The Thief of Bagdad. Achmed Abdullah

There were bell-shaped tents where golden-skinned, blue-tattooed Bedawin maidens trilled and quavered their desert songs, to the accompaniment of tamborines and shrill scrannel pipes. There was everything which makes life worth the living, including a great deal of love making—the love making of the Orient which is frank, direct, and a trifle indelicate to Western ears and prejudices.

      There were of course the many cries of the street.

      “Sweet water! Sweet water, and gladden thy soul! Lemonade! Lemonade here!” cried the sellers of that luxury, clanking their brass cups together.

      “O chick pease! O pips!” shouted the vendors of parched grains. “Good for the liver—the stomach! To sharpen the teeth!”

      “In thy protection, O my Head, O my Eyes!” moaned a peasant, drunk with hasheesh, whom a turbanded policeman, wielding his rhinoceros-hide whip with all his strength, was flogging toward the station house, the peas ant’s wife following with loud plaints of: “Yah Gharati—yah Dahwati! O thou my Calamity—O thou my Shame!”

      “Bless the Prophet and give way to our great Pasha!” exclaimed the panting, black slave who was running by the side of a grandee’s carriage as it crossed the Square.

      “O Daughter of the Devil! O Commodity on which Money is lost! O thou especially not wanted!” shrieked a woman as she yanked her tiny, pert-eyed girl-child from beneath the crimson paper partition of a sugar candy booth. The next moment she fondled and kissed her. “O Peace of my Soul!” she cooed. “O Chief Pride of thy Father’s House—though only a girl!”

      “The grave is the darkness! Good deeds are the lamps!” wailed the blind beggar woman, rattling two dry sticks.

      Friend would meet friend and greet each other with all the extravagance of the Orient, throwing themselves upon each other’s breasts, placing right arm over left shoulder, squeezing like wrestlers, with intermittent hugs and caresses, then laying cheek delicately against cheek and flat palm against palm, at the same time making the loud, smacking noise of many kisses in the air.

      Mild-mannered, sleepy-eyed and suave, they would burst into torrents of rage at the next moment because of some fancied insult. Their nostrils would quiver and they would become furious as Bengal tigers. Then would come streams of obscene abuse, carefully chosen phrases of that picaresque vituperation in which the East excels.

      “Owl! Donkey! Christian! Jew! Leper! Pig bereft of gratitude, understanding, and the average decencies!” This from an elderly Arab whose long white beard gave him an aspect of patriarchal dignity in ludicrous contrast with the foul invective which he was using. “Unclean and swinish foreigner! May thy countenance be cold! May dogs defile thy mother’s grave!”

      Came the reply courteous:

      “Basest of illegitimate hyenas! Father of seventeen dogs! Bath servant! Seller of pig’s tripe!”

      And then the final retort, drawling, slow-voiced, but bristling with all the venom of the East:

      “Ho! Thy maternal aunt had no nose, O thou brother of a naughty sister!”

      Then a physical assault, an exchange of blows, fists going like flails, until the grinning, spitting, crimson-turbaned policeman separated the combatants and cuffed them both with cheerful, democratic impartiality.

      “Hai! Hai! Hai! laughed the onlookers.

      “Hai! Hai! Hayah! Hai! laughed the Thief of Bagdad; and the very next moment, as a paunchy, grey-bearded money lender stopped at the fountain and bent to sip a drink of water with cupped hands, Ahmed’s agile fingers decended, twisted, tugged imperceptibly and came up with a well-filled purse.

      Another imperceptible jerk of these agile, brown fingers; and while his body lay flat and motionless, while his eyes were as innocent as those of a child, the purse plopped into his baggy trousers of purple, silver-threaded silk that were tight about the ankles and that, only the night before, he had acquired—without paying for them—in the Bazar of the Persian Weavers.

      Minute after minute he lay there, laughing, watching, exchanging jests with people here and there in the crowd; and many of those who stopped by the fountain to drink or to gossip, helped to swell the loot in Ahmed’s loose breeches.

      There was amongst that loot, to describe just a few items, a knotted handkerchief, clinking with coined silver and filched from the woolen folds of a hulking, bullying, beetle-browed Tartar camel master’s burnoose; a tinkling ruby-and-moonstone girdle gem from the waist shawl of one of the Caliph’s favorite Circassian slave girls who moved through the Square and past the fountain escorted by a dozen armed eunuchs; a ring of soft, hammered gold set with an enormous star-sapphire from the henna-stained thumb of a visiting Stambul dandy whom Ahmed, lest the stranger spot his brocaded robe, had helped to a drink of water, and had been rewarded by the other’s courtly: “May the Prophet Mohammed repay thee for thy kindness!”—rewarded too, and rather more substantially, by the afore-mentioned ring.

      Ahmed was about to call it a day when there came out of the Bazar of the Red Sea Traders a rich merchant, a certain Tagi Kahn, well known through all Bagdad because of his wealth and his extravagance—an extravagance, be it added, which he centred on his own person and the enjoyment of his five senses, and which he made up for by extreme penury where the poor and the needy were concerned, and by lending money at exorbitant rates, taking as security the cow and the unborn calf.

      He walked with a mincing step, his wicked, shriveled old face topped ludicrously by a coquettish turban of pale cerise, his scanty beard dyed blue with indigo, his pointed finger nails gilt in a foppish manner, his lean body clad in green silk, and holding in his bony right hand a large cluster of lilies at which he sniffed.

      All this Ahmed saw and disliked. Saw, furthermore, protruding a little from Tagi Kahn’s waist shawl, the sagging plumpness of an embroidered purse. A fat purse! A rich, swollen, bloated purse! A purse to stir the imagination of both the righteous and the unrighteous!

      “Mine—by the red pig’s bristles!” thought Ahmed, as the other passed the fountain. “Mine—or may I never laugh again!”

      Already his right hand had descended. Already his agile fingers were curling like question marks. Already the purse was sliding gently from Tagi Kahn’s waist shawl when—for let us remember that Ahmed was stretched flat on his stomach, his bare back warmed by the sun—an inquisitive mosquito lit on his shoulder and stung him painfully.

      He wiggled; twisted.

      His tapering fingers slipped and jerked.

      And Tagi Kahn, feeling the jerk, looked up, and saw his purse in Ahmed’s hand.

      “Thief! Thief! Thief!” he yelled, reaching up, clutching at the purse, grabbing its other end. “Give it back to me!”

      “No! No!” protested Ahmed, pulling the purse away and transfering it quickly to his left hand. “It is mine own purse! I am not a thief! I am an honest man! It is you, yourself, who are the thief!”

      And, appealing to the people who came crowding up on a run, he continued heatedly, with every expression of injured innocence:

      “Behold me this Tagi Kahn! This oppressor of widows and orphans! This worshiper before the unclean gods of compound interest! He accuses me—me—of being a thief!”

      “You are a thief!” bellowed the merchant. “You stole my purse!”

      “The purse is mine!”

      “No—mine—O Father of a bad Smell!”

      “Goat!” came Ahmed’s reply. “Goat of an odor most goatish! Abuser of the Salt!”—and he jumped down from the ledge and faced the other.

      Standing there in the bright, yellow sunlight, poised on the balls of his bare feet, ready for either flight or combat as the odds might advise, he was a fine figure of a man: short rather than tall, but perfectly proportioned from narrow foot to curly head, with a splendid breadth of chest and shoulders, and long muscles that were like running