![]() 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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