Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves—­p.219

I confess to entertaining a peculiar affection for this tale.  It was the first of the tales of the “Arabian Nights Entertainments” which I read in the days of my “marvelling boyhood” eheu! fugaces, &c, etc.  I may therefore be somewhat prejudiced in its favour, just as I still consider Scott’s “Waverley” as the best of his long series of fascinating fictions, that being the first of them which I read—­as it was the first he wrote.  But “All Baba and the Forty Thieves”—­the “open, sesame!” “shut, sesame!”—­the sackfuls of gold and silver and the bales of rich merchandise in the robbers’ cave—­the avaricious brother forgetting the magical formula which would open the door and permit him to escape with his booty—­his four quarters hung up in terrorem—­and above all, the clever, devoted slave girl Morgiana, who in every way outwitted the crafty robber-chief,—­these incidents remain stamped in my memory ineffaceably:  like the initials of lovers’ names cut into the bark of a growing tree, which, so far from disappearing, become larger by the lapse of time.  To me this delightful tale will ever be, as Hafiz sings of something, “freshly fresh and newly new.”  I care not much though it never be found in an Arabic or any other Oriental dress—­but that it is of Asiatic invention is self-evident; there is, in my poor opinion nothing to excel it, if indeed to equal it, for intense interest and graphic narrative power in all The Nights proper.

Sir Richard Burton has remarked, in note 1, p. 219, that Mr. Coote could only find in the south of Europe, or in the Levant, analogues of two of the incidents of this tale, yet one of those may be accepted as proof of its Eastern extraction, namely, the Cyprian story of “Three Eyes,” where the ogre attempts to rescue his wife with a party of blacks concealed in bales:  “The King’s jester went downstairs, in order to open the bales and takes something out of them.  Directly he approached one of the sacks, the black man answered from the inside,’Is it time, master?’ In the same manner he tried all the sacks, and then went upstairs and told them that the sacks were full of black men.  Directly the King’s bride heard this, she made the jester and the company go downstairs.  They take the executioner with them, and go to the first sack.  The black man says from the inside, ‘Is it time ?’ ‘Yes,’ say they to him, and directly he came out they cut his head off.  In the same manner they go to the other sacks and kill the other black men.’’[FN#408]

The first part of the tale of Ali Baba—­ending with the death of his greedy brother—­is current in North Germany, to this effect: