Lately, however, the daydream had been concentrating on the princess to whom Abdullah had been betrothed at his birth. She was as highborn as Abdullah and had grown up in his absence into a great beauty with perfect features and huge misty dark eyes. She lived in a palace as rich as Abdullah’s own. You approached it along an avenue lined with angelic statues and entered by way of seven marble courts, each with a fountain in the middle more precious than the last, starting with one made of chrysolite and ending with one of platinum studded with emeralds.

But that day Abdullah found he was not quite satisfied with this arrangement. It was a feeling he often had after a visit from his father’s first wife’s relations. It occurred to him that a good palace ought to have magnificent gardens. Abdullah loved gardens, though he knew very little about them. Most of his experience had come from the public parks of Zanzib—where the turf was somewhat trampled and the flowers few—in which he sometimes spent his lunch hour when he could afford to pay one-eyed Jamal to watch his booth. Jamal kept the fried food stall next door and would, for a coin or so, tie his dog to the front of Abdullah’s booth. Abdullah was well aware that this did not really qualify him to invent a proper garden, but since anything was better than thinking of two wives chosen for him by Fatima, he lost himself in waving fronds and scented walkways in the gardens of his princess.

Or nearly. Before Abdullah was fairly started, he was interrupted by a tall, dirty man with a dingy-looking carpet in his arms.

“You buy carpets for selling, son of a great house?” this stranger asked, bowing briefly.

For someone trying to sell a carpet in Zanzib, where buyers and sellers always spoke to one another in the most formal and flowery way, this man’s manner was shockingly abrupt. Abdullah was annoyed anyway because his dream garden was falling to pieces at this interruption from real life. He answered curtly. “That is so, O king of the desert. You wish to trade with this miserable merchant?”

“Not trade—sell, O master of a stack of mats,” the stranger corrected him.