my generous master, to a mistress for night, to a poet for a jest, to a rich friend for entertainment, to a beggar for a whim, are they not the revenues of cities, wrung by torture from the poor? But the sighs of your people, Haroun, do not so much as stir the leaves in your palace garden!

And I—I have taken your gold, I, Ishak, who was born on the mountains free of the woods and winds. I have made my home in your palace, and almost forgot it was a prison. And for you I have strung glittering, fulsome verses, a hundred rhyming to one rhyme, ingeniously woven, my disgrace as a poet, my dishonour as a man. And I have forgotten that there are men who dig and sow, and a hut on the hills where I was born. (Perceives Hassan.) Ah, there is a body, here in the shade. Corpses of the poor are very common on the streets these days. They die of poison or the knife, but most of hunger. Mashallah, but you have not died of hunger, my friend, and there is that on your face that I do not like to see. By his clothes this was a common man, a grocer or a baker, his person ill-proportioned and unseemly, but by his forehead not quite a common man. I think—

                        JAFAR
(From above) Ishak, are you coming up?

                        ISHAK
(Shouting back) Wait a minute, I will come.

(To himself) What has curved his mouth into that bitter line?
He is an ugly man, but I maintain there is grace in his countenance.

What? A lute? Take my hand, O brother. You loved music too, and you could sing the songs of the people, which are better than mine— the songs I learnt from the mother of my mother.