Note 628 — TALE OF HIMSELF TOLD BY THE KING.[608]
Richard Francis Burton translation · Edition 2
The dénouement is a replica of “The Tale of the King who lost kingdom and wife and wealth and Allah restored them to him” (Suppl. Nights, vol. i. 319). That a Sultan should send his Ministers to keep watch over a ship’s cargo sounds passably ridiculous to a European reader, but a coffee-house audience in the East would find it perfectly natural. Also that three men, the Sultan and his sons, should live together for years without knowing anything of one another’s lives seems to us an absurdity: in the case of an Oriental such detail would never strike him even as impossible or even improbable.