Ali Baba and the Forty Relying Parties
A tale from 1001 Nights, but with passkeys
6 min. read
This blog post is a silly adaptation of the tale of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and tells it as if the equivalent of passkeys were used instead of the (rather insecure) password “open sesame”.
I. The Word
The thieves kept their cave shut with a word, and the word was “sesame”.
Behind the door they piled what they took off the caravan roads, which over the years amounted to a great deal: bolts of stiff Damascus silk, saffron in stoppered jars, coin from mints nobody in the district could name, and loose gold enough to founder a camel.
Only the thieves knew of the cave, and only they knew the word. They would ride up to the cave, say the word out loud, and the door would roll open.
II. A Man in a Tree
A woodcutter was cutting brush at the edge of a clearing one afternoon when he heard hooves. He got himself up a tree, and counted forty riders approaching a great rock in the hillside. The riders stopped, and the woodcutter heard them say a word, and saw the rock roll open and the men go in.
Once they had ridden away, the woodcutter found that the word worked for him exactly as well as it had worked for them.
The virtue of the word was that a woodcutter could understand it. Its vice was that a woodcutter could steal it. And over four nights and a borrowed mule, a woodcutter did.
III. No Word
The woodcutter’s name was Ali Baba.
He carried the hoard to a small cave in the hill behind his house, and there sat down to think about locks, his whole fortune being the gift of a bad one.
No word, he decided. A word is a thing that can be overheard by an idle man in a tree, as he had reason to know. He sent to town for the fitters, who came out with their instruments and hung him a rock of the modern kind across the mouth of the cave, and gave him a Stone to open it with, and went away well paid.
IV. The Djinn in the Stone
The new rock does not want a word, but what it wants instead is harder to say. It wants the Stone, which Ali Baba wears on a cord under his shirt: a piece of smoked crystal the size of a plum, with a tiny djinn sealed inside it.
The rock speaks first now. Qad-elumeth, sarran, ivvi-khoth-nadeem – never the same twice, in no language spoken between here and Samarkand. Ali Baba understands none of it. The Stone answers. The djinn and the rock hold a brief private correspondence on a subject he is not told, and somewhere in it the djinn turns to Ali Baba and regards him through the crystal and requires him to lay his thumb against it to prove that he is Ali Baba, though to whom he could not say.
The door rolls open on a hoard that is not his and never was, about which neither the rock nor the djinn has any opinion whatsoever.
It opens for Ali Baba and for nobody else – not for his wife, not for his son, not for his brother, who minds the house while he is away in the woods. This pleased him very much at the time.
V. Three Thieves
It was no more than two moons before word of Ali Baba reached the thieves. A poor woodcutter who comes suddenly into a new roof, a string of good mules, and a wife wearing fine Damascus silk on a Tuesday gets himself talked about.
And so they sent three of their number, one after another, to learn whether it was Ali Baba who had taken what was theirs.
The first went up a tree and sat there eight days, and came down with a page of syllables in his own hand. He gave them back to the rock exactly as he had heard them. The rock heard him out politely, said something else entirely, and then remained silent. The door stayed shut.
The second had a glassmaker cut him a plum of smoked crystal on a cord, and paid a fair price for a tiny djinn to seal inside it. The rock spoke, and his djinn answered promptly; but the rock had never before seen that djinn, and did not care how well it spoke. The door stayed shut.
The third built another rock across the face of the first – the same grain, the same weathering, the same door in the same hillside, standing a hand’s breadth in front of the true one. Ali Baba came up at dusk and held out his Stone as he had so often before. The djinn looked once at that rock, refused it, and told him why. Ali Baba went for his axe and had the false front down before dark. Behind it stood his own door – firm, patient, unbothered.
There was nothing to overhear, nothing to counterfeit, and nothing to trick the woodcutter into giving away. Whatever the fitters had charged, it wasn’t enough.
VI. The Ford
In the spring of his fortieth year, the cord around Ali Baba’s neck broke at a ford, and the Stone went into four feet of brown water, and before he could stoop for it, the river had carried it away.
Ali Baba stood in front of his own rock and heard it say its nonsense into the empty air, and nothing answered, and the door stayed shut.
There is an elaborate provision for proving the Stone is yours. For the Stone at the bottom of a river, the provision is a good deal cruder. For that, the fitters had left a line at the foot of their bill: any difficulty, send to town.
So Ali Baba sent to town. The fitters were very sorry to hear it. A new Stone would be cut and sent out to his house by courier within the month. It would come to him blank, they explained: a djinn in it, but no master yet, and the first thumb laid upon it is the one it keeps for good.
VII. The Courier
Cassim minded the house on the days his brother was in the woods, and had done so for two years, and not out of kindness.
Ali Baba had come up in the world, but had been close about how. Cassim wanted to know. He had asked and been told nothing; he had looked and found nothing; so he minded that house very thoroughly indeed. Never once had he thought about the hill behind it.
The courier found Cassim sitting in the shade of Ali Baba’s house and was, in the way of couriers, helpful. He had a parcel for Ali Baba: the new Stone, for the cave in the hill behind the house. Would the householder please sign for it, and lay his thumb on it to make it his?
Cassim signed. There was nobody there to say otherwise. The Stone inside the parcel had never known a thumb of its own, so it gladly took his.
The door of the cave rolled open. And over four nights and a borrowed mule, Cassim emptied the hill.