ABSTRACT
It is related, O auspicious King, that there was once in the antiquity of years, in days of long ago, a King called Shahrimān who ruled over the lands of Ajam and lived in Khurāsān. This King had a hundred concubines who were all barren, so that not one of them had given him a child, even a daughter. As he sat one day in his audience chamber among his wazīrs, amīrs and nobles, talking with them, not of the weary affairs of government but of poetry, science, history and medicine, and all such things as might make him forget the grief of his childlessness, his sorrow that the throne which his fathers had left him should pass to another, a young mamlūk entered, saying: ‘My lord, there is a merchant at the door with a young slave more beautiful than eye has ever seen.’ ‘Let them come in!’ cried the King, and the mamlūk hastened to introduce them.
