Prompt and Circumstance

Ali-bi Baba and his Forty Beeves

('alibi' Dec.2-4 2016)

The story goes that Ali Baba had an elder brother called Cassim. A little-known side story is that Cassim was known to his mates as Ali-bi Baba - a nickname mainly earned by his unerring ability to earnestly swear (with tears in his eyes if the occasion demanded it), that he was in another place whenever accused of mischief-making. Being an exceptionally fast runner, often leaving behind clouds of dust that obscured all, he was able to get away with blue murder and other similar pranks.

There were those who became mightily confused between Ali-bi's seeming super-powers and those of another 'A' person's also little-known brother, Almaths, who could slip in and out of an oily place with the best of them. (That Big Brother would be Aladdin. Right? Yes, that's the one.)

Ali-bi was no rubber (of lamps, anyway). The inborn talent (unlike a painful ingrown toenail) that he carefully and painstakingly developed, had more to do with sesame seeds, and just two simply splendiferous words. In truth, they were fairly ordinary, but we won't let a little truth get in the way of a good story, will we?

At first, when it happened (the bizarre whisk off into the mist bit) Ali-bi was confused. He was, after all nought but a simple shepherd, normally to be found out on the flats with his forty beeves. What should an ill-educated but pleasant peasant like him know about the supernatural stuff that dreams are made of?

All came clear one regular-type Arabian night when a super-moon lit the barren landscape with its near-daylight glow. Ali-bi was lolling about on his plaited goat-hair filled bolster (or pillow for the non-Biblically-well-versed), having loosed his leather girdle. Carefully tucked into his soberly striped cloak to deter the desert chill, he now lay listening unwillingly to the near-sonic snoring of his brother, who'd popped over earlier for a little get-together around the campfire.

Out of the mysterious blue of evening, Ali-bi's brother snorted himself out of snoring and into a stream of mostly gibberish (uhrr, which came first? - the gibber-variety rocks, or gibberish - that language closest to the men of the land, like shepherds and so forth and so on). Ali-bi peeled his ears to their audio max. (not an easy feat... they were horrifically hairy), and found himself able to decipher 'cave' and 'door' and another top-secret word... or two.

The very next time Ali-bi came across a cave with a door, he fell down in a frenzy. THE door was covered in gold leaf with carved cherubim and flowers, and the door posts were sprinkled with the blood of a lamb in typical archaic-type fashion. The forty beeves, maddened by the scent of blood, stampeded straight over the hapless and helpless Ali-bi, in the split second before he could shout - OPEN SESAME.

And the moral of the story is -

It ain't over until the fat beeves bolt.