The Story
In a Persian city long ago, there lived two brothers: Cassim, who had married a rich wife and grown comfortable and proud, and Ali Baba, who had married a woman of modest means and worked as a woodcutter in the forest. The two brothers rarely visited each other, for Cassim had little patience for poverty and Ali Baba had little patience for pride.
One afternoon, deep in the forest with his three donkeys loaded with wood, Ali Baba heard the thunder of hooves and hid himself quickly in a tall tree. A troop of forty men on horseback came riding hard through the trees, their saddlebags heavy with something that clinked and glittered. They dismounted at a sheer rock face that seemed unbroken in every direction.
Their leader, a broad man with a scarred face and fierce eyes, stepped forward and called out in a voice like a command: "Open, Sesame!"
The rock face split open, revealing a wide passage into the earth. The forty men went inside. The passage closed. Ali Baba, holding his breath in the tree above, waited. After a time, the passage opened again, the men came out — lighter now, their saddlebags empty — and the captain called: "Close, Sesame!" The rock sealed itself as though it had never parted.
They rode away. Ali Baba waited a long time. Then he climbed down, walked to the rock face, and said, feeling somewhat foolish, the words he had heard.
"Open, Sesame."
The rock opened.
Inside was a cavern so vast he could not see the far wall. Every surface glittered. Gold coins lay in drifts like autumn leaves. Silver plate was stacked in towers. Jewels filled clay pots as though they were ordinary grain. Bolts of silk and brocade leaned against columns of naked rock. The forty thieves had been filling this place for years — perhaps generations.
Ali Baba loaded his donkeys with as many bags of gold as they could carry, covered them with wood as he had done before, and brought them home. He told his wife everything, and she wept with astonishment and then with happiness, and counted the coins on the kitchen table, and found there was more than they could spend in a lifetime of careful living.
The trouble came, as trouble does, through pride. Ali Baba's wife borrowed a measuring vessel from Cassim's wife to measure the gold — not wanting to count it but to know its volume. Cassim's wife, curious, pressed a little wax into the bottom of the vessel before lending it. When it was returned, a gold coin was stuck in the wax. Cassim came immediately to Ali Baba demanding to know everything.
Ali Baba told him. Cassim went to the cave the next morning, spoke the words, went inside, filled himself with more treasure than he could possibly carry — and then forgot the words to open the rock again. When the forty thieves returned, they found him inside. The captain gave the order, and that was the end of Cassim.
Ali Baba buried his brother in secret, with the help of his slave Morgiana, who was as clever as anyone in the city and quick-minded in a crisis.
The thieves knew someone had discovered their cave. The captain came to the city disguised as an oil merchant and, through inquiry, found Ali Baba's house. He came to the door in the evening asking to stay the night, bringing with him nineteen mules loaded with great jars — and in eighteen of those jars, hidden and waiting, were armed men. Only one jar held oil.
Morgiana went to the yard that night for oil for her lamp, and she opened the nearest jar, and a whispered voice came out: "Is it time?"
Morgiana did not flinch and did not run. She replied quietly: "Not yet," and went to every jar in turn, giving the same quiet answer, learning what lay in wait. Then she heated the oil from the one true jar to boiling and poured it carefully, jar by jar, until the danger was gone.
She said nothing to Ali Baba until morning.
The captain escaped and came back once more, this time without an army, disguised as a merchant. He was patient and clever and very dangerous. But Morgiana recognized something in his bearing — the way a soldier stands, the way a commander watches a room. She danced for the household after dinner, as was sometimes the custom, and in the dance she came close to the merchant with a small blade, and the long threat was ended.
Ali Baba, when he understood what Morgiana had done for him — three times over — freed her at once and welcomed her into the family. He returned to the cave only carefully and rarely, taking only what he needed, telling no one outside his household.
He lived long and quietly and well, and was known as a generous man, and if his neighbors wondered how a woodcutter had come to such modest prosperity, they found no answer — for Morgiana kept the secret all her life.