finished for a third time the Dervish droned out:

"Nay, but your mosque is not yet beautiful enough! There is something it
lacks and your prayers will be unavailing!"

"What can I do?" the Sultan cried. "I have spent all my riches and now I
have no means wherewith to build another mosque!"

He fell to grieving and nothing any one could say would comfort him.

His three sons came to him and said:

"Father, is there not something we can do for you?"

The Sultan sighed and shook his head.

"Nothing, my sons, unless indeed you were to find out for me why my
third mosque is not the most beautiful in the world."

"Brothers," the youngest suggested, "let us go to the Dervish and ask
him why it is that the third mosque is not yet beautiful enough. Perhaps
he will tell us what is lacking."

So they went to the Dervish and asked him what he meant by saying to the
Sultan that the third mosque was not yet beautiful enough and they
begged him to tell them what it was that was lacking.

The Dervish fixed his eyes in the distance and slightly swaying his body
back and forth answered them in his sing-song tone.

"The mosque is beautiful," he said, "and the fountain in its midst is
beautiful, but where is the glorious Nightingale Gisar? With the
Nightingale Gisar singing beside the fountain, then indeed would the
Sultan's third mosque be the most beautiful mosque in the world!"

"Only tell us where this glorious Nightingale is," the brothers begged,
"and we will get him if it costs us our lives!"

"I cannot tell you that," the Dervish droned. "You will have to go out
into the world and find him for yourselves."

So the three brothers returned to the Sultan and told him what the
Dervish had said.

"All your third mosque lacks to be the most beautiful mosque in the
world," they told him, "is the Nightingale Gisar singing beside the
fountain. So grieve no more, father. We, your three sons, will go out
into the world in quest of this glorious bird and within a year's time
we will return with the bird in our hands if so be that it is anywhere
to be found in all the wide world."

The Sultan blessed them and they set forth the three of them, side by
side. They traveled together until they reached a place where three
roads branched. Upon the stone of the left-hand road nothing was
written. Upon the stone of the middle road was the inscription: _Who
goes this way returns_. The inscription on the third stone read: _Who
goes