"Wilt thou," said the poet, "send one of the attendants to carry it?" "To carry what?" asked the King; "is it not upon a paper here in thy possession?" "No, our lord the Sulṭán," replied the poet; "at the time I composed it I could not procure a piece of paper upon which to write it, and could find nothing but a fragment of a marble column left me by my father; so I engraved it upon this, and it lies in the court of the palace." He had brought it, wrapped up, on the back of a camel. The King, to fulfil his promise, was obliged to exhaust his treasury; and to prevent a repetition of this trick, (of which he afterwards discovered El-Aṣma´ee to have been the author), in future rewarded the poets according to the usual custom of kings.[139] In the present declining age of Arabian learning (which may be said to have commenced about the period of the conquest of Egypt by the ´Othmánlees), literary recreations still exert a magical influence upon the Arabs. Compositions of a similar nature to the tales of the "Thousand and One Nights" (though regarded by the learned as idle stories unworthy of being classed with their literature) enable numbers of professional story-tellers to attract crowds of delighted listeners to the coffee-shops of the East; and now that the original of this work is printed and to be purchased at a moderate price, it will probably soon in a great measure supersede the romances of Aboo-Zeyd, Eẓ-Ẓáhir, and ´Antarah. As a proof of the powerful fascinations with which the tales of the "Thousand and One Nights" affect the mind of a highly enlightened Muslim, it may be mentioned that the latest native historian of Modern Egypt, the sheykh ´Abd-Er-Raḥmán El-Jabartee, so delighted in their perusal that he took the trouble of refining the language of a copy of them which he possessed, expunging or altering whatever was grossly offensive to morality without the somewhat redeeming quality of wit, and adding many facetiæ of his own and of other literati. What has become of this copy I have been unable, though acquainted with several of his friends, to discover.