The Spanish Prisoner?

I can tell you what happened today and link it to Poul Anderson. The image shows Morecambe which is part of Lancaster City District. Because we had gale force winds, I neither drove to gym nor walked into town and a meeting that I would have attended was cancelled because some local trains weren't running.

Instead, I stayed at home and got ahead with Latin before meditating and now blogging. After Livy on Hannibal, our text book presents Petrus Adolphus, a Christianized Jew and godson of the King of Aragon in the twelfth century.

Petrus retold Arab moral tales in Medieval Latin, contrasting markedly with Cicero's and Livy's Classical Latin. In one such story, a Spaniard traveling to Mecca deposits a thousand talents with a supposedly honest individual en route although that individual denies it when the traveler returns. A hermitess devises this plan:

fill ten ornate boxes with crushed stone;
have them carried in a long line to be deposited at the house of the unscrupulous man;
the man who was deceived to return and again ask for his money back just as the first box arrives;
the unscrupulous man, seeing the first box arrive and the others approaching, will return the money in case those bringing the boxes decide against depositing them with him.

As I was reading this, I was reminded of a deception perpetrated by Dominic Flandry in "The Plague of Masters" and described by Flandry as a refined version of a "...Spanish Prisoner..." (Flandry Of Terra, London, 1976, p. 157).

So have I now read the original version?