Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 2 (of 6)
General
Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 2 (of 6)
Fairy tales; Tales -- Arab countries
locked up in a chest by the Magian; sent to rule his country by the
Soudan; respectfully treated by the merchant in the Kashmírí story, and,
apparently, also by Kandan in the Panjábí legend; in the story of St.
Eustache her persecutor dies and she is living in humble circumstances
when discovered by her husband.—I think there is internal evidence,
apart from the existence of the Tibetan version, to lead to the
conclusion that the story is of Buddhist extraction, and if such be the
fact, it furnishes a further example of the indebtedness of Christian
hagiology to Buddhist tales and legends.
_AL-MALIK AL-ZAHIR AND THE SIXTEEN CAPTAINS OF POLICE.—Vol. II. p. 3._
We must, I think, regard this group of tales as being genuine narratives
of the exploits of Egyptian sharpers. From the days of Herodotus to the
present time, Egypt has bred the most expert thieves in the world. The
policemen don’t generally exhibit much ability for coping with the
sharpers whose tricks they so well recount; but indeed our home-grown
“bobbies” are not particularly quick-witted.
_THE THIEF’S TALE.—Vol. II. p. 42._
A parallel to the woman’s trick of shaving off the beards and blackening
the faces of the robbers is found in the well-known legend, as told by
Herodotus (Euterpe, 121), of the robbery of the treasure-house of
Rhampsinitus king of Egypt, where the clever thief, having made the
soldiers dead drunk, shaves off the right side of their beards and then
decamps with his brother’s headless body.
_THE NINTH CONSTABLE’S STORY.—Vol. II. p. 46._
The narrow escape of the singing-girl hidden under a pile of _halfah_
grass may be compared with an adventure of a fugitive Mexican prince
whose history, as related by Prescott, is as full of romantic daring and
hair’s-breadth ’scapes as that of Scanderbeg or the “Young Chevalier.”
This prince had just time to turn the crest of a hill as his enemies
were climbing it on the other side, when he fell in with a girl who was
reaping _chian_, a Mexican plant, the seed of which is much used in the
drinks of the country. He persuaded her to cover him with the stalks she
had been cutting. When his pursuers came up and inquired if she had seen
the fugitive, the girl coolly answered that she had, and pointed out a
path as the one he had taken.
_THE FIFTEENTH CONSTABLE’S STORY.—Vol. II. p. 59._
The concluding part of this story differs very materially from that of
the Greek legend of Ibycus (fl. B.C. 540), which is thus related in a
small MS. collection of Arabian and Persian anecdotes in my possession,
done into English from the French:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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