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When Thiuli saw there was no hope of her recovery, he cursed himself and the whole world, tore out his beard, and butted his head against the wall. But all this availed nothing, for Fatima, under the care of the other women, soon ceased to breathe. When Thiuli heard of her death, he ordered a coffin to be hastily made, as he could not suffer a dead person to remain in the house, and had the body carried to the tomb. The bearers carried the coffin there, dropped it hastily, and fled, as they heard groans and sighs proceeding from the other coffins.

Mustapha, who had hidden behind the coffins and frightened away the bearers of Fatima’s coffin, now came out from his hiding place, and lighted a lamp that he had provided for this purpose. Next he produced a phial containing the restorative, and raised the lid of Fatima’s coffin. But what was his amazement when the rays of the lamp disclosed features entirely strange to him! It was neither my sister nor Zoraide, but quite another person, that lay in the coffin. It took him a long time to recover from this latest blow of fate, but finally pity overcame his vexation. He opened the phial, and poured some of the contents into the mouth of the sleeper. She breathed, opened her eyes, and seemed for a long time to be trying to make out her situation. At last she recalled all that had happened, and, stepping out of the coffin, flung herself at Mustapha’s feet. “How can I thank you, gracious being?” cried she, “for freeing me from my terrible prison!” Mustapha interrupted her expressions of gratitude with the question how it happened that she and not his sister Fatima had been rescued. She looked at him in an astonished way before replying: “Now for the first time I understand what before was incomprehensible to me. You must know that I was called Fatima in the castle, and it was to me you gave the note and medicine.” My brother requested her to give him news of his sister and Zoraide, and learned that they were both in the castle, but, in accordance with a custom of Thiuli’s, had received other names, and were now called Mirza and Nurmahal.

When the freed slave, Fatima, saw that my brother was so cast down by this mistake, she consoled him with the assurance that she could point out another way by which both of the young girls might be rescued. Aroused by what she said, he begged her to tell him her plan, to which she replied–

“For some five months I have been Thiuli’s slave; yet from the first I have planned to escape, but it was too much of a task for me to attempt alone. In the inner court of the castle you must have noticed a fountain that throws the water in a cascade from ten pipes. This fountain impressed me strongly, because I remembered a similar one in my father’s house, the water of which was brought through a large aqueduct. In order to learn whether this fountain was built in the same way, I one day praised its beauty to Thiuli, and asked who had constructed it. ‘I built it myself,’ answered he; ‘and what you see here is the least part of the work, as the water is brought from a brook, a thousand paces away, through an arched viaduct at least high enough for a man to walk in. And the construction of all this I directed myself.’

“Since hearing this, I have often wished for the strength of a man to pull out a stone in the side of the fountain, and thereby escape. I will now show you the aqueduct, through which you can obtain entrance to the castle at night, and set your sister free. But you ought to have at least two men with you, in order to overpower the slaves who watch the seraglio at night.”