ALI NUR AL-DIN AND MIRIAM THE
GIRDLE-GIRL[FN#377]



There was once in days of yore and in ages and times long gone
before in the parts of Cairo, a merchant named Taj al-Din who was
of the most considerable of the merchants and of the chiefs of
the freeborn. But he was given to travelling everywhere and loved
to fare over wild and wold, waterless lowland and stony waste,
and to journey to the isles of the seas, in quest of dirhams and
dinars: wherefore he had in his time encountered dangers and
suffered duresse of the way such as would grizzle little children
and turn their black hair grey. He was possessed of black slaves
and Mamelukes, eunuchs and concubines, and was the wealthiest of
the merchants of his time and the goodliest of them in speech,
owning horses and mules and Bactrian camels and dromedaries;
sacks great and small of size; goods and merchandise and stuffs
such as muslins of Hums, silks and brocades of Ba'allak, cotton
of Mery, stuffs of India, gauzes of Baghdad, burnouses of
Moorland and Turkish white slaves and Abyssinian castratos and
Grecian girls and Egyptian boys; and the coverings of his bales
were silk with gold purfled fair, for he was wealthy beyond
compare. Furthermore he was rare of comeliness, accomplished in
goodliness, and gracious in his kindliness, even as one of his
describers doth thus express,

"A merchant I spied whose lovers * Were fighting in furious
guise:
Quoth he, 'Why this turmoil of people?' * Quoth I, 'Trader, for