pavilion, but finding the guards on the alert, turned to that of the Wazir Dandan. Now she found him reading the Koran and when his sight fell upon her he said, "Welcome to the Holy Man!" Hearing this from the Wazir, her heart trembled and she said, "The reason of my coming hither at this time is that I heard the voice of a saint amongst Allah's Saints and am going to him." Then she turned her back, but the Wazir said to himself, "By Allah, I will follow our Devotee this night!" So he rose and walked after her; but when the accursed old woman sensed his footsteps, she knew that he was following her: wherefore she feared the disgrace of discovery and said in herself, "Unless I serve some trick upon him he will disgrace me." So she turned and said to him from afar, "Ho, thou Wazir, I am going in search of this Saint that I may learn who he is; and, after learning this much, I will ask his leave for thee to visit him. Then I will come back and tell thee: for I fear thine accompanying me, without having his permission, lest he take umbrage at me seeing thee in my society." Now when the Wazir heard these words, he was ashamed to answer her; so he left her and returned to his tent, and would have slept; but sleep was not favourable to him and the world seemed heaped upon him. Presently he rose and went forth from the tent saying in himself, "I will go to Sharrkan and chat with him till morning." But when he entered into Sharrkan's pavilion, he found the blood running like an aqueduct and saw the servants lying with their throats cut like beasts for food. At this he cried a cry which aroused all who were asleep; the folk hastened to him and, seeing the blood streaming, set up a clamour of weeping and wailing. Then the noise awoke the Sultan, who enquired what was the matter, and it was said to him, "Sharrkan thy brother and his servants are murthered." So he rose in haste and entered the tent, and found the Wazir Dandan shrieking aloud and he saw his brother's body without a head. Thereat he swooned away and all the troops crowded around him, weeping and crying out, and so remained for a while, till he came to himself, when he looked at Sharrkan and wept with sore weeping, while the Wazir and Rustam and Bahram did the like. But the Chamberlain cried and lamented more than the rest and asked leave to absent himself, such was his alarm. Then said Zau al-Makan, "Know ye who did this deed and how is it I see not the Devotee, him who the things of this world hath put away?" Quoth the Wazir, "And who should have been the cause of this affliction, save that Devotee, that Satan? By Allah, my heart abhorred him from the first, because I know that all who pretend to be absorbed in practices religious are vile and treacherous!" And he repeated to the King the tale of how he would have followed the Religious, but he forbade him, whereupon the folk broke out into a tumult of weeping and lamentation and