar al-Sana laughed. "So it was ordained," she said, "and whoso beguileth folk, him Allah will beguile." "She has the right of it," said the nurse. "Both of them," said the King. King Hassun met them with his horsemen under the trees, and they were his guests three days. At the cavern of brass the two Shaykhs were waiting, Abd al-Kaddus and Abu al-Ruwaysh, and Abd al-Kaddus said, "Thou hast delivered thy wife and sons and hast no further need of the two. Give me the rod and Abu al-Ruwaysh the cap." Hasan hung his head. He did not want to say he would not; he said that he would. "He could have kept them," said Shah Zaman. "Foolish." "He had them in his hand," said the King, "and he gave them to the men who got him there." "His mother says he was a fool," said the nurse; for when Hasan reached Baghdad, two months and ten days from the sisters' palace, and his mother had fainted and come round and kissed his wife's head, she heard of the rod and the cap and said, "O my son, hadst thou kept them thou wert master of the whole earth." He bought houses and gardens and estates, and they lived in all pleasance, said my sister, until the Destroyer of Delights. "Master of the whole earth," said the King. "She wanted that for him." "Mothers do," said the nurse.

The eight had gone out of the jail the day after the 821st night, at noon, with a dinar apiece, and nobody saw where they went. My father had gone out at dusk the same day with a litter and two bearers, and he did not come back until the second glass; and he said nothing, and the King did not ask. I noticed that his sleeves smelt faintly of lime and wet bark. I did not strike the line about the nine. I wrote under it: one dead; eight out. The King read it, and put his thumb beside it. On the 826th night Shah Zaman had a letter from Samarkand, which he read twice and put in his sleeve; in the morning he sent two riders, and told the King only that he had a use for his horses. The King said he could have what he liked. On the 830th night the nurse put her finger into Yusuf's mouth, and said, "Tooth," and everybody had to feel it, even Shah Zaman, who was bitten. "Is it straight?" said the King. "It is," said the nurse. The north was a hundred and one days without rain, and nine hundred and twelve people sat outside the gate now, and the sky over the north gate was the colour of tin, and Hamid had asked for a second oven and a boy to turn the loaves. On the 831st night my sister began Khalifah, a fisherman of Baghdad.

Night 831. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a fisherman of Baghdad, only begun; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, nine hundred and twelve at the gate, and a baker who has asked for a second oven; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and one days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, one hundred and eighty-one days old, with a tooth; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Eight Hundred and Thirty-one to Eight Hundred and Forty-five: Three Apes, and a Paper That Chose

Khalifah the fisherman of Baghdad had never married, and had never caught enough to be worth marrying on. One morning he cast his net ten times and drew up nothing, and said that bread belongs to God, who gives it to some and not to others; and he cast an eleventh time, and it was heavy, and in it was a lame one-eyed ape. "What is this heart-breaking luck?" he said. He tied the ape to a tree and took up a whip, and the ape said, "Khalifah, hold thy hand, and cast again; God will give thee thy daily bread." He cast again and drew up a second ape, with teeth wide apart, Kohl on his eyes, henna on his hands, laughing; and a third, red, with a blue waistcloth, who said he was the ape of Abu al-Sa'adat the banker, whom he greeted each morning and each evening, and each time the banker made five dinars. "Three apes in three casts," said Shah Zaman. "The river has changed its trade." "Praised be God," said Khalifah, "who has turned the fish of the Tigris into monkeys!" He called the third one the monarch of all monkeys, and did what he was told. The older boy had been given the nurse's shawl to hold, and cast it over the cat; the cat took it as an insult, and the nurse said that was five apes today. Sumayya wrote the three apes in the margin of the Open, with a number beside each, and the King asked what the numbers were, and she said the casts.

The third ape told him what to do. Catch a fish, a big one; lay it on green grass in a basket; take it to the banker's shop and say, I went out to fish on your luck and God sent me this. The banker will offer a dinar, then two, then five; take nothing; say that you will sell it for two sayings only, that he stand up and say, "Bear witness, people of the market, that I give Khalifah the fisherman my ape for his ape, and my lot for his lot, and my luck for his." Then the one-eyed ape would give the banker good-morning every day, and every day an affliction would fall on him, until he had nothing; and Khalifah would make ten dinars a day. The book gives the banker a faith, as it gave one to the goldsmith, and I leave it out; he was the banker. When Khalifah would not take his five dinars but threw them back, saying, "Give folk back their fish!" the banker thought that two sayings meant something else, and was frightened and angry and had him beaten in the street. "I can eat ten donkeys' rations of stick," said Khalifah, getting up. The banker laughed in spite of himself, and said the words; and Khalifah went down to the river and drew up a net full of fish, and sold ten dinars' worth that day, and ten each day for ten days.

That night, with a hundred dinars in the house, and a good deal of hashish in him, he said to himself, "Everyone knows I was a poor fisherman and now I have a hundred dinars. The Caliph Harun al-Rashid will hear. He will send for me and say, lend me the hundred, and I will say, I have nothing, and he will have me beaten until I confess. The wise thing is to practise." So he stripped, and set a leather pillow beside him, and whipped himself, every other blow on the pillow, roaring, "Alas, my lord, they lie against me, I am a poor fisherman, I have nothing of this world!" The merchants of the Khan climbed over the roofs and came down through the skylight to find him naked and flogging himself. "We are preparing for the Caliph," he said. The King laughed. He laughed with his head back, as he does when it comes up from the bottom, and the sound went round the room; and Yusuf, on the nurse's knee, who had never laughed in his life, opened his mouth with the new tooth in it and laughed too, a short dry sound like a door. Everyone stopped. "Again," said the King, and did it again, and the child did. Shah Zaman, who had been trying to look as if nothing was happening, put his hand over his face.

The next day Khalifah lost the purse in the Tigris, diving a hundred times, and when he came out his clothes had been stolen. He wrapped himself in his net and ran about the bank like a camel in rut. Meanwhile the Caliph had bought a slave-girl, Kut al-Kulub, who knew all the arts and could sing, for five thousand dinars and had given the jeweller ten, and had not left her for a month except for the Friday prayers, and forsaken the Lady Zubaydah and his concubines. The Lords of the realm complained to Ja'far, who told him the highest boast of a King is the chase. So they rode out, and the Caliph, thirsty, rode alone up a mound where he saw a figure, and the figure was Khalifah naked in a net. "Hast thou any water?" "Art thou blind?" said Khalifah. "The Tigris is behind this mound." He drank; and when Khalifah heard the Caliph name the gown and the girdle and the waistcloth, which were the very things that had been taken, he took hold of the mule and said, "Thou stolest my clothes." The Caliph gave him his own satin gown. Khalifah cut a third off the skirt with a knife, because it was too long. "What wage dost thou get for thy piping?" he asked, for the Caliph's mouth was small and his cheeks large. "Ten dinars a month." "I make thy ten dinars every day. Be my apprentice, and I will give thee five."

They fished. They could not pull the net in, and Khalifah said that for the first time he had taken the gown, but this time he would take the ass; together they got it in, full. "Go to the market and fetch two frails," said Khalifah, "and I will keep the fish." The Caliph rode back to Ja'far laughing, and all the Barmecides kissed the ground; and the Caliph said that whoever brought him one of the fish that Khalifah his master had taken would have a dinar. The Mamelukes went down to the river like vultures, and Khalifah, seeing them come, thought they were fish of Paradise, and went into the water up to his neck with two fish in his hands, praying that his partner the piper would come. He gave them in the end to the chief eunuch, Sandal, who had no money on him, and told him to come to the palace in the morning. "Whence hadst thou that gown?" said the Caliph's own tailor, in the street. "From a man I taught to fish," said Khalifah. "I forgave him the cutting off of his hand, for stealing my clothes, and he gave me this." "He forgave a hand," said the nurse. "There are not many in this book who do." "No," said the King. "Not many."

On the 838th night my father said that wheat in the lower market was double what it had been in the spring, and that three men had been taken forestalling it, buying from the carters at the gates and holding it back. "Irons?" he said. The King did not answer, and my father wrote a word on his palm and did not look at it. "No," said the King. "Make them sell at the old price, to the kitchens, what they bought. And write their names." "All three, lord?" "All three. In the Open." Sumayya read them aloud the next night, three names, in a voice that did not know them; and my father said that the second was a cousin of his, and that he had known it when he reported them.

At the palace, Zubaydah, who had heard of Kut al-Kulub and had not eaten for a month, asked the girl to sing for her, and gave her sweets with Bhang in them; and when she was asleep had a chest made and a tomb, and put it about that the girl had choked, and told her women she would strike off the neck of whoever said she was alive. The Caliph came back from the chase and went to the tomb and wept on it. "There is nobody in it," said Sumayya. "No." "That is another," said the nurse. "Hasan's mother had one, and the three graves, and this." "Baghdad is full of empty graves," said Shah Zaman. "Not all of them are empty," said the King, very quietly, and no one said anything, because no one could have said what he meant, and my father looked at his palm. Zubaydah gave the chest to a eunuch to sell on the condition that it was bought unopened, and give the price in alms.

The Caliph, to amuse himself, had Ja'far write twenty papers: twenty sums of money from a dinar to a thousand, and twenty offices from the smallest to the Caliphate, and twenty punishments from a beating to death, and told Khalifah to draw one. "Whatever is on it, I will give," he said. "If it is the Caliphate I will take off my robe, and if it is hanging I will do it." Ja'far said to himself that something might fall to this wretch's lot and be the end of him, and that he would be the cause. Khalifah drew a hundred blows; and they beat him. He drew a second: naught shall be given to the fisherman. He drew a third: one dinar. "He wrote the papers himself," said the King. "Ja'far wrote them, lord," said my sister. "The Caliph told him what to write." "He made the paper choose." "Yes, lord," said my father, from his corner. "So that it should not be him." "It was him." "Yes, lord." The King looked at the Roll, and did not say any more. Khalifah, outside, threw the dinar to Sandal, who saw that his eyes were wet, and gave him a hundred dinars for the fish.

He walked to the slave-market, where a chest was being sold; it was Zubaydah's. The bidding reached a hundred dinars and he said, "A hundred and one," and the merchants laughed and the eunuch said, "Sell it to him." He carried it home on his head. In the night it moved. He thought there were Jinn in it, and woke the quarter for a lamp, and broke the lock with a stone, and there lay a girl like a Houri, who woke and said, "Bring me jessamine and narcissus." "There is only henna," said Khalifah. She asked where she was; he said she was his slave, bought for a hundred dinars and one; she asked his name. He fetched her bread and cheese and a cucumber and a pitcher of water from his neighbours, whom he woke twice, and she wrote a note to Ibn al-Kirnas the jeweller and told him to take it to the jewel-market and say nothing. The jeweller read it and kissed it and gave him a thousand dinars and a mule; he got on face to crupper and held the tail and was thrown. "She sent him a thousand dinars more," said my sister. "Then she took him to the Caliph."

The Caliph said, "Wast thou in very deed my partner yesterday?" "By Him who gave thee thy cousin's succession," said Khalifah, "I know her not, except by sight and speech." The Caliph gave him fifty thousand dinars and a robe and a mule and slaves to serve him, so that he was like a King; and was angry for a long time with Zubaydah, and would not go to her, until she wrote him a letter in verse: "I long once more the love that was between us." And he read it, and said, "All sins doth God forgive," and answered that he pardoned her. "She wrote first," said the nurse. "She asked," said Sumayya. "Everybody who asks is pardoned," said Shah Zaman. "In this book." "In this book," said the King. Khalifah took a monthly pay of fifty dinars and a mansion and a wife, the daughter of a chief man, and praised God in verse, and lived until the Destroyer of Delights. The book tells him again, from another manuscript, as Khalif, with a handsome ape and a village that pays twenty thousand dinars a year; I give you only the first.

The north was a hundred and fifteen days without rain. There were fourteen hundred at the north gate, and three ovens in Coppersmiths' Row, and a fourth being built by the palace masons. On the 845th night my sister began Masrur and Zayn al-Mawasif, and I saw the King look at the ceiling, as a man looks to see whether the roof is sound, and look at the window, which was clear and hard and blue. In the morning I went up to the roof of the Roll-room, which I had not done since the first snow, and saw the north road: a line of grey people, women with children on their hips, walking to the gate where the smoke of the kitchens went straight up, there being no wind to bend it.

Night 845. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a merchant named Masrur, only begun; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, fourteen hundred at the gate, three ovens and a fourth, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and fifteen days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, one hundred and ninety-five days old, who has laughed; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Eight Hundred and Forty-six to Eight Hundred and Sixty-three: Chess for Everything, and a Man Who Knocked at His Own Door

The merchant Masrur dreamed that he held a white dove in a garden and that a great bird came down and took it out of his hand; and in the morning he went out to find someone who would say what it meant. Nobody would. He walked until he was far from his own street, and heard a voice reciting on the other side of a wall, and the door was open, and he went in. There was a garden with a blessing painted over each of its four daises, on the house, on its owner, on every guest who came in need; and at the far end of it, behind a curtain of red brocade, four women sat, and one of them, the book is careful to say, was over four feet and under five. This was Zayn al-Mawasif, the Adornment of Qualities. "What brings you into a house that is not yours," she said, "among women who are not yours, without leave?" He said the garden had pleased him. "With love and gladness," she said, and told him to go. He asked for water. The book has the two of them call one another by their faiths here, as a person is called by a name; I leave them out, here and everywhere in this tale, and the husband's too, and shall not say again that I have. He said her water was not forbidden to him nor his to her, since we are all one creation, and she had it brought, and then food, and a cup with writing on the outside, Guard thy tongue, and when he had drunk it, writing on the inside, And hide her secrets from foes.

The maid Hubub told him what would not work. Her mistress, she said, was the daughter of a strict house and had never been seen outside it, and had no use for money or for men; if he wanted her he must put her into verse. He did. She answered in verse that told him to leave, and kept him the whole night, and in the morning made him swear to tell no one and to keep company with no other woman, and swore the same herself, and sent Hubub home with him to see what he owned. "If he is a man of condition we will take him," she said, "and if not, we will let him go." He was a man of condition. She played him at chess. It takes three days in the book and she won every bout: ten dinars a bout, then a hundred, then his shop, then his slave-girls and houses and gardens, until a Kazi was fetched, who looked at her fingers and lost his wits, and wrote the deed that made everything Masrur had in the world hers. Then she asked him for things he could not buy, and he went out with nothing, and Hubub followed to see what credit he had, and he turned round in the road and told her the truth. She went back weeping. Zayn al-Mawasif wrote him a note: all she had taken would come back to him, and he should come when it was dark. He came, and she gave him the shops, the houses, the deed. The book spends a poem on him and a poem on her, and a poem about her body that I leave out.

"All of it?" said the King. "All of it, lord." "It is the only way to find out," said the nurse. "Find out what?" said Sumayya. "Whether they stay when there is nothing." "It is expensive," said Shah Zaman. "He stayed," said the King. "He had nowhere else," said my father, in the voice he uses for numbers. On the 850th night the rains in the north were a hundred and twenty days late, and he wrote it on his palm, which by now had so many things on it that he had to write across them. The fourth oven in Coppersmiths' Row was lit that morning by the palace masons; Hamid asked for a fifth, and four boys; there were sixteen hundred at the north gate, and the line for the loaves went out through the gate and half-way round the wall. "Give him what he asks," said the King. The second of the three men whose names Sumayya had read, my father's cousin, had brought his wheat to the kitchens on his own cart, and carried the sacks in himself, and stood at the ovens half a morning, and would not be given a receipt. Hamid sent the boy who carries the loaves to say so, and nothing else. My father heard it, and had nowhere on his palm to write it.

The husband came home. His wife had washed her face in saffron to look ill, and told him she had sickened for his absence, and begged him never to go again without a companion; he said he would take one, and opened his shop, and that same morning Masrur came and sat beside him and bought drugs and spices, and came again, and within a week the husband was asking him to be his partner. She made a great business of not appearing before a stranger, and appeared, veiled, and sat across from Masrur and looked at him until the day ended. The husband had a mocking-bird that had always come to his head when he sat down to eat; in his long absence it had grown used to Masrur's lap, and now it would not come to its master. That night his wife said a name in her sleep, and the next night, and the third; on the fourth he lay awake and heard her say Masrur. He asked the man's name at table, and was told, and went out to fetch his cousins to witness their brotherhood, and came back by the back way and stood at a window that gave on the room, and saw his wife fill her mouth with wine and give it to the man beside her, and pour rose-water over him from head to foot. Then he went round to the front door and knocked.

"He knocked," said Shah Zaman. "He had a key," said the nurse. The King had got up and gone to the window, which gives on the court and a great deal of sky, and he said, with his back to us, "He knocked so that someone would tell him it had not happened." And someone did: the girl told her mistress that her master was at the door, and her mistress said to let him in; and the girl told him that the door had not been opened, day or night, since he went; and he said, "That pleases me." "It did not," said the nurse. "He said it did," said the King. Nobody asked him how he knew. He came back to his place, and my sister, who had waited without moving, went on: the husband put off the brotherhood to another day, and Masrur went home.

After that he sold all he owned, and forged a letter from kinsmen asking him to bring his wife for twelve days, and had a litter made for her and her maids. She saw what it was. While he was out loading the camels she went to the three doors of the house, the outer first, and wrote on each in verse: on the first, to a dove, to carry her greeting; on the second, to whoever passed, to remember her; on the third, to Masrur by name, not to forget what had been sworn. Then she let herself be lifted into the litter. Masrur found the house shut and the doors written on, and read them in order, and fell down; and when he came to himself he went out by the road they had taken, and came up with the caravan at the rear, where she rode, and held to the litter, weeping, while she begged him to turn back before morning showed him to her husband. He fell down again, and when he woke the caravan was out of sight. At the place where Masrur comes up with it the King's thumb went to the margin of the margin, found a word, and stayed on it; it was the eighth, came. I saw, and looked away.

The husband, who had begun to find the letters, took her silks and gave her hair-cloth, and her maids the same, and had three pairs of irons made; and the smith who was brought to put them on looked at her and could not. He begged the lightest pair for her and the heaviest for the maids; and going home that night he said some lines aloud about the chain on such a leg, which a judge in the road overheard, and sent for him. When he was sent back to bring her to the court, he made keys for the padlocks, and opened the door and the irons, and showed the three of them the way. I thought of the casket with seven padlocks on the first page of the Roll, and of the girl who got out of it every time the Jinni slept; and I did not write that on either sheet.

The two riders Shah Zaman had sent to Samarkand on the 826th night came back on the morning of the 856th, one on a lame horse, with a letter in the hand of the governor of Bukhara, the man he had made sit and watch him keep accounts for forty days. Shah Zaman read it in the Roll-room with his finger under the line. The state granaries on the Oxus were full of the last two harvests; there was no hunger on that side of the mountains; the governor had counted what could be spared and counted it again, and would send it: three hundred camel-loads in the first caravan and a second to follow, sixty days if the passes were clear and seventy if they were not. Then, in another tone, he added that the room Shah Zaman had shut after his wife was now the counting-room, and the ledgers were kept in it. Shah Zaman stopped there, and went on. "Sixty days," said the King. "Put it in the Open," he told my father. "As promised. Not as coming. Coming is what you can see on the road." My father wrote on his palm, across the rains. "I thought I had wasted forty days," said Shah Zaman. "No," said the King, and then, "Read the last part again," and Shah Zaman, who had meant to skip it, read it.

At the judge's house she told him she was no man's wife but a stranger, whom the man she was shackled to had carried a long way from home with her dead father's money; and he looked at her and asked if she would marry him, and she said yes. She went to the second and told him the same, and the third, and the fourth, none of whom knew of the others. In the morning, while the husband was at a bride-feast, she went to the court in her best silk, and the four of them looked at her: one dropped his pen, one's tongue stopped in his mouth, one made a mistake in his sum; and they sent four sergeants for the husband, who was dragged before them and said, "She is my wife." What they did to him then, and in the street afterwards, I leave out. They did not ask him whose the money was, or what he had done; they told him what to say, that she was no wife of his and the money hers, and he said it, and they gave her the money and the paper and sent him to the jail. "They did not ask him," said Sumayya. "Not one question," said my sister. "And her?" said the King. "Four times, lord. The same question." "Whether she would marry them." "Yes." "And not the other," said the King, and no one asked which.

That night she rode out with her maids in the dark, and rode three days and nights. The judges sat in their court next morning and waited, and she did not come. The chief of them mounted his mule to look, and in the street met the other three, each on his own mule, each looking; and when they had told one another what they were looking for, nobody said anything. Shah Zaman laughed first, one loud short laugh, and then the King, once, through his nose, and the nurse said, "Four," like a woman counting eggs. The chief judge lay down on his bed and made verses and sobbed one sob and died; the second did the same, with other verses; the third and fourth the book tells as it told the first and second, and does not say that anyone was sorry. "Men do not die of it," said the nurse. "No," said my sister. "In books they do." She had come meanwhile to a house of forty men who had sworn off women, and the head of them begged her to rest ten days, and sent the forty to her one by one with his messages, and each fell in love at the door and never named him; and on the ninth night she told her maids that she could not stand against forty men who each wanted her for himself, and they rode out in the last of the dark. The forty, finding the room empty, recited a verse apiece, and then, because they could not follow her, made an image of her and set it up among them. "A picture," said Sumayya. "It was not her," said the nurse. "Nobody asked her to sit." She left every place in this tale at the darkest hour, before it could be called morning; I noticed it on the second sheet, and drew a line through it.

She came home. Her sister Nasim brought back the stuffs that had been left with her, and Zayn al-Mawasif hung the curtains and burned aloes-wood and sent Hubub for Masrur, who had been walking up and down her street for forty days. They fell down together in the doorway, and when they came to themselves they sat down to sherbet and told one another everything from the first. Then a Kazi came, and a contract was written, and they were married; the book makes a ceremony of their faiths here, and I have said what I do with those. The husband, meanwhile, had been let out of the jail by the new judges and was three days from the city. Zayn al-Mawasif called Hubub. "Dig a grave in the burial-ground," she said, "and plant basil and jessamine on it and water it. If he comes and asks for me, say I died twenty days ago of grief for him; if he asks to see the tomb, take him, and weep before him, and put him in." Hubub said, I hear and obey. He came; he was told; he was taken to the grave, and wept, and said some lines about the two things for which the eyes should weep blood, and fell down in a swoon. "He was alive," my sister said, "and Hubub put him in," and said nothing more about it, and nobody asked her to. "That one is not empty," said the nurse. The King said nothing. I looked at my father; he was looking at his palm. "Put it in the Open," said the King at last. "What?" said Sumayya, who had the reed. "A grave with someone in it." She wrote it, and read the line back, as she does, and he said it was straight.

At the end of the 863rd night my sister began the next tale: a merchant of Cairo, and his son, who was asked by the sons of other merchants to go to a garden, and said he could not go without his father's leave, and went to ask it. The boy by the brick, who had three words and had never put two together, said "Ba," and then, after a count of three, "Gain," and looked at the King; and the King said, "Yes," and then, "Again," and got down on the floor with him. In the morning the rains in the north were a hundred and thirty-three days late. There were nineteen hundred at the north gate, and the fifth oven was laid. Yusuf, who was two hundred and thirteen days old, sat on the nurse's rug without her hand for as long as it took the King to count eleven, and then fell over sideways on his brother's shoe, and was not at all put out.

Night 863. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a merchant of Cairo named Taj al-Din, and his son, who asked leave to go to a garden, only begun; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, nineteen hundred at the gate, four ovens and a fifth, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a caravan from Samarkand, promised; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and thirty-three days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and thirteen days old, who sits; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Eight Hundred and Sixty-four to Eight Hundred and Eighty: A Rose for a Verse, and a Girdle a Night

Ali Nur al-Din was the son of the merchant Taj al-Din of Cairo, and when the sons of other merchants asked him to a garden he said he could not go without his father's leave, and asked, and his father said yes and gave him money. "He asked," said Sumayya, who had just read us the Open, the grave and all, in the voice she keeps for lists. "He did," said the King. "And he was given." It was a garden of every fruit the book could think of, each in two kinds, with a verse for each, and I give you the pomegranate and leave the rest; and a gardener who gave out roses only against verses, ten roses, ten young men, ten verses, which they made while Ali Nur al-Din watched. Then the wine. He said he had never drunk it and would not. The gardener said that God is forgiving; one of the young men swore by the divorce of his wife that Ali would, another said it was for his sake, a third that it would mend his heart, and when he said it was bitter they put sugar in the cup. He drank ten. He asked for music, and they fetched a girl with a lute, and what the book does with her I leave out.

On the 866th night the fifth oven in Coppersmiths' Row was lit, and by the 867th there were two thousand at the north gate. Hamid, so the boy who carries the loaves said, had asked for nothing, which my father took to mean that he would need something soon. In the Roll-room Yusuf, who was two hundred and eighteen days old, went on his stomach across the rug toward the brick, pulling with his elbows, a hand's breadth at a time, with the face of a man crossing a river; and the older boy took him by the ankle and brought him back, and did it four times, and then, because it was not working, lay down beside him and showed him the brick from close to. "Let them," said the King, when the nurse moved. Nobody moved again.

He rode home in the dark. His mother met him at the door and put her face to his and smelt the wine, and his father, who did not love wine-drinkers, came to his bed and smelt it too, and said, "Is folly come to such a pass with thee?" And Ali Nur al-Din, who was drunk, lifted his hand and struck his father in the face; the book says where, and what came of it, and I do not. His father, when they had brought him round, swore by the oath of divorce, which is the oath a man swears when he wants to be believed and puts his wife on it, that in the morning he would cut off his son's right hand. "He swore it by her," said the nurse. "She was in the room." "She had not been asked," said Sumayya. "She was the one who got him out," said my sister. "At dawn," said the King. "In the morning, lord." "Oaths sworn at night," said the nurse, "are mostly undone by morning." "By whom?" "By whoever swore them, if he wakes in time." "Yes," said the King. The mother waited until the father slept and the moon was up, and woke the boy, who was sober now, and told him what he had done and what was sworn. "Go," she said, and gave him a purse of a hundred dinars and told him to send word where he was. As he went he saw, on the edge of the chest, a second purse, a great one, of a thousand, which the book says she forgot. He took it, and tied both round his waist, and was out of Cairo by dawn. "She forgot it," said the King. "The book says so." "A woman who has just counted out a hundred," said the nurse, "does not forget a thousand by the same chest." "Write it forgotten," said the King. On the second sheet I wrote forgotten, and underneath, in the nurse's words, "no."

He went by ship to Rosetta and by boat to Alexandria, and walked in at the Gate of the Lote-tree, and an old man came down from his shop in the druggists' market and took him by the hand and led him home and fed him. Years before, in Cairo, the old man said, he had been short a thousand dinars on a purchase, and a merchant who did not know him had weighed it out and taken no paper; and the merchant was this boy's father. Ali Nur al-Din gave him the great purse to keep for him, and spent the hundred in the lanes, eating and walking and looking at the sea, and when it was gone went back to the shop for a little of his own money and found the old man out, and sat down in the shop to wait.

There came into the market a man of Persia on a mule with a girl behind him, and he gave her to the broker to cry; the broker set her on an ebony stool and lifted her veil, and the bidding went to nine hundred and fifty. The Persian asked whether she consented. He had been sick on the road, he said, and she had nursed him, and he had sworn not to sell her to anyone she did not approve; her sale was in her own hand. So the broker went to her and asked, and she said, "Show me the man." "He asked her," said Sumayya. "Before," said the nurse. "Yes," said the King. "Before." She was shown six. She sent each back with a verse about him, and the broker was cuffed at every stall, and I give you the dyed beard and the long beard and leave out the rest, because the rest is about what is wrong with the men's bodies, and I do not like to laugh at that. The King laughed once, at the beard, and stopped. "Write that down," he said. "In the Open?" said Sumayya. "No. It is not open." So on the second sheet, among the things the book does and I have changed, I wrote: a girl whose sale was put in her own hand. Then her eye fell on a young man in a striped coat sitting on a shop-bench in the middle of the merchants, and she took a ruby ring off her finger and gave it to the broker and said, "Take me to him."

Ali Nur al-Din said, when she asked why he did not bid, that if he had been in his own country he would have bought her with all he had; she said that if he would add one dinar to the price it would hearten her, though he did not buy, so that the merchants might say, he is a Cairene, he knows slave-girls. He said a thousand, and she said, "I sell myself to this young man for a thousand dinars," and the Kazi was fetched, and the paper written, before he understood that it was done. He paid out the thousand from the druggist's keeping and took her to the poor room the old man had lent him, and she looked round at the patched rugs and said it would do until he went home. He had nothing else; he borrowed fifty dirhams from the druggist, who said he would lend him up to ten times and after that would not return his greeting, and she sent him for silk of five colours at twenty dirhams and for bread and meat and wine and flowers with the rest. She cooked, and they ate; what the book gives the night I leave to the night. When he slept, she took out a pair of knitting needles and made a girdle.

In the morning she gave it to him and told him to sell it in the Persian bazaar for twenty dinars, and he said it could not be, a girdle of twenty dirhams' silk made in one night; and it fetched twenty dinars, money down. He paid the druggist his fifty and bought silk, and she made another. Every night she made a girdle and every morning he sold it, and they lived so for a year and a half. "Five hundred," said the nurse. I had five hundred and forty on the second sheet. "She kept none," said the King. "He sold one every morning, lord. She kept the money in a box, against need." "The money," said the King. "And the girdles went." "They went," said my sister. "I do not think she ever saw one again after it was finished." He put his thumb on the stroke for that night in the Roll, beside the straight line, and took it away. At the end of the year she made a kerchief of silk of six colours, which took a week of nights besides, and he wore it on his shoulders in the market, and people stopped to look, because there was not another like it in the world, and he took it for a thing that could only bring him good.

One night he woke and she was weeping. She said that parting was near, and told him how to know the man who would bring it: an old man with one eye and a limp. "Do not speak with him, do not buy from him or sell to him, do not return his greeting, though the law says you must," she said. He said that if he saw him he would kill him. "No," she said. "Do not do even that. Do nothing." "Do nothing," said the King, as a man reads aloud a line he has not met before. "She said it as if it were a thing he could do, lord," said my sister. "He could not," said the nurse. He could not. He fell asleep next morning on a shop-bench in the market with the end of the kerchief in his fist, and the old man with one eye and a limp sat down beside him with seven others and took the other end in his hand and turned it over. "She should have made it badly," said Shah Zaman. "She could not," said my sister. The King put his thumb on the stroke again, and this time left it.

Ali Nur al-Din woke and knew him and cried out. The old man asked who had made the kerchief; Ali Nur al-Din said his mother. He offered five hundred, six, nine, a thousand; Ali said no, for it was the only one; the merchants round them said that its price was a hundred at most, and nine hundred was profit, and told him to sell, and he was ashamed before them, and sold. The old man paid the thousand in front of them, and then said that he and the merchants must be his guests that night, for he had old wine and a fat lamb; and when Ali would have gone home to her they swore him by the divorce and held him back by main force. At the table they filled his cup and the old man asked, in the voice of a man making conversation, whether he would sell the girl he had bought a year and a half ago for a thousand dinars, for five thousand, for ten; and Ali, who was drunk, said before them all, "I sell her to thee for ten thousand," and the old man sent for a Kazi and witnesses. In the morning he counted out the ten thousand, and Ali Nur al-Din said, "I sold thee nothing; I have no slave-girl." And the merchants said, you did, and we are the witnesses; are you angry that you bought her for a thousand, and had a year and a half of her, and made ten thousand besides? Take the money. And he took it.

"They made him," said the nurse. "They swore him by the divorce, and they held him by force, and they made him drink." "There was a Kazi once," said the King, "who said that a divorce under compulsion is sanctioned by no school." "I remember him," said my father. "Is a sale?" "The schools differ, lord. And the Kazi who wrote this one was not asked." "Nor was Ali Nur al-Din," said the King. "The book does not say that he was," said my sister. "It is kept, lord," said my father, from his corner, and I saw the King look at him and look away. He did not say, as he says of other things, put it in the Open. I put it in myself.

All that night Miriam sat waiting, and the druggist's wife sat up with her and said he was surely with friends from Cairo; and in the morning she saw him come into the street behind the old man with one eye, in the middle of the merchants, and began to shake like a ship in a gale. "I told thee," she said. He wept; she kissed him between the eyes. The old man came in to kiss her hands, and she struck him on the cheek and said, "Thou hast followed me and followed me." He laughed, and swore by a name I leave out that if the boy had loved her he would not have sold her. Then the book says who she was. She was the daughter of a king across the sea; she had been sick, and vowed to visit a church on an island if she lived; and on the way the ships of the other side took her and all her ladies and sold them at Kairouan; and she was sold to a merchant of Persia who could not be a husband to any woman, and who set her to serve him. He fell ill, and she nursed him two months; and when he was well he said to her, "Ask a boon." She said, "Sell me only to the man of my choice." He taught her what he believed, and she learned it, and that, too, I leave where I have been leaving such things. "And he swore," said my sister, "and put her sale in her own hand." I did not look at the King, and he did not look at me, and the nurse bit off her thread.

The old man had a ship, and a mule with a silk canopy for her, and she was carried out by the sea-gate and rowed to the ship, and stood looking at Alexandria until it went under the sea; the book gives her a long poem for it, and I give you the first line. Ali Nur al-Din went back to the room and found her frame and the dress she had worn, and held them against him, and locked the door and ran to the shore, and stood looking at where the ship had been, and called her name. An old man came off a ship that lay there and asked whether he wept for the girl who had sailed yesterday with the man from over the sea; and Ali fell down. The old man was the captain of a ship bound for her city, with a hundred merchants in it. "Have patience," he said. "Three days, and I will bring thee to her, if God wills."

On the 880th night the rains in the north were a hundred and fifty days late, and there were twenty-three hundred at the north gate, and Hamid had asked for a sixth oven. My father held up his palm to show the King that it was full. "Use the other hand," said the King. He turned the other hand over and wrote on the back of it, and looked at the number for some time, and put both hands in his sleeves.

Night 880. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a young man on a quay in Alexandria, who sold what he did not mean to sell, and a ship that sails in three days, only begun; a father's oath, sworn at night, to cut off a hand in the morning; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, twenty-three hundred at the gate, five ovens and a sixth asked for, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a caravan from Samarkand, promised; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and fifty days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and thirty days old, who crawls; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Eight Hundred and Eighty-one to Eight Hundred and Ninety-four: A Hundred Heads, and a Man Who Always Went to Fetch Something

The captain's ship, with a hundred merchants in it, and Ali Nur al-Din, sailed fifty-one days, and was taken off the coast of the city across the sea by the king's cruisers, which had been scouring those waters ever since his daughter came home and took every ship that came from our side. They were paraded before him and put in a cellar; and a day later the galleon came in with Miriam, and the king rode down and took her in his arms, and her mother asked her, privately, whether she was as she had been. She said she was not: she had been sold from merchant to merchant, and one had beaten her and forced her, and the next. I do not say whether it was true; the book does not. "What else could she say?" said Sumayya. "Nothing," said the nurse. "And they asked for a hundred." The queen told the king, and the king told his grandees, and the grandees said that nothing would make her clean again but the heads of a hundred men from our side of the sea. "How many?" said the King. "A hundred, lord." "For what she said." "For what they thought she meant," said my sister. They sent for the prisoners. What was done I leave out, and the book does not leave out one head: it goes down the rug man by man, beginning with the captain, and my sister told it in a single breath and stopped, and the nurse put down her mending.

There was one left. Ali Nur al-Din was already blindfolded at the rug when an old woman, the keeper of a church, came up to the king and reminded him that he had vowed five captives to every church if his daughter were restored; and the king, who had one man left, said, take him. She led him to the church and gave him a black gown and set him to sweeping. On the seventh day she told him to put on his own clothes and take ten dirhams and go out, because the king's daughter was coming to the church that day with four hundred ladies, who would cut him to pieces if they found him. He walked all day round the city and learned its gates, and came back at dusk; and the princess came, and he saw her, and cried her name before four hundred. The ladies ran at him with swords. "Leave him," said Miriam. "He is mad." And he rolled his eyes and foamed at the mouth and twisted his legs, and I think it was the first thing in the book he had done well. "He had been drunk," said Shah Zaman. "He knew how it is done." That night she stayed behind alone, she said, to pray in the chapel, and when her ladies slept she went to him where he sat on live coals, and told him: tomorrow, when the first third of the night is gone, go to the offering-chest and take what is light, open the door to the tunnel and go down to the sea; there is a little ship with ten men; when the captain puts out his hand, give him yours; and do not sleep.

The captain was a tall old man with a long beard, and when one of the sailors said that the king meant to sail in this ship himself in the morning to guard his daughter, he struck the man down, and so with the rest, all ten; and told Ali Nur al-Din to haul up the mooring-stake; and Ali did, and stood shaking, and was not told why. I leave out the ten. At dawn the captain took hold of his long beard, and it came off in his hand. "It was she," said my sister. "She had got the captain's place and his beard by a way I leave out, and she stuck it on her face." The King laughed. "Another beard," said Shah Zaman. "It is a book of beards," said the nurse. They sailed with a fair wind and came to Alexandria in the book's usual space of a sentence, and Ali Nur al-Din tied the ship to the quay and left her in it and went up into the city to borrow a veil and a mantle and walking boots from the druggist's wife.

"He left her in the ship," said the nurse. "For the length of a street," said my sister. "He went for a veil." "He is always going for something," said Sumayya. In the time it takes to borrow a veil, the king, who had missed his daughter at daybreak and found ten dead men on the shore and the postern open and the ship gone, had sent his captain of the port after her on pain of a foul death; and the captain asked the old woman at the church where the prisoner was from, and she said Alexandria. They came in at the very hour Ali went ashore, and took the empty ship with one person in it, and sailed home without drawing a sword. The king, when his daughter was brought to him, said, "Thou liest, O whore"; she had told him she was carried off by robbers and had talked them round. He bade crucify her over the palace gate. At those words the King took Yusuf from the nurse's lap, which he does not do at that hour, and held him against his shoulder until the one-eyed Wazir, who had wanted her all along, came in and asked for her to wife: he would build her a palace with walls no thief could climb, and when it was finished he would cut the throats of thirty men from our side of the sea before its gate. And they married her to him.

Ali Nur al-Din came back with the veil and the mantle and the boots, and the ship was gone. The people on the shore told him, and reproached him, and one said, why did you not bring her up without a mantle? and each said a hard word, and one said, let him be, he has enough. The druggist found him in a faint and said, praised be God, you have lost nothing; you have gained by her. "He had nine thousand dinars," said Shah Zaman. "He did not want them," said my sister. He took the first ship going to her country, and was taken by the same cruisers, with a hundred more, and brought to the same king, who had them killed one after another and left him to the last because he was young and slight. What was done, again, I leave out; the nurse did not put down her mending, having put it down once. The king knew him and said, "Thou art Nur al-Din." "My name is Ibrahim," he said. They sent for the old woman, to see; and meanwhile the one-eyed Wazir came to the king and said his palace was finished and he had need of his thirty, and the king said he had only this one, take him; and the painters said they had two days' work still to do, and he was put in the stables, in chains, to wait.

There were two stallions, brothers, that the kings of the islands would have given an island to steal, one white as silver and one black as night; and one had a film over his eyes. The king had given him to the Wazir to cure, and he stood in the stable where Ali Nur al-Din lay chained, and the other neighed for him until the whole house shook; and the Wazir told the king, and the king said, "If this, which is but a beast, cannot bear to be parted from his brother, how should it be with those that have reason?" and sent the other stallion too. "I have a brother," said Shah Zaman to the nurse. "We know," said the nurse. The King said nothing. He was looking at the older boy, who had hold of the younger one by the ankle again, to bring him back from the brick. Ali Nur al-Din knew something of horses. He thought: I will say I can cure it, and spoil its eyes, and they will kill me and I shall be at rest. So he took glass, ground fine, and lime, and onion-juice, and bound it on the horse's eyes; and in the morning the film was gone and the eyes were finer than before. The Wazir took off his chains with his own hand and made him master of the horse.

The Wazir's new palace had a lattice over the stable-yard, and his daughter, sitting at it, heard the master of the horse singing in the night, and told the princess, whom the Wazir had married and not touched, because he had sworn not to until the palace was built. The princess came to the lattice and looked down; and he, who had seen nothing for a month but a horse, looked up and said, "That is the voice of the Lady Miriam." She threw him a letter in a kerchief: when the first third of the night is past, saddle the two stallions and bring them to the city gate; if anyone asks, say you are exercising them; and do not sleep. That evening she gave the Wazir wine, and in it a pastille of which, the book says, an elephant would sleep a year; and he fell on his face on the carpet. She filled two saddle-bags with what was light to carry and heavy in worth, and put on armour, and went to the gate. Ali Nur al-Din was at the gate with the halters in his hands, and slept.

"Again," said the nurse. "He had waited all the first third," said Sumayya. "He slept," said the King. A man whom the kings of the islands had been paying for years to steal those stallions came by that night, and found the horses untied and the master asleep with the halters in his fist, and took them off his hands; and Miriam, coming up in the dark with the saddle-bags, took the thief for Ali, and handed them to him, and he laid them on the horses, and they rode out of the gate in silence, till she said, "What ails thee that thou art silent?" and he answered in a voice that was not Ali's. The book describes him for six lines by his colour, and I leave out the six lines. She killed him with one blow, and rode back, and found Ali asleep and snoring where she had left him, and woke him with a cuff. "Did I not tell thee not to sleep?" "My heart was cooled by thy promise," he said. And they rode out of the city.

In the morning the king came with gifts to give the bride and bridegroom good-day, and found the Wazir on the carpet in a drugged sleep; and when he had been waked, and said he knew nothing, the king drew his sword and killed him where he sat. Then he called his three sons and mounted with all his knights, and followed the tracks, and found the two in a green valley, where they had stopped to eat. "And how is thy heart for a fight?" she asked Ali. "As steadfast as a stake in bran," he said, and recited some lines about the mouse, at which Shah Zaman laughed. She told him to keep behind her and she would keep him from harm; and one after another her three brothers rode out at her, each after the king had told him to offer her the old faith before he killed her, and she killed each of them, the eldest first. The King put his hand over the older boy's ear; he had not been told to; and he took it away when she had said the third. The knights fled. The king turned back to his city, and wrote to the Caliph.

He wrote to Harun al-Rashid that his daughter had been stolen by a captive of our side, and asked for her back, and promised half of a great city for the trouble. The Caliph wrote to every governor. Ali Nur al-Din and Miriam, who knew nothing of it, rode into Damascus, where the governor's men were waiting, and were sent on to Baghdad. The Caliph looked at her and at him. He asked Ali his story and said, "How manifold are the sufferings that men suffer!" Then he asked her what she said, and she said what she believed, at some length, and I leave it out. "Art thou willing," said the Caliph, "that this young man be thy husband?" "How should I not be willing," she said, "who was bought by him with his money, and kept with kindness, and ventured for with his life, many times?" "He asked her," said Sumayya. "That is the third," said my sister. "The Persian, the broker, the Caliph." "Write it on the other sheet," said the King. So the Caliph married them. Then the king's envoy, who had come to Baghdad for her, said that if she were not given back his master would send an army by land and sea; and the Caliph ordered his head struck off; and Miriam said, do not soil your sword, and did it herself. The Caliph, who admired her forearm, gave them robes and a house.

In time Ali Nur al-Din longed for his mother and father, and the Caliph gave him leave and letters to the emirs of Cairo, and they went home, and his parents met him and Miriam and honoured her; and they lived in the house with gifts coming in from emirs and merchants, eating and drinking, until the Destroyer of Delights came. The book says nothing about a hand. It says nothing about an eye, either; I leave out the eye, which the book gives once, early, and never again. "The oath," said the King. "By the divorce of his wife," said my father, from his corner, and the room turned toward him, because he had not spoken in this tale. "By the law, lord, a man who swears so to do a thing, and does not do it, has divorced her; she is divorced when the time he named has passed. If he swore to cut the hand at morning and the morning passed and the hand was whole, then at morning his wife was divorced by his own oath." "Could he take her back?" said the nurse. "During the waiting time, lord, he could." "If he asked," said Sumayya. "If he asked her," said my father. "The book does not say that he did." "She woke the boy," said the King. "She knew the oath. She knew what it did." "Yes, lord," said my father. The King put his thumb on the seventh word, hands. "Put it in the Open." "What?" said Sumayya, who had the reed. "A woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand," said the King, "and whether she was asked back." I wrote it, and struck out the line before it about the father's oath, which was the same line seen from the other side.

At the foot of the part of the tale that I had left out I had kept a count on the second sheet, as I did in the Sindbad, of the dead; it came to two hundred and fifteen. I did not read it out. On the 894th night the rains in the north were a hundred and sixty-four days late, and there were twenty-six hundred at the north gate, and Hamid's sixth oven was lit; and Yusuf, who was two hundred and forty-four days old, took hold of the brick with both hands and pulled himself up on it, and stood, for as long as it took the King to say "Ba," which is not his word to say, and then sat down hard. The older boy clapped. At the end of the night my sister began a tale that the Prefect of Cairo used to tell, of an old man in Upper Egypt who was asked where the mother of his children came from.

Night 894. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: an old man of Upper Egypt, who was asked where the mother of his children came from, only begun; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, twenty-six hundred at the gate, six ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a caravan from Samarkand, promised; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and sixty-four days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and forty-four days old, who stands; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Eight Hundred and Ninety-five to Nine Hundred and One: Two Purses Still Tied, and a Third Child

The Prefect of Cairo said that he lay one night in the house of a man of Upper Egypt, very old, with small children; and when they asked him where their mother came from, the old man said she was a captive of the great war, and that he had a rare adventure with her. He had sowed flax, and the price at home was bad, and people told him to take it to Acre, where there was a buyer. In the market at Acre a woman came to buy flax, with her face uncovered, as the women of that place go, and he was easy with her about the price, and she came back, and he was easier. She walked with an old woman, to whom he said that he was sick with love; and the old woman said it could be done, if no one knew but the three of them, and if he were lavish. He paid her fifty dinars. He made ready his house, which looked on the sea, and spread a bed on the roof, for it was summer, and the woman came, and they ate and drank, and it grew dark. They lay under the sky with the moon on them, and watched the stars shaking in the water; and he said to himself that he was ashamed before the sea. The book has a name for what he was ashamed before, and I say the sea, which is also in the book. He did not touch her. She got up at dawn in a rage and left.

He walked to his shop and sat, and presently she passed, as bright as the moon, with the old woman, who was angry too; and he thought: who are you, that you should refuse her, a saint? So he ran after the old woman and said, bring her again, and she said she would not come back for less than a hundred; and he paid, and the woman came a second night, and again he came to himself and refrained. The third time the old woman asked five hundred, and he decided to spend the whole price of his flax; and before he could, the crier went through the town to say that the truce between the two sides had run out and that everyone from his country had a week to be gone. So he sold what he could, and went to Damascus with a heart full of love for a woman he had paid for and not had, and traded in slave-girls for three years, to ease it. Then the war came, and the Sultan won, and took the cities back, and sent to him for a girl, and bought one, and owed him ten dinars, and there was no money in the treasury that day, having been spent on the war; so they said, take him to the captives and let him choose one for the ten. He went in, and among the women of the other side he saw her.

"He paid three times and did not," said Sumayya. "Four, if you count the ten," said Shah Zaman. "That is a poor merchant," said the nurse. "Or a good one," said Sumayya. The King said, "He paid to be asked to come again." Nobody asked him what he meant. She was another man's wife, a knight's; he chose her; he said to her, "Do you know me?" and she said no; and he told her who he was, the flax-merchant of Acre, whom she had told that he would not see her again except for five hundred; and now she was his for ten. The book has her say a thing then about his faith, and take it for her own, and I leave it out. What he did, the book says, is this: he would not go in to her until he had set her free and had the Kazi write the marriage. And then she conceived. When the war was ended, an envoy came from her king to ask for the captives back, and they were all returned except her, and the envoy asked where she was; and she was brought before the Sultan, and the envoy, and said, as they could see by her middle, that she was with child, and was his, and they should have no more profit of her. The envoy said, take thy wife and go. And then he ran after the man, and said that her mother had sent a chest for her, because her daughter was a captive and naked. He brought it home and she opened it, and found her clothes, and on top of them the two purses, the fifty and the hundred, which he had given the old woman for her, tied still with his own tying.

"She kept them," said the nurse. "Tied," said the King. "Three years," said Shah Zaman. "Untouched, the book says, lord," said my sister. "It is a long way for a purse to go." "It came home," said the King. He asked nothing more, and we went on.

The next tale was a short one, of a ruined man of Baghdad and his slave-girl. He was a man of condition who spent everything on a girl he loved and who loved him, till there was nothing left. He did not know what to do; the girl did. "Sell me," she said. "Someone rich will buy me, and I will find a way back to you." He took her to the market, and a gentleman of Basra bought her for fifteen hundred dinars; and when he had the money the young man repented, and wept, and asked to cancel, and the buyer would not. He sat in a mosque with the bag of gold under his head, and slept; and when he woke, the bag was gone, and his feet were tied with a rope. He threw himself into the Tigris, and they pulled him out. An old man took him home and sat with him until he was calmer, and a friend gave him fifty dinars and told him to go to Wasit, where he had family; and at the river a ship was loading, and the sailors would not take a gentleman, so he bought a sailor's clothes and sat with the crew. Then the girl came aboard, with two women, and after her the gentleman of Basra, who had bought her.

The gentleman fed her at his own table, and asked her how long she meant to go without singing; and the young man, in sailor's clothes in the bows, knew what she suffered for love of him. They hung a curtain along the gunwale and the gentleman sat with his friends before it, and wine was brought, and they pressed her to sing. She tuned the lute and sang two lines about a camp left empty, and wept, and threw it down; and he fell down in a faint, and they thought he was possessed, and a page said, why have you taken this madman aboard? and the sailors said they would put him ashore at the next village. That evening, while the others were on the bank, he went behind the curtain, and took the lute, and tuned it in the manner that he had taught her, and nobody else would know, and went back to his place. When they came on board, and the moon was bright on the river, the gentleman said, do not spoil our evening. She took the lute, and drew a breath, and said, "By God, my master and teacher is in this ship." The gentleman said he would be glad to hear him. The sailors said they had brought no one. The young man laughed, and said, "Yes, I am her master, who taught her when I was her lord," and she said from behind the curtain, "That is my lord's voice."

"She knew the lute," said the nurse. "She knew how it was tuned," said Sumayya. "And she did not say so," said Shah Zaman. "She said it was her master. That is saying so." "In the book it is the lute," said my sister. The gentleman of Basra, who had not touched her, nor even heard her sing before that day, wept with the rest when he had the story; he said he had bought her only to hear singing in Baghdad and had not known; he would free her at Basra and marry her to him, and settle money on them, on one condition: that when he wanted music a curtain should be hung and she sing behind it, and the young man should be of his company. So they drank and sang the rest of the way, and at a landing-place they all got off, and the young man, who was drunk, sat down on his heels and fell asleep; and the ship went on without him, for they were drunk too, and no one missed him. He woke in the sun with nobody there. He had given the girl his money, and he had forgotten to ask the gentleman's name or where he lived.

On the 898th night, at the foot of the bed, with the sand-glass in her hand, my sister said before she began, "There will be a third." No one had said it. I had known since the cold of the 870s, and the nurse longer; and I had not written it in the Roll, which is kept for what is said. The King, I think, had known as he knows the number of loaves. He was on the floor with the older boy, and he did not look up. "When?" "The nurse says about the 990th." "That is a number," said the King. "I am counting," said my sister. He looked up then. "Again," he said. "There will be a third." "Again." "There will be a third." He took Yusuf, who was standing at the brick with both hands, under the arms and held him up against the lamp, as one holds up a cup to see whether it is full. Then he said, "Put it in the Open." "It is not open, lord," said Sumayya. "It is, until it comes," said my sister. I wrote: a third child, not yet.

The young man took a ship to Basra and knew nobody there, and did not know the gentleman's house. He sat down by a grocer who needed a clerk, and wrote out his accounts so well that in a month the grocer's takings were up and his expenses down, and in a year the grocer gave him his daughter and a partnership in the shop. He lived in the grocer's house two years with a broken heart, and would not drink, and one day, the day the singers and dancers of the town go out to eat on the river bank, he went with them, because he thought he might see her; and the boatman of the old ship was going along the bank, and knew him, and took him up. "We thought you had fallen in the river," they said. They told him: when she knew he was lost she tore her clothes and burned the lute, and when they came to Basra she put on black and made a tomb beside the house and stayed in it, and said she would not sing again. They took him to her. She cried out, he thought she had died, and he held her; and the gentleman freed her and married her to him, and settled five hundred dinars a month, on the old terms. The young man went to the grocer and told him what had happened, and begged him to hold him blameless for divorcing his daughter, without any fault of hers; and paid her dowry. "Well," he said at the end, "the Bountiful loaded us with the gifts of good fortune."

"She made her own tomb," said Sumayya. "A tomb with someone in it." "She chose it," said the King. "Do I cross out the other?" I said. "No," said the King. "It is a different grave. She was waiting in that one." "Two years," said the nurse. "And he in the grocer's," said Shah Zaman. "And the grocer's daughter?" said the King. "He begged the father to hold him blameless," said my sister. "And paid her dowry." "He asked her father." "Yes, lord." "Not her." "The book says he told the grocer, lord." "Told," said the King. "Put her in the Open." I wrote: a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked.

The next tale my sister began on the 899th night, near the dawn: that in the land of Hind there was a mighty king, Jali'ad, who had two-and-seventy kings under him and three hundred and fifty judges in his cities, and whose chief minister, Shimas, was two-and-twenty years old; and who had no child. The King of Hind dreamed that he poured water on the roots of a tree with many trees about it, and fire came out of the tree and burned up all that grew round it. He woke in terror and sent for Shimas, who bowed his head, and smiled, and said that it promised a son. But there was something more, he said, that he did not wish to explain at that hour. The King sent for the interpreters of the realm; and one of them said that Shimas knew the whole, but would not trouble his lord's rest; and that the son would not govern as his father did, but would oppress, and something would befall him that befell the mouse with the cat. And my sister told the Mouse and the Cat: that a cat, on a wet night, weak with cold, came to the door of a mouse's nest and begged him to let her in, a stranger and wretched; and the mouse said, thou art my natural foe, and the cat swore by God that she could not hurt him, she had no strength; and he took pity, and dragged her in, and she lay in the nest till she was rested, and then crept round to the door of it, and when the mouse would have gone out as usual, she seized him. He cried out, "Where are the oaths thou swarest?" And a hunter came by with his hounds, and one of them put his head into the nest, and took her by the neck.

"He let her in," said Sumayya. "He did right," said the King. "He nearly died of it," said the nurse. "He did right, and nearly died," said the King. "That is how it goes." "The dog came," said Shah Zaman. "The dog came," said my sister. "The book says, who has compassion shall be compassionated." "Does it?" said the King. "It says it," said my sister. On the 901st night the rains in the north were a hundred and seventy-one days late, and my father had run out of back of the hand and begun on the wrist; the lower market sold its last sack of wheat on the 899th, and the King's mill was eating its own stock, and Hamid had asked for a seventh oven. There were twenty-eight hundred at the north gate. Yusuf, who was two hundred and fifty-one days old, let go of the brick with one hand and took a step sideways along it, and the older boy said "Yu," and the King said nothing, and did not move, as a man does not move when a bird comes down near him.

Night 901. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a king of Hind who dreamed he watered the roots of a tree, and the mouse and the cat, only begun; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, twenty-eight hundred at the gate, six ovens and a seventh asked for, and the last sack of wheat in the lower market; a caravan from Samarkand, promised; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and seventy-one days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and fifty-one days old, who takes a step; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Nine Hundred and Two to Nine Hundred and Seventeen: A Jar of Butter, the Oldest Granary, and a Door with Writing on It

A few months after the dream, the woman the King of Hind loved best told him that the child had stirred, and he sent for Shimas and said, "My dream is come true, and I have my wish. What sayest thou?" And Shimas said nothing. "What ails thee," said the King, "that thou dost not rejoice with me?" Shimas prostrated himself and said that there are three things of which it does not become the understanding to speak until they are accomplished: the traveller, until he is home; the man in the fight, until he has beaten his enemy; and the pregnant woman, until she has cast her burden. My sister told it on the 901st night, looking at the lamp. "Three," said the nurse. "Three," said my sister. "I did not choose it. It is next." "I have been counting," said the King. "Once," said Sumayya. "Aloud, once." "Once is a count," said the nurse.

For he who speaks of a thing before it is, said Shimas, is like the Fakir with the jar of butter. A Fakir was given every day three scones and a little butter and honey by a rich man, and saved the butter in a jar, which he hung over his bed. Sitting up one night with his staff, he thought: I shall sell the butter and buy an ewe, and the ewe will bear a ram-lamb and an ewe-lamb, and those will bear; and I shall sell the males and buy cows, and buy land, and build a palace, and hold a wedding the like of which was never seen. And I shall have a son. I shall teach him philosophy, and bid him do good, and he will not gainsay me; and if I see him disobey, I shall come down on him with this staff. So saying, he raised the staff, and struck the jar, and the butter ran down into his beard. The King said nothing for a while. He had Yusuf on his knee. "He raised the stick," he said, "before there was a ewe." "Yes, lord." "It is the first thing they plan," said the nurse. "The stick." "Not always," said my sister. "Often," said the nurse.

On the 903rd night Shimas gave the second tale, to show that God answers: a pond shrank until there was barely water for the fishes in it, and they went to the Crab, who was the oldest, and asked what they should do. The Crab said they lacked understanding, to despair of God's mercy; the daily bread of every creature was fixed before it was made; let each of them clear his conscience, and ask, and have patience, and if death came they would be at rest, and if there were cause to flee, they would flee. And in a few days there was a violent rain, and the pond was fuller than before. "Because it rained," said the King. "Yes, lord." "It might not have." "Then they would have died, lord," said my sister, "and the book would have put another fish." "The Crab said have patience." "The Crab had no granary," said Shah Zaman. No one expected the King to laugh, and he did not; he looked at my father, who had the number on his wrist and the figures in his sleeve. The King's mill, my father said, had eleven days of flour and the kitchens nine; the lower market had no wheat to sell; Hamid said he could bake from anything that came to him, but not from nothing. "Open the oldest granary," said the King. "A tenth." "The oldest is the sixth year's corn, lord. It is from the hill." "Then it will be eaten first." "You said not to touch it." "I said so on the 660th night. This is the 903rd." "Yes, lord." "Hamid says that grain is a thing that keeps," said the nurse, "and bread is a thing that goes off." "Then send him the one that keeps," said the King, "and let him make the other."

The first carts came down from the hill on the 905th night, twenty of them, with the seal on every sack; my father counted them in at the gate and Hamid counted them out. On the 906th a loaf from the sixth year's corn came to the palace on a board. "It tastes of the hill," said the nurse. "It tastes of having been kept," said the King, and ate the heel of it, and gave the crust to Yusuf, who had been waiting for it with his mouth open, and who put it in his mouth, and looked at the ceiling like a man who is told a thing he has been expecting.

The next nights gave the rest of the seven ministers: a crow and a serpent; a jackal who envied a jackal; a king who stripped a pilgrim of his gown and was burned, with his city, when the pilgrim prayed in the jail; a hawk; a charmer's wife who opened the basket; a spider and the wind. I give you two. The crows had lost their king and could not agree on another, so they decided that whichever flew highest should reign, and they all rose, and each thought himself the highest, until the lowest said, look up, and above them was a hawk. So they made the hawk king. And every day he took a company of them to a cave and ate them, and when the rest came to complain he tore ten of their chiefs in pieces in front of them and called them the murderers. "They chose the highest," said Shah Zaman. "It is how it is done." "It is how it is done," said the King. The spider had built in a high gate and was content, and a wind blew her out into the sea, and she upbraided the wind; and the wind said that this world is a house of trials, and that she should wait, and when it changed carried her home, and she knew her place and clung to it. "Not all go back," said the nurse. "No," said my sister. "The book says she did."

On the 908th night the child was born, and the King named him Wird Khan; and when he was twelve he built him a palace of three hundred and sixty rooms, and put three sages in it with orders to teach him in a different room each day, and write on the door of each room what had been taught there. "On the door," said Sumayya. "A door with writing on it," said Shah Zaman, looking at no one. The sages reported every seventh day. By twelve and a half the boy knew more than any of them, and the King, who could not wait, told Shimas to call the learned of the realm and put the boy to the question.

Shimas asked him a hundred things before them all, about this world and the other, and the body and the soul; I put on the second sheet that my sister gave the questions fast, as one pays out coins, and that the answers are in the book. Of the Prince's two pictures I give you these. A blind man and a cripple begged together, and were let into a garden on condition that they did no waste; the cripple wanted fruit he could not reach, and the blind man could not see it; so the cripple climbed on the blind man's back and guided him to the trees, and they stripped the garden; and when the master asked what they had done, they said they had no means, and he said, I know that you carried the cripple, O blind, and he showed the way. "The cripple knows where the fruit is," said the nurse, "and the blind one has the legs." "And both are beaten," said Sumayya. "That is the body and the soul," said my sister. "The book says the blind one is the body." "It is a garden," said the King. Nobody knew what he meant, and I wrote nothing on either sheet.

Then Shimas asked what a Wazir owes his King; and the Prince said, good counsel, in public and private, and the keeping of secrets, and to tell his lord all he has a right to know, and not to climb to a rank that the King thinks him unworthy of, like the hunter who made friends with a lion, and trusting its gentleness mounted it to skin it, and was torn in pieces. And if the King is a tyrant, said Shimas? Then the Wazir must show him the way of justice, and warn him of the punishment; and if the King will hear him, his end is gained; and if not, there is nothing for it but to leave him with courtesy, because in parting there is ease for each. My father, in his corner, did not move. The King did not look at him. "That is the book," said my father, after a while, to nobody. "Yes," said the King. "I have not parted," said my father. "No," said the King. That was all; and my sister, who had stopped, went on.

On the 912th night Yusuf, who was two hundred and sixty-two days old, let go of the brick with both hands and walked from it to the King, six steps, with his arms out and holding nothing, while the older boy, who held nothing either, stood and watched with his mouth open. The King did not put out a hand. He sat with his hands a little off the floor, and when the child arrived, he put one thumb on the eighth word in the margin of the margin, came, and one on the ninth, Yusuf, and said nothing at all. The older boy said, "Yu. Ba." The nurse said something to the cats.

When the Prince was seventeen King Jali'ad sickened, and called him, and told him to keep ten precepts: when wroth, to curb wrath; when afflicted, to be patient; to speak soothfast; to perform what he promised; to do justice in judgment; to be merciful in power; to deal generously with his governors; to forgive his foes; to be lavish of good offices to his adversary; and to stay his mischief from him. And ten more, for the people: when thou dividest, be just; when thou punishest, oppress not; fulfil thine engagement; hearken to those that give thee loyal counsel; when offence is offered, neglect it; abstain from contention; enjoin the laws; abate ignorance with a sharp sword; withhold thy regard from treachery; and do equal justice, so that the great and small love thee and the wicked fear. Sumayya counted on her fingers. "Twenty," she said. "Which have I kept?" said the King. It was not a question for the room, and the room answered it. "When thou hast power, be merciful," said the nurse. "Not all." "No," said the King. "When thou punishest, oppress not," said my sister, and no one said anything. "Forgive thy foes." "The eight," said Sumayya. "Hearken to those that give thee loyal counsel," said Shah Zaman, and looked at my father. "Abate ignorance with a sharp sword," said Sumayya. "I should skip that one," said the nurse. "Skip it," said the King. "Perform what thou promisest," said my sister. I did not look up. "That one," said the King, "I have not yet been asked to keep." I wrote nothing; I heard the nurse's needle stop.

Then Jali'ad died, and they buried him and put the crown on his son; and for a little while the young king governed as his father had, until the world waylaid him. The book says so in those words. He began to send for every beauty he heard of and take her, until he had more women than Solomon; he shut himself up with a company of them for a month at a time, and did not go out, nor look into the complaints of his people, and if they wrote to him he did not answer. The grandees met in secret and said that some calamity would come, and went to Shimas, saying, thou art the chiefest and the wisest of us; go and speak with him. Shimas asked a page to ask leave for him to go in, and the page said that for a month no one had seen the King's face, and told him to find the slave who carried the King's food from the kitchen, a man the book describes by his colour, which I leave out. Shimas sat at the kitchen door until the man came, and asked him, when the King had eaten and his temper was at its best, to say that Shimas was at the door.

On the 917th night the rains in the north were a hundred and eighty-seven days late, and there were thirty-two hundred at the north gate, and Hamid's seventh oven was lit and an eighth asked for; the carts from the hill had come down every day for twelve days, and the Vizier had written the count of them on the inside of his left arm, where the sleeve covers it. My sister stopped with Shimas at the kitchen door, and the dawn was at the window; and the King said nothing, and let her.

Night 917. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a wazir at a kitchen door, waiting to speak to a king who has not been seen in a month, only begun; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, thirty-two hundred at the gate, seven ovens and an eighth asked for, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread, baking from the sixth year's corn; a caravan from Samarkand, promised; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains a hundred and eighty-seven days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and sixty-seven days old, who walks; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Nine Hundred and Eighteen to Nine Hundred and Thirty-one: The Last Story Wins, Three Hundred and Five Camels, and a Name Said with the Bread

On the 918th night the slave took the King his dinner, and when his temper was at its best said that Shimas was at the door, and Shimas was let in. He said that the King had been given, by God, learning and wisdom beyond any king before him, and that he was forgetting his father's charge and the people's complaints; and he told him of a fisherman who went out to the river, and saw a big fish from the bridge, and took off his clothes and plunged in after it, and caught it, and found himself far from the bank; and would not let go of the fish, but floated with it into a whirlpool from which no one comes out. The keepers of the river ran along the shore and cried to him, "Throw away what is in thy hand and save thyself!" And he would not, or could not, and went down with it. "He should have let go," said the King. "He did, lord," said Shah Zaman, "at the last." "Too late." My sister said that the book has the fisherman say, as he went down, that it was he who had left the plain way where there was safety, for concupiscence. "And the King of Hind?" said Sumayya. "He said he would come out and sit in judgment the next day."

He did not. A woman he loved best said that the Wazirs were duping him, so that he should have no joy of his kingship but spend his life warding off their troubles, like the boy and the thieves: seven thieves who found an orphan and fed him and set him to climb a walnut tree and shake it down for them, and when the owner of the garden came they said it was the boy's tree, and the boy was punished and had not had a nut. The next day Shimas came with a camel that broke free while its master was admiring its milk, and a man who took his wife into his garden, which I give you by its title only; the favourite answered with a merchant who trusted a doctor who gave him a purge, and a stronger purge, and the third time a poison; and Shimas with the jackals who made a wolf their judge and found that he kept the whole camel; and she with a shepherd who gave up his sheep one by one to a lion that was stuffed with straw. The shape was always the same. "They are fighting with stories," said Shah Zaman. "Whoever tells the last one wins," said the nurse. "He decided each time," said Sumayya, "after the last one." "Who tells the last one here?" said the King. "The mistress," said Sumayya. "She does not let anyone else," said the nurse.

On the 921st night, at first light, a rider came down the north road at a gallop to say that camels had been seen from the post-house at the second milestone, a long file of them, coming in under red dust, with a standard that was not ours. We all went up to the roof of the Roll-room, except my sister, whom the nurse would not let climb the stair: the King, with Yusuf on his arm, Shah Zaman, my father, Sumayya, and I; the older boy had hold of the King's coat. The north road was grey with people, as it has been since the winter, on both sides; and down the middle of it, where they had made a lane, came the camels, in a file as long as the road, each led by a man with a cloth over his face against the dust, and the dust was not grey but red. Sumayya counted aloud. My father counted under his breath and wrote on his arm. "Three hundred and four," they said together, and then, "No, five." The grey people did not shout. Some of them knelt. "Coming is what you can see on the road," said the King. "It is on the road, lord," said my father. "Strike it." I took the Open and drew a line through a caravan from Samarkand, promised, and wrote: come. Shah Zaman's hand was over his eyes, as it was when the child laughed. The King stayed on the roof until the last camel had gone in at the gate and Hamid's boys had run out to meet the first sack. Then he went down the stair and stood at the foot of the bed with his hands open and told my sister what he had seen, from the beginning, in the order he had seen it: the rider, and the dust, and the cloth over the faces, and the people who did not shout. It was the first time I had heard him tell anything from the start. "You left out the dust," said the nurse. "I did not," said the King.

On the 922nd night the favourite told the King to do away with the Wazirs, all of them, beginning with Shimas, who was the head of the matter; and the King sent for ten slaves, big men who had been his father's, and told them to stand beside him with their eyes on his hand; and the next day he sat in the Divan with the Book of law-cases on his knee and had the herald proclaim that anyone who had business with the King might come, and the Wazirs and the Prefects and the Chamberlains came, in their ranks, one by one, and Shimas first, as the Grand Wazir always does. "As the Grand Wazir does," said my father, from his corner. "I know the custom," said the King. I leave out what was done in the next room and to whom, in the order they came; the book is careful to say that it was done in order, and that the common people, who had no valour, were sent home. My father had his sleeve over the number on his arm. He did not ask my sister to go on faster, and he did not ask her to stop.

Then the King of Outer Hind, who envied his country and saw that there was no one left in it to give counsel, wrote him a letter: build me a castle in the middle of the sea, or twelve hordes of horse will come and besiege your capital until I have it. Wird Khan read it and said to his women, "This is what befell the Francolin and the Tortoises." A francolin, passing an island in the heat, came to the tortoises' dwelling and stayed; they loved him; he flew out every morning and came back every night, and they could not bear his being away all day. One of them said to him, kindly, that he who has wings has no rest, and that they feared lest some enemy take him; why did he not pluck out his wing-feathers and stay with them, and eat of their trees? He plucked them, one by one, to please them. A weasel came. "Is there nothing with you but weeping?" he said to the tortoises, when it had him; and they said they had no force against a weasel. He said it was not their fault, it was his, for having listened. "They loved him," said the nurse. "They clipped him," said Sumayya. "They did not mean to," said my sister. "No," said the King. "That is the worst kind." Shah Zaman looked at the lamp, and I looked at the lock of hair in the front board of the Roll, and did not open it. The book has Wird Khan go on, after the francolin, to blame women, and the garden, and Adam; I leave out the list.

That night the King put on old clothes and went into the city alone, and stopped at a wall where two boys of about twelve sat talking, and one said that his father's crops had withered before their time, from the want of rain, and the other said, do you know why? Because our King killed his Wazirs, not for any offence of theirs, but for love of women who told him to; my father was one, Shimas; and soon you will see how God deals with him. The King, listening, was astonished: the boy knew of a letter that only he possessed. "How do you know?" he said. "From the sand," said the boy, "and from the saying that no mystery is hidden from God." When my sister came to the end of the boy's speech, no one in the room said anything for as long as it takes to turn the glass. The nurse put down her thread. "Is that what they say?" said Sumayya, not to my sister. She turned to my father. "At the north gate, some," he said. "What do they say?" said the King. "That the rain is late, lord." "Why?" "Some say the north is being punished." "For what?" My father looked at the number on his arm. "For what, Vizier?" "For the names, lord." "Which names?" "The ones that have not been read. They say it will not rain until they are." "Who says?" "The women at the gate, lord, when the bread comes. They say a name first, one of them, and the others say, here. And then they eat." "Since when?" "Since the second week of the kitchens." "You did not tell me." "You did not ask, lord." "I am asking." "Yes, lord," said my father. And then he told him, and I put it in the Open: names said at the north gate with the bread, and the answer, here.

In the book the boy, the son of Shimas, goes with the other children of the school and answers the King of Outer Hind's letter for Wird Khan: he reads it aloud, and laughs, and writes that thou hast put out thy hand to that whereto thou canst not reach; build thee the castle in the midst of the sea thyself, but first still the waves and wall off the winds; and in the margin he draws his own portrait, and writes under it, This answer was written by the least of the boys of the school. The King of Outer Hind read it, and saw the face, and did not sleep; and he wrote back that it had only been a test of Wird Khan's mettle. Shah Zaman laughed until the nurse made him stop. The King, who had not laughed in a week, laughed once, and said, "The least of the boys of the school," twice, in two voices.

When Wird Khan had put away his love of women, he asked the boy how he should punish them; and the boy said that women are not alone to blame, they are like a stock in trade, and no one forces a man to buy; the fault is the buyer's. "I have fixed it on myself," said the King, "and I have no excuse except divine foreordainment." And the boy said: God has endowed us with capability and freewill, and so if we will, we do, and if we will, we do not. "He did not let him have it," said the King. He said it as one reads the next line in the Roll. Nobody asked what he meant, and I wrote nothing on either sheet.

On the 930th night the book ends, as it ends, with the repentance; and it is a clean end; and the end is this. Wird Khan asked his ministers what should be done with the women who had advised him, and the boy said, let what has befallen them suffice; reduce them to servants' estate. Another minister said that the least they deserved was to be put in the room in which the Wazirs were killed, with a little coarse food and a little water, to die one by one, the last among the dead. And the King took the second. I leave out the rest, which the book gives with its blessing. "He asked the boy first," said the King, very low. "Yes, lord." "And did the other." "Yes, lord." "Put them in the Open," he said. "The women in the room." "The ones he shut in?" said Sumayya. "And the boy who would not have," said the King. I wrote: the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them.

On the 931st night the rains in the north were two hundred and one days late, and there were thirty-six hundred at the north gate, and the first loaf from the Samarkand wheat came to the palace with a pebble in it. "Good," said Hamid, so the boy said; "it is real." Yusuf, who was two hundred and eighty-one days old, stood at the brick and said a word. It was "Ba." The older boy looked at him with great seriousness. "Yu," he said. "Ba."

Night 931. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a dyer and a barber, only begun; names said at the north gate with the bread, and the answer, here; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, thirty-six hundred at the gate, eight ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread, baking from Samarkand's wheat; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and one days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and eighty-one days old, who walks; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Nine Hundred and Thirty-two to Nine Hundred and Forty-seven: A Sack of Lime, a Ring Given Back, and Whose It Is to Pardon

In Alexandria there lived two neighbours, a dyer named Abu Kir and a barber named Abu Sir, whose shops stood side by side. The dyer took cloth from people to dye, and required his wage in advance for the dyestuffs, and sold the cloth, and spent the price on meat and tobacco; and when the owner came he said, come tomorrow, and the next day, my wife was brought to bed, and the day after that, it was stolen. "A dyer who sells the cloth," said Sumayya. "Every town has one," said the nurse. "He said it was stolen," said the King. "Another who said it was done." Nobody asked which. The barber was poor too, with no customers, and one day the dyer, whose door a customer had nailed up with the Kazi's seal, said that there was no call to stay in a town like this; let them go abroad, with their crafts in their hands; and they would recite the Opening of the Book on it, that whichever of them got work should feed the one who had none, and the rest go in a chest until they came home. They took ship. The barber shaved the passengers for loaves and cheese, and the Captain's table, and carried it all to the dyer, who was sea-sick, and ate it, and slept; and for eighty days in the city they came to, the dyer ate and slept and said, do not blame me, I am giddy. On the forty-first day the barber fell ill and lost his wits with fever, and the dyer took the thousand silver bits from under his head, and went out and locked the door.

The Khan's porter found him on the third day and fed him from his own money for two months, for the face of God. When he was well he went out to look for his friend, and found a dyery with coloured cloths spread out before the door and a crowd looking; for in that city there were forty master-dyers, who knew only blue, and who admitted no stranger; and the King had built the stranger a dyery, and given him a horse and two slaves. The dyer sat on a mattress at the door, in royal clothes, with eight slaves. He looked at the barber and said, "O scoundrel, have I not told thee not to stand at my door?" and had him seized and beaten, and told the crowd he was a thief who stole their cloth. "A city of blue," said Shah Zaman. "And a man who brought it colours," said Sumayya, "and was beaten for it." "He brought them red," said my sister. What was done to the barber in front of the shop I leave out; the book counts the strokes, and I do not; and then the barber went back to the Khan and sat there until the burning went off.

Then he went to the King and told him that the city had no baths; and the King had one built, and he heated the water, and made a fountain in the basin, and taught ten boys to rub with the glove; and for three days all who came went in and out for nothing. On the fourth the King came himself, and was scraped clean, and said, "Take a thousand dinars from every man who washes." And the barber said: pardon, King; all men are not alike; if I take a thousand the poor man cannot enter, and the bath will stand empty; let each pay what his heart can give. The Lords agreed, and each gave a hundred dinars, and a slave, and a woman, and a servant, for the King's honour, four hundred of them; and the barber said, where shall I put all these, and sold them back to the King for a hundred a head, and said, may God ease thee as thou hast eased me of these Ghuls, whose bellies none may fill. "What did the poor pay?" said the nurse. "What they could," said my sister. "Hamid takes that," said Sumayya. "He takes nothing," said my father. "The King pays." "The King's kitchens take what is given," said the King, "and Hamid takes the rest of it out of what is given." "Yes, lord," said my father. "He will not call it a price." The King laughed, once, and stopped.

The dyer went to the bath, and was shampooed and fed, and the barber would take nothing from him and called him comrade; and the dyer, going away, said that it lacked a paste of yellow arsenic and quicklime which takes the hair off, and Abu Sir said he would make it. And Abu Kir went to the King at once and said: this barber is thy enemy; the king across the sea, whose prisoner he was, has promised him his wife and children if he kills thee; he will give thee a paste, saying it takes off the hair, and it is poison. The King went to the bath, to see; the barber gave him the paste, and it smelt foul. He had the barber seized, and sent for his Sea-captain and said: put him in a sack with two quintals of unslaked lime and tie the mouth over his head; row him out in front of my window, and when I say, cast him, throw him in, so that he is drowned and burned. My father's hand had gone to his sleeve. "Lime," said the King, not loudly. "Yes, lord," said my father. "The tanners use it, for the hides." "To take the hair off." "Yes, lord." The nurse's needle stopped; then went on. I looked at the lamp. I did not look at my father's sleeves, which were clean.

"Did anyone ask him?" said the King. "They asked the dyer, lord," said my sister. The Captain took the barber to an island and said that he had been shaved and bathed by him once, and not allowed to pay; he would not drown him; he put a stone in the sack, and gave him a net, to fish for the King's kitchen, and went to row under the lattice. The King signed to him with his right hand, cast him, and something flashed from his finger and fell into the sea. It was his seal-ring, which was spelled; when the King was angry with anyone and signed at him with that hand, a flash came from the ring and the man's head fell from his shoulders; the troops obeyed him for nothing else; and he said not a word of it, for fear of the troops. A fish swallowed the ring, and the fish came up in the barber's net, and he cut it open, and put the ring on his finger. When two of the cook's boys came for fish, he signed to them, knowing nothing, and they died. I leave out how. The King put his right hand on his knee, palm up, and looked at it, as my father looks at his.

When the Captain came back he said, do not move your hand, and told him what the ring was; and Abu Sir said, take me to the city. He went in to the King, who was sitting facing his men, grey with not telling them, and said: thou didst throw me in the sea; thy Captain took me to an island; thy ring fell into the water and a fish swallowed it, and I found it, and two of the boys died, not by my will; here it is; take it. And if I have done anything deserving death, tell me what, and slay me, and thou art absolved. "He gave it back," said Sumayya. "He did not know what it was," said my father, "till he was told." "And then he gave it back," said the King. "Had any but thou found it," says the King in the book, "he would never have restored it to me." The King put on the ring and felt life come back to him, and embraced the barber, and said, blame me not, but forgive me.

The King sent for the Khan's porter and the dyer's workmen, and they told the truth. They brought the dyer bareheaded, with his elbows bound, and paraded him through the markets, and said he should be sewn in a sack with lime and thrown into the sea. And Abu Sir said, "O King, accept my intercession for him, for I pardon him all that he has done to me." "If thou pardon him what he did to thee," said the King, "I cannot pardon him what he did to me." And they threw him in. The barber asked, for his boon, to be sent home, and the King gave him a galleon and its crew; and at Alexandria the sea had washed the sack up on the beach, and he buried the dyer there, and built a tomb over him, and wrote a verse on the door; and when he died he was buried beside him, and the place is called Abu Kir to this day. "He pardoned him," said Sumayya. "It was not the King's to take," said the nurse. "It was his own to give," said my sister. "He could pardon what was done to him," said the King. "Yes, lord." "Not what was done to the King." "No, lord." "Whose is it to pardon what the King has done?" No one answered. My father wrote nothing on his palm. "Those it was done to," said the nurse. "They are dead," said the King. "Their mothers are not," said the nurse, and bit off the thread.

On the 940th night my sister began the Fisherman and the Merman. A fisherman named Abdullah had nine children and a tenth born that day, and when he cast his net on the luck of the new-born, nothing came up; and he cast it again, and again, and went home without a fish, past the baker's oven, where the baker called to him, "Hast thou bread enough?" and gave him ten half-dirhams' worth of bread and ten more, and said, we will reckon when better luck betide thee. For forty days he took the bread and nothing came. "When I say reckon with me," he said, "he says, be off; this is no time for reckoning." "That is Hamid," said Sumayya. "That is not Hamid," said my father, "who does reckon; but he does not say what the sum is." On the forty-first day the fisherman said to his wife that he would tear the net up; and she said, Allah is bountiful. And that day his net came up heavy, and in it was a dead donkey; and when he cast it again, in it was a man.

He thought the man was one of Solomon's Ifrits, and ran; but the man said he was a Merman, and that if the fisherman would let him go they would be friends: a basket of fruit from the land every morning, and a basket of jewels from the sea. The fisherman let him go; and sat on the shore saying, "Thou hast let thy prey from thy hand away. I might have made a show of him." "He was sorry he let him go," said Sumayya. "And then he came back," said the nurse, "with both hands full." "Yes," said the King. He did not say anything else. The fisherman paid the baker with a handful of pearls, and the baker left his oven and followed him home with the bread on his head. Then he tried to sell a jewel to the Syndic of the jewellers, who said, here is the thief who stole the Queen's necklace, and had him beaten and bound and dragged to the King. "They did not ask him," said Sumayya. "Not one question," said my sister. The Queen sent to say that her necklace was in its place and that these were finer; and the King called the jewellers filthy villains, and said, why did you not ask him? He made him his Wazir and married him to his daughter, and made the baker Wazir of the left. "Hamid, Wazir of the left," said Sumayya. "He would not have it," said the King. "He would make bread of it," said the nurse.

The fisherman went down to the sea every morning with the fruit and came back with the jewels, for a year; and one day the Merman asked whether he had visited the Prophet's tomb in Yathrib, and when he said no, said he would give him a deposit to lay on it, and carried him down into the sea with an ointment of the liver-fat of the Dandan, a fish so big that it swallows an elephant, and dies at a single cry of a son of Adam. The fisherman cried, and one died. They went through eighty cities; I leave out the city of women, and what the sea-king does with them, and with their sons, and the custom of dress and marriage, which the book gives forty lines. At the Merman's house his daughter looked at the fisherman and said, "What is this No-tail?" and she and her mother and her brothers laughed at him; and the Merman said, forgive them, they lack wit; no-tails are rare, and the Sultan takes them and keeps them to make fun of. The Sultan said, "Welcome to the No-tail," and everyone laughed, and let him go; he asked for jewels as his boon. "He kept him to laugh at," said Shah Zaman. "In the book it is a custom," said my sister.

The Merman gave him a purse for the Prophet's tomb, and as they went back to the shore they heard singing and saw a table spread with fish and many people feasting; and he asked, a wedding? "Nay," said the Merman, "one of them is dead." And the fisherman said that in his country, when one dies, they weep and keen and the women beat their faces and rend their garments. The Merman stared at him and said, "Give me the deposit." "I have broken off our companionship," he said. "Are ye not, O folk of the land, a deposit of Allah? Why is it grievous to you that Allah should take back His deposit? How can I trust thee with a deposit for the Prophet, if when a child is born to you ye rejoice, albeit the Almighty sets the soul in it as a deposit, and when He takes it again it is grievous to you and ye weep? Since it is hard for thee to give up the deposit of Allah, how shall it be easy to thee to give up the deposit of the Prophet?" And he went down into the sea and the fisherman never saw him again. He called upon him for some time from the shore, and the King his father-in-law said that he should not have told him. "He told the truth," said Sumayya. "And lost the friend," said the nurse. "Often," said my sister. The King said, "They feast." "At a death, lord." "I would not like to live in it," said Shah Zaman. "You would not have to," said the nurse. The King said nothing for a long time. Then he said, "How many last night?" "Nine, lord," said my father. "Whose?" "I do not know the names, lord. I know the number." "Write the names tomorrow." "Yes, lord." From that night my father wrote the names he was told at the gate on the inside of his right arm, and the count of the rains on his left, and said he did not know which was the heavier.

On the 947th night the rains in the north were two hundred and seventeen days late, and there were thirty-nine hundred at the north gate and nine ovens, and the lime-burners' carts, my father said, had stopped coming to the Tanners' Lane for want of firewood. Yusuf, who was two hundred and ninety-seven days old, pointed at his brother and said, "Ba." And his brother, who had said it for him all the winter, pointed back and said, "Yu." They looked at one another, each with his word for the other; and the King, who had given them both, did not say whose was whose.

Night 947. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a Caliph who could not sleep, and a merchant of Oman, only begun; a friend lost for telling the truth, and a deposit; whose it is to pardon what the King has done; names said at the north gate with the bread, and the answer, here; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, thirty-nine hundred at the gate, nine ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and seventeen days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, two hundred and ninety-seven days old, who says Ba; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Nine Hundred and Forty-eight to Nine Hundred and Fifty-nine: A Grey Book, a Glass, and Blood on a Hand

The Caliph Harun al-Rashid could not sleep. He called Ja'afar and said that if his sleeplessness were not cured by morning he would strike off his neck; and Ja'afar, who has had to deal with this before, said that care is lightened in three ways, by looking in a mirror, by going to the bath, and by hearing song; and the Caliph said he had done all three. "Then there is a fourth," said Ja'afar: "to see what you have never seen, or hear what you have never heard, or tread a ground you have never trodden." "He is always awake, that Caliph," said the nurse. "The book does not say what he does by day." "He sleeps by day," said the King, "and the Vizier does not." "I sleep, lord," said my father. "At the second glass," said the King. "For the length of one." Nobody asked how he knew that either.

On the 948th night my father came to the Roll-room with his right sleeve rolled to the elbow, and read out what was written on the inside of his arm, in the voice he uses for numbers: nine names. Seven of them were in the blue books; Sumayya found them, with the page. Two were not. They were two girls of eight and eleven who had come down the north road with their mothers and died of the cough in the first month of the kitchens, and their mothers had said the names at the gate, with the others, since they had no one else to say them. "They are in nobody's book," said my father. "Write them in mine," said the King, and sent for a stationer, who brought a grey book of a hundred leaves, and Sumayya wrote the two on the first page in her own hand, and under them the seven. "Keep them with the others," said the King. It is what he said of the first sixty-one names, on the nineteenth night. Then my father read the last name. It was Salma. "The four hundred and second," said the King. He did not ask whose. My father said that the woman who says it had been serving the bread at the gate since the second week, in black, and stood at the back; and that when she said it the others said, here; and she ate, and went on serving. The King sat for some time with his hand on the grey book, and my sister began.

It was the merchant of Oman. He had sold his thirty ships and his houses and come to Baghdad with a million dinars to see the city he had been told of, and on a Friday he walked to Karn al-Sirat and found a house where an old man named Tahir kept girls, who let their nights by the price: ten dinars, twenty, forty. He took a month of the first for three hundred and a month of the second for six hundred, and so on up the ladder, until, one evening on the roof, he saw behind a curtain a girl on a couch with a boy's hand on her neck, so beautiful that he lay awake until morning; and she was the old man's daughter, and her night was five hundred dinars. He paid fifteen thousand for the first month. "A million dinars," said Shah Zaman. "In a house on a river." "At so much a night," said the nurse. "I leave out what the book makes the girl say to him on the first night, in verse," said my sister; "it takes a page, and my father is in the room." "I am in the room," said my father. "Yes, lord," said my sister.

He stayed month after month, until the money was gone, and wept to her, and she told him what her father did to those who ran out: three days' hospitality and the door. "Keep your secret," she said, "and I will keep you. All my father's money is under my hand. Every morning I will give you a purse of five hundred dinars; give it to him, saying, I shall pay you day by day; he will hand it to me; and I will give it to you again." He did that for a year. "She paid her father with his own money," said the nurse. "So that he would not be paid by anyone else," said Sumayya. "It is a kind of kitchen," said my father; and no one asked what he meant. Then one day she beat a maid, and the maid said, I will torture thy heart as thou hast tortured mine, and went to her master, who came in, and said that it was his wont to give a merchant three days, and he had had a year; his servants took his clothes, and gave him ten dirhams and an old suit worth five, and told him to go, and that if he stayed in the town his blood was on his own head.

He sailed to Basra and worked for a grocer he knew, and when he had a hundred dinars he took a room by the river to buy goods; and there came a ship in with two men who spread a carpet and a bag of jewels, and one was an old acquaintance, who, seeing him bidding nothing, asked why, and when he said he had a hundred dinars in the world, sold him the whole bag for a hundred, in front of the merchants, and said it was a gift. Among the stones was a red amulet, the size of a hand, graven with marks like the tracks of ants; and for a year no one in the market would give him more than ten or fifteen dirhams for it. Then a man came, bearing the dust of the road, and turned over his wares, and took the amulet, and kissed his hand, and offered twenty dinars, and fifty, and a thousand, and the merchant, who was angry because no one wanted the amulet, would not answer; and the crowd told him to sell, or they would drub him; and he sold it for thirty thousand. "Hadst thou held back," said the buyer, "I would have bid thee a hundred thousand, ay, a thousand thousand." "And from that day," said the Omani to the Caliph, "this pallor you see." "He did not know what it was," said the King. "No one told him," said my father. "He asked," said Sumayya. "He asked the broker, and the broker threw it in his face." "Brokers do," said the nurse.

The buyer was the servant of a king of Hind whose daughter was sick of a sickness that cannot be named, and bound; the amulet cured her; and she lost it to the sea in a necklace, and the sickness came back; I leave out what the book says the sickness did, night by night, to the girls who were set to sleep in her room. He found the old man dead who could make another, and was sent out through the world to look, and had found it in a shop in Basra. The Omani went back to Baghdad with what he had, and to Tahir's house, where the balcony was broken down and the lattice built up; and a servant told him that Tahir had repented, and sold his girls, and that his daughter was dying for a merchant named Abu al-Hasan, for whom he had offered a hundred thousand dinars. "Thou owest me the reward for good news," said the Omani, "for Abu al-Hasan stands at the door." The old man ran out and wept on his neck, and led him in to the daughter, who fell down in a swoon and, when she woke, said that now she would eat. The Kazi was sent for; and the old man gave the wedding. The Caliph, when he had heard it, went home and had three years' tribute put in an alcove behind a curtain, and sent for the Omani, and said, "Which is more, this, or what you lost by the amulet?" "This many times, Commander of the Faithful." "Bear witness," said the Caliph, "that I give it to this young man." He wept for joy, and the blood came back to his face, and the Caliph held up a mirror and showed him. "Bring me a glass," said the King. Sumayya brought the polished copper from the nurse's box, and he held it away from himself, then near, for as long as it takes to turn a page. He gave it back and said nothing. "Well?" said the nurse. "Put it away," said the King.

On the 953rd night my sister began a story of a vizier's son, Ibrahim, who could not leave the house except for the Friday prayer, and who on the way home found a book-seller with a book that had in it the picture of a girl so beautiful that she all but spoke; he bought it for a hundred dinars and wept over it for a week, and asked the bookseller who had painted it. A man of Baghdad, in the Karkh. He filled a bag with thirty thousand dinars of gold and gems, told no one, and rode off with a caravan; a Bedouin took his mare and a hundred dinars to guide him in two months' journey in a few days; and in Baghdad he found the street, and the painter, an old man on a marble bench, who gave him a house to live in, and a game of chess. Ibrahim lost the first game; he had no mind for it; he was thinking of the bag, which he had put down somewhere in the house. "I have eaten a morsel worth a dirham and lost a bag worth thirty thousand," he said, silently, "but I seek aid of Allah." And the old man brought it back, and said, "When thy thought was on the bag I beat thee; now I have brought it back, thou beatest me." "He beats me when I am not thinking of the board," said Shah Zaman. "I have not beaten you since the first snow," said the King. "Since you began to look at the door," said Shah Zaman. The King did not say anything, and moved a pawn.

The painter was Abu al-Kasim, and the picture was of his cousin Jamilah, who lived at Basra, and who would not hear the word man in her presence; he had asked her father for her, and she had sent word that if he valued his life he would leave the town. So he drew her, in books, and scattered them in all countries, so that some beautiful young man might see her and come, and see her, and that she might fall in love with him, and that he, the painter, might look at her once from afar. Ibrahim wept; and the painter sent him in a ship to Basra. The Khan's porter, and his wife, and a hunchback tailor whose pocket Ibrahim tore twice on purpose to give him gold, and the hunchback keeper of the garden called the Wild Heifer, who put him in an arbour and said, do not sneeze. "A picture," said Sumayya. "Nobody asked her," said the nurse. "She had heard of him," said my sister. "She loved him by report." No one said anything; the King looked at the grey book on the rug beside him. When Jamilah danced in the pavilion for her women she looked up and saw him, and took a knife a half-cubit long and went to him; and when face met face the knife fell from her hand, and she said, "Glory to Him who changeth men's hearts!"

They fled, with the ship; and at Baghdad the painter was waiting in a boat; and he threw into theirs a box of sweetmeats with Bhang in it. Ibrahim woke naked among the ruins of a bath, with blood on his hand from a dead woman whose head he had touched in the dark, and I leave out whose, and how it came to be there. The Chief of Police found him. "This needeth no proof," he said, seeing his hand, "strike off his head"; and the headsman, who had a heart, said, "By Allah, this is no murderer's face." They put him on the rug of blood. At that moment the Wazir of Egypt's Chamberlain rode up, sent to look for him, and said, "Why didst thou not have patience with him and question him? This is a lad of fifteen; he hath not killed a sparrow!" "That is the fourth," said Sumayya, "in a month." "Of what?" said the nurse. "That they did not ask." "It needed no proof," said the King. "Blood on a hand is the oldest proof, lord," said my father. "Is it?" said the King. My father said nothing, and put his hand in his sleeve.

The Caliph had the killer slain, I leave out how, and sent for Jamilah, who was found bound with her own hair, and for the painter, whom he ordered to be punished for what he had done to her, which I leave out; and Jamilah's father came in complaining of the youth who had taken his daughter, and the Caliph said that he had delivered her from torture and slaughter and married them on the spot. They went to Egypt, and lived as the book says. On the 959th night the rains in the north were two hundred and twenty-nine days late, and there were four thousand and one hundred at the north gate, and the Vizier said that of the names on his arm that night nine were new. The nurse had moved my sister's cushion to the floor by the bed and put a stool under her feet, and she told the first glass sitting up, with her hand on her side. Yusuf, who was three hundred and nine days old, stood without the brick, for as long as it took the King to say his name, and took two steps toward his brother, and sat down; and his brother said, "Yu," in a voice of great patience, and put the shoe back on his foot.

Night 959. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a Caliph named Al-Mu'tazid, who went out into a by-street at noon, only begun; a grey book of a hundred leaves, for names that are in nobody's book, kept with the blue ones; Salma, the four hundred and second, whose mother says her name at the north gate, and the answer, here; the nine new names of the night; whose it is to pardon what the King has done; a friend lost for telling the truth, and a deposit; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, four thousand and one hundred at the gate, nine ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and twenty-nine days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, three hundred and nine days old, who has taken two steps; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Nine Hundred and Sixty to Nine Hundred and Seventy-eight: A Bean at Every Door, Asked at Once, and a Knife in the Chest

My sister took up the Caliph where she had left him, in a by-street at noon. Al-Mu'tazid, in a merchant's coat, with his companion Ibn Hamdun, had heard two eunuchs at the door of a great house wish for a guest, since their master would not eat without one; so they went in. The master met them in a tunic of Nishapur silk with a ruby on his hand, and gave them water, and a table, and a curtain with three girls singing behind it, and the Caliph sat through all of it with a frown. The man said he was only a merchant's son, Abu al-Hasan of Khorasan, and did not know whom he had in his house, until Ibn Hamdun told him. "Since I came in," said the Caliph, "I have seen the name of my grandfather Al-Mutawakkil on the cups, and the cushions, and the very coat you wear. Tell me the truth and you are safe from me. Tell me a lie and I will punish you as no one has been punished." "He was asked for the truth," said the King. "And told it," said Sumayya. "And was safe," said the nurse. The King put his hand on the grey book on the stool beside him, and did not open it.

The truth was a long one. His father had been a money-changer, and he had eaten the money; he sold his mother the house for five thousand dinars, which were her own father's, kept for a time of need, and ate that; and sold it to her again for fifteen thousand, on the condition that she take his affairs into her hand, and she put him in the shop. "A mother who buys the house twice," said the nurse, "and does not say a word." Then a girl came in so beautiful that when she said, "Weigh me out three hundred dinars," he told his page to weigh it, and afterwards said he did not know why, he could not think. A month later she came again and unveiled, and took three hundred more, and then five hundred; he followed her to a jeweller's, where she took a necklace and told him to pay, and to the Tigris, where she got into a boat, and he made a sign to the ground as if to kiss it, and she went off laughing, into the palace of the Caliph Al-Mutawakkil. "He says three thousand dinars," said my father, who adds as other men breathe. "It comes to sixteen hundred. Either there is a necklace he has not told us about, or a man in love is counting in his heart." Nobody asked which.

His factor, an old druggist, told him to reckon it spent for the sake of God and forget her. But when she came again and said she had no way but to see him once a month, he went back to the druggist, who found a tailor working opposite the palace lattice, and told him to tear his own pocket and bring it to be sewn. "A pocket torn on purpose," said Sumayya. "Ibrahim's," said the nurse. "He tore Ibrahim's twice," said my sister. "This one only once." He ordered suits of Greek brocade, a hundred in the end, and whoever came out of the palace and liked one, he gave it to, even the doorkeeper, until the tailor said, "This is not how a merchant behaves. Are you in love?" The girl, the tailor told him, was the Caliph's own lutanist, and she had a Mameluke eunuch; and the eunuch, given five suits and then one worked with jewels worth three thousand dinars, looked at him and said, "You are Abu al-Hasan of Khorasan, the money-changer. The whole palace talks of you. She loves you more than you love her." "He was found by his gifts," said the King. "Nobody had to look," said Shah Zaman.

The next evening the eunuch dressed him in a shirt woven with gold and the Caliph's own gown, and scented him with the Caliph's scent, and took him into a gallery with rooms down both sides. "At each door put down a bean," he said. "It is what the Caliph does every night. Count the doors; the one you want has a marble threshold." In the middle of the gallery there was a clatter and the light of torches, and the real Caliph coming with the women, and he heard a girl say, "Have we two Caliphs? One has put his bean at my door, and here is the other with the lights." "He counts his nights with beans," said Shah Zaman. "A bean is not a name," said the King. My father put his sleeve down over his arm. A girl in the Caliph's train took the frightened man by the sleeve into a room, and said, "If you are a thief, you are lost. If you are Abu al-Hasan, you are safe; you are the friend of my sister Shajarat al-Durr, who never stops talking about you." Her sister came, and fell on his neck, and said she had promised him she would not be his unlawfully, and would find a way.

Then there was a noise, and the Caliph was coming to her room; she put the man in a cellar under a trapdoor, and went out to serve him. Al-Mutawakkil asked her to sing, and she took her lute and sang so well that the man in the cellar all but cried out, and the Caliph, pleased, said, "Shajarat al-Durr, ask a boon of me." "I ask my freedom," she said. "Thou art free," he said, "for the love of God." My sister stopped there, as she is allowed to stop, and I did not look up from the Roll. The nurse said to the cat, "Not yet," and the cat, which had been waiting, lay down. "She had it ready," said the King. "She asked at once." "He gave it when he was pleased," said Sumayya. "And when she asked."

The Caliph went off to make peace with the girl he had quarrelled with, and the lutanist opened the trap, and said she was a free woman by his coming. They dressed him in women's clothes to get him out; and in the middle of the palace the Caliph was sitting, and saw a handmaid who walked wrong, and had her brought back. Asked how he dared, the man said, "My ignorance, and my passion, and my trust in your clemency." Al-Mutawakkil heard them both, and said, "I pardon you both," and sent for the Kazi, and married them; and everything in Abu al-Hasan's house with that name on it was her marriage-gear, and not the Caliph's treasury. Some while after, she came home with her clothes torn and said that his rule was ended; his son had come in upon him with armed men of the guard, and the book says what they did, and I leave it out. They went down the river to Basra with her goods and the children she bore him. Al-Mu'tazid, who had come in to be angry, wrote him a patent that he need pay no tax on his lands for twenty years, and made him his cup-companion, until the world parted them. "He asked first," said Sumayya. "And said what he would do to a lie," said the nurse, "and then did not have to." "Everyone in the book who tells is pardoned," said Shah Zaman. "In this book," said the King; and the nurse, who had been about to say something, did not.

On the 963rd night my sister began another Kamar al-Zaman. "There are a great many," said the nurse. "This one is a merchant's son, not a prince," said my sister, "and I will say so each time." His father, Abd al-Rahman, had kept him and his sister shut up in a house with a slave-girl for fourteen years, for fear of the evil eye on a child so beautiful; and his wife said at last, "How long will you keep your son from the eyes of the folk? Is he a girl or a boy? If you die, and he says he is Abd al-Rahman's son, no one will believe him." "Fourteen years," said Sumayya. "He kept them in because he loved them," said the nurse. The father took the boy to the shop, and the whole market stopped to look, and a dervish in haircloth came through the crowd and sat on the bench opposite and wept. The merchant, thinking the worst, took the dervish home and set the boy to tempt him in the night, and watched from the window; and the dervish prayed, and would not, and at last lost his temper. "Why did you weep when you saw my son?" said the merchant. The dervish told him of a Friday in Basra when he had found the streets empty and the shops open, no dog and no cat, bread hot in the oven, and not one person; and then drums, and eighty girls riding two by two with their faces bare, and in the midst of them a woman on a horse so beautiful that he lay hid behind a shutter. She said there was a man in a doorway; they brought him out; and what was done to him on her word I leave out. "Your son," said the dervish, "is the image of her."

The boy asked for goods, and his father said he could not bear to be parted from him for an hour, and his mother said that if they refused he would run away; so he went, with ninety thousand in merchandise and forty jewels in his belt. A day short of Basra raiders took everything and killed his men, and he lay down among the dead and put their blood on himself until they went; and he came into the city on a Friday, into the empty streets, and saw the drums and the girls and the woman on the horse, and could not stand. "By report," said Sumayya. "Like Jamilah," said the nurse. He sold a jewel for a thousand dinars, and told a barber what he had seen; and the barber said, "Tell no one; all Basra locks itself in on Friday morning, and nobody knows why." The barber's wife, a midwife who knew every house, took a hundred dinars and told him. The chief of the jewellers, Obayd, had pierced a jewel that no one else could pierce, and the King of Basra had said, ask a boon. Obayd said, give me till tomorrow. He did nothing without consulting his wife, whom he loved; and she said: that every Friday, two hours before the prayer, the whole city go into the mosques or lock itself in its houses, with the dogs and cats, and every shop be left open, so that she could ride through with her women, her face bare, and where she found a man she would have him killed. "A city shut in," said Shah Zaman, "for one woman, one morning a week." "Ours has been shut in nearly three years," said the nurse. "One asked to be let out," said Sumayya, "and one asked to have a city shut in." "He took it home to ask her," said the King. "She had a better idea of what to ask than he did." Nobody said anything. I wrote it down, and the King's hand had gone to the grey book again.

The midwife told the boy what to do. He was to have a ring made by Obayd, give the apprentices a dinar each, pull the ring off as too tight and give it away, and bring a better stone; and Obayd, proud of his customer, would praise his face to his wife, because, my sister said, there is no sillier cuckold than the man who praises another man's looks to his wife. The wife wished for the ring. She had her husband bring the young man to supper three nights running, with a drug in the night cup of both men; and what she did to the sleeping guest I leave out. In the morning his cheeks and lips burned, and the jeweller, ashamed, said that the mosquitoes of that room loved only the beardless. "He gave the boy the reason himself," said the King. In the boy's pocket he found four cockles; and the midwife read it: a lover does not sleep, and you are a child to be playing with shells. The second night, a knife: sleep again and I will cut your throat. On the third night he poured the cup behind the pillow, and she came with the knife, and he laughed; and she said, "Three times, and you did not understand the sign." He told her an old woman had taught him, and she said, "Go to her, and ask if she has more; if not, I will do the rest."

She did the rest. She had the boy take a house next to hers, and a builder to dig a tunnel to her room, and every night she carried across bags of her husband's money. Then she gave him a knife her husband had made himself, which he valued at five hundred dinars and would not sell, and told him to show it in the shop and say he had it from a man whose mistress had given it to him instead of money; and the boy ran it back to her by the tunnel before the husband was through the door. Obayd knew it, because its fashion was a device of his own and there was not another like it. He came home with a face like a man who has swallowed a stone, and she said, "You suspected me, and came to see whether I had given your things away." "Where is my knife?" he said, and she said, "In the chest." It was in the chest. The next day it was the watch, and "Here it is." "She put them back," said my sister, "both times, before he was through the door." "And he was glad," said the King. "He saw the knife in the chest, and was glad." She told him that if she had not shown him the knife and the watch he would have known her for a traitor, and she would never break bread with him again; and he gentled her, and was sorry. "He wanted to be told," said the King, in a voice that did not rise. "It is easier," said Shah Zaman. "Yes," said the King.

On the 974th night she put on her best clothes and her rings, which her husband had made with his own hands, and walked behind the boy to the shop with her face bare, as a slave-girl; and the boy said, "I bought this girl for a thousand dinars. What do you think of the price?" "What is your name, girl?" said Obayd. "Halimah," she said, which was also his wife's. He ran home, and she was sitting in the same clothes in her room, having come back by the tunnel. "Look in my face," she said; "perhaps I am she who stood in the shop, and disguised myself, and agreed with him to lay a snare for you." "What words are these?" he said. "I never suspected you of such a thing." Then she beat her maid, and told him she could not bear the sight of her, and he took the maid to sell, and passed by the boy's house, where the boy bought her for nothing; and his wife was already in the litter, by the tunnel. "Kiss your old master's hand," the boy said to her, and she stepped out of the litter and kissed Obayd's hand, and got back in; and he looked hard at her. "He looked hard at her," said my sister. "He looked," said the King. "And did not see." "He was glad not to," said the nurse. Obayd wept when they left, because friendship has its debts, and went to his shop glad that his suspicion had come to nothing; and when he went home that night the house was empty to the boards.

He told no one. He said he was going on the pilgrimage with his wife, and the whole city rejoiced, because there would be no more Fridays; and on the road raiders stripped him, and he came on foot to Cairo, naked, and was told that on the last day of a wedding feast the poor were fed. It was the boy's wedding; his father had said, "If you marry her I am quit of you in this world and the next; she did it to her husband and will do it to you," and had shut the woman and her maid in an upper room and found the boy another bride. Obayd was bathed and clothed and told his story in private, and Abd al-Rahman said to his son that he would now see whether the man was a man of honour or a cuckold. He told Obayd to make peace with his wife, and gave him the key; and stood behind the door with a sword. "If he forgave her," said my sister, "he would have killed him." "For forgiving," said Sumayya. The King put his hand over the older boy's ear; nobody had told him to. My sister said what the jeweller did with his hands in one breath, and I did not write it down. Abd al-Rahman came out from behind the door and said, "I would have killed you if you had forgiven her. Now you shall have my daughter," and the folk were told two slave-girls had died. "A test with one answer," said the nurse. The King took his hand from the ear. Nobody said anything.

Obayd lived with the daughter five years and died. The King of Basra, who had said, when Obayd came home, that if he did not fear God he would kill him and marry her, asked for the widow, and she said no: not a woman among her kin had married twice, "not though you kill me." He sent her home to her father with a Wazir and five hundred horse and everything the jeweller had left, and she lived there without marrying until she died. "So if this woman would not replace her dead husband with a King," said my sister, reading the end of the book, "how is she to be compared with the other, who replaced her husband while he lived? And he who deems all women alike, there is no remedy for the disease of his insanity." She was on the cushion on the floor, with the stool under her feet and her hand at her side, and had stopped twice for breath. Shah Zaman looked at the King. The King did not look at Shah Zaman; he looked at the lamp. Sumayya trimmed it. On the 978th night the rains in the north were two hundred and forty-eight days late, and there were forty-three hundred at the north gate, and my father, who had twelve new names on his right arm, held it out to Sumayya to read without being asked. Yusuf, who was three hundred and twenty-eight days old, walked from the brick to the nurse's rug, and past it, and all the way to the King's knee, and the older boy walked beside him, not touching.

Night 978. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a Caliph who found that one province's tribute had not come, only begun; a grey book of a hundred leaves, in which are the names said at the north gate, kept with the blue ones; twelve new names of the night; Salma, the four hundred and second, whose mother says her name at the north gate, and the answer, here; a freed lutanist who asked at once; a jeweller who looked hard, and did not see; whose it is to pardon what the King has done; a friend lost for telling the truth, and a deposit; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, forty-three hundred at the gate, nine ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and forty-eight days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, three hundred and twenty-eight days old, who walks; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Nine Hundred and Seventy-nine to Nine Hundred and Eighty-nine: A Whip at Midnight, Five Times Bowed, and a Pardon That Is Not a Lock

The Caliph Harun al-Rashid, my sister went on, going over the tributes of his provinces, found that every one had come in but Basra's, which was twenty days late. "Perhaps something has befallen the governor," said Ja'afar. "Twenty days," said Shah Zaman. "Two hundred and forty-nine," said my father, from his corner, and looked as if he wished he had not. "I know the number," said the King. The Caliph sent Abu Ishak the boon-companion, with five thousand horse, to ask why; and the governor, Abdullah bin Fazil, rode out to meet him, and said the tribute was ready and would go tomorrow, but that since Abu Ishak had come so far he must be a guest for three days first. They ate, and sat late, and a bed was spread for him on an ivory couch inlaid with gold; and at midnight, lying awake and making verses, he saw his host get up, and gird himself, and take a whip from a locker and a lighted taper, and go out.

Abu Ishak followed as softly as he could. He saw the governor take a tray from a closet, four dishes and bread and a jug of water, and carry it down a passage to a room with an ivory couch in the middle and two dogs fastened to the couch with chains of gold. He loosed the first dog, which put its muzzle to the floor as if to kiss it, and whined; and he tied its paws behind it and threw it down and beat it with the whip until it groaned and lay without sense; and then he did the same to the second. Then he took out a kerchief and wiped their eyes, and said, "Bear me no malice; by God, this is not of my will, nor is it easy for me; it may be that God will give you a way out." He fed them from his own hand, a morsel at a time, and gave them water, and went away. Abu Ishak saw it three nights, and said nothing to his host, and on the fourth day took the tribute and went home. "Three nights," said Sumayya. "He did not ask him." "He was ashamed," said the nurse. "He told the Caliph," said Shah Zaman. "Casually," said my sister, "and without design." "Say what the man said after," said the King. My sister said it. "Again," said the King, and she said it again; and he said, "Again," and she said it a third time, and he said, "That is enough." I did not write it in the Roll. I put it on the second sheet, with a number beside it, and the number is three.

The Caliph said, "Go back, and bring me Abdullah and the two dogs." Abu Ishak begged to be excused, because he had been the man's guest and could not look him in the face; but the Caliph said that if he sent another, the governor would deny it and say he had no dogs, and if he sent Abu Ishak, who had seen them, he could not. "Otherwise I will kill you." "Man's wrong is from the tongue," said Abu Ishak, and went back with a letter in the Caliph's hand and told his host the whole of it. And Abdullah said, "Since you have told him, I will bear out your report, lest he think you a liar, for you are my friend. Were it anyone else, I would have denied it and given him the lie." They went to Baghdad, with the dogs on camels, in chains of gold, and the dogs kissed the floor before the Caliph and wagged their tails and wept. "He did not lose the friend," said Sumayya. "He lost the secret," said the nurse.

The dogs, said Abdullah, were his brothers, Mansur and Nasir; and if he spoke truly they would bow their heads, and if he lied they would stare up. Their father Fazil had been named for the twin who lived; he left three sons, a house and a shop and sixty thousand dinars; and Abdullah, the youngest, took the house and the shop in the division and stayed to keep them, while his brothers took their share in money and stuffs and went to sea. A year later, in the cold of winter, they came to his shop in ragged shirts with their lips white, having lost everything in a wreck; and he put his own furs on their backs and took them to the bath, and fed them, and then divided what he had into three, "as if our father had died today," and opened each of them a shop; and they sold by day and praised the sea by night, and urged him to come with them. Each time he turned to the dogs and said, "Was this so, O my brothers?" and each time they bowed their heads. I counted them on the second sheet. There were five before he was done. "He divided it twice," said Sumayya. "The second time nobody asked him to." "Nobody asked the dogs anything," said the nurse, "but whether it was true." "It is two answers," said the King. "Bow, or stare." Nobody asked him what he meant.

They sailed, and made money, and came to a mountain where Abdullah, going up to look for water, saw a white snake fleeing from a black dragon, and when the dragon had her by the head he threw a stone and killed it; and the snake became a girl, who kissed his hands and went down into the earth. Twenty days after, with the water gone, they came to another mountain, and behind it a city with fourteen gates and a porter on a bench with fourteen keys on a brass chain, who would not return his greeting, because he was stone. So was the old woman with a bundle of washing on her head, and the oilman with his scales and his cheeses, and the dogs and the cats. The cloth in the shops was like cobweb and went to powder in his hand; the bags of gold crumbled, and the gold in them did not. In the palace the Wazirs sat on their chairs, stone, and the King on his throne in a crown, stone; and up forty steps he heard a girl reciting aloud, and found her, the King's daughter, who knew his name. An old man who came on Fridays had told it to her. The book says why her father's city had been turned to stone, and it was a quarrel about gods, and I leave it out; she had been seven, and was thirty, and had lived twenty-three years in that room on one pomegranate a day from a tree in the court. "The cloth went to dust and the gold stayed," said Sumayya. "Gold does," said the nurse. "Hamid says bread is a thing that goes off," said the King. "It is why it is bread," said Shah Zaman. "Yes," said the King. "Twenty-three years," said my father. "He asked her whether she would be his wife," said my sister, "and to go with him to Basra. She said yes." "He asked her," said the nurse.

He brought her to the ship, and his brothers, who had not dared go in, took their share and rolled their eyes; and when they saw the girl, each said he must have her. He said he had promised to marry her himself, and that he would find each of them a bride in Basra, with a dowry, and they would be wed on one night; and they said nothing. On the fortieth night, in sight of Basra, they took him in his sleep by the arms and the legs and threw him into the sea, and told the captain he had gone over the side in the dark to relieve himself. He sank, and the water brought him up, and a great bird the size of a man took him in her claws; and she was the snake, whose name was Sa'idah, daughter of the Red King of the Jinn. She took him to her mother and her father, who gave him a suit of treasure; and she told him why the dragon had hunted her, and I leave that out; and she carried him back to the ship, where his brothers were quarrelling over the girl. She would have killed them. He begged her not to. "To content you, I will not kill them," she said, "but I will enchant them," and filled a cup with sea-water, and said a word over it, and sprinkled them, and they were two dogs. And she said: when you come to Basra, put a collar on each, and chain them in a room by themselves, and every night at midnight beat each of them until he faints; and if you let a night pass, I will come and beat you, and then I will beat them.

In Basra he put collars of gold on them, because he could not bear iron, and the first night he forgot, and she came out of the floor and beat him until he fainted, and then went and beat them. After that he never missed a night, for twelve years, "in my own despite," and afterwards he wiped their eyes and fed them with his hand. "Because she would beat him," said Shah Zaman. "He said it every night," said Sumayya. "After. 'It is not of my will.'" "It was in his hand," said the King. Nobody said anything. That night, at the foot of the Open, I wrote: a man who beat his brothers every night for twelve years, and said after that it was not of his will. Sumayya read it aloud with the rest at the end of the second glass, in the voice she uses for all of it. The King did not stop her.

The Caliph said he would have the dogs made men again, and wrote to the Jinn's daughter in his own hand, and told Abdullah to leave the beating for one night and give her the letter. That night Abdullah took the collars off and sat the dogs down to eat from the same tray, and let them wash their paws after, to the stupefaction of his servants, who threw the leavings away as unclean; and at midnight Sa'idah came up through the floor with eyes like fire. He gave her the letter. It said that the man had forgiven his brothers and given up his claim, and that where there was reconciliation retribution was remitted; and that if the Jinn would not hear him, he would not hear them. She took it to her father, who said that the writer of it had power over them, for reasons I leave out, and that she must obey; and she came back and sprinkled the dogs, and they were men, and fell at their brother's feet. "He forgave what was done to him," said the King. "The letter says the claim is his." "And hers?" said the nurse. "Whose?" "The one in the cabin." Nobody answered. Abdullah asked his brothers what they had done with his wife, and they said that she had heard them fighting, and gone into the sea. He wept, and forgave them for that too. Sa'idah, going, said, "Be on your guard against them; they are traitors."

They did not change. They made him a feast, one at a time, and sat him up late with stories, and when he slept they knelt on him, and put him in the river, and went to the Caliph weeping, and said the Jinn's daughter had carried their brother off, and begged his governorship. A dolphin took him up. It came every day under the kitchen window of that house, where the leavings were thrown into the river, and that day there had been more than usual, and it was strong; it carried him to the far bank. "Of course," said Shah Zaman. "A pardon is not a lock," said the nurse. "No," said the King. "The kitchen fed the dolphin," said my father. "It was the leavings," said the King. "It is the same." A caravan found him, and a man in it who knew medicine nursed him for thirty days' journey, to a city far from Basra, where a healer named Rajihah cured the sick overnight; he was carried in, and behind the curtain was his wife. She had gone into the sea, and the old man who came on Fridays had taken her up and put her there and told her to wait; and she rubbed his limbs, and he was well. "She was alive," said Sumayya. "Yes," said the King. On a Friday night the old man carried them both home to Abdullah's palace in Basra, and in the morning he looked from the lattice.

He saw his brothers where the Caliph had had them put, for what they had told him; the book says how, and I leave it out. He had them buried, and went to Baghdad and told the Caliph the whole of it, and the Caliph had the marriage contract drawn between him and the girl from the stone city; and they lived in Basra until the Destroyer of delights came. "Nobody asked her what she would have done with them," said the nurse. "No," said the King. On the 989th night my sister, who had told the end of the book with her hand at her side, began a cobbler of Cairo whose wife was called the Dung, and who was asked on the first page for a vermicelli-cake with honey and had no dirhams. "A cobbler with a wife," said the nurse. "Good." My sister laughed, and stopped; and the nurse took the stool from under her feet and put a cushion behind her back.

That night the rains in the north were two hundred and fifty-nine days late, and there were forty-five hundred at the north gate, and Hamid had asked for a tenth oven and it was laid; my father had eleven new names on his right arm, and held it out to Sumayya to read without being asked. Yusuf, who was three hundred and thirty-nine days old, walked from the nurse's rug to the King's knee, as he does, and stood, and lifted both arms. The King, who had picked him up unasked for three hundred and thirty-nine days, said, "He is asking," to no one, and picked him up.

Night 989. Shahrazad and Dunyazad. Present. Open: a cobbler of Cairo, whose wife is called the Dung, who was asked for a vermicelli-cake with honey and had no dirhams, only begun; a man who beat his brothers every night for twelve years, and said after that it was not of his will; a wife who went into the sea rather than be chosen, and was not asked what should be done to the men who chose; a grey book of a hundred leaves, in which are the names said at the north gate, kept with the blue ones; eleven new names of the night; Salma, the four hundred and second, whose mother says her name at the north gate, and the answer, here; a freed lutanist who asked at once; a jeweller who looked hard, and did not see; whose it is to pardon what the King has done; a friend lost for telling the truth, and a deposit; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a third child, not yet; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, forty-five hundred at the gate, ten ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and fifty-nine days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, three hundred and thirty-nine days old, who walks and lifted his arms; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Nights Nine Hundred and Ninety to Nine Hundred and Ninety-nine: Plenty, Present, and a Ring That a Princess Keeps

On the 990th night my sister went on with the cobbler. Ma'aruf lived in Cairo by patching old shoes, and his wife, Fatimah, whom the whole street called the Dung, told him one evening to bring her a vermicelli-cake dressed with bees' honey. My father's hand went to his right sleeve and came away. Nobody remarked on it. Ma'aruf had no dirhams; a pastry-cook trusted him, and dressed the cake with cane-honey, because he had no other; and she threw it in his face and knocked out a tooth, and he struck her once, lightly. "Lightly," said the King. "The book says lightly," said the nurse. "Who wrote the book?" said Shah Zaman. She complained of him to a Kazi, who gave him a quarter-dinar to buy honey and told them to be at peace; and the Kazi's runners, who wanted their fee, dragged him about the market until he sold his tools. She complained to a second Kazi, and a third court; a man ran in to warn him that she had gone to the High Court; and he ran, with five small coins, and sat down in the rain in a ruined cell, and wept.

A being came out of the wall. He had lived in that cell two hundred years, he said, and had never seen anyone do as this man was doing; and he had pity, and would do what the man wished. Ma'aruf asked for a country where his wife would not know the way. The being took him on his back and flew with him all night and set him down on a mountain above a city, and in the morning he went down, and the people laughed at him for saying that he had left Cairo yesterday, and a merchant on a mule drove them off and took him home. It was Ali, who had played with him as a boy, and had run away at seven and wandered, and made himself rich in that city by saying he was a merchant whose baggage was behind him. "Where nobody knows you, do what you like," said Ali. "Say that you are a rich man who has come for pleasure, and that your baggage is coming. When they ask if you have any such stuff, say, Plenty." "The being asked him what he wanted first," said Sumayya. "Before he did anything." "Two hundred years in a wall," said the nurse, "and nobody had wept in his cell." "He had been waiting for it," said the King. He did not say what he meant, and no one asked.

So Ma'aruf rode into the market on a mule, and Ali rose and kissed his hand and told the merchants that he was the richest man in Cairo; and whatever they asked, he said, "Plenty." A beggar came, and he gave him a handful of gold, and the thousand dinars Ali had lent him were gone by noon. The consul of the merchants said that when a beggar came he should say, God will send you your daily bread; and Ma'aruf said that was not his practice, and borrowed another thousand, and gave that away; and for twenty days he borrowed from the merchants and gave to the poor, until he owed sixty thousand dinars and no baggage came. "Plenty," said the nurse. "He had none," said Sumayya. "Sixty thousand dinars, lord, in twenty days," said my father, "to beggars, on his word." "He did not say, God will provide," said Shah Zaman. "He gave," said the King. "He had nothing to give," said the nurse. "He gave," said the King again. Nobody went on with it.

The merchants went to the Sultan of the city, who was a covetous man; and he thought that a man who gave away sixty thousand must have a great deal more, and that he had more right to it than the merchants. He sent for Ma'aruf and gave him a jewel to value; and Ma'aruf, who had no notion of jewels, pressed it between finger and thumb and broke it, and said it was a bit of stone worth a thousand dinars and he had better. The Sultan took this for proof. His Wazir said that the man was an impostor, and the Sultan said that he said so because he had once asked for the Princess himself, and been refused; and gave the Princess to Ma'aruf, with forty days of feasts. "The Wazir was right," said Sumayya. "With a grudge," said the nurse. "It is still the truth," said the King. "Nobody asked the Princess," said Sumayya. "She was asked about the Wazir," said my sister, "and she said no." "And about this one?" said the nurse. "No."

The book spends a page on the wedding night, and a hundred names for one thing, and I leave it out; so did my sister, but not for that reason. In the first glass of the 994th night, in the middle of a sentence about a treasurer, she put her hand to her side and said, "Nurse." The nurse said, "Yes," as if she had been asked what time it was, and took her under the arms, and the two women who had been waiting in the next room since the 985th night took her behind the curtain. "Take the boys," said the nurse. The King took the older boy by the hand and the younger on his arm, and sat down on the floor by the brick, with his back to the wall, and a boy on each knee. My father stood in his corner. Shah Zaman sat up on his rug and counted something on his fingers. Sumayya came and sat against my knees. "Go on," the King said to me. I said that I did not know where she had stopped. "Anywhere," he said.

I told the Princess asking her husband for the truth. She said to him, "Tell me, and nothing shall befall you but what will gladden you; you are my husband, and I will not transgress against you"; and he told her that he was a cobbler, and had a wife called the Dung; and she laughed, and said he was clever at lying, and that her father had given her to him for his money, and would kill him when he found out. She gave him fifty thousand dinars of her own, and a young man's clothes, and a horse, and told him to go where her father's rule did not reach and write to her, and she would send him all her hand could reach; and next morning she told her father, who had asked her to find out, that ten young men had come with a letter saying the baggage was late because robbers had taken two hundred loads on the road, and that her husband had gone to hurry it, laughing, and that the Wazir was a liar. "She kept it," said Sumayya. "She was asked to find out. She found out. She did not tell him." "She promised first," said the King. Behind the curtain there were sounds. When there was a noise, he put his hand on the nearer boy and kept it there until it had passed.

While I told it, the King began to speak to the boys, in the voice he keeps for the Open, so low that I do not think he knew I could hear. He told them a tale. There was a king, he said, who had a rule, and a book in which the rule was kept, and a vizier who carried the book up the hill at dawn; and one evening a girl came with a book under her arm and said, I will tell you a tale; and the king knew. He knew on the first night that he would not draw the line. He had sat up waiting to hear what happened next, but that was only to hear it; he had known from the beginning, and she was never in danger from him, not for one dawn. "Gain," said the older boy, who has three words, and none of them right for this. The King told it again, the same way, word for word, as one says a thing that has now been said. My father, in his corner, said nothing. I wrote what the King had said in the margin, where I write what is said, under the stroke for the night. On the second sheet I wrote what the Roll says of the first morning, which is: Night 1. Shahrazad. Struck: nothing. Open: a merchant and a Jinni, only begun; and I put no mark beside it. The Roll is kept for what is said. It was never kept for what is true; that is what the second sheet is for. The second time he told it, I did not write it down. The Roll takes a thing once.

The window had gone from black to the colour of ash when a voice said from behind the curtain, "A son." It was the nurse. Nobody moved. Then, from behind the curtain, there was a thin, outraged sound, the sound of a very small person finding out what air is like; and the King, with a boy on each knee, said, loud and level, to me, "Write: Present." I did not understand him. "He answered," said the King. "Write it." So I wrote it, by the small lamp, at the foot of the night, where the line is: Night 994. Shahrazad and Dunyazad, and one. Present. The King put his thumb beside the word. "Is she," he said, and the nurse said, "Tired, lord. She says you may come." He gave me both boys, who were heavy and warm and asleep, and went behind the curtain, and I heard nothing; and when he came out he did not say what he had said. "He will be named on the seventh morning," said the nurse. "I know," said the King.

For six nights I told both glasses, and my sister lay with her face to the wall and the new one on her arm. On the 995th I told the ploughman: Ma'aruf rode into the waste with the Princess's money, and a peasant asked him to be his guest and went to fetch him dinner, and Ma'aruf, to make up for the time, took the plough himself, and the share caught in a ring of gold, and under a slab he found a stair and a hall with four daises, one of gold, one of emeralds and pearls, one of rubies, one of diamonds, and a coffer of crystal with a casket on it, and in the casket a seal-ring with writing on it like the tracks of ants. He rubbed it. A voice said, "Adsum! Wilt thou raise a city or ruin a capital or kill a king?" It was a spirit called Abu al-Sa'adat, who had been Shaddad's, and who said he must serve whoever held the ring and rub it, once; and if you rubbed it twice together, you would burn him. Ma'aruf asked for the whole hoard brought up, and eight hundred of the spirit's sons came out as boys with golden baskets and made it three hundred mules' load; and seven hundred mules of stuff, and horses with jewelled saddles that were spirits, and a litter of red gold; and when the peasant came back with a bowl of lentils and a nosebag of barley, he took him for the Sultan, and Ma'aruf ate the lentils, and filled the bowl with gold. "He ate what he was given," said Shah Zaman, "and paid." "He asked the ring what it could do," said Sumayya, "before he asked it for anything." "He asked for the mules," said the nurse. "He had plenty," said the King. "After all."

He went back to the city in the litter, with the Sultan coming out to meet him, and the merchants repaid two for one, and he gave to the poor until the Sultan had to find another store-house, and the Wazir's face went the colour of a dead leaf. It was the Wazir who said that there must be a secret, and that wine is a traitor. On the 998th night he took the Sultan and Ma'aruf into a garden and filled the cup and filled it again, and Ma'aruf told him everything, and, when the Wazir asked to see the ring, drunk, handed it over. The Wazir rubbed it, and said, "Take this man and throw him down in the Desert Quarter, where there is nothing to eat or drink." And when the Sultan asked what his crime was, he rubbed it again, and the Sultan went down beside his son-in-law. Our King looked at my father. "Have you a ring?" he said. "I have no ring, lord," said my father. "No," said the King. "You have sleeves." My father looked at his sleeves, which were rolled to the elbow, and said that he supposed he did.

The Wazir called the troops and told them he would have them thrown down too if they did not make him Sultan; and they did. He sent word to the Princess that he would come to her that night, widowhood or no; and she sent back, "Welcome." I leave out what the book says he meant. She put on her best, and laughed at him, and said, "Seest thou not the man looking at us? He is in the bezel of the ring. Throw it away from me." He plucked it off and laid it on the cushion; and she kicked him in the stomach, and he fell over, and forty slave-girls held him while she rubbed the ring once and had him taken to a prison. She had her father and her husband fetched back from the desert, and told her father to sit on his throne and make her husband Wazir of the Right, and said what should be done to the Wazir, and I leave that out. "Give me the ring," said her father. "Or give it to thy husband." "It behoveth not that either of you have it," said the Princess. "I will keep it myself, and belike I shall be more careful of it than you." "She kept it," said Sumayya. "She could," said the nurse. "She was careful, lord," said my father. "She was." The King looked at his right hand, which lay on his knee, and did not turn it over.

On the 999th night the rains in the north were two hundred and sixty-nine days late, and there were forty-seven hundred at the north gate, and Hamid had asked for an eleventh oven and it had not been laid; my father had thirteen new names on his right arm, and read them without being asked. Yusuf, who was three hundred and forty-nine days old, walked the length of the Roll-room, and past the brick, and back, and the older boy walked beside him, not touching. My sister sat up, for the first time, with the new one asleep on her arm, and said that the cobbler's tale would end in two nights, and that she would tell it herself. Nobody said what the number two meant; all of us had counted it.

Night 999. Shahrazad and Dunyazad, and one. Present. Open: a Wazir in the Prison of Wrath, and a ring that a Princess keeps, only begun; a man who beat his brothers every night for twelve years, and said after that it was not of his will; a wife who went into the sea rather than be chosen, and was not asked what should be done to the men who chose; a grey book of a hundred leaves, in which are the names said at the north gate, kept with the blue ones; thirteen new names of the night; Salma, the four hundred and second, whose mother says her name at the north gate, and the answer, here; a freed lutanist who asked at once; a jeweller who looked hard, and did not see; whose it is to pardon what the King has done; a friend lost for telling the truth, and a deposit; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a son, five days old, who has no name, and who answered; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, and eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, forty-seven hundred at the gate, ten ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut and barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and sixty-nine days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, three hundred and forty-nine days old, who walks; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Night One Thousand: One Breath Each, Someone to Answer, and a Shutter Not Barred

The Night column of the Roll is three figures wide. The chief clerk ruled it so on the evening before my sister came, when he could not have thought of a night with a fourth, and for two hundred nights I had known this one would not fit. On the thousandth I wrote it small, with the one tucked against the line and the three noughts going over into the column headed Name, and nobody remarked on it, though my father looked at it for the length of a breath. It was the sixth day since the new one came, if you count the day he came, which the nurse does. My sister sat up on the cushion with him on her arm and told the first glass herself, in a voice that was thinner than it had been and did not shake. "I said I would," she said, to nobody.

She began where she had left the Wazir, in the Prison of Wrath. The Sultan had him fetched out and put to death and burned in front of the troops, who cursed him as he passed; what was done I leave out, and so did she, in a sentence. Ma'aruf was made Wazir of the Right. They lived so five years, and in the sixth the old Sultan died, and the Princess made her husband Sultan in his place, and kept the ring. They had a son, who was five. "She kept it to the end," said Sumayya. "She gave it to him when she was dying," said my sister. "She said, be careful of the ring, for your own sake and for this boy's. And in the morning she was dead." The King looked at the new one on my sister's arm and said nothing. "She was careful," said the nurse. "She was," said the King.

One night Ma'aruf, who had been Sultan for a while, woke in the dark and found a woman in his bed, long-toothed and ill-favoured, who said, "Fear not, I am your wife Fatimah." She had been begging in Cairo, she said; she had wept for him every night; and a being had found her weeping and told her that her husband was a Sultan in a certain city, and had taken her through the air and set her down in his room. Ma'aruf asked when she had left Cairo, and she said, just now. She said she was sorry; and she asked him, as a beggar asks, to let her eat bread with him. "He took her in," said the nurse. "She asked," said Sumayya. "She said, I place myself under your protection." "Someone carries them all," said Shah Zaman. "There is always one," said the nurse. Ma'aruf gave her a palace and twenty slave-girls and said that if she did any mischief he would kill her and fear nobody; and the boy, who visited her as he visited his father, took a dislike to her, because she looked at him as at somebody else's. "Children know," said the nurse. "Yes," said the King.

My sister stopped there, at the end of the first glass, in the middle of the boy and the woman, and said that the rest was tomorrow's, and that she would not make it longer than it was. She did not tell the second; she held the new one. It was Sumayya's turn to read the Open, which she does at the end of the second glass, and she took up the paper because there was nothing else to do with the silence, and read it from the top in the voice she uses for all of it; and when she came to the line about the names said at the north gate with the bread, and the answer, here, which she has read eighty times and the King has heard eighty times with his hand on his knee, the King said, "Tonight."

Nobody asked what he meant. He stood up and gave the boy on his knee to the nurse and said to my father, "The Roll. All of it, and the grey book." "It is a thousand and eighty-one, lord," said my father. "You have carried them up the hill every dawn," said the King. My father went and brought the Roll, and took it in both arms, with the cover against his chest, as he used to take the shroud; and a porter took the grey book. "Who is to come?" said my father. "Whoever wants to," said the King. Shah Zaman put his cap on his knee, and took it up again. Sumayya took the lamp. The nurse said that nobody was to take my sister, and my sister said that she had no intention, she had something on her arm; but she looked at the King as he went by, and nodded, once, as one does when a thing has been said the right size. I put on the nurse's brown veil, which smells of cats, and followed.

We went out by the gardeners' gate, with ten guards in porters' coats a hundred paces behind, and through a city that was asleep or pretending to be. Shutters closed ahead of us, one after another, as on the evening we walked to the palace; but this time, here and there, a shutter opened behind. It smelled of lime and wet bark in the lower streets, and of bread near the north. The gate is at the top of the town. Forty-nine hundred people were lying on the stones in the dark with their feet toward eleven ovens, and Hamid, who does not wear a coat, was standing by the first with his arms folded; and the women in black were in the third row, where I had seen them on the fortieth day. Nobody cheered. I think the King had expected it. I think he had walked the whole way with his hands down, ready for it; and when the crowd only turned over, like sleepers, and sat up one by one, he let out his breath. My father opened the Roll on the lid of a bread-box, at the first page, where the first name was. The King, who had read it every dawn for the length of a breath, read it aloud.

"Layla," he said, and took one breath, which was what he had always given, and nobody answered. Shah Zaman, behind him, took off his cap, which in Samarkand is a thing a man does at a burial; I do not think he knew he had done it. He read the second. He read the third, and from somewhere in the crowd a woman's voice said, "Here," not loudly, and it went back through the court like a bucket along a line, until it reached the ovens; and I saw that she had not known the girl; she was an old woman with a limp who had come for bread. After that there were more. For the names that had somebody, the somebody said it; and for the names that had nobody, a person near the front said it, and then another; and by the two hundredth, when the King's voice had begun to break on the long ones, I could not have said which were answered by kin and which by neighbours, and I do not think they could. He never made a breath longer than a breath. I asked him afterwards. He said that he could not give the first more than the last, nor the last less than the first; he had given them one breath apiece for three years, and it was the only thing he had given them that was exactly fair. He said it as a man says the price of bread.

At the three hundred and eleventh, a woman in a grey veil said "Here" in the voice in which she had asked me for a place to write it, and I thought of the dimple. At the four hundred and second the King stopped before the name, and the women in black waited; and he said, "Salma," and the woman who had stepped out of the rank on the fortieth day said, "Mine," and then, "Here," and sat down on the stones, not because she was tired. He took the breath. He did not look at the book. By the six hundredth the whole of the gate was answering. It was not loud. It was like the sound of a long thing being passed from hand to hand in the dark. At the eight hundred and fifth the voice that said "Here" belonged to an old man at the edge of the crowd, with nobody beside him, who had come on the seventeenth day to write his sister's name; and he looked, as he said it, at my father; and my father, who was holding the book open with both hands, bowed his head once, as one does to a witness, and did not lift it until the next name.

There were a thousand and eighty-one before her. The last was a girl called Nafisa, seventeen, a salt-seller's daughter, and her father said "Here" from the third row in the voice of a man answering a roll he has dreaded for three years. The grey had begun in the dark above the gate, and the ovens ticked, and at the back a child coughed. The King turned the page, to the page I had ruled in the last of the light, and read what was written on the first line of it, in my sister's hand. "Shahrazad," he said. It was not a name that anyone at the gate had to answer. "Present," I said. I had not known I was going to. It is the word I have drawn beside her name for a thousand nights, and I said it in my own voice, which carried further than I meant; and from the back a man's voice that I did not know said, "Here," and then another, and then, quietly, the whole gate, once, and stopped.

He did not read the blue books, which are the same names with more written beside them. He read the grey book, which is short; and last of all my father gave the Roll to the porters, and pushed up his right sleeve to the elbow, and held out the arm in the light of the ovens, and the King read the twelve new names from the ink on the inside of it, one breath each, and twelve voices answered. My father's arm did not shake, and he did not look at it. When it was done, the sky above the gate was the colour of the inside of a shell. There was no wind. The wind had stood in the north for as long as the rains had been late; and the smoke of the ovens went straight up, and then, near the top, leaned a little to the south, which my father looked at and did not mention. Hamid came with a loaf in his two hands and held it out. "Lord." The King broke it and gave half to my father. "It is not the King's bread," he said. "No, lord," said Hamid. They ate it standing, in the cold, with forty-nine hundred people not watching.

We did not go back by the way we had come. The King went down, through the town, by the steps to the river, with my father behind him carrying the Roll in both arms again, and Shah Zaman, and Sumayya with the lamp that nobody needed now; and I do not think he had said where. At the bottom, where the river bends, in the lane that smells of lime, he stopped across from the two houses with no roof. The shutter was shut. The bar was down. "Ma'aruf," said the King. He gave it the breath. "A cobbler. Seventy-one." Nothing. I counted ten, as she had counted it for him. At eleven, I heard the bar lifted, and the shutter opened a hand's breadth, and a woman's face was in the gap, about forty, with a cloth over her hair; and she looked at him for as long as she had looked at him before. "Here," she said. "Yes," said the King. And then he said, "I have a son. He is to be named this morning. I would give him the name. I am asking." She looked at him. "It is a common name," she said, and shut the shutter. She did not drop the bar. We stood there a little longer than there was any need, in the smell of lime, and then my father moved, and we went up. On the steps I thought: my sister had not chosen the tale; it was next; and my father's hand had gone to his sleeve on the 990th night at a name, and I had thought it was a trade.

It was the seventh morning. The nurse was waiting on the Roll-room stair with the new one wrapped in the green shawl, which is mine, and my sister behind her, who had not slept and did not say so. The King sat down at the table where the Roll was lying, and took the reed, and in the margin of the margin, after CAME and YUSUF and the others, in his small square hand, wrote the tenth word. Sumayya, who copies a name four times, wrote it once, and looked at it, and wrote it again, and her fourth was straight. It said MA'ARUF. "It is the name in the tale," said Shah Zaman. "It is a common name," said the King. My father said, in the voice for numbers, that there were four hundred and six of them in the city, in the registers of the quarters; he had looked. "Both," said the nurse, who had not been told which. "Both," said the King. I do not know what the woman at the shutter meant. I wrote it as she said it.

On the thousandth night the rains in the north were two hundred and seventy days late, and there were forty-nine hundred at the north gate, and Hamid's eleventh oven was laid; my father had twelve names on his arm, which had been read, and he washed it in the ewer, and the water ran blue. Yusuf, who was three hundred and fifty days old, walked the length of the Roll-room and back, and the older boy walked beside him, not touching. I wrote the line at the foot of the night, where the line is. I did not strike anything.

Night 1000. Shahrazad and Dunyazad, and one. Present. Open: a woman come from Cairo to a cobbler who is a Sultan, and a boy who dislikes her, only begun; a man who beat his brothers every night for twelve years, and said after that it was not of his will; a wife who went into the sea rather than be chosen, and was not asked what should be done to the men who chose; the names of the Roll, read aloud at the north gate from the first to the last, one breath each, and the answer, here; Salma, the four hundred and second, who said, mine; twelve new names of the night, read from an arm; a freed lutanist who asked at once; a jeweller who looked hard, and did not see; whose it is to pardon what the King has done; a friend lost for telling the truth, and a deposit; the women in the room where the Wazirs were killed, and a boy who would have spared them; a son named Ma'aruf, seven days old, who answered; a grocer's daughter, who was divorced and paid, and not asked; a woman who gave up her marriage to save a hand, and whether she was asked back; a purse, forgotten; a sale made under compulsion, and the Kazi who wrote it; a grave with someone in it; a cobbler, seventy-one, who is dead, whose name was said, and the answer; eight men let out of the jails for words, who went where nobody saw; a litter, and a smell of lime; kitchens at the north gate, forty-nine hundred at the gate, eleven ovens, and a baker who will not call it the King's bread; a slave-girl called Marsinah, who said it was done; a shutter, shut, not barred, in the Tanners' Lane; a eunuch who told the truth, in Sumayya's hand; rains two hundred and seventy days late in the north; a son named Yusuf, three hundred and fifty days old, who walks; a boy in shoes that squeak, who says Ba and Gain and Yu; a woman who was asked, after; a woman who was not asked; a woodcutter, who was not asked; a book of names; a boon, not yet asked.

Night One Thousand and One: A Stroke That Leans, Yes to Again, and One Line Left Open

The seventh morning was the thousand and first day, though nobody called it that, and it had nothing in it. The King slept in daylight, which he does not do, on the floor of the Roll-room, with the older boy against his back. My father, who did not sleep, went down to the north gate at noon and came back with his left sleeve pushed up and a number on the inside of the wrist: a hundred and eleven. A hundred and eleven families had gone home in the night, with their bundles, by the north road, toward the villages they had come from, because their names had been read; Hamid had counted the pallets. My father did not know which arm the number belonged on. He wrote it on the left, under the rains, and looked at it. The wind had gone round to the south after midnight. Nobody mentioned that either. Sumayya read the Open to the cat, to practise. The new one had a day of being looked at. The older boy brought him a shoe, which was the only thing he had to give, and the nurse took it away, and he brought it again.

At the first glass my sister, on the cushion, took the cobbler up where she had left him: the woman from Cairo, and the boy who disliked her. Ma'aruf, she said, would have nothing to do with the woman as a husband, and kept to others, and she grew jealous, and took it into her head to have the ring and kill him and be Queen in his place. It was his custom, out of respect for the writing on it, to take the ring off when he lay with a woman, and lay it on the pillow, and not put it on again until he had washed, and to send the woman away before dawn; and Fatimah knew. "He took it off," said Sumayya. "Every time," said the nurse. "She watched him do it," said Shah Zaman. "She had nothing else to watch," said the nurse.

The night she went to do it, the boy, who had gone out to the privy without a light, saw her come out of her palace in the dark and go to his father's, and said to himself, what does that witch want there at this hour? He had a short sword of watered steel that he would not go to his father's Divan without, and his father used to laugh at it and say, "It is a fine sword, my son, but you have not gone down with it to battle nor cut off a head"; and the boy would say, "I will not fail to cut off with it some head that deserves it." He followed her. She went in, and searched, and said to herself, "Where has he laid the ring?"; and found it; and as she came out, turning it in her hand, about to rub it, the boy did what he had said he would, and I leave out how, and she cried out once and was dead. "He did not wake his father," said Shah Zaman. "He followed her," said the King. "She had the ring in her hand," said the nurse. "She did," said the King. He looked at his right hand on his knee. This time he turned it over, and looked at the palm, which was empty, as my father looks at his; and turned it back.

Ma'aruf woke and saw his wife on the floor, and the boy with the sword, and heard it, and said that the boy was his son without doubt, and had eased him of her. He took the ring from her hand, and had her washed and shrouded and buried; her coming from Cairo had been only to her grave. He sent for the ploughman whose lentils he had eaten, and made him Wazir of the Right, and married his daughter, and in due time married his son; and they lived in all the ease that there is, and their days were serene, until there came the Destroyer of delights and the Severer of societies. "That is the end of the cobbler," my sister said. "It is also the end of what I have." Nobody moved. The lamp made its small noise. Outside, in the night, as it had been all day, it was dry.

"I have not asked you for anything," she said, "since I asked your leave to say good-bye to my sister, on the first night. After that I told you what I would do. I would like to ask now." "Ask," said the King. She said, "Bring me my sons," to the nurse; and the nurse brought them: the older, by the hand, walking, in his shoes that squeak; the second, who walks, but goes down on his hands when he is in a hurry; and the third, on her arm, who had been named that morning. My sister took the baby and stood up, which nobody had told her she might. The nurse said her name, in a tone I will not set down. She stood in the lamp with her free hand on the older boy's head and the second holding her skirt, in front of the King. "These are your sons," she said. "I ask that you release me from the doom of death, as a gift to them; for if you kill me they will have no one to tell them how it was."

The King looked at her for a long time. Then he said, in the plain voice he uses to Hamid, "I pardoned you before the coming of these children." He said it as one says a thing that has now been said. Nobody spoke. My father, in his corner, put a hand into his sleeve and took out nothing, and put it back. "I know, lord," said my sister. She meant either thing. She had the baby on her arm, and she looked past the King, at the lamp, with the face she wears at the end of a tale, which gives nothing away, and which I have been reading for a thousand nights and could not read. I wrote what he had said in the margin, where I write what is said, under the stroke for the night; and on the second sheet I wrote nothing, because I did not know what to put. I know what the Roll says of the first morning, and the third, and the hundredth; I have it by heart. It does not say when. The older boy said, "Gain," and the King, to my surprise, said, "No."

Shah Zaman cleared his throat. He said that if it was not an ill time he had something to ask, and had meant to ask it of the King as the head of the house. "Ask," said the King, in the voice of a man who has had practice with the word. Shah Zaman said that he wished to ask Dunyazad to marry him; and that he would stay where they were, and not take her to Samarkand, because he had learned in two years that he could not do without the sight of the rug by the cushion. "Do not ask me," said the King. "She is not mine to give. She is the one who keeps the book." Shah Zaman turned on his rug. He is a plain, kind man, and I think he was more afraid than the King had been of the gate. "Dunyazad," he said. "Ask me in the morning," I said. It was the first thing I had said to him in a voice that was not for the Roll. Shah Zaman sat back on his rug as if he had been handed something to carry, and put it carefully on his knee. "She has a boon first," said the King.

I had forgotten that he remembered. "It is the end of the Roll," he said, "and you said you would ask me at the end." "It is the end of a night," I said. "The Roll has a great many pages left. I ruled them." "Ask." I had had nine hundred nights to think of a boon, and every one I thought of was for somebody else, and one by one he had done them without being asked: the eight out of the jail, the gate fed, the names read. What was left was mine, and small. I did not know that I would say what I said until I had said it. "I would like to stop counting." "Counting what?" "Nights. Names. Days. Ovens. Strokes. I have counted everything since I was fifteen. I would like to do it badly." "Granted," said the King. "I wrote it down." He took the Roll, which was open on the table at the last page, and turned it to the binding, and showed me the mark he had made on the 462nd night, under the last stroke, in the margin by the spine, which I had taken for a date. It was a small upright stroke, not so straight as mine. "It is what you write," he said. "I was told it means, I am in the room." "It leans," I said. "I was not practised," said the King. I put my thumb beside it, as he does, and left it there, and he let me.

The others went on; the nurse put the boys to bed in a row; my sister sat down, because her knees had decided it; Sumayya trimmed the lamp. The King stayed at the table. After a while he said, low, not as to anyone, "When did I stop?" I said that the Roll does not say. "No," he said. "Is there a night?" "There is a night when you said, Then stop. There is a night when you said, Not yet, to my father, in the old voice, and it was not the old voice. There are nine nights that I could put a finger on, and none of them is it." "It is not in the Roll," he said. "No." "Then write that it is not." I took the second sheet and wrote: he does not know when. I wrote it with him watching, and he said, "That is the truer one," and put his thumb beside it, as he does, and left it there.

It began about the middle of the night, with a sound on the shutter that I took for a moth. Then it was on the roof, a few at a time, and then more, in no order, with the dull particular note that dry tiles make, and the cat went to the window and sat with her back to us. My father, who was standing in his corner, opened his mouth; I saw the number come up in it. "Two hundred and seventy-one," he began, in the voice for numbers; and the King said, "No." My father shut his mouth on it, and I watched it go down. He told me afterwards that it was the first number he had swallowed in forty years, and that it did not sit well. Nobody went to the window. The nurse said to my sister, quietly, that she should lie down. The baby woke and found it a thing worth the trouble of crying about. I lay on my cushion, where I lay on the first night, and listened, and did not count the drops. My sister, from hers, said, without turning her head, "You have stopped." "Yes." "Good. I never could. It is why I needed you." Then the older boy, who had been put to bed and had got out of it, walked to the window in his shoes and put both hands on the glass, and said, "Gain." "Yes," said the King. It was the first time he had answered the word. A little rain had come in at the door, which nobody had shut, and lay on the floor in a dark tongue; it reached the brick, which had stood all winter and all the dry months by the door, the colour of dust; and the brick drank it, and turned the colour of the lane. The second boy went and put his hand on it, as he does. It rained for some days. Sumayya says eleven, and my father says eleven and part of a twelfth; I do not know. It is what I asked for.

I did not carry the Open over. There were thirty-two lines in it that night; I had written them all myself, over nine hundred nights, and Sumayya had read them all aloud; and I wrote one. The names are the gate's now, and the arm is my father's, and the shutter is hers, and the rest, Marsinah and the grave and the woodcutter and the woman who was not asked, is on the second sheet, in order, as it stood on the thousandth night; it is the longest thing on the sheet and I am keeping it. My father went down to the Tanners' Lane in the spring, when the shutter was open, and I do not know what she said to him; he did not write it on his arm. I said at the beginning that the chroniclers were not in the room. They were not. They wrote the tales, which fill thirty volumes in the treasury in letters of gold; the King told them what to put in the front of them, and they put it, and it is as he said it to my sister, in front of the children. This is what was in the room. I said yes to Shah Zaman in the spring, when the rains had stopped. He had asked me three times by then. That is not in the Roll either. On the flyleaf the chief clerk's hand still says what the King said, in the hand he used for treaties. Nobody has asked him to change it. The Roll is not in the treasury. It is in the chief clerk's chest, and it has pages left, which I ruled; Sumayya keeps it, and writes the line each night in a hand that has stopped learning and looks like nobody's but hers. When it was time to write the line that night, I put the reed down, and held it out, and Sumayya took it. "What do I write?" she said. "What is said," I said. "And the number?" "Ask my father." My father said nothing; he pushed up his left sleeve, and let her read the number off his arm.

Night 1001. Shahrazad and Dunyazad, and three. Present. Open: whose it is to pardon what the King has done.

Under it, in another hand, one that is learning: Night 1002. Present.