Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 5.djvu/174

148 number of concubines, as they were moons, and three hundred Abyssinian slave-girls, beside five hundred mules laden with treasure and sheep and oxen and buffaloes and other cattle, beyond count, and commanded all his Viziers and Amirs and grandees and notables and the officers of his household and his subjects in general to bring him gifts.

Then Hasib took horse and rode, followed by the Viziers and Amirs and grandees and all the troops, to the house which the King had set apart for him, where he sat down on a chair and the Viziers and Amirs came up to him and kissed his hand and gave him joy of the Vizierate, vying with each other in paying court to him. When his mother and household knew what had happened, they rejoiced greatly and congratulated him on his good fortune, and the woodcutters also came and gave him joy. Then he mounted again and riding to the house of the late Vizier, laid hands on all that was therein and transported it to his own abode.

Thus did Hasib, from a know-nothing, unskilled to read writing, become, by the decree of God the Most High, proficient in all sciences and versed in all manner of knowledge, so that the fame of his learning was blazed abroad in all the land and he became renowned for profound skill in medicine and astronomy and geometry and astrology and alchemy and natural magic and the Cabala and all other arts and sciences.

One day, he said to his mother, ‘My father Daniel was exceeding wise and learned; tell me what he left by way of books or what not.’ So his mother brought him the chest and taking out the five leaves aforesaid, gave them to him, saying, ‘These five scrolls are all thy father left thee.’ So he read them and said to her, ‘O my mother, these leaves are part of a book. Where is the rest?’ Quoth she, ‘Thy father was shipwrecked a while before thy birth and lost all his books, save these five scrolls.’