Part 2: The Search for Qassim
When Qassim's wife informs Ali Baba that her husband did not come home the previous night, he departs for the forest to look for him.
He hopes to find him alive, but he gets nervous when he sees one of his shoes outside the cave. The ground nearby is disturbed, the sign of a struggle, but it is the fresh blood nearby that makes him think that a tragedy may have befallen his brother. He, however, is not discouraged and continues his search. "Open, oh Simsim," he shouts, and the cave door swings open, revealing Qassim's mutilated body.
It has been split in half from the head down, with each half affixed to a wooden pole, one to the right and the other to the left of the entrance – possibly to warn anyone else who enters the cave of looming doom.
An hour earlier, the robbers had stopped by to deposit some more booty, and when the door opened, Qassim sprinted past them to escape, but they caught up with him and killed him.
Ali Baba has arrived a little too late, and the best he can do is carry the remains home for burial. He loads them onto a donkey cart, carefully concealing them with wood.
Also, to exact revenge on his brother’s killers, he carries bags and bags of gold and silver on the other donkey carts, which he also conceals with wood. On the highway, he looks like a wood vendor, and anyone who sees him thinks he's returning from the forest to fetch firewood for sale at the town bazaar.
He buries the gold and silver in his backyard before taking Qassim's remains home. Upon her learning of her husband's fate, his widow is overcome with grief and withdraws to a private room to cry. "It’s all my fault," she sobs. "I allowed him to go alone yet I know he gets confused when he sees a lot of money, which makes him forget things.”
Later, Ali Baba and the widow agree on a private funeral, and they ask Morgiana, Qassim's devoted and wise slave-girl, to prepare the body for burial. They are afraid that a public funeral will reveal Qassim’s home to the robbers, who might seek vengeance on the family.
Morgiana goes to the market square the next morning and finds Baba Mustafa, the tailor, opening his shop. She hands him ten gold coins, asks him to follow her, and they walk together to a dark room in Qassim's house where his body is resting.
She instructs him to sew the body together and make a lovely kanzu for it, which he does in two hours, and Morgiana is impressed by his work. Anyone looking at the body would have no idea it had been dismembered, and a visitor might think Qassim is just sleeping. Before she pays him, she asks him to promise not to tell anyone what he has seen, and he agrees.
Apart from the Imam and his assistants, nobody outside Qassim’s family learns of his death or burial, so the secret of how he died does not leak out. Following the funeral, Ali Baba takes his widow as his second wife and moves in with her.
Meanwhile, the robbers stop by the cave but don’t find the body. They conclude that someone other than the dead man knows the secret words for opening the cave, and it must be he who carried the body away. They must find and kill him, they agree.
One robber will disguise himself as a merchant from a distant land and go from street to street and house to house, looking for families who may have recently lost a loved one. One robber volunteers to investigate and the captain gives him the green light.
He enters the market square at dawn, and all shopkeepers, apart from Baba Mustafa, the tailor, have yet to open. The old man is sitting, thread-in-hand, on his work stool.
"It's still dark; how do you manage to thread the needle?" the robber inquires.
"You must be a stranger here," Baba Mustafa responds. "Everyone knows my eyesight is still good despite my age. I sewed two pieces of a human body in a very dark room recently."
The robber places ten gold coins in Mustafa’s hand and says, “Show me the house.”
“I promised not to tell or show anyone,” protests Baba Mustafa.
The robber shoves another 10 gold coins in the tailor’s hand, after which Baba Mustafa, unable to resist the temptation, says, “Let’s go.”
They walk together to Qassim's house, where now lives his brother, Ali Baba.
“Who lives in this house?” the robber asks.
“I have no idea,” replies the old man. “I don’t know much about this part of the city.”
The robber draws a white chalk mark on the gate and rejoins the other robbers to inform them of his important discovery. He tells them about his adventure and how he found the clue on his first try, and they agree they must recover their stolen treasure.
Later that day, Morgiana is returning from the market when she sees the white chalk mark on the gate. She suspects that whoever placed it there is up to no good, so she draws similar white marks on all the gates on the street.
At midnight, the robbers enter the city, and the robber-guide leads them to the house where Baba Mustafa had led him.
"This is the house of the man who stole our treasure," says the robber-guide, "I marked his gate with white chalk."
When the captain looks around, he notices that all the houses on the street have similar white chalk marks. "How can you tell which of these houses is the one we want?" he wonders.
The robber-guide is perplexed.
"I put a white mark on one gate," he admits, "but I have no idea where the others came from."
The captain calls off the operation, saying he would not risk-taking revenge on the wrong person.
"If we enter the wrong compound," he says, "we won't find the treasure, so we'll have squandered our time and effort."
When they return to the forest, the robber-guide is punished for leading the group on a wild goose chase, and another is chosen to conduct more thorough surveillance the following day.
