Explore "Tale of the Two Dreamers" by Jorge Luis Borges on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The Arabic historian al-Ishaqi tells this story in the reign of the caliph al-Ma'mun ( a . d . 786-83):
Men worthy of trust have recorded (but Allah alone is All-Knowing and All-Powerful and All-Merciful and does not sleep) that there once lived in Cairo a man who possessed great wealth, but so freehanded and liberal was he that he lost all he had, save his father's house, and in time was forced to earn his living by his own hands. He worked so hard that one night sleep overcame him at the foot of a fig tree in his garden, and in a dream he was visited by a man, drenched through and through, who took a gold coin out of his mouth and said to him, ‘Your fortune lies in Persia, in Isfahan; go thither and seek it.'