Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/245

213 serving thee. So ask what thou wilt beside this.’ Quoth Marouf, ‘Canst thou bring me mules and chests and fill the chests with the treasure and load them on the mules?’ ‘Nothing easier,’ answered Aboussaadat and gave a great cry; whereupon his sons presented themselves before him, to the number of eight hundred, and he said to them, ‘Let some of you take the form of mules and others of muleteers and servants and handsome white slaves, the like of the least of whom is not found with any of the kings.’ So seven hundred of them changed themselves into pack mules and other hundred took the form of servants. Then Aboussaadat called upon his Marids, who presented themselves before him, and he commanded some of them to assume the semblance of horses saddled with saddles of gold set with jewels. [They did as he bade them], which when Marouf saw, he said, ‘Where are the chests?’ They brought them before him and he said, ‘Pack the gold and the jewels, each kind by itself.’ So they packed them and loaded three hundred mules with them.

Then said Marouf, ‘O Aboussaadat, canst thou bring me some loads of costly stuffs?’ Quoth the genie, ‘Wilt thou have Egyptian stuffs or Syrian or Persian or Indian or Greek?’ ‘Bring me a hundred loads of each kind,’ answered Marouf, ‘on five hundred mules.’ ‘O my lord,’ said Aboussaadat, ‘grant me time that I may dispose my Marids for this and send a company of them to each country to fetch a hundred loads of its stuffs and then take the form of mules and return, carrying the stuffs.’ ‘What time dost thou want?’ asked Marouf. ‘The time of the blackness of the night,’ answered Aboussaadat, ‘and day shall not dawn ere thou have all thou seekest.’ ‘I grant thee this time,’ said Marouf and bade them pitch him a tent. So they pitched him a tent and he sat down therein and they brought him a table of food. Then said Aboussaadat to him, ‘O my lord, abide thou in this tent