Collected Prose

kissing and clipping and clicketing and carousing.” He retreats from the world, vowing never to succumb to feminine trickery again. Later, returning to his throne, he gratifies his physical desires by taking in women of the kingdom. Once satisfied, he orders their execution. “And he ceased not to do this for three years, till the land was stripped of marriageable girls, and all the women and mothers and fathers wept and cried out against the King, cursing him and complaining to the Creator of heaven and earth and calling for succor upon Him who heareth prayer and answereth those that cry to Him; and those that had daughters left fled with them, till at last there remained not a single girl in the city apt for marriage.”
    At this point, Shehrzad, the vizier’s daughter, volunteers to go to the King. (“Her memory was stored with verses and stories and folklore and the sayings of Kings and sages, and she was wise, witty, prudent, and well-bred.”) Her desperate father tries to dissuade her from going to this sure death, but she is unperturbed. “Marry me to this king, for either I will be the means of the deliverance of the daughters of the Muslims from slaughter, or I will die and perish as others have perished.” She goes off to sleep with the king and puts her plan into action: “to tell … delightful stories to pass away the watches of our night …; it shall be the means of my deliverance and the ridding of the folk of this calamity, and by it I will turn the king from his custom.”
    The king agrees to listen to her. She begins her story, and what she tells is a story about story-telling, a story within which are several stories, each one, in itself, about story-telling—by means of which a man is saved from death.
    Day begins to dawn, and mid-way through the first story-within-the-story, Shehrzad falls silent. “This is nothing to what I will tell tomorrow night,” she says, “if the king let me live.” And the king says to himself, “By Allah, I will not kill her, till I hear the rest of the story.” So it goes for three nights, each night’s story stopping before the end and spilling over into the beginning of the next night’s story, by which time the first cycle of stories has ended and a new one begun. Truly, it is a matter of life and death. On the first night, Shehrzad begins with The Merchant and the Genie. A man stops to eat his lunch in a garden (an oasis in the desert), throws away a date stone, and behold “there started up before him a gigantic spirit, with a naked sword in his hand, who came up to him and said, ‘Arise, that I may slay thee, even as thou hast slain my son.’ ‘How did I slay thy son?’ asked the merchant, and the genie replied, ‘When thou threwest away the date stone, it smote my son, who was passing at the time, on the breast, and he died forthright.’”
    This is guilt out of innocence (echoing the fate of the marriageable girls in the kingdom), and at the same time the birth of enchantment—turning a thought into a thing, bringing the invisible to life. The merchant pleads his case, and the genie agrees to stay his execution. But in exactly one year the merchant must return to the same spot, where the genie will mete out the sentence. Already, a parallel is being drawn with Sherhzad’s situation. She wishes to delay her execution, and by planting this idea in the king’s mind she is pleading her case—but doing it in such a way that the king cannot recognize it. For this is the function of the story: to make a man see the thing before his eyes by holding up another thing to view.
    The year passes, and the merchant, good to his word, returns to the garden. He sits down and begins to weep. An old man wanders by, leading a gazelle by a chain, and asks the merchant what is wrong. The old man is fascinated by what the merchant tells him (as if the merchant’s life were a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, a fiction concocted by some other mind—which in fact it is), and decides to wait and see how it will turn out. Then another old man wanders by, leading two black dogs. The conversation is repeated, and then he, too, sits down and waits. Then a third old man wanders by, leading a dappled she-mule, and once again the same thing happens. Finally, the genie appears, in a “cloud of dust and a great whirling column from the heart of the desert.” Just as he is about to drag off the merchant and slay him with his sword, “as thou slewest my