Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

The sound of hooves came first, from the far end of the forest road. At first it was only a low, dull rumble, faint as thunder somewhere far away. Then it grew nearer, thicker, faster. After the sound came the dust. A cloud of yellow dust rolled up above the treetops, rising higher and higher, coming closer. A woodcutter tying up firewood by the road felt his heart sink. He could not see a single rider yet, but so many hooves striking the ground at once could only mean a large band. And what a man in the forest feared most was meeting robbers. He dropped his load of wood, scrambled up a big tree nearby, and pressed himself behind the thick leaves.

From high above, he counted the horses as they galloped in: one, two, three, on and on, until 40 riders reined in, jumped down, and tied their horses to the trees. The woodcutter's name was Ali Baba. He was a poor man who cut wood in the forest near the city and carried it to the market every day to feed his wife and children.

The story of Ali Baba is one of the tales of the Thousand and One Nights. Like the secret at the heart of this tale, the story did not begin in a book. It was told aloud, poured from a storyteller's mouth into a listener's ear, before anyone sat down to write it out.

The best dressed of the band, the one Ali Baba took to be the captain, walked up to a rock hidden behind a thicket. He called out a phrase in a loud, firm voice, so clearly that Ali Baba heard it up in his tree: "Open, Sesame!" To his amazement, a stone door slowly swung open right in the face of the cliff. The whole band filed inside, and the door closed by itself behind them. After a long wait, the stone door opened again, and the captain came out first. He waited while the robbers filed past him one by one. Then he turned and said, "Shut, Sesame!" The door closed tight, as if it had never opened. Then the band mounted and galloped away, fading into the dust.

Ali Baba waited until the hoofbeats had died away completely before he dared to climb down. Curious, he went to that same rock and tried the words softly: "Open, Sesame." The stone door opened right in front of him. Inside it was not dark, as he had expected. It was a wide cave, lit by an opening in the rock high above. All around lay piles of precious goods, silks and brocades, and heaps of gold and silver in leather bags. Ali Baba was dazzled. But he was a man who knew when he had enough. He took only as many bags of gold as his donkeys could carry. He did not touch the silver, and he did not touch the goods. Then he said, "Shut, Sesame," and drove his donkeys home.

Back home, his wife wanted to measure how much gold they had before burying it. A poor house had no measuring bowl, so she ran to borrow one from her sister-in-law, the wife of Cassim, Ali Baba's older brother. The two brothers lived very different lives. Cassim had married a rich wife and lived in comfort. Ali Baba, all year round, had nothing but his firewood to live on. Cassim's wife was a curious woman. She thought it strange that her poor brother-in-law's family should suddenly need a measure, so she secretly smeared a little fat on the bottom of the bowl. When the bowl came back, a gold coin was stuck fast to the fat. So the secret was out. Cassim's household learned that poor Ali Baba had suddenly grown so rich that he measured his gold instead of counting it.

Cassim pressed him until he had the whole truth. Ali Baba told his brother everything, about the cave in the forest and the magic words that opened the door. He did it more out of honest brotherly feeling than out of fear, and he even offered to share the gold. But greed had blinded Cassim. Just before dawn the next day, he quietly led ten mules loaded with big chests to the cave, alone, meaning to take everything and share nothing. "Open, Sesame." The stone door opened, and Cassim rushed in among the heaps of gold and silver, his head spinning at so much wealth, filling one chest after another. But when he wanted to leave, disaster struck. He had clean forgotten the word Sesame. He called out the names of every grain he could think of, barley and many others, but the stone door would not open for a single one. At noon the robbers came back. They caught Cassim, still unable to remember the magic words, and from that day on he never came home again.

When night fell and her husband had not come back, Cassim's wife panicked and ran to her brother-in-law for help. Ali Baba hurried into the forest, and he understood that something terrible had happened to his brother. He could not bear to have the sad news spread all over town, so he quietly arranged a proper but discreet funeral. To manage everything smoothly, he relied on Morgiana, a servant girl in Cassim's house whom he knew to be both clever and completely loyal. That name matters, because from here on, this story is really Morgiana's story.

Morgiana thought of a way to settle everything at once. She went to the apothecary and bought some medicine, as if someone in the house had fallen ill. The next day she went back for a medicine that was only given to someone at death's door. So when the family raised their cries of mourning that evening, loud enough to be heard out in the lane, the neighbors were all certain that Cassim had died of a sudden illness. No one gave a thought to a cave in the forest. Cassim was buried in peace. Out of loyalty, Ali Baba took his widowed sister-in-law into his own home. He also gave Cassim's shop to his own eldest son to run. And Morgiana stayed on, working in Ali Baba's house as before.

But out in the forest, the danger was not over. The robbers returned to the cave and saw that someone had come and carried Cassim away. With a jolt, they realized that their secret had reached a second person. The captain sent one of his men into the city in disguise as a traveler. His task was to find out which house had lately had a death, a man buried in a hurry. Asking around the streets, the spy tracked down the lane where one house had just held a hasty funeral.

And this was the first time Morgiana had to act. The spy found the right door, Ali Baba's door, and made a chalk mark on it, so that the band could follow it there the next night. Early the next morning, Morgiana came out with her broom to sweep the doorstep and stopped short. A white chalk mark sat right in the middle of the door, brand new, not there the night before. She touched it, and the chalk came off on her fingertips. She did not panic, and she did not wake anyone. She quietly took a piece of chalk and walked along the street in the half-light. On two or three neighbors' doors on each side, she drew exactly the same mark. That night, when the robbers crept up, five or six houses in a row had the same chalk mark. They stood there baffled, with no idea which door to choose, and had to go back empty-handed. The captain sent a second man. This time he marked the door in red chalk. But Morgiana saw it just in time, and again she quietly drew red marks on many other doors. Once more the whole band came and went for nothing. Two spies had failed, so the captain decided that the third time he would go himself. Smarter than his men, he made no mark at all. He only stood and studied Ali Baba's door with great care, fixing it in his mind until he was sure he would know it anywhere.

Then he laid a bigger and far more dangerous plan. This was Morgiana's second test. He had his men buy 19 mules and 38 large jars. One jar held real cooking oil. In each of the other 37, an armed robber hid, curled up inside. He had the outside of every jar smeared with oil until it shone, so that the whole train looked like the goods of an oil merchant. Disguised as an oil merchant on his way to an early market, the captain knocked at Ali Baba's door and asked for a bed for the night. Ali Baba was an honest man. He had no idea that the stranger at his door was the robber captain himself. He welcomed his guest warmly and told Morgiana to serve supper and make up a bed for the merchant. The jars were all set out in the courtyard.

Late that night, the oil lamp in the kitchen ran dry. Morgiana took a jug out to the courtyard, meaning to borrow a little oil from the guest's jars. As she bent over the first jar, she heard a soft voice whisper from inside: "Is it time?" Most people would have screamed. Not Morgiana. She guessed at once that someone was hiding inside, and that he took her for his captain giving the signal. She lowered her voice and answered calmly, "Not yet, soon." Every jar whispered the same question, and to every jar Morgiana gave the same answer, not yet, soon. At last she had counted all 37 jars with a man hidden inside. Only one jar held real oil. As she filled her lamp from that jar, Morgiana understood the whole trap that had been laid around the house that night.

She quietly set a big pot of oil on the fire and heated it until it was boiling. Then she ladled out that scalding oil and poured it into each jar, one by one. The hot oil burned the robbers inside. Each of them shrank down, unable to move or to climb out. One by one, every robber was put out of action in his own hiding place, while outside all stayed quiet, as if nothing had happened. At midnight, the captain sat by his window and tossed a few pebbles down at the jars as a signal. He waited for his men to leap out. But every jar was silent. He crept down to the courtyard to look, and with a chill he understood that his whole plot had been discovered. He could not save his men from capture, so he climbed over the garden wall alone and slipped away into the dark. In the morning, the household woke to find the 37 jars still standing silent in the courtyard. When the lids came off, the robbers inside still could not move. They were tied up and taken away that same morning. When Morgiana told him everything from beginning to end, Ali Baba was shaken. He understood that his whole family had come close to disaster in the night, and that the one who had saved them all was a slight young servant girl. That very day, to thank her, he gave Morgiana her freedom. From then on she was no longer a servant.

It seemed that all was well. But the captain who had escaped still nursed his grudge, and the third test, the most dangerous of all, came disguised as a friend. He quietly prepared a new disguise, carrying load after load of fine cloth away from the cave. Then he came back to the city, this time as a cloth merchant named Cogia Hassan. He rented a shop right across from the shop of Ali Baba's son, the very shop that had once been Cassim's. He skillfully made friends with the son, and then with Ali Baba as well. One day this polished gentleman was invited to dine at Ali Baba's house.

At the meal, Cogia Hassan asked for only one odd thing: that no salt be put in any of his food. The small request reached Morgiana in the kitchen, and something about it troubled her. Why would an honest man, sharing a meal at his host's table, refuse even a grain of salt? Curious, she carried the tray in herself to serve the guest, and took a long, careful look at the merchant's face. She knew him at once. This was the robber captain from before. Looking a moment longer, she also saw a knife hidden under his robe.

Morgiana knew she must not show the slightest alarm. She asked leave to entertain the party with a dance. With a small tambourine in her hand, she danced and swirled around the room, the beat now slow, now quick, and every eye in the house was on her. Then, just as the dance was at its height, she stopped suddenly right in front of the guest. She pulled his robe aside so that the whole household could see the knife hidden underneath. And she declared in a clear voice that the man sitting there disguised as the merchant Cogia Hassan was in truth the captain of the robbers from the forest. Unmasked in the middle of the feast, the captain knew his scheme had failed. He sprang up, left his meal, and ran out the door into the night. From then on he never again dared to set foot in that city.

Only now did Ali Baba fully understand that Morgiana had twice saved his life and his son's. Once with the jars, and once with the knife hidden in a guest's robe. No debt could be greater than that. He gave Morgiana in marriage to his own son. The wedding was held with great joy and laughter, in a house that had come so close to disaster so many times, and had been saved every time by one pair of hands.

About a year after that, when he was sure the old troubles were truly over, Ali Baba went back to the old forest. It was the same forest where, years before, a poor woodcutter had heard 40 horses come pounding through a cloud of dust. He stopped in front of the familiar rock and softly spoke the old magic words once more: "Open, Sesame." The stone door opened again, like an old greeting. He brought home a little more gold. But what he gave his son was worth more than gold: the secret of the cave and the words that opened its door. The son in turn passed it on to his own children, to the children who would one day call Morgiana grandmother. The secret that had once brought so much danger had quietly become a family treasure. It became a story poured from father to son, from one house to the next, just the way the story of Ali Baba itself has traveled, mouth to ear, all the way to this telling.