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visible.
    Like everyone else who has ever moved to Morocco, we were
destined to brush with the supernatural, whether it be through
the shantytown, the workforce, or through our new friends. But
it was the purchase of Dar Khalifa itself that sucked us deep into
the Moroccan underbelly. With its legions of supposed jinns, the
house was somehow directly connected to the kingdom's
bedrock of supernatural belief.
    The mere thought of spirits struck unimaginable fear into the
    hearts of the guardians, our maids and all other believers who crossed the
    threshold. The jinns may have plagued our lives through the belief and actions
    of those around us, but for me they became an almost tangible link to the
    world that created A Thousand and One Nights .
     
    That collection of stories is a byword for the exotic, the jackpot
of cultural colour. Even in our society, saturated by written
information, the title is enough to raise the hairs on the back of
our collective necks. It conjures emotion, a sense of treasure,
opulence, magic and the supernatural, a fantasy within the reach
of mere mortals.
    It is just over three centuries since the tales of the Arabian
Nights arrived in Western Europe. They appeared first in
French, translated by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717,
under the title Les Mille et une nuit . Galland had been cautious to
censor passages he felt overly lewd for sensitive French tastes; as
opposed to later translators, such as Burton, who delighted in the
abounding obscenity. According to Robert Irwin, author of the
remarkable Arabian Nights: A Companion , Galland's translation
was based on a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century manuscript.
There may have been an even earlier edition, perhaps dating to
the tenth or even the ninth century. As Irwin suggests, Galland
and subsequent translators added to the base manuscript,
expanding it freely with as many new characters and tales as they
could find.
    Galland's translation was an overnight sensation. The salons
of polite French society swooned at the richness in storytelling
seldom seen on the Continent. The event can be compared to the
blandness of European food prior to the sixteenth century, before
spices arrived from the Orient. Granted the Latin and Greek
classics were well-known, but they lacked the mystery, the dark
layers and sublayers of the East.
    The public demand for the tales led to linguists, historians,
and Orientalists struggling over translations of astonishing
complexity and scope. During the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, at least a dozen separate translations appeared in
English, the most famous by Edward Lane, John Payne, Joseph
Mardrus and, of course, Richard Burton. They ranged from the
concise to the encyclopedic and were found in the libraries of
royalty, of institutions and of gentlemen.
    From the moment they reached Europe, the Arabian Nights were surrounded by intrigue. The anonymity of the text led to
incessant speculation. Some claimed that the stories were a kind
of tonic that could boost flagging spirits. Others asserted that no
man could ever read the entire collection without dropping dead
from the feat. That of course was hyperbole. Translators, editors
and printers, as well as scores of readers, read them from cover
to cover and lived to tell the tale.
    The Arabian Nights are stories within stories. One character
tells a tale about a character who recounts a tale about another,
who tells a further tale. The structure leads to multiple layers,
extraordinary depth and frequent confusion.
    The premise for the collection is that a fictional king, called
Shahriyar, discovers that his wife is having an affair with a
servant. Enraged, he has her executed. So as not to be betrayed
again, he marries a virgin each night and sleeps with her, before
having her beheaded at sunrise. The arrangement goes on for
some time, brides' heads rolling, until the daughter of the grand
vizier, Sherherazade, begs her father to allow her to marry the
king.