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

Once there was a king who, when he was growing up, had been told that he possessed the most magnificent crown jewels imaginable. These jewels had been presented to his ancestors by an emperor many generations before, the same emperor who had given them their throne. The king had asked his parents if he could see the crown jewels, but they told him that this was impossible. Despite his persistence, they refused--indeed sometimes they told him 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 king had believed them.

But when he grew up and became a king in his own right, he decided that he would try to find the crown jewels himself, if they really existed. So, he sent out officers to search out his 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 king 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 king resolved to search the palace personally.

But he did not begin with the dungeons, as the peasant's story had suggested, for, the king 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, he thought, in the language of the kingdom, the words for 'tower' and 'dungeon' were similar. So, he began his search in the towers.

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

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

At the bottom, he found himself before a huge metal door that was locked with a massive padlock. He did not have the key, and neither did the servants with him. He 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 king 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 king asked who had issued such instructions, but the prime minister was unable to tell him. 'Well, I am the king,' the king said, and wielding a hammer with his own hands, he broke the padlock open.

The dungeons were dark and gloomy, damp and foul-smelling. Water dripped down the stone walls in places, fungi grew in others. The king 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 king through the bars in each door. He was about to ask who had condemned these people to imprisonment, but stopped himself. He already knew the answer, for he said: 'Well, I am the king.'

The king 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 king kept the real criminals locked up, but these others he set free.

This took a long time, but when he was finished, he found that facing him 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 king not to open this door, but the king was determined to go on. With a mighty hammer blow, he broke the lock and opened the door.

Inside there was another prisoner: a woman, chained to the wall and wearing a mask. With another blow of the hammer, the king broke the chain. With one pull he removed the mask and looked at the woman's face. 'It is like looking into a mirror,' he thought. 'I am your twin,' she said. 'We were separated almost at birth--you to be king and I to be a prisoner. And the jewels that you seek are here.'

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

She opened the gigantic lock with ease, 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 king's twin sister was suddenly changed. Instead of a filthy prisoner in tattered garments, she had become a beautiful woman 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 king had kept locked up were transformed into elegant courtiers. And the king was now as magnificent as the emperor himself.