The Thief of Bagdad. Achmed Abdullah
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freezing the marrow in his bones.
Where could he turn? Where hide himself? And then he saw, directly in front of him, an immense building; saw above him, thirty feet up, the invitation of an open window. How reach it? Hopeless! But, the next moment, he remembered his magic rope. He spoke the secret word. And the rope uncoiled, whizzed, stood straight like a lance at rest, and up he went hand over hand.
He reached the window, climbed in, drew the rope after him.
The house was deserted. He sped through empty rooms and corridors; came out on the roof and crossed it; leaped to a second roof and crossed that; a third; a fourth; until at last, slipping through a trap door, he found himself—for the first time in his unhallowed existence—in a Mosque of Allah, up on the ceiling rafters.
Inside, below him, a tall, gentle-eyed, green-turbaned Moslem priest was addressing a small gathering of devotees.
“There is prayer to Allah in everything,” he said, “in the buzzing of the insects, the scent of flowers, the lowing of cattle, the sighing of the breeze. But there is no prayer to be compared to the prayer of a man’s honest, plucky work. Such prayer means happiness. Honest, courageous, fearless work means the greatest happiness on earth!”
A sentiment the opposite of Ahmed’s philosophy of life.
“You lie, O priest!” he shouted from the rafters; and he slid down and faced the Holy Man with impudent eyes and arrogant gestures.
There was an angry growling, as of wild animals, among the devotees. Fists were raised to smash that blasphemous mouth. But the priest raised calm hands. He smiled upon Ahmed as he might upon a babbling child.
“You are—ah—quite sure, my friend?” he asked with gentle irony. “You know, belike, a better prayer, a greater happiness than honest, courageous work?”
“I do!” replied Ahmed. For a fleeting moment he felt embarrassed beneath the other’s steady gaze. The shadow of an uneasy premonition crept over his soul. Something akin to awe, to fear, touched his spine with clay-cold hands, and he was ashamed of this feeling of fear; spoke the more arrogantly and loudly to hide this fear from himself: “I have a different creed! What I want, I take! My reward is here, on earth! Paradise is a fool’s dream, and Allah is nothing but a myth!”
Again the angry worshippers surged toward him. Again the Holy Man held them back with a gesture of his lean hands. He called after Ahmed, who was about to leave the Mosque.
“I shall be here, little brother,” he said, “and waiting for you—in case you need my help—the help of my faith in God and the Prophet!”
“I—need you?” mocked Ahmed. “Never, priest! Hayah! Can a frog catch cold?”
And, with a ringing laugh, he was out of the Mosque.
Ten minutes later, he reached the dwelling place which he shared with Hassan el-Toork, nicknamed Bird-of-Evil, his pal and partner. A snug, cosy, secret little dwelling it was, in the bottom of an abandoned well, and there he spread his loot before the other’s delighted eyes.
“I love you, my little butter-ball, my little sprig of sweet-scented sassafras!” mumbled Bird-of-Evil, caressing Ahmed’s cheek with his clawlike old hands. “Never was there as clever a thief as you! You could steal food from between my lips, and my belly would be none the wiser! Gold—Jewels—purses …” he toyed with the loot—“and this magic rope! Why, in the future there will be no wall too high for us, no roof too steep, and …” he slurred, interrupted himself as—for the abandoned well was only a stone’s throw from Bagdad’s outer gate—a loud voice called to the warden to open it:
“Open wide the gates of Bagdad! We are porters bringing precious things for the adornment of the Palace! For tomorrow suitors come to woo our royal Princess!”
The Caliph in those days was Shirzad Kemal-ud-Dowlah, twelfth and greatest of the glorious Ghaznavide dynasty. Lord he was from Bagdad to Stambul, and from Mecca to Jerusalem. His pride was immense, and, beside his Arabic title of Caliph, he gloried in such splendid Turkish titles as: Imam-ul-Muslemin—Pontiff of all Moslems; Alem Penah—Refuge of the World; Hunkiar—Man-Slayer; Ali-Osman Padishahi—King of the Descendants of Osman; Shahin Shahi Alem—King of the Sovereigns of the Universe; Hudavendighar—Attached to God; Shahin Shahi Movazem ve-Hillulah—High King of Kings and shadow of God upon Earth.
Zobeid was his daughter, his only child, and heir to his great kingdom.
As to Zobeid’s beauty and charm and surpassing witchery, there have come down to us, through the grey, swinging centuries, a baker’s dozen of reports. To believe them all one would have to conclude that, compared to her, Helen of Troy for the sake of whose face a thousand ships were launched, was only an ugly duckling. We choose therefore, with full deliberation, the simplest and least florid of these contemporary accounts, as contained in the letter of a certain Abu’l Hamed el-Andalusi, an Arab poet who, visiting for reasons of his own a young Circassian slave girl in the Caliph’s harem, happened to glance through a slit in the brocaded curtain which separated the slave’s room from the apartment of the Princess, and saw her there. He wrote his impressions to a brother-poet in Damascus; wrote as follows:
“Her face is as wondrous as the moon on the fourteenth day; her black locks are female cobras; her waist is the waist of the she-lion; her eyes are violets drenched in dew; her mouth is like a crimson sword wound; her skin is like the sweetly scented champaka flower; her narrow feet are twin lilies.”
The letter continues with slight Oriental exaggeration that Zobeid was the Light of the writer’s Eyes, the Soul of his Soul, the Breath of his Nostrils, and—than which there is no praise more ardent in the Arabic language—the Blood of his Liver; it mentions such rather personal items that the Circassian slave girl when she saw the desire eddy up in the poet’s eyes, was for scratching them out on the spot; and comes down to earth again by saying:
“Never in all the seven worlds of Allah’s creation lived there a woman to touch the shadow of Zobeid’s feet. Brother mine!—as a garment she is white and gold; as a season, the spring; as a flower, the Persian jasmine; as a speaker, the nightingale, as a perfume, musk blended with amber and sandalwood; as a being, love incarnate. …”
So the letter, today yellow and brittle and pathetic with age, goes on for several pages. Small wonder, therefore, that throughout the Orient Zobeid’s fame spread like powder under spark, and that there were many suitors for her small, pretty hand—not to mention the great kingdom which she would inherit on her father’s death—and chiefly Asia’s three mightiest monarchs.
The first of these was Cham Sheng, Prince of the Mongols, King of Ho Sho, Governor of Wah Hoo and the sacred Island of Wak, Khan of the golden Horde, Khan of the Silver Horde, who traced his descent in a straight line back to Gengiz Khan, the great conqueror out of the Central Asian plains, and who had brought under his spurred heel all the North and East, from Lake Baikal to Pekin, from the frozen Arctic tundras to the moist, malarial warmth of Tonkin’s rice paddies.
The second was Khalaf Mansur Nasir-ud-din Nadir Khan Kuli Khan Durani, Prince and King of Persia, Shah-in-Shah of Khorassan and Azerbaian, Khan of the Kizilbashis and Outer Tartars, Chief of the Shia Moslems, Ever-Victorious Lion of Allah, Conqueror of Russia and of Germany as far as the Oder, Warrior for the Faith of Islam, Attabeg over all the Cossacks, and descendant of the Prophet Mohammed.
The third was Bhartari-hari Vijramukut, Prince of Hindustan and the South from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, descendant of Ganesha, the elephant-headed God of Wisdom, on his father’s side and on his mother’s—slightly more modestly—descendant of an illegitimate union between the Flame and the Moon.
All three were due to arrive in Bagdad on the morrow; so the slaves and servants and majordomos and eunuchs of the Caliph’s palace were hustling and bustling and yelling and rushing about and perspiring and swearing and appealing to Allah in a fever of preparations for the princely visitors; and loud was the clamoring at Bagdad’s outer gate:
“Open up! Open up, O Warden of the Walls! We are