Introduction Sheherezade stopped

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Introduction 
Sheherezade stopped.
'Well?' said the sultan. 'What happened next? What was behind the door?'
'Sir, there's light in the sky,' said Sheherezade. 'You're going to kill me now!
'But you can't stop there.You have to finish the story.'
Sheherezade is beautiful and clever. She also knows many wonderful stories. Night 
after night, she tells them to Sultan Shahriar. She always stops in an exciting place, so he 
wants to hear the end of the story. She knows stories for a thousand and one nights. The 
Arabic name for these stories (Alf Leila wa Leila) means The Thousand and One Nights.
The stories in this book are very different. Some are sad and some are funny. Some are 
exciting. We meet many interesting people — an unhappy young man, a clever servant 
girl, a boy judge, a stupid barber and forty bad thieves. The stories aren't new, but you 
can find the same people in the world today — a young man in love, a good friend or a 
clever young boy.
Everybody enjoys a good story, and before the days of television and cinema stories 
were very important. The stories in Tales from the Arabian Nights are very old. People 
in Europe first read them in French between 1704 and 1717. They don't come from one 
place, but from many different countries — the Middle East, India and Pakistan. At that 
time Europeans didn't know much about the countries in the Middle East. So these 
stories were very strange and exciting, and they opened a wonderful new world.

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