![]() He had resolved on this brutal measure after learning from his brother Shah Zaman that he had been the victim of sexual betrayal by his beautiful wife. King Shahriyar had previously resolved to sleep with a virgin every night and then have her killed the following dawn. ‘The semi-petrified prince’ is a tale told by Shahrazad to King Shahriyar as she tells stories night after night with the aim of prolonging her life. There is no need here to follow this story any further. When his wife, a sorceress, eventually discovered it was he who had come close to killing her beloved, she cast the spell upon him that turned his lower half into stone. As my wife kissed the ground before him, he raised his head and said: “Damn you, why have you been so slow? My black cousins were here drinking and each left with a girl, but because of you I didn’t want to drink.” The prince watched his wife humble herself before the slave and cook for him, but when he saw her undress and get in the bed of rags and tatters with the black slave, he lost control of himself and, descending from the roof, he unsheathed his sword and struck at the neck of the slave with what he hoped was a fatal blow before slipping away. The slave was lying on cane stalks he was leprous and covered in rags and tatters. ‘One of his lips looked like a pot lid and the other like the sole of a shoe – a lip that could pick up sand from the top of a pebble. When she entered a hut he climbed on the roof to spy on her. So the following night the prince pretended to take the sleeping draught and feigned sleep before following his wife out of the palace. ![]() The prince relates how he used to rule over the Black Islands and believed that he was happily married, but eavesdropping on his wife’s slave-girls he learned that he was being cuckolded: every night his wife had been giving him a sleeping draught before going out to visit her lover. But just as the leisurely flow of the Thames in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness carries the novel’s readers to the depths of the Congo and the horrors that were being practised there, so the bizarre and meandering narratives of the linked stories of ‘The fisherman and the ‘ifrit’ and ‘The semi-petrified prince’ conduct us to a tale that is dark and cruel. ![]() ![]() The prince tells the sultan his story… So far so mysterious. Then the sultan proceeds on alone and enters a palace in the middle of which he encounters a prince who has been turned to stone from the waist down. Now the sultan and the fisherman are determined to solve the mystery of the curiously coloured fish and they set out towards the lake that no one has ever seen before. The sultan orders that the fish should be cooked, but just as the fish are put in the pan, ready to be fried, the wall of the kitchen bursts open and a woman appears who demands to know if the fish are true to their oath. The fisherman takes some of these fish to the sultan’s palace where he is richly rewarded. So then the ‘ ifrit takes him to a lake where there are white, red, blue and yellow fish. Yet the wily fisherman tricks the jinni into re-entering the flask and only releases the ‘ ifrit on receiving the promise that he, the ‘ifrit, will not harm him, but reward him. When he unstoppers the jar an enormous ‘ ifrit (a kind of jinni) comes billowing out and the ‘ ifrit, whom Solomon had imprisoned in the flask, now threatens to kill the fisherman. ![]() On the particular day in question he has little luck until the fourth attempt when he finds a brass jar in his net. The stories are indeed delightful, but how innocent are they? A fisherman, desperate to make a living, casts his net out four times a day. As well he might!’ The innocent childhood delight in reading The Arabian Nights (or more correctly The Thousand and One Nights) has been much celebrated in Victorian and subsequent literature. But instead of ordering the book away, he said he envied me. I was well into the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my clergyman grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came up behind me. In an essay on toy theatres, ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’, the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson recalled the evening when as a child ‘I brought back with me “The Arabian Nights Entertainments” in a fat, old double-columned volume with prints. ![]()
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