SELIM Zachariah, the Jew, has but lately arrived from Aleppo: he is the talk of all the market place, and a wonderful man if tales be true.
HASSAN
Have you the tales?
SELIM I have this among many. They say that in Bokhara a man called him an offensive Jew and flung a stone at his head: and he caused the stone to be suspended in the air and the man too, so that the man walked all round Bokhara over the heads of the passers-by, who were astonished, and was constrained to enter his house by the upper window.
HASSAN
(Incredulous) Mashallah!
SELIM And stranger than that. At Ispahan men say he took off the dome of the Great Mosque and turned it round and had a bath in it, and put it back again.
HASSAN
Mashallah!
SELIM And strangest of all, at Cairo, for the amusement of the Sultan, he turned the whole population into apes for half an hour.
HASSAN A very trifling change if you knew the Egyptians. I don't believe a word of all these tales. Yet, doubtless he is as good enough physician to make a love philtre. But are philtres any good?
SELIM There can be no doubt that there are philtres which drive women to love, though their hearts be as strong and their heads as cold as the mountains of Qaf. But as for this Zachariah, I know he sells philtres at ten dinars the bottle: his shop is crowded with rich old women.
HASSAN Eywallah, Salim, I am sick of love; but no damsel is worth ten dinars. And sages have remarked, "the ideal is expensive!" And philosophers have observed, "There are a thousand figs on the fig-tree and all as like as like."