In the Orient’s motley, twisted annals the tale of Ahmed el-Bagdadi’s—“the Thief of Bagdad,” as he is called in the ancient records—search for happiness, which is by the same token the tale of his adventures and exploits and love, has assumed in the course of time the character of something homeric, something epic and fabulous, something close-woven to the golden loom of the desert in both pattern and sweep of romance.

It is mentioned with pride by his own tribe, the Benni Hussaynieh, a raucous-tongued, hard-riding breed of Bedawins, brittle of honor and greedy of gain, of whom—due to a father, tired of the sterile Arabian sands and eager for the pleasures of bazar and marketplace—he was the city-bred descendant. It is spoken of with a mixture of awe and envy by the Honorable Guild of Bagdad Thieves of whom he was once a keen and highly respected member. It is wide-blown through the flaps of the nomads’ black felt tents from Mecca to Jeddah and beyond; berry-brown, wizen old women cackle its gliding gossip as they bray the coffee for the morning meal or rock the blown-up milk skins upon their knees till the butter rolls yellow and frothing; and, on the sun-cracked lips of the cameleers, on the honeyed, lying lips of overland traders and merchants, the tale has drifted South as far as the Sahara, North to the walls of grey, stony Bokhara, Southeast and Northeast to Pekin’s carved dragon gates and the orchid plains and ochre mountains of Hindustan, and West to the pleasant, odorous gardens of Morocco where garrulous white-beards comment upon it as they digest the brave deeds of the past in the curling, blue smoke of their water-pipes.

“Wah hyat Ullah—as God liveth!” their telling begins. “This Ahmed el-Bagdadi—what a keen lad he was! A deer in running! A cat in climbing! A snake in twisting! A hawk in pouncing! A dog in scenting! Fleet as a hare! Stealthy as a fox! Tenacious as a wolf! Brave as a lion! Strong as an elephant in mating-time!”

Or, taking a blade of grass between thumb and second finger, another ancient will exclaim:

“Wah hyat hatha el-awd wah er-rub el-mabood—by the life of this stem and the blessed Lord God! Never, in all Islam, lived there one to equal Ahmed the Thief in quality and pride, the scope and exquisite charm of his thievery!”

Or perhaps:

“Wah hyat duqny—by the honor of these my whiskers! Once, O True Believers, it happened in Bagdad the Golden! Aye—may I eat dirt—may I not be father to my sons if I lie! But once, indeed, it happened in Bagdad the Golden!”

And then the full, rich tale. The wondrous ending.

Yet the tale’s original cause was simple enough, consisting in the snatching of a well-filled purse, a hungry belly craving food, and the jerk and pull of a magic rope woven from the hair of a purple-faced witch of the left-handed sect; while the scene was the Square of the One-Eyed Jew—thus called for reasons lost in the mists of antiquity—in the heart of Bagdad.

Across the South end of the Square straddled the Mosque of Seven Swords, raised on a flight of broad marble steps as on a base, lifting the apex of its wide horseshoe gateway fifty feet into the air, its walls untwining sinuous arabesques of yellow and elfin-green faience beneath the pigeon-blue glare of the sky, its lonely minaret lovely and pointed and snowy-white. East the latticed Bazar of the Red Sea Traders filtered the sun on rugs and silks, on copper vessels and jewelry and thin gold-inlaid perfume bottles, in an ever-shifting saraband of shadows, rose and purple and sapphire and purest emerald. North a broad, tree-lined avenue swept on toward the palace of the Caliph of the Faithful that etched the horizon with a tortured abandon of spires and turrets and bartizans. West squatted a packed wilderness of narrow, cobbled alleys; a labyrinth of flat-roofed Arab houses with dead-white walls facing the street, but blossoming toward the inner courtyards with palm and olive and rose-bush. Here, too, was the dim, tortuous Bazar of the Potters, plum-colored Nubians brought as slaves from Africa, and, farther on, a cemetery criss-crossed with Barbary fig and the tiny stone cups filled with grain and water for the birds of passage, in obedience to the blessed Moslem tradition.

In the very centre of the square of the One-Eyed Jew a great fountain played with sleepy, silvered cadences. And here, on a stone slab a little to one side of the fountain, Ahmed the Thief lay flat on his stomach, his chin cupped in his hands, the sun rays warming his bare, bronzed back, his black eyes darting in all directions like dragon-flies to give warning of rich and careless citizens who might pass within reach of his agile hands and whose purses might be had for a little soft twist and tug.

The Square and the streets and bazars were teeming with humanity, not to mention humanity’s wives and children and mothers-in-law and visiting country cousins. For today was a holiday: the day before the Lelet el-Kadr, the “Night of Honor,” the anniversary of the occasion when the Koran was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed in the year 609.

So throngs milled and moiled everywhere: people of half the Orient’s crazy-quilt of races, Arabs and Seljuks and Osmanlis, Tartars and Syrians, Turkomans and Uzbeks, Bokharans, Moors and Egyptians, with here and there men from the Farther East, Chinese, Hindus and Malays, traveling merchants these, come to Bagdad to swap the products of their home lands for what the Arabs markets had to offer. They were all making merry after the Orient’s immemorial fashion, resplendently, extravagantly, and noisily: the men swaggering and strutting, fingering their jewled daggers and cocking their immense turbans at a rakish, devil-may-care angle; the women adjusting their thin-meshed face veils which did not need adjusting at all; the little boys seeing if they could shout richer and louder abuse than the other little boys; the little girls rivaling each other in the gay pansy-shades of their dresses and the consumption of greasy candy.

There were ambulant coffee houses filled with men and women in their silken, colorful holiday best, listening to singers and professional story tellers, smoking and chatting, looking at jugglers, knife twirlers, sword swallowers, and dancing-boys. There were cook shops and lemonade stands, toy booths and merry-go-rounds. There were bear leaders, ape leaders, fakirs,

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