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About Harun-Al-Rashid

And of many tales concerning the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid and his going disguised into the lanes and bazaars of Bagdad, where he chanced upon strange people who told him strange stories of magic. Once he supped with three ladies of dazzling beauty, and with him were a porter dazed with the magnificence he saw, and three mendicants, sons of kings, all blind in the left eye. Not knowing the caliph, they told of their fantastic adventures and sufferings and he rewarded them. And again he encountered a beggar who implored him to strike him, a youth who spurred cruelly a mare upon which he rode, and a rope-maker who had risen suddenly from poverty to affluence. Their tales, too, did he hear and them, too, did he reward. Nor should Abou-Hassan the Wag be forgotten, whose trickery in pretending that he and his wife were dead won so much gold and so many laughs from the caliph. And of like import is the mad tale of the humpback who seemed dead and of the talkative barber who restored him to life, of all those who had believed themselves murderers of the humpback and of the amazing tales that they related. So it came to pass that by the end of the thousand and one nights Shahriar so delighted in the cleverness of Sheherazade that he wedded her again with regal pomp and they lived happily ever after.