# Stories from the Arabian Nights retold by Laurence Housman with drawings by Edmund Dulac (London 1907)

Printed with fifty plates, bound separately, which are inserted using the illustration list at #xiii. Two plates are missing, the frontispiece depicting the storyteller, Scheherazadè, which appears at the US edition, and the eleventh plate, which ought to appear in The Story of the King of the Ebony Isles.
Stories from
The Arabian Nights
Retold by Laurence Housman
With Drawings by Edmund Dulac
Hodder and Stoughton Publishers, London
All Rights Reserved
Printed in 1907
Butler and Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London
PREFACE
Scheherazadè, the heroine of the Thousand and one Nights, ranks among the great story-tellers of the world much as does Penelope among the weavers. Procrastination was the basis of her art; for though the task she accomplished was splendid and memorable, it is rather in the quantity than the quality of her invention—in the long spun-out performance of what could have been done far more shortly—that she becomes a figure of dramatic interest. The idea which binds the stories together is greater and more romantic than the stories themselves; and though, both in the original and in translation, the diurnal interruption of their flow is more and more taken for granted, we are never quite ​robbed of the sense that it is Scheherazadè who is speaking—Scheherazadè, loquacious and self-possessed, sitting up in bed at the renewed call of dawn to save her neck for the round of another day. Here is a figure of romance worth a dozen of the prolix stories to which it has been made sponsor; and often we may have followed the fortunes of some shoddy hero and heroine chiefly to determine at what possible point of interest the narrator could have left hanging that frail thread on which for another twenty-four hours her life was to depend.
Yes, the idea is delightful; and, with the fiction of Scheherazadè to colour them, the tales acquire a rank which they would not otherwise deserve; their prolixity is then the crowning point of their art, their sententious truisms have a flavour of ironic wit, their repetitions become humorous, their trivialities a mark of light-hearted courage; even those deeper indiscretions, which Burton ​has so faithfully recorded, seem then but a wise adaptation of vile means to a noble end. And yet we know that it is not so; for, as a matter of fact, the "Arabian Nights Entertainment" is but a miscellany gathered from various sources, of various dates, and passing down to us, even in its collocated form, under widely differing versions. None but scholars can know how little of the unadulterated originals has come into our possession; and only those whose pious opinions shut their eyes to obvious facts can object in principle to the simplification of a form which, from the point of view of mere story-telling, can so easily be bettered. Even the more accurate of the versions ordinarily available are full of abridgement, alteration, and suppression; and if you have to eliminate Scheherazadè and select your stories mainly with a view to illustration, then you have very largely done away with the reasons for treating tenderly that prolixity which ​in an impatient age tends to debar readers from an old classic.
And so, in the present version, whoever shall care to make comparison will find that the original material has been treated with considerable freedom in the direction of brevity, and with an almost uniform departure from the exact text, save where essentials of plot or character or local colour required a closer accuracy. In the case also of conflicting versions, there has been no reluctance to choose and combine in order to secure a livelier result; and a further freedom has sometimes been taken of giving to an incident more meaning and connexion than has been allowed to it in the original. That is, perhaps, the greatest licence of all, but it is the one that does least harm in formal result; for no one can read the majority of the tales in their accepted versions without perceiving that, as regards construction and the piecing of event ​with event, they are either incredibly careless or discreditably perfunctory. We have to reckon with them as the product of a race keenly alive to the value of colour and pictorial description, but a race whose constructive imagination was feeble and diffuse, lacking almost entirely that great essential for the development of art in its finer forms—the economy of means toward ends.
But because they contain, though at a low pressure, the expression of so much life, habit and custom, so many coloured and secluded interiors, so quaint a commingling of crowds, so brilliant and moving a pageantry of Eastern mediævalism, because of all these things the "Arabian Nights" will still retain their perennial charm. Those of us who read are all travellers; and never is our travelling sense so awakened perhaps, as when we dip into a book such as this where the incredible and the common-place are so curiously blended, and where ​Jinn and Efreet and Magician have far less interest for us now than the silly staring crowds, and the bobbing camels in the narrow streets, and Scheherazadè spinning her poor thin yarn of wonders that she may share for another night the pillow of a homicidal maniac.
CONTENTS
| | PAGE |
| The Fisherman and the Genie | 1 |
| The Story of the King of the Ebony Isles | 17 |
| Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves | 31 |
| The Story of the Magic Horse | 66 |
| The Story of the Wicked Half-Brothers | 100 |
| The Story of the Princess of Deryabar | 111 |
ILLUSTRATIONS
| 1. Scheherazadè, the heroine of the Thousand and One Nights | Frontispiece |
| | Page |
| 2. And there in its midst stood a mighty Genie | 2 |
| 3. When having brought into submission all the rest of my race | 4 |
| 4. No sooner had the monarch seen them, so strange of form and so brilliant and diverse in hue | 9 |
| 5. Thereupon the damsel upset the pan into the fire | 10 |
| 6. Recalling the fisherman by a swift messenger. | 10 |
| 7. He arrived within sight of a palace of shining marble | 14 |
| 8. The Queen of the Ebony Isles | 17 |
| 9. Supposing me asleep, they began to talk | 17 |
| 10. The cup of wine which she gives him each night contains a sleeping-draught | 18 |
| 11. She went on to vent her malice upon the city and islands | 22 |
| 12. Began to heap upon me terms of the most violent and shameful abuse | 22 |
| 13. Thus by her wicked machinations the city became a lake | 22 |
| 14. Great was the astonishment of the Vizier and the Sultan's escort | 27 |
| 15. Their chief in a low but distinct voice uttered the two words "Open Sesame!" | 32 |
| 16. Ali Baba departed for the town a well satisfied man | 34 |
| 17. As soon as he came in she began to jeer at him | 36 |
| 18. Greater still was the exultation of a greedy nature like that of Cassim's | 38 |
| 19. Mustapha doubted much of his ability to refrain from question | 43 |
| 20. This way and that she led him blindfold | 44 |
| 21. Having transformed himself by disguise | 46 |
| 22. "Sir," said he, "I have brought my oil a great distance to sell to-morrow" | 51 |
| 23. She poured into each jar in turn a sufficient quantity of the boiling oil to scald its occupant to death | 54 |
| 24. When Morgiana, who had remained all this time on the watch | 56 |
| 25. Then for the last figure of all she drew out the dagger | 63 |
| 26. At so arrogant a claim all the courtiers burst into loud laughter | 68 |
| 27. As he descended, the daylight in which hitherto he had been travelling faded from view | 72 |
| 28. He saw black eunuchs lying asleep | 73 |
| 29. She gave orders for a rich banquet to be prepared | 75 |
| 30. Till the tale of her mirror contented her | 76 |
| 31. She cried: "O miserable man, what sorry watch is this that thou hast kept" | 77 |
| 32. All this time the Princess had been watching the combat from the roof of the palace | 84 |
| 33. In the garden of the summer palace all was silence and solitude | 85 |
| 34. Sat by the lake and solaced themselves sweetly with love | 85 |
| 35. It was in vain that all the wisest physicians in the country were summoned into consultation | 93 |
| 36. For many months he travelled without clue | 94 |
| 37. And ever with the tears falling down from her eyes she sighed and sang | 96 |
| 38. There appeared before him an old man of venerable appearance | 100 |
| 39. Pirouzè, the fairest and most honourably born | 101 |
| 40. Reaching his farthest wounded the giant in the knee | 107 |
| 41. The lady advanced to meet him | 107 |
| 42. A city among the Isles named Deryabar | 111 |
| 43. Presently in the distance he perceived a light | 111 |
| 44. The ship struck upon a rock | 115 |
| 45. And presently, feeling myself lifted by men's hands | 115 |
| 46. The Princess of Deryabar | 119 |
| 47. She found to her grief the place where Codadad had lain left vacant | 121 |
| 48. She and her companion arrived at the city of Harran | 123 |
| 49. And taking her hand he led her to the apartments of the Queen Pirouzè | 127 |
| 50. After these, maidens on white horses, with heads unveiled, bearing in their hands baskets of precious stones | 129 |
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1959, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 64 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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