Thousand & One Nights: 105th Night

One hundred and fifth night. Shahriar the king of India Indochina, the queen, and her sister were present. The queen Shahrazad had been telling the stories at the request of her sister Dinarzad, and the king had been getting involved in following the story.

The tailor and his wife found a jolly  hunchback with his tambourine. They invited him to their house for merry making and entertainment. While carousing and feasting the hunchack was choked and dead. The tailor and his wife propped up the dead man on the staircase of a Jewish physician. While coming downstairs the physician stumbled upon the dead hunchback propped up on the staircase, and it rolled down. The physician thought that he had stumbled on a sick man, who fell down and dead. He carried the body upstairs.
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The physician's wife said to him, "Why do you sit still? Rise at once and let us carry the body to the roof and throw it into the house of our neighbour, the Muslim bachelor." The Jew's neighbour was the steward of the King's kitchen, who used to bring a great deal of cooking butter, which, together with everything else he brought, was eaten by the cats and mice, causing much loss. The Jew and his wife took the hunchback upto the roof, carried him little by little towards the steward's house, and holding him by hands and feet lowered him until he reached the ground. Then they propped him up against the wall and went away.
 
No sooner had they descended from the roof than the steward, who had been at the recitation of the Quran, came home in the middle of the night, carrying lighted candle. He opened the door, and when he entered his house, he saw a man standing in the corner, under the ventilator, and said, "By God, this is a fine thing! My food has been stolen by none other than a man. You kept taking meat and fat sheep tails and scooping out the cooking butter, and I kept blaming cats and dogs and mice. I have killed many cats and dogs and have sinned against them, while you have been coming down the wind shaft to steal my provisions, but now by God I will myself avenge on you with my own hands." Then he took a heavy club, and with one leap stood before the hunchback and gave him a heavy blow on the rib cage, and as the hunchback fell, he gave him another blow on the back. Looking at his face and seeing that he was dead, he cried out, saying, "Alas! I have killed him. There is no power and no strength, save in God, the Almighty, the Magnificent." Then he turned pale with fear for himself, saying, "May God curse the cooking butter and curse this night! To God we belong and to whom we return."

It was the beginning of dawn, and Shahrazad stopped storytelling.




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