Read the fairy tale Anna loves
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
A poor woodcutter, a rock that opens when you say the right words, and a servant girl who is paying attention when nobody else is: one of the best-loved tales carried west with the Thousand and One Nights.
Ali Baba was a poor man who gathered firewood in the hills above a town in Persia. One morning, loading his donkeys, he heard horses and climbed quickly into a tree. A band of forty riders stopped at the foot of a bare rock wall below him. Their leader faced the stone and said, Open, Sesame, and the wall swung open like a door.
The riders carried heavy sacks inside, came out with their hands empty, said, Close, Sesame, and rode away. When the hills were quiet again Ali Baba climbed down, stood where the leader had stood, and tried the words himself. The wall opened onto a cave with more old coins and cloth and silver in it than the whole town owned. He filled a few small sacks, no more than his donkeys could carry with ease, closed the wall behind him, and went home.
Open, Sesame
He told only his wife, and asked her to say nothing. But she wanted to measure the coins, and borrowed a measuring bowl from his brother Kasim’s wife, who wondered why they suddenly needed one. She brushed a little fat inside the bowl before lending it, and when it came back a single gold coin was stuck to the bottom. That evening Kasim came to the door and said he knew.
Ali Baba had never been able to keep anything from his brother. He told him about the cave and the words, and offered to share what he had already carried home. But Kasim wanted the cave itself. The next morning he took ten mules and hurried up into the hills alone.
The other brother
Kasim said, Open, Sesame, and the wall let him in. But once he was inside, with more around him than he could ever lift, he could not call the word back to mind. He tried every grain he knew, barley and wheat and rye, and the stone stayed shut. When the thieves returned and found that someone had been in their cave they were very angry, and Kasim did not come home. Ali Baba went up the next day, found the wall standing open and the mules wandering loose, and carried the sad news back to the family. He brought Morgiana, the quick and careful young woman who worked in Kasim’s house, into his own home to help his brother’s widow.
The thieves knew now that someone else had found the cave, and they meant to learn who. One of them went down into the town, asked here and there about a man lately buried, and worked out which house was Ali Baba’s. He made a small chalk mark on the door and left to fetch the others. But Morgiana saw the mark as she came back from the well, did not like it, and quietly chalked the very same mark on every door in the street. When the thieves came that night they could not tell one house from another, and left with nothing.
The oil jars
The leader tried once more himself. He came to the town with a line of mules and forty tall oil jars, and asked Ali Baba, who was a kind host, if he might rest a night in the courtyard. One jar held oil. Each of the others held a waiting thief. But Morgiana went out for oil to fill her lamp, heard a whisper from inside a jar, and understood at once. She heated the one jar of real oil until it was very hot, poured a little into the top of each of the others, and the thieves came scrambling out and over the wall and did not stop running.
The leader came back one last time, months later, dressed as a cloth merchant. He made friends with Ali Baba’s son and was asked to dinner. Morgiana, carrying in the dishes, knew his face. She asked to dance for the guests, the way she often did, with a thin dagger held flat in her hand as part of the dance. She turned and stepped closer and closer to the merchant, and at the last turn she stopped still in front of him, lowered the dagger, and said that this was no cloth merchant but the leader of the thieves, come back yet again. He was through the door and gone before anyone had risen from the table. Ali Baba, who understood by then how much he owed her, gave Morgiana her freedom and a home with the family for as long as she wished, and in time she and his son were married. The cave was still up in the hills with all its gold inside, but the story the family told on winter evenings was never really about the treasure. It was about the young woman who kept her eyes open while everyone else was looking at the gold.
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Nami, Ya Yasminti
Play this softly while you read Ali Baba aloud: Nami Ya Yasminti, sleep my little jasmine, a lullaby from the Levant, the same corner of the world the storyteller came from.
More stories, more lullabies
This is one tale in a growing collection of traditional stories from around the world, each one paired, where we can, with a real lullaby from the same culture.