Week 5 Storytelling : Thieves in the Night

Arabian Nights - By Milo Winter

Thieves in the Night

Once upon a time, there lived a handsome prince and a beautiful princess in a palace far far away.  The palace was made up of the most beautiful gems and jewels any person could imagine.  The window panes were made of diamond, and the gilded walls and the marble floors danced with light when the sunlight peeked through the windows.

The palace spent a week in Africa were me and my fellows first laid eyes on the riches and wonder.  All those riches and jewels are exactly the kind of thing we had been eyeing. The second we laid eyes on it, we started making plans.  We could probably have filled a whole bag full of jewels and nobody would even have noticed that they were gone.  Before we were able to complete our plan, the palace vanished.  The legend told of a genie, a magician and a princess.

A prince fell madly in love with a beautiful princess.  The prince came from a very wealthy family, and he was convinced that the princess was so beautiful, that he would only be worthy of her if he used every last ounce of his gold for her.   He spend the next fifteen years building a palace, working and laboring with his own hands, as well as making his slaved labor day and night on the palace.  One the 365th day of the 15th year, he was final done.  We went up to the Sultan and asked for the princess's hand in marriage.  Impressed by the dedication and splendor that the prince showed, he agreed and the two were happily married for the rest of their days, living in splendor.

My personal opinion is that the story has been elaborated during the telling.  There is no way a man could build a palace of such splendor in 15 years, much less a lifetime.  I had also never believed in magic until I saw the palace appear, and then disappear a week later.  We kept our ears open for rumors of the palace, until finally one day we heard that it moved to China.  We did not hesitate for an instance, we packed up our bags and moved to China.

My band of thieves gathered around the palace.  We knew we needed to scout out the place, figure out the guard patterns etc.  before we could actually steel anything.  We believed this process would take weeks of time.  On our first day of scouting out the palace, we did not see a single guard.  We could not believe our eyes, no palace was ever left completely unguarded. Three more days we surveyed the palace to be sure, and three more days we saw nobody protected the palace.  On the fourth day, we entered the palace, found the treasure room, and left with all we could carry. We found many things in the treasure room, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pears, gold, and so much more.  We also found a very old looking dingy lamp, which we disregarded in an instance, skipping over it to look at the rest of the treasure.

We praised our luck as we left the palace, feeling fortunate to have come out with such a successful score.  It was morning by the time we went to a quiet  place and started counting our money.  As we were doing this, the room around us suddenly blurred, as as if by magic.  We found ourselves back in the palace we had just left, kneeling in front of the prince of the castle, Aladdin, and his princess.  Aladdin held the lamp, and beside him floated what could only be a genie.

Finally we understood why the palace had no guards.  The palace didn't need any guards, because Aladdin had the power to summon up anything he needed from his genie.  I knelt to the floor and begged forgiveness, promising to mend the error of my ways.  I knew what happened to thieves, and it was not a fate I wanted to share with my friends.  Aladdin would not yield, wanting to set an example for people who would steal from him in the future.  He spoke a command to the genie, speaking a sentence which I knew was the last one I would ever hear.  Know this, keep your greed in check because no amount of jewels and money is worth the price of your own life.


Authors Note:
Everyone is familiar with the Disney Movie Aladdin.  The story is The Arabian Nights, however, is quite different than the childhood tale most of us grew up with.  I wanted to tell yet another, third retelling of the story, taking five different Motifs from the original story and wrote my own plot.  I chose The Jeweled palace as the setting, Aladdin, Genie, and the princess as the characters, and the lamp as my artifact.  Together, these are five different things from the original story.

The Arabian Nights includes many stories inside stories, and sometime even stories inside stories inside stories.  Because of this, I decided to include a brief summary of the original as a story within my story.  The tale is based on the rumors that the people have been hearing, so it's a fabrication, a slightly different version of what actually happened.

Bibliography: 
The Arabian Nights' Entertainments by Andrew Lang, illustrated by H. J. Ford (1898).