The Thief of Bagdad/Chapter 5

miles to the East of Bagdad was the oasis of Terek el Bey. Greenly and peacefully, in the shadow of an immense, dun-colored limestone rock that seemed as if tossed there by a Titan’s playful fist, it squatted athwart the yellow swash of the desert, stippled with the bayt-es-shaar, the nomads’ felt tents black as the tents of Kedar in Hebrew Scripture. Here, with a stirrup cup and courtly words, the three Princes said farewell to each other—“we shall meet again at the end of the seventh moon”—for here the overland road to Bagdad split in three directions.

One branch stretched East, straight East as flies the crow, crossing the great desert of Arabistan where the sands spawned their golden, cosmic, eternal centuries, and debouching at the Cape of the Ras Mussendom that dropped with a rocky avalanche into the Persian Gulf where swift, square-rigged Arab sailing craft connected with Karachi, the Indian port. Thence a narrow trail, coiling like a shimmering silver snake over the ochre loam of the plains, led to Puri, the ancient capital founded by the gods themselves, and there the Prince of India intended taking counsel with the Swami Haridat Rashiq Lall, a learned Brahmin priest who was reputed to be in the odor of sanctity, a man of wisdom as wide as the shoreless seas.

To quote a contemporary and doubtless truthful Hindu account:

“The Swami was the father and mother of all knowledge. He wrote a learned tome anent the metaphysical differences between Substance and Unsubstance when his mother’s milk was not yet dry on his lips; on his fourth birthday he surprised and delighted his parents, and made other Brahmin boys’ parents envious, by memorizing and reciting the ninety-nine thousand verses of the Holy Vedas; he was familiar with the innermost secrets of eternal and infinite principles before he was eleven; when he was twelve he had written a critical study about the leading Hindu critics’ commentaries that dealt with Buddhist critics of the Shintoist critical school; and he was considered the equal of the eleven hundred and seventeen minor gods before his mustache had begun to sprout.”

Small wonder, therefore, that the Prince of India, riding his elephant to the East, smiled ironically as he thought how foolish the other two Princes were in endeavoring to compete with him in the quest for the greatest rarity on earth.

The Prince of Persia took the second road, North over the snow-topped fastness of the Caucasus, then Southeast into the foot hills of Luristan where, beneath a tropical sun, the rocks seemed like glowing heaps of topaz and the scorched, flayed ridges, like carved masses of amethyst and ruddy quartz. Here the road dipped East, skirting the yellow fields and crimson rose gardens of Kerman, to find its goal in Shiraz. At the latter place, in the far-flung Bazar of the Badakshani Merchants, every thing precious and incredible that had ever come out of Asia as well as out of the lands of the European barbarians, was for sale. There a display of phoenix eggs, dragon teeth, and green diamonds from the Mountains of the Moon was an every-day occurrence that did not create even the slightest ripple of excitement.

There, too, lived a certain Hakim Ali who was reputed to he the son of a union between the Archangel Ishrafil and a female desert vampire from Kurdistan. None knew how old he was: some said a thousand years, while more conservative people put his age at seven centuries. But all the world agreed that, though preferring the garb and mode of life of a beggar, nothing under the sun was hidden from his eyes.

Him the Prince of Persia had decided to consult; and, like his brother of India, he laughed maliciously as his litter bore him on his way.

The Prince of the Mongols took the third road, the long, the cold, the hard road to the Northeast; travelling by swift relays of Bactrian camels and shaggy Tartar ponies and white reindeer through the bleak, inhospitable steppes of Turkestan and Siberia; slashing rapidly through the frozen, black slush of Outer Mongolia; mounting and descending the hard-baked, shimmering snow of the Salt Range, that seemed hooded and grim like the gigantic eyebrows of some ancient heathen god; finally after a short halt at his capital of Kahn Baligh—the Tartar town which the Chinese call Pekin—wending on toward the far, mysterious Island of Wak that, separated from the Manchurian coast by a narrow channel, glimmered like a jewel of smoky purple and dull orange.

He, too, was sure of his quest. For in an underground temple at Wak lived a Tunguz medicineman who had discovered—others said, had made with his own hands—a certain dread fruit which held in its evil heart instantaneous power over life and death … without doubt a treasure so extraordinary and exotic that, compared to it, anything the other two Princes might find, would seem like a child’s brittle, useless toy.

So the Prince of the Mongols smiled—as smiled the other two. But there was a better, sounder reason for his sardonic amusement. For he was an intensely practical man. He believed in making assurance doubly sure; even trebly sure. Thus, not satisfied with the treasure of the Island of Wak, nor yet satisfied with his plan of sending Mongol warriors disguised as peaceful traders to Bagdad in case anything should go wrong, he furthermore gave orders to his spies to follow and shadow the Princes of India and Persia and to report to him by swift messengers whatever they might find out.

He wasted never a thought on the self-styled Prince of the Isles, the Thief of Bagdad.

He imagined that by this time the latter had been thoroughly killed, thoroughly eaten, and thoroughly digested by the Caliph’s gorilla. And even had he known of Ahmed’s escape, he would not have worried: Ahmed, the lonely man, the thief, the outcast, with every man’s hand against his—with nothing but his sword, his small bag of provisions and, perhaps a faint hope—out on the bitter, thorny path—out to conquer, first himself, and then the greatest treasure on earth!

Hard, hard was the beginning of Ahmed’s road.

For it led him through the Valley of the Seven Temptations, where not even his sword was of help to him, and where he had no weapon nor shield except his own heart.

This valley was inhabited by the spirits of those who had died by giving way to one of the seven temptations, the seven deadly sins of man. These spirits crawled like worms along the ground or flew on black wings amongst the trees while skeletons, whose moldy, yellow bones were held together by bits of charred sinew, followed them as the murderer does his victim. The air was filled with their shrill and pitiful cries; and, occasionally, by a heartbreaking sob of relief when a spirit, his period of punishment over, was reincarnated by Allah into a new body, to return once more to earthly existence, to be faced once more by the seven temptations, perhaps to win out on his next road through life. Here, too, malignant dwarfs and witches with shriveled, bluish-phosphorescent skin and ruby-red eyes leaped about like hobgoblins, yelling at the heavens with the hooting of the owl, the bark of the hyena, and the jackal’s long, wild, lonely cry. For they were the spirits who have been twice born, had twice succumbed to temptation, and were doomed to live in the valley for the length of three hundred and seven eternities.

There were, furthermore, many other dreadful sights and sounds which the ancient Arab chronicler refuses to describe … “for fear,” he says, “that I might cause the reader’s heart to stop from beating with the black horror of it!”

But Ahmed passed unharmed through the Valley of the Seven Temptations, with the help of prayer and faith: faith in Allah, the One, that was slowly growing in his inmost soul. And by the time he had left the valley and was climbing up toward the Hill of Eternal Fire, the Hill of Pride, he had sloughed his old lawless passions as snakes slough their skin in spring and had begun to admit that there was a Master greater than his own will, finer and nobler than his own desires.

Thus, when he reached the outer, red-glowing wall of the Hill of Eternal Fire, the Hill of Pride, he gave thanks to the Creator, crying: “Allahu akbar—God is great!” and: “Subhan 'llah—I sing the praises of God!”; and he gave a solemn vow that, should he pass unscathed through the perils of his journey, he would hereafter obey the five cardinal ordinances of the Prophet Mohammed’s teaching: he would repeat his daily prayers to Allah; he would observe the month of Ramazzan with scrupulous care, fasting during thirty days from sunrise to sunset; he would give the prescribed alms to the poor; he would live a clean life; and he would make the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

He smiled, just a little sheepishly, a little self-consciously, as he remembered his former boast that Allah was only a myth and that a man who was worth his salt took what he wished without asking leave from anyone.

“Allahu akbar—God is great!” he repeated, as the Hill of Eternal Fire, the Hill of Pride, rose before him like a gigantic flame.

By this time the Prince of Persia was drawing near to Shiraz, leaning back, as was his habit, on the heaped, silken pillows of his litter; helping himself liberally to sweetmeats and sugared pistache nuts; listening drowsily to a little slave girl curled at his feet, who was crooning him to sleep with a lilting Afghan love song:

So the litter—with the Prince by this time sound asleep and snoring loudly through his nose, like a guttural and raucous accompaniment to the little slave girl’s dulcet piping—reached the Bazar of the Badakshani Merchants; and the Prince kept on sleeping and snoring although there was a great cheering and huzzaing, and although the stalwart soldiers who preceded the litter made the air ring with defiant and rude shouts as they cleared the way with:

“O thy right!”—yelling as they brought down their long, brass-tipped staves with full force. “O thy left! O thy face! O thy ear! O thy heel!”—suiting the swing of their sticks to the part of Asian anatomy which they were striking—“O thy back, thy back, thy back! Give way, ignoble and unmentionable ones! Give way, sellers of unclean filth! Give way, leprous sons of burnt fathers!”

But, in spite of the soldiers’ abuse, the merchants, knowing of old the Prince to be an extravagant spender, crowded about the litter, pushing and jostling each other, heaping their treasures of jewels and brocades and embroideries and perfume and costly rarities about the snoring potentate’s small, fat feet, vociferously clamoring that he should look, touch, buy:

“Behold, Protector of the Pitiful! Only a thousand Persian gold pieces for this priceless emerald! See! It is flawless and cut in the form of a Kashmiri parrot! Only a thousand gold pieces—and I am losing money on the transaction—may I be father to my sons!”

“Behold, O Heaven-Born! A pink turmaline from Tartary as big as my head! Its touch is guaranteed to cure fever, dyspepsia, whitlows, and the pain of sorrowing hearts! Call me a Jew, a Christian, a bath servant, a cut-off one, if I lie!”

“Look, look, look, O Great and Exquisite Moon! Look, O Holder of the Scales of Benevolence with the Strength of Thy Hands! This brocade—look, look—it was woven by the daughter of the King of Germany as a ransom for her father, captured in battle! The diamonds with which it is encrusted—look, look —they are the tears, crystalized [sic] by the will of Allah, which she shed while weaving the extraordinary fabric!”

“Look!” “Buy!” “Look!” “Buy!”

The pulling, bartering symphony rose ever more shrilly until the Prince, at last awakened by the tumult, sat up, opened his eyes, rubbed them, and dismissed the merchants with a promise to look at their wares some other time. Today he could not. For he was awaiting Hakim Ali, that descendant of the Archangel Ishrafil and the Kurdish vampire, who had been notified of the Prince’s coming by a swift messenger galloping ahead of the caravan.

Hakim Ali, in spite of his—to say the least—peculiar, mixed ancestry, was a good, one hundred per cent Persian patriot and eager to do all in his unhallowed power so as to help his sovereign lord. He came now, crippled, naked but for a beggar’s loin cloth, and carried in the arms of two slaves. His was not a very prepossessing exterior. His eyes were yellow flecked with green, his hair was red, and his face brown—unpleasantly so, resembling in color, texture and outlines an over-dried cocoanut. His body was emaciated and ribbed like a bamboo frame, and from his mother, the Kurdish vampire, he had inherited birds’ claws that took the place of hands and feet. From her, too, he had inherited the neat, furry little tail, very much like a goat’s, that he whisked from side to side to drive away the flies and mosquitoes and that he used to gesture with as mere humans use their hands.

And violently he gestured with his tail when the Prince told him about Zobeid and his overwhelming love for her.

“Bah!” exclaimed Hakim Ali. “Your words are as wind in my ears! Personally I disapprove of women. The Lord God created them only so as to prevent life from being as charming and agreeable as it might otherwise be.”

“You dislike women?”

“I do not care for them. These seven centuries or so have I been a confirmed bachelor.”

“But”—objected the Prince—“I love her.”

“Did not the Prophet Mohammed—on Him the salute!—say that Allah has not left any calamity more hurtful to man than woman?” came the other’s pious quotation.

“Doubtless the Prophet—on Him the blessings!—was right. But still—I love Zobeid. For the sake of one of her precious eyelashes would I commit the many sins. And so I want her to be my wife.”

“By my tail! Almost a woman’s reason!” exclaimed Hakim Ali impatiently, scratching his nose with his left hind claw—“that is to say, no reason at all!”

But the Prince of India was stubborn in his resolve. He implored the other to help him find the greatest treasure, the most exotic rarity on earth, adding: “There is no price I would not be willing to pay for it, including the revenues of all my kingdom, and all the jewels of my ancient dynasty!”

Hakim Ali laughed.

“My lord,” he replied, “you will not have to pay one millionth part of it.”

With his tail he pointed at a bazar booth where a mass of Persian, Bokharan, and Turkish rugs was heaped up for sale, precious, silken masterpieces of the weaver’s art, gay with furnace-crimson and cherry-red and lilac subtle as a spirit flame, with serpent-green and emerald-green, with amber like the bloom of grapes and the dead-gold of autumn leaves, with black and silver as a fervid summer night that is flashed by lightnings and with delicate yellow as the seedling of a pea.

“Rugs? Bah!” objected the Prince. “All the world has rugs.”

Again Hakim Ali laughed. He pointed to the corner where, carelessly, negligently thrown, was a threadbare, worn, drab-colored square of carpet with a fair fringe all round.

“Look at it!” he said.

“What about it?”

“Buy it. Ten silver pieces will be enough.”

“Why should I buy it?”

“Because”—Hakim Ali lowered his voice—“there is nothing rarer in the Seven Worlds of Allah’s Creation.”

And then, when the transaction had been finished through the Prince’s majordomo who, incidentally, bargained the rug dealer down to six pieces of silver and deducted twenty-five per cent from this sum as his personal commission, Hakim Ali whispered into the Prince’s ear the secret of the rug:

“Not one of these foolish Badakshani merchants knows its value nor its hidden mystery. You see”—talking in a flat, sibilant purr—“it is the magic carpet of Isfahan—the flying carpet of Isfahan!”

“What?” interrupted the Prince with rising excitement. “You don’t mean to say that it is really …”

“Yes! I mean it! There is no doubt of it! It is the magic carpet! Stand on it! Sit on it! Squat on it! Then tell the rug where you wish to go! And—swish, swish, swish! like the shooting of dragon-flies—it will rise into the air, it will cut through the sky, high up, above the roofs, above the clouds, and carry you wherever you command. Hai—ho—hee!" he laughed vindictively, triumphantly—“for years it has been in this bazar—for all the world’s fools to spit on and wipe their feet on. And none knew! None knew!”

“Thank you, thank you!” exclaimed the Prince, while the servants stowed away the magic carpet in the litter. “Name your reward!”

“Don’t thank me—yet!” sneered Hakim Ali. “For, doubtless, you will win Zobeid with this rug.”

“That is just why I am thanking you!”

“That is just why you should not thank me! Woman? By Allah! Has it not been said that woman is an inflicter of grief in love as well as in hate? Has it not been said: ‘Among the philosophers, the Chinese; among the beasts, the fox; among the birds, the jackdaw; among men, the barber; and in all the world woman—is the most crafty?’ Has it not been said, furthermore: ‘The beauty of the lark is in its song, good manners are the beauty of an ugly man, forgiveness the beauty of the devotee, and the beauty of woman is virtue—but where shall we find a virtuous woman?’ Wah!” he rumbled on. “I have always considered the female of the species a sort of walking, two-legged pest, whose mission on earth, like the mission of mosquitoes”—here he flicked a mosquito away with his tail—“is only to prevent our being too happy! No, no, my lord! Do not thank me!”

And the Hakim, still laughing disagreeably, was carried away by his slaves, while the Prince of Persia, reclining in his litter, left Shiraz.

He was serene and happy. The end of the first moon—and already he had acquired the treasure wherewith to win the Princess’ hand. Why—he thought—he was in no hurry to return to Bagdad; would he able to stop for a couple of months at Kerman. For this was the season when the purple plums and purple melons of Kerman were ripe! Ah!—he smacked his fat lips—a lamb, stuffed with nuts and raisins and roasted whole; a heaped plat ter of plums; a bottle of golden Khaketian wine; and a melon—perhaps two melons—as dessert! Life was worth the living indeed!

He fell asleep, while the little slave girl, curled at his feet, crooned a lilting, lisping Afghan love song, and while the Mongol Prince’s spy, who had watched and listened, rode swiftly toward the North to make report to his master.

On he rode; over the ragged, bitter crests of the mountains, across sudden valleys, flanking the dwarf dikes of the poppy fields, on through the huge, grey flat of the upland desert that was seamed with wide sheets of tufaceous gypsum shining like mirrors; on, ever hurrying, grudging the hours of rest spent in camp and towns by the way; galloping his shaggy pony no matter how rough and steep the road; knowing well that the Mongol Prince, while punishing cruelly those who disobeyed, rewarded liberally those who obeyed and rendered fair service.

And it was an ironic twisting of Fate that, without knowing it, the spy passed within a short distance of the Hill of Eternal Fire, the Hill of Pride, where the Thief of Bagdad was facing his second ordeal.

This Hill—wrongly so called—was an enormous defile, cleft between towering black walls, and in the centre of it a great, seething, rock-lined caldron of flames, perhaps three miles across, fed by the pride of unjust men and fallen Angels.

Hard was the road up the defile to the stepping of Ahmed’s feet. Stronger and stronger, as he toiled upwards, his lungs heating like a hammer, the heat from the caldron,, as he approached it, sucking through the defile as through a chimney and scorching his face, grew the temptation to return, to give up this pilgrimage. Was Zobeid, his love for her and her love for him, worth this terrible suffering of his flesh and his soul? Was anything under heaven worth it?

“Return, O fool! Return!” whispered his brain. “Go back to Bagdad! There is a life of ease and plenty waiting for you in bazar and marketplace! Why strive for the unobtainable?”

But while his brain reasoned, his soul prayed; mechanically at first; then ardently, fervently; until—dimly, gradually—he began to comprehend that Allah was something far greater, more immeasurable, more vast, both more merciless and more kindly, than hitherto he had been able to grasp. Something there was in Allah’s will, he knew, he felt, which gave unity and coherence and reason to all, even to sufferings and martyrdom, and he might some day lay hold of this something, the Infinite, through his faith, and thus vaguely, but truly and in deed, see the shining face of God.

Reasoned his brain:

“Return, O fool!”

Said his soul:

“Keep on your road! For everything is of God—you yourself, your weakness, your strength, your love for Zobeid, your faith, your doubts!”

So with the understanding of God’s eternal omnipotence, humility came to the Thief of Bagdad while step by step as he neared the seething caldron and while his flesh suffered ever more intensely with the enormous, cruel, splintering heat, the temptation to return, to give up his pilgrimage, vanished and thinned and disappeared completely; was only a drab memory when at last he reached the caldron—and looked down—and shuddered.

Around the rim of the caldron the flames licked up like speckled, blotched, luminous reptiles; like cobras with dripping lips, stained crimson and scarlet by the blood of sacrifice; coiling about the souls of the unjust men and the fallen Angels with the destroying heat of their flaming bodies, cleansing the sin-scabbed spirits as in a crucible; while smoke, blue, black, grey—the sins of these souls released from the pure, spiritual matter—rolled on and up in gloomy, grotesque, sinister garlands. Farther toward the centre of the caldron the flames peaked a thousand feet high in a supreme travail and martyrdom, melting the rocks here and there, bursting them asunder, so that they tumbled down, loud-booming, like the black crack of doom. And still the blaze soared up, spread up, twirled up, forked up; red-hearted, blue-tipped, yellow-frayed; and ever and anon, when the black-winged Angel of Death tossed another soul of pride and injustice into the caldron, there would come an immense shrieking and yelling, and the flames would shoot higher—ever higher.

Ahmed looked. He stared. How might he cross? There seemed no way, except to swim across these flames as across a river. And again temptation touched him. He would return. He was too weak to face this ordeal.

Curiously, with the thought, with the very realization of his weakness, something strengthened his resolve and, by the same token, steeled his will power. For, as he admitted his weakness, his pride died; as his pride died, his humility increased; as his humility increased, his belief in Allah’s mercy grew; and as his belief grew, he saw dimly at first, then more and more clearly, rocks rising out of the ocean of fire—rocks that seemed untouched by the seething, hissing whirlpool of flame—“the Rocks of Faith,” the ancient Arab chronicle calls them. The first rock was only a couple of feet from the rim. Ahmed measured the distance with his eyes. Yes, he said to himself, by vaulting high and straight he might reach it. Again he stared into the flaming sea. Beyond the first, he saw a second rock like a small, flat-topped island; beyond the second, a third; a fourth; a fifth; a whole chain of them; and at the opposite side of the caldron he saw, shimmering like a holy silver grail through the crimson curtain of fire, a limpid stream of water that rippled from a basalt wall—“the Stream of God’s Charity,” according to the ancient manuscript that has brought down to us the tale of the Thief of Bagdad.

He longed for the coolness of this stream. The longing grew. He made up his mind. He would risk the journey across the precarious bridge of rocks. He whispered a short, fervent prayer:

“El-hamdoo 'lillahi Rub el-alamin—unto God be all glory, the Lord of the Worlds!”

Then he leaped away from the rim, with all his lithe, clean young strength; leaped high and straight, with never the shadow of fear in his heart. He reached the first rock; trembled a little, then balanced himself, his agile, bare toes gripping the slippery stones.

Again he mumbled a prayer:

“Yah abeyd Ullah, la ilah ill' Ullah, wahed Ullah—verily I declare that there is no God but the Lord God—one the Lord God is!”

Again he leaped while the tossing flames beneath him licked up with their cruel red tongues—missing him—just missing him. So he reached the third rock, the fourth, the fifth, and with every keen, lean, straight jump his confidence became stronger until at last he found himself at the opposite side of the caldron, where he bathed his face and hands and soul in the cool, healing water from “the Stream of God’s Charity.”

Yet, grateful, humbled, having shed his pride as if it were a soiled turban cloth, he was still the old Ahmed, merry and gay, with ever a joke on his lips, a jest ever in his heart. and looking back at the seething, hissing maelstrom of fire, he said:

“If the Prince of Persia had to vault across this caldron—by my teeth and my honor!—his fat body would have melted and would have reeked to heaven like a mountain of grease sizzling in a gigantic skillet. If the Prince of the Mongols had attempted it—hayah!—his proud and haughty soul would have fed these flames so that they would have flared up, high up to the Seventh Hall of the Blessed where the Prophet Mohammed—on Him the salute!—sits on his seven-stepped throne of glory. And I doubt that the Indian Prince’s divine ancestors would have helped him much. Decidedly, it pays to be a thief—at least a reformed thief!”

Laughing gayly, he left the defile of the Hill of Eternal Fire, the Hill of Pride, and walked along steadily until at the beginning of the third moon he fell in with a wise hermit—a hermit, indeed, so wise that, alone in that part of the world, perhaps in all Asia, he knew all about the defects of a horse, the reasoning of a cat, the thundering of clouds, a woman’s deeds, and a man’s future fortunes. He told Ahmed that he was on the right road, but that he would first have to cross the Valley of the Monsters and the Garden of the Enchanted Trees.

“As to the latter,” said the hermit, “it is your wit and cleverness that will help you; and, as to the former, your strength, your pluck, your sword.”

Ahmed smiled.

“It is a good thing,” he replied, “that I lost my pride in crossing the Hill of Eternal Fire. Otherwise I might say that, as to wit and cleverness, the bazars have sharpened my brain to needle point, while as to strength and pluck—by Allah and by Allah—modesty stuffs my mouth from telling you the truth!”

Then he was serious once more. For it seemed to him as though, from very far away, spanning the distance, he could hear the voice of Zobeid urging him on, telling him:

“I love you, Ahmed! I trust you—utterly! I shall wait for you!”

The voice came to him with an all-pervading sense of sweetness and peace. It came with a wafting of jasmine and marigold perfume, a soft tinkling of far-away silver bells, and the muffled sob of a one-stringed guitar. And, indeed, at that very moment, up in the tower room of the harem, Zobeid was thinking of the Thief of Bagdad. She looked from the window, out toward the East, where, under the sweep of the twilight, the bunched, squat mass of Bagdad was reddening to russet, then chilling to a flat, silvery grey.

“Send back to me my lover, O Allah!” the prayer rose to her lips. “Dear Allah! send him back to me! For I love him—I love him so …”