Open Sesame: The Cave, the Cook, and a Slave Girl Who Outwitted Forty Thieves
Two magic words open a mountain of gold — and close a trap of blood. What follows tests not the poor woodcutter's luck, but his slave girl's wits.
In a town where two brothers had inherited nothing but their father's name, fortune split them in two. Cassim married wealth and lived idly upon it; Ali Baba married poverty and went on cutting wood in the forest, day after day, asking for nothing more than his labor could earn.
It was in that forest that Ali Baba's life changed. He overheard forty thieves approaching a great rock, and heard the words that split it open: 'open sesame.' When the men vanished into the earth and rode away again, Ali Baba crept to the stone, spoke the phrase himself, and stepped into a cave heaped with treasure. He took only a single bag of gold — enough, he judged, not to be missed.
But secrets among family rarely keep. Borrowing scales to weigh his new coins, Ali Baba unknowingly let his sister-in-law smear wax on the pans; a gold coin stuck fast, and Cassim's greed was lit. Under pressure, Ali Baba told him everything. Cassim rode to the cave with a donkey to haul away riches — and in his excitement over the gold, forgot the very words that would let him leave. The thieves found him trapped inside and killed him, quartering his body and displaying the pieces at the cave's mouth as a warning to any other intruder.
Ali Baba brought his brother's remains home and turned to Morgiana, a clever slave-girl of Cassim's household, to hide the truth of his death. She bought medicine from an apothecary to suggest a fatal illness, then blindfolded an old tailor named Baba Mustafa and led him to the house, where overnight he stitched the body whole again. Cassim was buried with no one the wiser — not even his own widow.
The thieves, discovering the corpse gone, knew someone else held their secret. One tracked down Baba Mustafa, who unwittingly led him — blindfolded again — back to Ali Baba's door, which he marked for a night raid. But Morgiana had seen him, and quietly marked every door on the street the same way. When the forty thieves returned, they could not tell one house from another, and their furious leader killed the failed scout. A second thief tried the same plan with a chipped doorstep as his mark; Morgiana foiled him too, chipping every other step in sight, and he met the same fate.
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