Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley

deciphered. In the fourth room found he a mappa mundi figuring the earth and the seas and the different cities and countries and villages of the world, each with its true name and exact shape.
    In the fifth, they found a marvelous mirror, great and round, of mixed metals, which had been made for Suleyman, son of David—on the twain be forgiveness!—wherein whoso looked might see the counterfeit presentment of his parents and his children, from the first Adam to those who shall hear the Trumpet. The sixth room was filled with that hermetic powder, one drachm of which elixir can change three thousand drachms of silver into three thousand drachms of gold. The seventh appeared empty, and it was so long that the ablest of the king's archers might have loosed an arrow from its doorway without hitting the distant wall. Carved on that far wall, they saw a terrible inscription. The king examined it, and understood it, and it spoke in this wise: "If any hand opens the gate of this castle, the warriors of flesh at the entrance, who resemble warriors of metal, shall take possession of the kingdom."
    These things occurred in the eighty-ninth year of the Hegira. Before the year reached its end, Tarik ibn Zayid would conquer that city and slay this King after the sorriest fashion and sack the city and make prisoners of the women and boys therein and get great loot. Thus it was that the Arabs spread all over the cities of Andalusia—a kingdom of fig trees and watered plains in which no man suffered thirst. As for the treasures, it is widely known that Tarik, son of Zayid, sent them to his lord, the caliph Al-Walid bin Abd al-Malik, who entombed them in a pyramid.
    (From the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Night 272)*

    THE STORY OF THE TWO DREAMERS
    The Arab historian Al-Ishaqi tells the story of this event:

    "It is related by men worthy of belief (though only Allah is omniscient and omnipotent and all-merciful and unsleeping) that a man of Cairo was possessed of ample riches and great wealth; but he was so generous and magnanimous that his wealth passed away, save his father's house, and his state changed, and he became utterly destitute, and could not obtain his sustenance save by laborious exertion. And he slept one night, overwhelmed and oppressed, under a fig tree in his garden, and saw in his sleep a person drip-ping wet who took from his mouth a golden coin and said to him, 'Verily thy fortune is in Persia, in Isfahan: therefore seek it and repair to it.' So he journeyed to Persia, meeting on the way with all the dangers of the desert, and of ships, and of pirates, and of idolaters, and of rivers, and of wild beasts, and of men; and when he at last arrived there, the evening overtook him, and he slept in a mosque. Now there was, adjacent to the mosque, a house; and as Allah (whose name be exalted!) had decreed, a party of robbers entered the mosque, and thence passed to that house; and the people of the house, awaking at the disturbance occasioned by the robbers, raised cries; the neighbors made a cry as well, whereupon the Wálee came to their aid with his followers, and the robbers fled over the housetops. The Wálee then entered the mosque, and found the man of Cairo sleeping there; so he laid hold upon him, and inflicted upon him a painful beating with mikra'ahs, until he was at the point of death, and imprisoned him; and he remained three days in the prison; after which, the Wálee caused him to be brought, and said to him, 'From what country art thou?' He answered, 'From Cairo.' —'And what affair,' said the Wálee,'was the cause of thy coming to Persia?' He answered, 'I saw in my sleep a person who said to me, "Verily thy fortune is in Isfahan; therefore repair to it." And when I came here, I found the fortune of which he told me to be those blows of the mikra'ahs, that I have received from thee.'—
    "And upon this the Wálee laughed so that his grinders appeared, and said to him, 'O thou of little sense, I saw