The first part of the tale of Zaun al-Asnam—­the Dream of Riches—­is an interesting variant of the tale in The Nights, vol. iv. p. 289, where (briefly to recapitulate, for purposes of comparison by-and-by) a man of Baghdad, having lost all his wealth and become destitute, dreams one night that a figure appeared before him and told him that his fortune was in Cairo.  To that city he went accordingly, and as it was night when he arrived, he took shelter in a mosque.  A party of thieves just then had got into an adjacent house from that same mosque, and the inmates, discovering them, raised such an outcry as to bring the police at once on the spot.  The thieves contrive to get away, and the wali, finding only the man of Baghdad in the mosque, causes him to be seized and severely beaten after which he sends him to prison, where the poor fellow remains thirty days, when the wali sends for him and begins to question him.  The man tells his story, at which the wali laughs, calls him an ass for coming so far because of a dream, and adds that he himself had had a similar dream of a great treasure buried in the garden of such a house in Baghdad, but he was not so silly as to go there.  The poor man recognises his own house and garden from the wali’s description, and being set at liberty returns to Baghdad, and finds the treasure on the very spot indicated.

Lane, who puts this story (as indeed he has done with much better ones) among his notes, states that it is also related by El-Ishaki, who flourished during the reign of the Khalif El-Ma’mun (9th century), and his editor Edward Stanley Poole adds that he found it also in a Ms. of Lane’s entitled “Murshid ez-Zuwar ila el-Abrar,” with the difference that it is there related of an Egyptian saint who travelled to Baghdad, and was in the same manner directed to his own house in El-Fustat.

The same story is told in the 6th book of the “Masnavi,” an enormously long sufi poem, written in Persian, by Jelad ed-Din, the founder of the sect of Muslim devotees generally known in Europe as the Dancing Dervishes, who died in 1272.  This version differs from the Arabian in but a few and unimportant details:  Arriving at Cairo, destitute and hungry, he resolves to beg when it is dark, and is wandering about, “one foot forward, one foot backwards,” for a third of the night, when suddenly a watchman pounces on him and beats him with fist and stick—­for the people having been plagued with robbers, the Khalif had given orders to cut off the head of any one found abroad at night.  The wretched man begs for mercy till he has told his story, and when he has finished the watchman acquaints him of a similar dream he had had of treasure at Baghdad.[FN#376]