In a town in Persia there lived two brothers: Kasim and Ali Baba. Their father had left them a small inheritance which they divided fairly and, with equal enthusiasm, spent entirely. Kasim, the elder, had the better luck — or made better use of it — for he married the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and when his father-in-law died he found himself owner of a fine shop, a well-stocked warehouse, a house in the city, and a good deal of gold buried in his garden. He was a prosperous and respected man.
Ali Baba's wife brought no fortune with her at all. They lived in a modest house on the edge of the poor quarter, and Ali Baba kept them fed by cutting wood in the forest each day and selling it in the market, loading and unloading his three donkeys. It was a hard life, but not an unhappy one.
One morning Ali Baba had loaded his animals and was making his way home through the trees when he saw, far off, a great cloud of dust rising above the road. He watched it for a moment; it was moving fast and coming his way. He thought of bandits — the forest was not always safe — and looked quickly for somewhere to hide. There was a large oak nearby; he tied his donkeys in a thicket and scrambled up into the branches, tucking himself out of sight among the leaves.
He was still climbing when the riders came around the bend: a troop of forty men on fine horses, hard-faced and armed, and at their head a captain whose bearing made clear he was a man accustomed to being obeyed. They rode straight to the rock face beneath the tree where Ali Baba was hiding, dismounted, tied their horses, and the captain walked forward alone to the cliff.
He stood before the bare rock, raised his voice, and said clearly: "Open, Sesame."
In the rock face a door opened. The captain entered. The forty men filed in after him. The door closed.
Ali Baba sat very still in his tree and thought very carefully about what to do. He could not come down — they might return at any moment and he had no idea how long they would be. He clung to his branch and waited.
They were not long. After perhaps an hour the door opened again, and the forty men came out carrying nothing. The captain was last; he turned to the rock and said, "Close, Sesame," and the door shut as smoothly as if it had always been solid stone. They mounted and rode away, and Ali Baba watched the dust of them until it settled.
He waited a little longer, then climbed down, went to the cliff face, and said, with some care: "Open, Sesame."
The door opened.
He went inside.
The cave was enormous — carved high in the rock, lit by a light that seemed to come from the walls themselves, or perhaps from above through some crack he couldn't find. It was full to the ceiling with plunder: silks and carpets and embroideries and brocades in great heaps, and jars and sacks everywhere, and among the sacks, poking out and stacked in towers, more gold and silver coin than Ali Baba had seen in his entire life. The thieves had been accumulating this for a long time.
He stood there for a moment taking it all in. Then he got to work. He carried out as many sacks of gold as his three donkeys could comfortably carry without looking obviously overloaded — enough to make him comfortable for years, but not enough to look, from the outside, like anything other than a load of firewood with some bulging bags mixed in. He covered everything neatly, went back to the entrance, and said, "Close, Sesame," and the door shut behind him.
He went home by back roads.
His wife met him at the door, and when she saw the sacks she went pale with alarm and then red with excitement and then began talking very fast about what might have happened to him and what people would say and how they could possibly hide it all. Ali Baba calmed her down and explained everything, and she became less agitated and more curious. She wanted to count the coins. He said they should bury them first and count later; she said counting first, then burying. He said the neighbours would see the light through the windows if they worked all night. She said she would borrow Kasim's wife's scales and weigh it instead — that would be quicker.
Ali Baba, recognising the wisdom of this, said nothing more against it, and his wife hurried next door to her sister-in-law's house and asked to borrow a small pair of scales. Kasim's wife, being a woman of lively curiosity and no small appetite for information about other people's business, immediately wanted to know what Ali Baba's wife needed scales for. The explanation she was given — flour, she was told, or grain — didn't satisfy her. So before handing over the scales she rubbed a little grease inside the pan.
That night, Ali Baba's wife weighed the gold and brought the scales back. But stuck in the grease, which she hadn't noticed, was a single gold coin.
Kasim's wife found it in the morning. She looked at it for a long time. Then she went to find her husband.
Kasim arrived at Ali Baba's house in a state of controlled fury, trying to sound like a helpful brother. Ali Baba, who knew his brother and trusted him the way you trust a man who has always been slightly too interested in what you have, told him enough — the place, the magic words — because Kasim threatened to denounce him to the authorities if he didn't, and Ali Baba was not, by nature, a deceitful man.
The next morning Kasim rose early, loaded ten mules with a great many empty chests, and rode to the forest. He found the cliff face without difficulty, said the magic words, and went inside. The door closed behind him.
He filled his chests. Then he turned to leave and said, "Open, Barley."
Nothing happened.
He tried again. "Open, Wheat." Silence. "Open, Rice. Open, Rye. Open, Corn." He had completely forgotten the word. He knew it was a grain — or was it? He ran through everything he could think of and came back around to Barley and started again. The door did not move.
He was still trying when the forty thieves returned.
Ali Baba came to the cave the next morning, after his brother had not returned and his sister-in-law had come weeping to his door at dawn. He found what was left of Kasim — the robbers had made a careful example of whoever had tried to rob them — and he brought the pieces home wrapped in cloth, on the back of one of the mules, thinking hard the whole way about what to do.
The answer to that question was provided, as it often was, by Morgiana.
Morgiana was a slave in Kasim's household — not a servant but a slave, which in this time and place was a common enough situation, and she had been Kasim's property for years. She was clever and observant and quick and she had a gift for seeing around corners that other people didn't know were there. It was Morgiana who had the idea for the cover story: Kasim had been taken ill suddenly on a journey; he had died of his illness; he was already buried in the ground before anyone could be brought. She arranged everything — the mourning, the story, the burial — and she enlisted the help of a cobbler named Baba Mustafa who was known to be old and blind enough in both eyes and in his sense of discretion that he could be paid to sew Kasim back together for the coffin without asking inconvenient questions.
It was done. Kasim was buried. His widow, after a decent interval, moved into Ali Baba's house, and Ali Baba managed both the households, and for a time everyone was as comfortable as people can be who are keeping a large secret.
The robbers were not comfortable at all.
They returned to the cave and found the body gone and more gold missing than Kasim had taken. This meant someone else knew about the cave. The captain chose one of his men — a plausible, sharp-eyed fellow — and sent him into the city to find out who had recently buried a man who had been cut into pieces, and where the mourners lived.
The spy found Baba Mustafa without too much difficulty. Old men who have done unusual things for money tend to remember them vividly, even when they've been paid to forget. Baba Mustafa couldn't take him directly to the house — he'd been blindfolded for the journey — but he could walk the route again with his eyes open. He led the spy to the street; the spy memorised the neighbourhood, then marked Ali Baba's door with a small chalk cross when no one was looking, and went back to report.
He did not reckon on Morgiana.
Morgiana noticed the chalk mark the next morning. She looked at it carefully. She thought about it. Then she took a piece of chalk and marked every other door on the street with the same cross, in exactly the same position.
When the robbers came that night to find the marked house, they found the entire street marked, and could not tell one door from another. The captain was not pleased. He had the spy killed for carelessness.
He sent a second man. The second man was cleverer — instead of chalk he used a small red mark, low down on the doorpost where it was harder to spot. But Morgiana's eyes were always moving, and she found it and marked every other door in the same way before noon. The second spy also did not survive the captain's disappointment.
The captain decided to handle it himself.
He came to the city in disguise, as a travelling oil merchant with a large train of mules. Eighteen mules, each carrying two great clay jars — thirty-seven jars of oil, and one jar per mule containing not oil but a man: thirty-seven of his thieves, curled up inside, armed, waiting for the signal.
He presented himself at Ali Baba's door as a merchant looking for lodging, saying he had come a long way and his oil was for sale at market in the morning. Ali Baba had no suspicion of him whatsoever — he was a hospitable man by nature — and welcomed him in, had the mules unloaded and the jars set in the courtyard and the mules taken to the stable, and invited his guest to supper.
That night, when the household had settled and the lamps were low, the captain intended to go to the courtyard and give the signal to his men. They would creep out of their jars, kill Ali Baba and everyone in the house, take the gold, and that would be that.
He had not accounted for Morgiana.
Morgiana, who ran the kitchen, had run out of lamp oil late that night and went to the courtyard to get more from the merchant's stores. She went to the first jar and tapped it. From inside came a whispered voice: "Is it time?"
Morgiana did not scream. She did not run. She paused for just a moment — no longer — and whispered back: "Not yet." Then she went to every jar in turn, tapping and whispering "Not yet" until she had confirmed that thirty-seven of them contained a man. The last jar, at the end of the row, contained oil.
She went back to the kitchen, heated a large pot of oil to boiling, filled a bucket, and went back to the courtyard. Working quickly and quietly, she poured boiling oil into each jar. One after another. It didn't take very long.
Then she returned to the kitchen and waited.
The captain crept out at midnight and went to the courtyard and whispered to the first jar. There was no answer. He went from jar to jar and found them all silent, and when he reached in to touch the nearest man he found him very still and very hot. He understood what had happened. He went to the garden wall, climbed it, and disappeared into the night.
In the morning Morgiana told Ali Baba everything. He looked at the thirty-seven jars and sat down heavily and said nothing for quite a long time. Then he thanked her, with great feeling, and began to think about what to do next.
What he did was stay careful. He sold the oil — no point wasting it — and kept quiet, and moved more carefully through the city, and time passed.
Then one day his nephew, a young man who worked in the market as a cloth merchant, came home with a new acquaintance: a pleasant, generous, well-travelled oil trader who had come to town some weeks ago and had been buying fabric regularly and always chatting and never seeming to push for anything, just good company and sharp eyes. The nephew liked him. Ali Baba, when he met him, felt a faint uneasiness he could not name — something familiar about the set of the man's jaw, or the way he stood — but he could not place it, and the man was charming, and he invited him to dinner.
Morgiana served the meal. When she came in with the dishes she looked at the guest once, looked again, and went back to the kitchen. She came back with wine and cups and looked at him a third time from a different angle. She was almost sure.
After the meal she asked Ali Baba's permission to entertain the guests with a dance. She was an accomplished dancer; this was not unusual. He agreed. She performed — gracefully, then dramatically, whirling and leaping, drawing closer and closer to the guest with each pass. She had a small dagger at her belt, the kind that was common on dancers' costumes, and no one thought anything of it as she worked it loose.
She came close to the guest in a final flourish, the blade hidden in her palm. The man looked up at her face and in that instant she saw it — just a flicker, the faintest tightening around the eyes — recognition. He knew that she knew him.
She drove the knife home before he could move.
Ali Baba leaped up, furious. "What have you done?"
"Saved your life," said Morgiana, "for the third time. That is the captain of the forty thieves. Look at his belt — he has a dagger there with your name on it."
The captain, expiring on the floor, confirmed this without meaning to.
Ali Baba sat down again. After a while he said, "Morgiana. What do you want?"
She was quiet for a moment. "Freedom," she said.
"Done," he said. "And what else?"
She glanced at his nephew, who was looking at her with an expression that made the situation fairly clear. "Perhaps," she said carefully, "nothing else immediately."
In time, with everyone's agreement freely given, Morgiana and the nephew were married. Ali Baba became sole master of the cave and its treasure — because the captain was dead and the other thieves were already dead and there was no one left to object — and he shared it generously and wisely, and did a good deal of good with it, and was remembered long after he was gone.
He taught the magic words to no one except Morgiana, who had, in his estimation, more than earned them.