'When GOD is pleased with people's conduct, God turns even their enemies into allies.'

Once there was a queen who, when she was growing up, had been told that she possessed the most magnificent crown jewels imaginable. These jewels had been presented to her ancestors by an empress many generations before, the same empress who had given them their throne. The queen had asked her parents if she could see the crown jewels, but they told her that this was impossible. Despite her persistence, they refused--indeed sometimes they told her that the jewels really did not exist, that they were just a nice story that parents told their children to make them go to sleep, and sometimes the queen had believed them.

But when she grew up and became a queen in her own right, she decided that she would try to find the crown jewels herself, if they really existed. So, she sent out officers to search out her entire kingdom, from the palace to the outermost boundaries, the very frontiers of the kingdom. But the officers came back without having found them, or even hearing of them.

All, that is, except for one. He had heard a legend from an old peasant. The peasant had told the officer that his great-great-grandfather had helped to bring the jewels to the kingdom, and that they had been taken to the darkest recesses of the royal palace, the dungeons. The queen was overjoyed to hear this, but became dejected when the officers who had been given the task of searching the palace itself reported that they too had found nothing. Nevertheless, the queen resolved to search the palace personally.

But she did not begin with the dungeons, as the peasant's story had suggested, for, the queen reasoned, what would a peasant understand about such things as crown jewels? For, since they were said to shine like the stars or the sun itself, it seemed only right that the jewels should be kept in that part of the palace that was nearest the sky. Or perhaps the officer who had brought back the peasant's report had made a mistake, for, she thought, in the language of the kingdom, the words for 'tower' and 'dungeon' were similar. So, she began her search in the towers.

She went to the top of each tower in turn, looking into each room she encountered on the narrow twisting staircases. But she found nothing. After the towers, she examined the staterooms and the royal chambers, tapping on the walls for secret passages, but again she found no crown jewels. She also inspected all the servants' living quarters, but found no jewels there either. Finally, she had to go down to the dungeons.

She had stood at the top of the stairwell leading down to the dungeons before, on many occasions, but had never gone down. Now, she stood trembling at the top, and then gingerly inched her way down the cold stone steps.

At the bottom, she found herself before a huge metal door that was locked with a massive padlock. She did not have the key, and neither did the servants with her. She sent for more senior servants, but none of them had the key or knew where to find it. The prime minister himself came to the queen to explain that he also did not have the key, and moreover, that he had strict instructions that absolutely no one was to be allowed to enter the dungeons. The queen asked who had issued such instructions, but the prime minister was unable to tell her. 'Well, I am the queen,' the queen said, and using a hair pin, she picked the lock until it fell open.

The dungeons were dark and gloomy, damp and foul-smelling. Water dripped down the stone walls in places, fungi grew in others. The queen suddenly realised that this was a long corridor with locked doors at regular intervals. Behind each door there were prisoners; their haunted eyes stared at the queen through the bars in each door. She was about to ask who had condemned these people to imprisonment, but stopped herself. She already knew the answer, for she said: 'Well, I am the queen.'

The queen opened the doors one by one, spoke with the prisoners and reviewed each case. Many had committed the most unspeakable crimes: theft, adultery, rape, murder and worse. But others had only spoken out for unpopular causes, asked difficult questions in search of truth, or simply thought different thoughts. The queen kept the real criminals locked up, but these others she set free.

This took a long time, but when she was finished, she found that facing her at the end of the corridor was another massive locked door, with a lock that was even bigger than the first. The prime minister begged the queen not to open this door, but the queen was determined to go on. With her hair pin, she picked this lock too and opened the door.

Inside there was another prisoner: a man, chained to the wall and wearing a mask. Wielding her hair pin again she unlocked the lock that held the chain in place. With one pull she removed the mask and looked at the man's face. 'It is like looking into a mirror,' she thought. 'I am your twin,' he said. 'We were separated almost at birth--you to be queen and I to be a prisoner. And the jewels that you seek are here.'

He led her by the hand to yet another massive door that she had not seen before. The prime minister's armed guards, their rifles at the ready, immediately stepped forward to block their approach, but he laughed, and brushed them aside.

Taking one of the guards' rifles, he smashed the gigantic lock, and pulled the massive door open. Suddenly, the entire dungeon was filled with an intensely bright white light, a light reflected by thousands of crystalline shapes--the crown jewels.

The queen's twin brother was suddenly changed. Instead of a filthy prisoner in tattered garments, he had become a handsome man in regal robes. The walls of the dungeon were transformed from cold, damp, dank stone to the most beautiful pure white marble; the metal doors were now pure light oak. Even the criminals that the queen had kept locked up were transformed into elegant courtiers. And the queen was now as magnificent as the empress herself.