Once in the kingdom of Tashgar of the Great Tartary, a tailor, amused by the music of a fellow hunchback, decided to take him home to divert his wife. The trio took a heavy supper that night, amid which the hunchback swallowed a large fishbone that stroked his throat and caused him death.
Out of the fear of being caught by the police, the couple left the body at their neighbour Jewish doctor’s place.
To escape the indictment, the Jewish doctor threw the body onto the chimney of their neighbour Muslim, employed by the Sultan. The purveyor, out of the guilt of having killed a thief presumably, put the body against a shop wall. The Christian merchant was arrested. The Sul-tan was approached for the verdict, and did not show mercy.
When the merchant was about to be hanged, the purveyor followed by the Jewish doctor and the tailor emerged and admitted their crimes of having killed the poor hunchback and requested the merchant’s release. The Sultan, hearing this, asked each one of them to narrate his story, and his historian to take their accounts.
