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asked the old king: and Saïd replied, ‘With a king’s daughter of the Jinn, whose portait he saw wroughten on the tunic that was in the wrapper given thee by Solomon, prophet of God.’
When the king heard this, he rose, and going in to his son, said to him, ‘O my son, what is this portrait whereof thou art enamoured and why didst thou not tell me?’ ‘O my father,’ answered Seif el Mulouk, ‘I was ashamed to name this to thee and could not bring myself to discover aught thereof to any; but now thou knowest my case, look how thou mayest do to cure me.’ ‘What is to be done?’ rejoined his father. ‘Were she of the daughters of men, we might find a means of coming at her; but she is a king’s daughter of the Jinn and who can avail to her, except it be Solomon son of David, and hardly he? Wherefore, O my son, do thou arise forthright and take heart and mount and ride out a-hunting or to the games in the tilting-ground. Divert thyself with eating and drinking and put away grief and concern from thy heart, and I will bring thee a hundred kings’ daughters; for thou hast no call to the daughters of the Jinn, over whom we have no power and who are not of our kind.’ But Seif said, ‘I cannot renounce her nor will I seek another than her.’ ‘How then shall we do, O my son?’ asked King Aasim; and Seif said, ‘Bring us all the merchants and travellers and pilgrims in the city, that we may question them of the city of Babel and the garden of Irem. Peradventure, God will guide us thereto.’
So King Aasim summoned all the merchants and strangers and sea-captains in the city and enquired of them for the city of Babel and its peninsula and the garden of Irem; but none of them knew these places nor could any give him tidings thereof. However, when the session broke up, one of them said to the king, ‘O king of the age, if thou hast a mind to know this thing,
