The Thief of Bagdad. Achmed Abdullah

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СКАЧАТЬ appealing to the people who came crowding up on a run, he continued heatedly, with every expression of injured innocence:

      “Behold me this Tagi Kahn! This oppressor of widows and orphans! This worshiper before the unclean gods of compound interest! He accuses me—me—of being a thief!”

      “You are a thief!” bellowed the merchant. “You stole my purse!”

      “The purse is mine!”

      “No—mine—O Father of a bad Smell!”

      “Goat!” came Ahmed’s reply. “Goat of an odor most goatish! Abuser of the Salt!”—and he jumped down from the ledge and faced the other.

      Standing there in the bright, yellow sunlight, poised on the balls of his bare feet, ready for either flight or combat as the odds might advise, he was a fine figure of a man: short rather than tall, but perfectly proportioned from narrow foot to curly head, with a splendid breadth of chest and shoulders, and long muscles that were like running water. There was here none of your clumsy, flabby, overfed Nordic flesh, like a greasy, pink-and-white suet pudding, but a smooth, hairless torso, with the crunching strength of a man and the grace of a woman. The face was clean-shaven except for an impudent little mustache that quivered with well-simulated wrath as he heaped insults upon the stammering, raging Tagi Khan.

      The crowd laughed and applauded—for Tagi Khan had not many friends in Bagdad—until finally a gigantic, black-bearded Captain of the Watch shouldered his way through the throng.

      “Be quiet, both you fighting-cocks!” he thundered threateningly. “This is Bagdad, the Caliph’s town, where they hang men in chains from the Gate of Lions for shouting too loudly in the marketplace. And now—softly, softly—what is the trouble?”

      “He took my purse, O Protector of the Righteous!” wailed Tagi Khan.

      “The purse was never his,” asserted Ahmed, boldly displaying the disputed article and holding it high. “It is a most precious heirloom bequeathed to me by my late father—may his soul dwell in Paradise!”

      “A lie!” exclaimed the other.

      “The truth!” insisted Ahmed.

      “A lie! A lie! A lie!” the merchant’s voice rose a hectic octave.

      “Softly, softly!” came the Captain’s warning; and he went on: “There is but one way to decide this matter. Whoever owns this purse knows its contents.”

      “A wise man!” commented the crowd.

      “As wise as Solomon, the King of the Jews!”

      Unblushingly, the Captain of the Watch accepted the flattery. He stuck out his great beard like a batteringram; raised hairy, high-veined hands.

      “Wise indeed am I!” he admitted calmly. “And now—my Tagi Khan—since you claim this purse, suppose you tell me what its contents are. … ?”

      “Gladly! Readily! Easily!” came the merchant’s triumphant reply. “My purse holds three golden tomans from Persia, one chipped at the edge; a bright, carved silver medjidieh from Stambul; eighteen various gold pieces from Bokhara, Khiva, and Samarkand; a shoe-shaped candareen from far Pekin; and a handful of small coins from the lands of the Franks—cursed be all unbelievers! Give me the purse! It is mine!”

      “One moment,” said the Captain. He turned to Ahmed. “And what do you claim the purse to contain?”

      “Why—” laughed the Thief of Bagdad—“it contains nothing at all, O Great Lord! And—” opening the purse and turning it inside out—“here is the proof!” But he kept his right leg very quiet to keep the stolen money, which he had plopped into his baggy breeches, from rattling against the rest of his loot and thus giving him away.

      Laughter, then, from the crowd. Riotous, exaggerated, falsetto Oriental laughter—presently topped by the Captain’s words:

      “You spoke the truth, young man!”

      He winked at Ahmed shamelessly and brazenly. For a year or two earlier he had borrowed a sum of money from Tagi Khan; and, the first of every month, had paid high interest and substantial instalments without, thanks to the other’s miraculous calculations, being ever able to diminish the principal.

      He addresed the merchant with crushing, chilly words:

      “Consider, O Wart, that the Prophet Mohammed—on Him the blessings and the peace!—recommended honesty as a charming and worthwhile virtue! No—no …” as Tagi Khan was about to break into a flood of bitter protestations—“consider, furthermore, that the tongue is the enemy of the neck!”

      With which cryptic threat he swaggered off, bumping his sabre tip martially against the stone pavement, while the Thief of Bagdad thumbed his nose insultingly at the infuriated merchant and turned West across the Square, toward the Bazar of the Potters.

      Ahmed was pleased with himself, the sunshine, and the world at large.

      Money he had! Money that would be eagerly welcomed by his pal, an old man who had first initiated him into the Honorable Guild of Bagdad Thieves and had taught him the tricks and principles of their ancient profession.

      Today Ahmed was a greater thief than his former teacher. But he still loved the other, a certain Hassan el-Toork, nicknamed Bird-of-Evil because of his scrawny neck, his claw like hands, his parrot’s beak and beady, purple-black eyes; and he shared everything with him.

      Yes. Hassan el-Toork would be glad of the money—and the other rich loot.

      “But here it was getting on toward the noon hour, and Ahmed had not yet broken his fast. His stomach grumbled and rumbled, protestingly, challengingly. Should he spend his money on food? No! Not unless he absolutely had to!

      “I shall follow my nose!” he said to himself. “Aye! I shall follow this clever nose of mine than which, except for my hands, I have no better friend in the world. Lead on, nose!” he laughed. “Sniff! Smell! Trail! Show me the way! And I, thy master, shall be grateful to thee and shall reward thee with the aroma of whatever rich food may tickle my palate and bloat this shriveled belly of mine!”

      So the nose sniffed and led the way; and Ahmed followed, across the Square of the One-Eyed Jew, through the packed wilderness of small Arab houses that ran together like children at play, with a glimpse at the sky above the roof tops revealing scarcely three yards of breadth, the copings meeting at times, and the bulbous, fantastic balconies seeming to interlace like the outrigging of sailing craft in a Malay harbor; until finally, at a place where the alleys broadened into another Square, the nostrils quivered and the nose dilated, causing the owner of the nose to stop and stand still, like a pointer at hay.

      A delicious, seductive odor was wafted from somewhere: rice cooked with honey and rose buds and green pistache nuts and drowned in a generous flood of clarified butter; meat balls spiced with saffron and poppy seeds; egg plants cleverly stuffed with raisins and with secret condiments from the Island of the Seven Purple Cranes.

      Ahmed looked in the direction where the nose sniffed.

      And there, balanced on the railing of a bird’s-nest balcony high up on the wall of a Pasha’s proud palace, he saw three great porcelain bowls, heaped with steaming СКАЧАТЬ