CHIEF OF POLICE
Since your excellency deigns to enquire, for urgent reasons of police.
CAPTAIN OF MILITARY They must have been very urgent indeed before you would permit such an inopportune disturbance outside the very house where our Lord the Caliph is imprisoned. You have seriously impaired our chances of a speedy and effective rescue.
CHIEF OF POLICE (Drawing his sword and whirling it about) Thou melon head, thou, thou dung pig, thou brother of disaster, get thee hence with thy knock-kneed band of fatherless brigands, ere I have thee arrested for unnatural crime.
CAPTAIN OF MILITARY
Out with thy sword, thou big-bellied snatcher up of burglars,
thou manacler of little boys, thou terror of the peaceful market,
I will teach thee to insult the slaughterers of the infidel host.
ISHAK
(Interrupting the COMBATANTS) Is this a time for indecent brawling?
Quick, where are the ladders?
A SOLDIER
(Pompously) In the rear, Sir, in the rear.
(The ladders are brought along.)
CHIEF OF POLICE
(To POLICEMAN) Place a ladder.
CAPTAIN OF MILITARY
(To SOLDIERS) Place a ladder.
(Each goes up his ladder at the same time: bang at wall and are answered: shout for levers which are procured, and assistance which speedily arrives. The iron wall is lifted up, and CALIPH and the REST disclosed seated peaceably awaiting their deliverance, the lamp still burning.)