' Then the youth's weakness
redoubled upon him, till he could neither sleep nor eat, and his
mother bound her head with the fillets of mourning. Presently, as
she sat at home, lamenting over her son, there came in to her an
old woman, known as the mother of Ahmed Kemakim the arch-thief, a
knave who would bore through the stoutest wall and scale the
highest and steal the very kohl from the eye. From his earliest
years he had been given to these foul practices, till they made
him captain of the watch, when he committed a robbery and the
Chief of the Police, taking him in the act, carried him to the
Khalif, who bade put him to death. But he sought protection of
the Vizier, whose intercession the Khalif never rejected; so he
pleaded for him with the Commander of the Faithful, who said,
'How canst thou intercede for a wretch who is the pest of the
human race?' 'O Commander of the Faithful,' replied Jaafer, 'do
thou imprison him; he who built the [first] prison was a sage,
seeing that a prison is the sepulchre of the live and a cause for
their enemies to exult.' So the Khalif bade lay him in chains and
write thereon, 'Appointed to remain until death and not to be
loosed but on the bench of the washer of the dead.
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