63
ALI NOUREDDIN AND THE FRANK KING’S DAUGHTER.
There was once, of old days and in bygone ages and times, in the parts of Cairo, a merchant named Tajeddin, who was of the most considerable of the merchants and of the chiefs of the freeborn [of the city]. He was given to travelling to all parts and loved to fare over desert and down and stony waste and to journey to the islands of the seas, in quest of dirhems and dinars: wherefore he had in his time encountered dangers and suffered hardships of travel, such as would make little children gray. He was possessed of slaves and servants, white and black and male and female, and was the wealthiest of the merchants of his time and the goodliest of them in speech, owning horses and mules and Bactrian and other camels and sacks, great and small, and goods and merchandise and stuffs beyond compare, such as Hems muslins and Baalbek silks and brocades and Merv cottons and Indian stuffs and Baghdad gauzes and Moorish burnouses and Turkish white slaves and Abyssinian eunuchs and Greek slave-girls and Egyptian boys; and the coverings of his bales were of gold-embroidered silk, for he was abundantly wealthy. Moreover he was accomplished in goodliness, stately of port and pleasant of composition, even as saith of him one of his describers:
A certain merchant once I did espy, Between whose lovers war raged fierce and high.
Quoth he, ‘What ails the folk to clamour thus?’ ‘’Tis for thy sake, O merchant,’ answered I.
And saith another in his praise and saith well and accomplisheth the wish of him:
