Aladdin and the Magic Lamp: A Fairy Tale Sleep Story to Fall Asleep To

Full transcript

The dust of the marketplace lay warm on the boy's bare feet as he leaned against a shaded wall, watching the water sellers and the sweet vendors pass. And this idle boy was Aladdin, son of the tailor Mustafa. In one of the cities of ancient China, where the ruler was called Sultan, Aladdin dawdled where he should have worked. His father had gone to his grave, grieving that the boy would learn no trade. His mother, a widow now, sat at home over her spindle, drawing thread from wool hour upon hour, and the coins that thread earned were thin and and few. This is the tale of Aladdin, of an oil lamp buried in a sealed and booby-trapped cave, and of a rise from nothing that no one in that lane could have foreseen.

If these old tales help you rest, subscribe so the next story can find you beside the fire. What follows is a slow road out of poverty and into peril, from a stranger's false kindness to a hidden stare beneath the earth. And along the way, we will pause once to ask where this story itself was born, for it wandered as far as its hero did. Consider the boy a moment longer, for the whole tale turns upon what kind of soul he was at the start. He was neither cruel nor wicked, only restless, the sort of child who cannot sit at a bench, while the street sings with life beyond the door. When the other lads of the quarter were bound as apprentices to weavers and coppersmiths and scribes, Aladdin slipped away to play in the open squares, and his mother could not hold him. She spun and she sold and she spun again, and she wept in the evenings for the husband who had left her, and for the son who would not settle. There was little bread in that house, and less silver, and the future looked as narrow as the alley outside their step. And yet a great question waits already in the shadows of this small, poor life.

How did a poor Taylor's son and the very tale that carries his name both climb from nothing to a place beside kings? The answer began, as such answers often do, with a stranger. He came into the marketplace one afternoon, from the far west, from the land of the Maghreb, a man of middle years with a shrewd and watchful eye. He was no ordinary traveller. He was a sorcerer, learned in hidden arts, in the reading of the sand and the working of charms. And he had journeyed a very long way, for one small thing that he could not lift with his own two hands. He moved through the crowd as though searching for a particular face, and when his gaze fell upon Aladdin, idling as ever among the stalls, it settled and stayed.

He asked a bystander quietly for the boy's name and for the name of his father, and when Then he heard that the lad was the son of Mustafa the tailor, lately dead. A slow satisfaction crossed his face. Then the sorcerer did a strange and moving thing. He came to Aladdin and he opened his arms and he wept. He clasped the astonished boy to his chest and kissed him and called him nephew and declared, tears on his cheeks, that he was the brother of Mustafa the tailor, come home at last, from long years of wandering in distant countries. He said that he had grieved to hear his brother was dead, that he had crossed deserts and seas, hoping to embrace him once more, and that now, finding him gone, he would pour all his love upon the son instead.

Aladdin had never heard of any such uncle, but the man knew his father's name and trade, and he spoke with such warmth and such conviction, and the boy was young, and the words were sweet. were oppressed money into Aladdin's hand, and bade him run and tell his mother that his uncle would come to sup with them that very evening. The widow, when she heard, was bewildered, for her husband had never once spoken of a living brother. Yet when the stranger arrived, laden with wine and fruit and fine things for the table, and wept again at the site of the room where his brother had lived, and asked after every small memory of the dead man, her doubt began to soften.

He sighed over Mustafa. He praised the boy. He mourned that he had come too late. Grief and hunger together are poor guardians of good sense, and the house had known much of both. By the end of the meal, the widow half believed, and Aladdin believed altogether. The false uncle turned then to the boy's future. It was a shame, he said, a true shame, that so bright a lad should have no trade and no prospects. He would not allow it. He would set Aladdin up as a merchant, give him a shop stocked with rich cloth and rare goods, and make of him a man of standing in the city, the kind of man before whom others rose when he entered a room. The widow's eyes filled, for it was the very thing she had despaired of ever hearing. Aladdin's heart leaped at the promise of fine robes and easy wealth. Neither of them saw that a merchant's shop was not what the stranger wanted at all. His true errand lay outside the city, in a sealed place beneath the earth, where a plain oil lamp waited in the dark, a lamp he could not reach with his own hand, and for the sake of which he had need of a trusting boy.

Before the boy follows his false uncle out through the gates, it is worth halting on the threshold to ask where this tale itself came from, for it is a curious wanderer among stories. We speak of Aladdin as one of the tales of the thousand and one nights, of Scheherazade spinning her nights of stories to hold off the dawn. Yet Aladdin was not in the old Arabic book at all. It is what the scholars call an orphan A foundling with no proven Arabic manuscript behind it, gathered in the same strange company as Ali Baba and his 40 thieves.

For a long time, no one could say quite where it had entered the Great Collection, or by whose voice? The voice, so far as the records let us see it, belonged to a young man from Aleppo named Hannah Diab. He was a Maronite Christian, born around the year 1688, and he had traveled a great distance from his home in Syria in the company of a French adventurer and collector named Paul Lucas. In this way, Diab came at last to Paris, to the glittering and unfamiliar court and city of the French king, so far from the lanes of Aleppo. And in Paris, he met a scholar named Antoine Galant, who was then laboring to translate the Knights into French and who was hungry for more stories than his manuscripts could give him.

They met, the record says, on the 25th of March in the year 1709. Galland kept a diary, and in it the young Syrian appears only as Hannah from Aleppo, a man who told him wonderful tales. Diab told Aladdin aloud, from memory, in the way stories have always passed from one person to another, by the warmth of the voice and not the ink of the page. Galland listened, and that winter of 1709 and 10 he wrote the story down, and in the year 1710 he printed it in his great translation in the ninth and tenth volumes of the work.

He never named the man from Aleppo who had given it to him. So the tale of a poor boy raised up by a hidden treasure was itself carried out of the east by a young traveler whose own name was left out of the book, a small injustice that later scholars would try, long afterward, to mend. Some of them, weighing his life against the tales he told, would come to wonder whether Diab should be thought not merely the teller, but in some measure the maker of Aladdin. That is an argument for the learned, and it is not yet settled.

For now it is enough to know that the story you are hearing crossed a sea and a continent in a young man's memory, and that it too rose from humble beginnings to sit among the famous stories of the world. Now returned to the boy who knew nothing of Paris or of Galland, and who rose the next morning full of hope, believing he was to become a merchant. The sorcerer came for him early and led him out of the city. They walked past the last houses and the last gardens, past the tombs at the edge of the town, and on into a lonely country of bare hills where no one came.

Aladdin grew tired and then uneasy, for this was no road to any shop or market. But the false uncle soothed him with kind words and marvelous promises, telling him that beyond the next rise lay a wonder worth all the weariness of the walk. And so the boy went on. At last, in a place hemmed by two hills and altogether empty of any living thing, the sorcerer stopped. He bade Aladdin gather sticks and dry brush. And when a small fire was kindled, he cast upon it a powder from a fold of his robe and began to speak.

The words were not words the boy knew. They were charms, muttered low and quick. And as they rose, the smoke thickened and darkened, and the earth beneath their feet trembled. Aladdin, frightened, would have run. But the man held him fast. Then the ground before them split and rolled back, and there in the opened earth lay a flat stone with a ring of brass set into it. And beneath it, the sorcerer said, a flight of steps going down into the dark. The boy was terrified and wished only to go home, but the sorcerer, seeing he had gone too far to gentle him with promises of shops alone, changed his voice.

He told Aladdin that below lay a treasure greater than any sultan's, gold and silver past counting, and that among it all stood a single plain oil lamp, a chirag, burning or unburning, of no beauty to the eye. That lamp, and that lamp only, he must bring up. He might touch the treasure. He might fill his pockets with whatever he liked along the way. But the lamp was the one thing needful, and here was the strange heart of it, which the boy did not think to question. Only Aladdin could lift the stone. Only Aladdin could go down. The sorcerer, for all his charms and all his power, could not set foot upon those steps himself. And it was for this, and this alone, that he had crossed the world to find a tailor's idle son. To guard the boy on the descent, the sorcerer drew a ring from his own finger, and slipped it onto Aladdin's hand.

It was a ring of virtue, he said, a protection against every harm that might rise against him in the dark below. Touch nothing but the lamp, he warned again. Take the treasure freely on your way out, but let nothing turn you aside from the lamp. Then he bade the boy grasp the brass ring in the stone, and speak the names of his father and his grandfather, and pull. Aladdin, half in dread and half in wonder, laid hold of the ring, and spoke the names as he was told. And the heavy stone came up in his hands, as lightly as if it were a lid of straw.

Below him, the steps went down into a cool and waiting darkness. He drew a breath, and he began to descend. At the foot of the stair he found himself in a great chamber, and beyond it another, and the sorcerer's warnings rang in his memory, for these were the booby-trapped halls of which he had been told, where a wrong step or a greedy hand might bring ruin. He passed through them carefully, harming nothing and taking nothing, until he came out into a place that stopped his breath. Before him spread a garden underground, and in that garden grew trees, and on the trees hung fruit, and the fruit was not fruit at all, but jewels. There were globes of clear white light and globes of deep green, fruits of burning red and warm gold and soft sky blue, hanging heavy and still in the quiet, catching what little glimmer there was and throwing it back a hundredfold.

Aladdin, who had never in his life held a single coin of gold, walked slow-eyed among them, thinking them only pretty-colored glass, fine playthings to carry home. There, in a niche among the jeweled branches, stood the lamp. It was exactly as the sorcerer had said, plain and small and humble. An ordinary oil lamp such as any poor house might own, worth nothing beside the blaze of false fruit all around it. Aladdin took it down from its place and poured out what oil remained and tucked it away safe inside his robe.

Then, since he had been told he might, he went back among the trees and filled his sleeves his pockets and the folds of his sash with the shining fruit until he could scarcely move for the weight of it, still believing it glass, and turned at last toward the stair and the daylight far above. He climbed until he stood again at the foot of the steps, near the top, with the sorcerer's face dark against the bright sky at the opening. The man leaned down, eager, his hand stretched out. "'Give me the lamp,' he said. "'Hand it up to me first, and then I will help you climb out.'" And Aladdin, laden and weary and clutching the one small thing his false uncle had crossed the whole world to possess.

Paused upon the threshold of the earth, the lamp pressed close beneath his heavy sleeves, the outstretched hand waiting above him in the light. He did not hand it up. Something small and stubborn woke in the boy at that moment, a plain and reasonable wariness that he could not have named. He was tired, and he was heavy with the weight of the false fruit, and the lamp was pressed so deep beneath his sleeves that to reach it he would have had to unburden himself first, there upon the narrow step, with no ground beneath him to stand on and set the treasure down.

So he answered as any weary boy might answer, without insolence and without cunning, only asking for the sense of the thing. "'Let me climb out first,' he said. "'Lift me clear onto the good earth, and then the lamp is yours. And gladly, only give me your hand.' The sorcerer's face changed. Till then it had worn the soft mask of an uncle, patient and coaxing. But now the mask slipped, and what looked down at Aladdin from the mouth of the cave was something colder and older and full of fury.

He had crossed deserts and seas for that one small lamp. He had spent his arts to find the boy who alone could reach it. And now the boy stood a stairs-length below him and would not give it up. To the sorcerer, this was not a child's fair bargain, but a betrayal, a hand closing round the thing he had come so far to hold. And beneath the anger ran a colder thought still. A boy who had seen the cave, who had walked the jewelled garden and carried up the lamp, a witness. Once the sorcerer held the lamp, he had no further use for a living witness at all.

He did not argue. He did not plead. He turned to the small fire he had kindled at the cave's mouth, and from a fold of his robe he took a pinch of dark powder and he cast it upon the flames while his lips moved in words that Aladdin could not hear and would not have understood. The fire flared up green and sudden, and a smoke went up, and the earth answered. The great stone that Aladdin had lifted so lightly came grinding back over the opening of its own accord. The garden of jewels, the halls, the stair, the boy upon it, all were swallowed as the light narrowed to a seam, then to a thread, then to nothing. The stone settled home. The ground closed over it and lay flat and quiet, as though no cave had ever been, as though no boy stood breathing in the dark beneath the field, and the sorcerer, believing the deed done, turned away.

He believed the lamp lost, sealed forever beyond the reach of any hand, and the boy lost with it, and this second loss he counted for little. He gathered his gear and put out the ruined fire and set his face toward the long road home, toward the magreb from which he had come, a man who had gambled everything on one throw and, as he thought, had lost. He would not learn for years how wrong he was, but that lies further along the road, and there is time enough for it. For now the field lay empty under the wide sky, and far below it, past the closed stone and the silent halls, a boy sat down upon a step, in a blackness so complete that he could not tell his open eyes from his shut ones, a loan with a treasure he could not eat, and a lamp he did not understand.

For two days Aladdin sat there in the dark. He wept, and when he had no more weeping in him, he was silent, and when the silence grew unbearable, he wept again. He called upon his false uncle, not yet fully understanding that the man had meant to bury him, calling as a lost child calls, expecting no answer and receiving none. He felt in the blackness for the stone above the stair and pushed against it until his hands were raw. But it did not move for him now, for he did not know the words, and perhaps no words of his could have shifted it.

He thought of his mother in their poor house, waiting for a son who would not come. He thought of bread, he thought of the cool water of the fountains in the city above, and his throat ached. Hunger came, and thirst came after it, and cold sat in his bones. The jewelled fruit lay heaped in his sleeves, worth the ransom of kingdoms, and it could not buy him one mouthful nor one candle's light. On the second day, worn past all hope, he pressed his two hands together in the old gesture of a man begging heaven for mercy, ringing them slowly, murmuring what prayers he knew.

And in the ringing of his hands he chanced to rub the ring, the plain ring the sorcerer had set upon his finger, and then, in his haste and his fury, had forgotten to reclaim. Aladdin had forgotten it too. He had thought it only a charm against harm on the descent, a thing of no more use now that the descent was done. But at the touch of his own palm upon it, the dark before him stirred. The blackness thickened and drew together, and out of it rose a shape. And though there was no light to see by, Aladdin saw it, for it made a dim light of its own. It was vast and it was quiet, a spirit of thin and subtle body such as the old belief tells of, made not of flesh but of something finer, able to fill a great space or fold itself small. It bowed before the boy, and its voice, when it came, was low and level, and strangely courteous, without either malice or love in it, only readiness. What wouldst thou have? it said. Ask and it shall be done. I am the slave of the ring, and the slave of whosoever wears the ring upon his hand. I and the other slaves of the ring.

Aladdin was afraid, more afraid than he had been in all the dark, for this was a thing beyond the edges of the world he knew. Yet fear, in a boy at the very end of his strength, can turn quickly into a kind of plainness. And he did not think to ask for gold, or for the freedom of the cave, or for vengeance on the man who had sealed him in. He asked for the one thing his whole heart was set upon. "'Carry me home,' he said, "'only take me out of this darkness, "'and set me down again where my mother is.'" The spirit did not answer with words.

The earth seemed to open, or the boy to pass through it, as smoke passes through a lattice, and there was a lifting, a swiftness that was not quite falling, and not quite flight. and then good air on his face, and the smell of the lane he had known all his life, and the ordinary starlight of the world above. Aladdin lay upon the ground outside his mother's door, hungry, weak, filthy with the dust of the cave, still clutching the jewels in his ruined sleeves, and the plain lamp against his breast, and alive. The spirit was gone, the field far off held its buried secret, and the boy who had gone down a fool and been left for dead had come up again, carrying, though he did not yet know it, the two most powerful things in his world upon his own body, the ring upon his finger, and the lamp in his arms.

His mother, hearing him at the threshold, came out and found her son as one returned from the grave. And she wept over him and drew him in and gave him what little there was, and he slept. When he woke, he told her everything—the false uncle, the cave, the garden of colored glass, the closing stone, the shape that had risen in the dark and borne him home. She listened, and she gave thanks that he was living, and she cursed the wicked man who had sought her son's death under the name of kinship.

And then, being a practical woman with an empty cupboard, she looked at what her son had brought back from the pit. Colored glass, she thought, as he did, pretty and useless. And a small brass lamp, dull and dirty, of no beauty at all, but brass, at least, might be scoured and sold, and a scoured lamp would fetch a little, and a little would buy bread. So on the next day, faint herself with hunger, the mother took the dull lamp and a handful of sand and a rag and sat down to clean it, meaning to make it bright enough for the market.

She rubbed at the tarnish with her thin hand, and at the very first stroke, before she had so much as begun, the air of the poor room shuddered and gave up a shape far greater than the one her son had met below. This spirit was vaster than the spirit of the ring, taller, deeper, stronger. filling the little house from floor to smoke-stained ceiling and seeming to fill more than the house could hold. The mother cried out, and the lamp fell from her hand, and she would have fainted from the terror of it, for she had not been down in the dark to grow half accustomed to such wonders. But the shape did no violence. It bowed, as the other had bowed, and its great low voice, rolled out the same readiness in grander words.

"'Ask what thou wilt,' it said. "'I am the slave of the lamp, and the slave of whosoever holds the lamp in his hand. I am the other slave of the lamp.' It was Aladdin who kept his wits, for he had seen a spirit before and lived. He caught up the fallen lamp from the floor and held it, and though his heart hammered, he made himself speak steadily, and he asked for the plainest thing, the thing that stood nearest, the thing a hungry house wants first. We are starving, he said. Bring us something to eat.

The spirit was gone in the drawing of a breath, and back again as swiftly, and it set down before them a great tray of solid silver, and upon the tray twelve dishes of silver heaped with fine food, and two cups, and two flasks of clear and excellent wine, and loaves whiter than either of them had ever tasted. Then it bowed once more and folded itself back into nothing. And the room was only a poor room again, but a poor room in which a feast now steamed upon silver, filling the close air with a smell that made the mother weep a second time, for a different reason. They ate as people eat who have been long without, slowly at first and then with joy. And when they had done, there was food enough left over to carry them for days, and the mother, wiping her eyes, looked at the small dull lamp lying quiet on the floor, and began to understand that a great power had come to sleep in the house of a beggar.

From that day the shape of their lives began to change, though slowly and by small careful steps, for Aladdin was not a foolish boy in this at least, that he did not fling the lamp's gifts about for all the lane to see. When the food was gone, he did not at once summon the spirit again. Instead, he took one of the silver dishes and carried it out into the city to sell it. And here he showed how little the son of a poor tailor knew of the worth of things. He fell in with a Jewish merchant, a dealer in such wares, who saw at a glance that the boy had no notion of the value of what he carried, and who bought the great silver plate for a small fraction of its worth, a few pieces of gold, and thought himself well pleased.

Aladdin, who had never held gold before, thought himself rich beyond dreaming and went home glad. So it went for a time, one silver dish sold and then another, each for less than its due, until Aladdin, growing wiser as he watched and listened in the market, began to learn what things were truly worth, and to understand that he had been giving away silver for the price of tin. He grew shrewder in his dealing, and little by little he came to know the measure of the lamp itself, that it would bring not only food, but whatsoever he asked, that its spirit could fetch from far places things no market in the city could show. He learned to ask, and to ask well. He clothed his mother in good cloth in place of her worn things.

He set their house in order, and filled it, and never again did either of them go hungry or cold. Yet he did not become a spendthrift or a fool. Having known the pit and the closing stone. He had a caution in him now, and a patience. He went often into the markets and the great streets of the city, not only to buy but to watch and to learn, studying how the rich merchants carried themselves, how the great men spoke, what manners and what bearing set a man of standing apart from a boy of the lane. He listened to the talk of jewels among the traders. And one day, turning over in his mind the colored glass he had carried up from the cave and heaped carelessly in a corner of the house, he came to understand, with a slow astonishment, that it was not glass at all.

The fruit of that underground garden was gems, true gems, of a size and a water beyond anything the jewelers of the city had ever handled, and he had a bowlful of them lying forgotten among the household things. So the idle boy of the lane, the ne'er-do-well whom the neighbors had shaken their heads over, became by quiet degrees a young man of easy means and careful manner, well-dressed, well-spoken, at home among the stalls of the great bazaar, known a little now as a youth of some substance. But the city did not know the spring from which his fortune flowed.

It saw the good cloak and the full purse, and guessed at some inheritance, some lucky venture and let him pass. The lamp lay hidden and safe in his own house, and the ring stayed upon his finger, and the secret of both he kept close, telling no one, trusting no one, for he had learned in the dark below what came of trusting a smiling stranger. Then one day the course of his life bent again, not through any spirit or any treasure, but through the simplest thing, the sight of a face.

Word went through the city that the Sultan had commanded all folk to keep within doors and shutter their windows, for his daughter the princess would pass through the streets on her way to the baths, and no common eye was to look upon her. Aladdin, whose curiosity had never left him for all his new gravity, hid himself behind the door of the bathhouse, where she must enter, in a place where he might see and not be seen. And as the princess came, thinking herself unwatched, she lifted her veil for a moment from her face. She was the Sultan's daughter, the Princess Badrul Badur, and her name in that tongue meant the full moon of full moons, for it was the way of the old poets to liken a woman's beauty to the round and shining moon, and to call the fairest of them the The moon among moons.

When Aladdin saw her face in that unguarded moment, he understood why the poets had made such words. And he stood behind the door with his heart gone still and then hammering. And something in him was altered that would not be set right again. He went home changed. He said little and ate little and sat long in thought, and at last he told his mother the truth of it, that he loved the Princess Badrul Badrur, and that he meant being what he was and having what he had to make her his wife.

His mother thought him gone out of his senses. He was a tailor's son, she said, a boy of the lane, whatever fine cloak he wore now. And Badroulbadour was the daughter of the Sultan, kept behind walls and guards, promised in the ordinary way of things to some prince or some great man's son, and no more to be reached by such as they than the true moon in the sky. But Aladdin had walked in a garden where jewels grew on trees, and he did not measure himself now by the old measure. He bade his mother look again at the colored fruit from the cave, the gems he had once thought glass, and he chose out the finest of them, the clearest whites, and the deep greens and the burning reds, and heaped them in a bowl of fine china until the bowl brimmed and blazed, with a light no jeweler in the city could match. This, he said, she must carry to the palace, and lay before the sultan, and so open the way. For no prince in all the land, whatever his birth, could set beside the throne a gift to equal the jeweled fruit of the underground garden, and gifts in the courts of the great have a voice of their own.

The sultan sat that morning in his hall of audience, hearing the complaints of merchants and the quarrels of neighbors, when a woman came forward and knelt and drew the cloth from a bowl she carried, and the whole chamber seemed to catch its breath. For the light that rose from that bowl was not the light of gold or silver, which the court knew well, but something colder and clearer and far older, the fire that sleeps in the heart of a jewel and wakes only when the eye falls upon it.

There were whites in it, like the first star of evening, and greens the color of deep water under sun, and reds that held a slow flame within them, and they were heaped and running over, each stone larger than any the royal treasury had ever counted among its wonders. The sultan leaned from his seat. He turned two or three of the gems in his fingers, and he was long silent. And then he said that in all his years he had never looked on their equal, and that the man who could send such a gift as a mere token of courtship was no common suitor whatever his birth or his name.

He was minded, in that first flush of astonishment, to say yes and be done, to give his daughter to the sender of the jewels and count himself fortunate in the match. at his right hand stood his vizier, the grave and careful man who had served him through many seasons and had a purpose of his own, tucked close beneath his robes. This vizier had long hoped that the princess Badrulbadur would be given to his own son and so bind his house to the throne forever, and he was not willing to see that hope scattered by a bowl of stones, however bright. He bent to the Sultan's ear and counseled patience.

"'Let the Sultan not decide in haste,' he said. On the strength of a single gift, let him ask a delay of some months, and in that space perhaps a worthier claim might ripen, and the matter be weighed as such matters ought to be weighed. The sultan, who loved his old servant and saw no harm in waiting, granted the woman fair words and a promise wrapped in a condition, and sent her home to her son with the answer that he might hope, but must hope for a while yet. Now in the weeks that followed, the vizier pressed his own suit quietly and well, and There came a day when word reached Aladdin, through the talk of the streets and the gossip of the bazaar, that the Sultan had after all promised Badrulbadur to the vizier's son, and that the wedding was set, and the feast prepared, and the bridegroom already glad.

It struck him like a blow, but he did not run to the palace and cry out, nor did he He give himself over to grief in the corner, as another might have done. He had a servant that no vizier commanded. He went to the place where the lamp lay hidden, and he took it up, and he rubbed it, and the air of the room thickened and turned, and the mighty spirit of the lamp stood before him and asked, in that voice like wind moving through a great empty hall, his master would have. Aladdin bade the genie work no harm to any living soul, but on the night the vizier's son should come to the princess to lift the bridegroom out of the marriage chamber and set him where he could do no mischief until morning and to bear the bride herself, untouched and unafraid, to Aladdin's own house, and there to keep her safe and apart until the dawn returned her. And so it was done. On the wedding night, when the household slept and the young husband thought himself come at last into his happiness, The genie took him up as easily as a nurse lifts a child and carried him off, and left him shivering out the dark hours in a cold and comfortless place.

The princess he bore gently to Aladdin, who treated her with such grave courtesy, asking nothing of her, guarding her honor as his own, that even in her fright she took the measure of the man. light the genie returned them both, and the vizier's son crept back to the marriage bed, bruised and bewildered, and swore he had passed the strangest and most wretched night of his life. The next night it happened again, and the night after, until the vizier's son would no longer go near the chamber at all, and the princess grew pale and silent and would say nothing of what befell her in the dark. The match, so carefully built, began to crack under a thing no one could see or name. At last the young man went to his father and begged to be released from the marriage, saying that his life was worth more to him than any bride, and the vizier, unwilling to lose a son to a mystery he could not fight, brought the matter to the sultan, and the wedding was undone and set aside, and the whole design abandoned as quietly as it had been raised. The court whispered of ill omens and unlucky stars. None of them guessed at the true cause, which sat patient in a poor man's house, biding its hour. When the months of the promised delay had run their course, Aladdin sent his mother once more to the palace to hold the sultan to his word. And this time, he did not send a bowl only. He commanded the genie of the lamp, and out of nowhere there came into the streets a train such as the city had never witnessed, ranks of slaves in cloth of gold, each bearing upon his head a basin of jewels, and black slaves and white walking in ordered file, and horses in trappings that shamed the royal stable, and gold scattered to the crowds as they passed, until the whole procession wound up to the palace gate, like a river of light.

Before such a showing the sultan had no more objections left in him, and the vizier no more counsel that would serve. The sultan looked on the trains of treasure and the endless slaves, and he said that a man who could command all this was fit to marry a princess, and he gave his daughter freely, and the marriage of Aladdin and the princess Badrou-Badour was granted at last, with the whole city glad of it. And in a single night the servant of the lamp made ready the place where they should live.

Where before there had been open ground near the sultan's own palace, there rose between dusk and dawn a building more beautiful than the sultans, of marble and porphyry and rare stone, with a great dome and courts of fountains and gardens, laid out full-grown as though they had stood a hundred years. The windows of its upper hall were framed and latticed, not with glass, but with jewels, emerald and ruby, and sapphire set close, so that when the sun came through them the very light fell colored on the floor.

And the genie, at Aladdin's word, left one window of that hall deliberately unfinished, A single lattice bare of its jewels, that the wonder of it might be tested. For when the Sultan came to marvel, and saw the floor, and offered out of his own treasury the gems to complete it, all the jewelers of the kingdom together could not furnish stones enough for that one window. And the Sultan understood then how far the wealth of his new son passed his own. Aladdin, smiling, bade the genie finish the window in a moment, and the Sultan went away, shaking his head at a power he could not fathom.

So Aladdin wedded the full moon of full moons, and dwelt in honor beside the throne, and rode out to the hunt and to the wars as a prince of the realm. He did not grow proud with his fortune, as another might, or close his hand now that it was full. He remembered the lane he had come from, and the days of thin bread, and he gave freely to the poor of the city, and judged fairly among those who came to him, and spoke to the small and the great with the same even courtesy, so that the people came to love him beyond any lord they had known, and to bless his name in their prayers.

The idle boy of the market-place, whom the neighbors had once given up as good for nothing, now walked in splendor with a princess at his side and a city's love about him, yet the thing that had made him did not sleep. Far off across the deserts and the sea, in the land of the Magreb from which the sorcerer had first come, an old enemy still lived and and would not always stay far off. It is worth pausing here upon the two servants that had carried Aladdin so high, for they were creatures the old tellers spoke of with care, and knew by many signs.

The genie of the ring and the genie of the lamp were of the kind called Jinn, and in the belief of the Arabs and of Islam, these were no idle inventions, a whole people set beside our own in the world, made not of clay as we are, but of a thin and subtle stuff, of bodies fine and unseen. By their nature they are invisible and pass among us unnoticed, and when they choose to show themselves, they take what shape they they please. Often the old accounts say they appear as serpents, gliding along a wall, but they may come also as a scorpion, or a lizard flat against a stone, or in the seeming of a man or a woman like ourselves. They live, it was said, not scattered and alone, but But in tribes and companies, as people do, with their own kinds and quarrels and laws, some among them are believers, and some are not, some gentle, and some cruel, the same mixture that runs through the children of men.

And they might be reached. The old learning held that a jinni could be summoned and set to work through charms and talismans, through amulets and rings and lamps, into which such power had been bound, so that whoever held the token held the servant. Against them too there was a defense, for the name of God, worn upon the body, was believed to turn them aside and keep their mischief off. two such spirits now stood on either side of Aladdin's fate, though he thought little of them in his days of plenty. The one of the ring was the lesser, quick and willing, but limited in his strength. The one of the lamp was the greater by far, able to raise palaces and shift the wealth of kingdoms in a night. Whoever came to hold that lamp would command the mightier of the two, and the mightier could undo, in an hour, all that the years had built.

Aladdin kept the lamp shut away in his new palace and gave it small thought, and there lay the one thread by which everything might yet unravel. For the sorcerer of the Maghreb had not forgotten. He had believed, in the days after he sealed the boy into the cave, that Aladdin was long dead, smothered in the dark with the lamp beside him, and had gone home to nurse his loss. But being a man of the black arts, he turned one day to his sand and his figures, casting them to learn where the lamp had gone to its ruin.

And the answer that came back was not ruin at all. The signs told him that the lamp was above ground and in use, and that the wretched boy he had left to die was alive, and rich beyond reckoning, and wedded to a sultan's daughter, and dwelling in a palace raised by the lamp's own power. The sorcerer's face darkened at the reading, and a slow and patient hatred woken him, and he set out again across the long roads to that far city, resolved to take back the lamp and everything that had grown from it.

He came into the city quietly, and asked here and there, and learned the shape of things, And above all, he learned that Aladdin was gone away for some days upon a hunt, and the palace left without its master. Then the sorcerer laid his snare. He went to a coppersmith and bought a number of new lamps, bright and shining, and set them in a basket, and went through the streets beneath the jeweled windows of Aladdin's palace, Crying out a strange bargain, New lamps for old, new lamps for old, Who will give an old lamp for a new?

The children ran after him, laughing, Thinking him a madman, For no peddler gives the new and takes the warn. But within the palace the princess Badrul Badrur heard the crying, And her women told her of it, and she remembered an old battered lamp that stood upon a shelf in the hall, a shabby thing she had often wondered that her lord should keep. She knew nothing of its worth. She had never been told what it was or what slept within it, and thinking to please Aladdin with a small jest to give a worthless old lamp and gain a clean new one for nothing, She bade a servant take it down and carry it out to the peddler in the street.

The sorcerer, when he saw it come, could scarcely keep his hands from shaking. He took the old lamp and thrust his whole basket of shining new ones upon the servant, careless now of the price, and hurried away out of the streets to a place apart. There, when he was alone and sure, he rubbed the battered thing, and the mighty spirit of the lamp rose up before him as it had risen for Aladdin, bound now to this new hand as it had been bound to the old, asking what its master would have.

And the sorcerer commanded that the whole palace, with all that was in it, and the princess Badrulbadur within its walls, belifted whole from its place, and carried through the air across the deserts and the sea to the land of the Maghreb, and set down there in his own country. The genie who served the lamp and not the man bowed to the order. In a breath the great building rose from the ground where it had stood beside the sultan's own, gardens, fountains, jewelled windows and all, and was gone, and where it had been there was only bare earth and the wind.

When morning came, the Sultan looked from his window toward the palace of his daughter, as was his custom, to see its dome catch the first light. He saw nothing but open ground, as though the place had never been. He called for his vizier and rubbed his eyes and looked again. And still there was nothing, and a terror took him that turned quickly to rage. His daughter was gone, vanished with the whole house in a single night, and there was one man he blamed for it. He sent his riders out upon the roads, and they found Aladdin returning easy and unknowing from the hunt.

And they laid hands on him, and brought him before the Sultan in chains. The Sultan, wild with grief and shame, would have had him put to death that hour, and only Only the love the people bore Aladdin, crowding and murmuring about the palace, stayed the Sultan's hand. He gave the young man forty days. Within forty days he must bring back the princess, or forfeit his head. Aladdin went out from that judgment a broken man, dazed, not understanding how his fortune had fallen from him overnight.

He wandered by the river, half-minded to throw himself in and be done, and as he stood there in his despair, he wrung his hands together, and his fingers passed over the ring that still sat upon one of them. The ring the sorcerer had lent him long ago at the mouth of the cave and never thought to take back. At the touch, the lesser genie of the ring sprang up before him, the willing servant he had all but forgotten, and asked what his master would have. For a moment, hope came back into Aladdin's face, and he cried out at once that the genie should bring back the palace and the princess, and set all as it had been.

But the spirit of the ring bowed low and answered that this was not in his power. He was the lesser of the two, he said, and could not undo the work of the mightiest spirit of the lamp, nor break what that greater one had made. What one servant of the lamp had done, only the lamp could undo. Yet there was one thing, the Ring Genie said, that lay within his strength. He could not fetch the palace to the man, but he could carry the man to the palace. And Aladdin, seizing on that thread as a drowning man seizes a rope, bade him do it.

In the space of a single breath, the ground and the river were gone from beneath him, And the wind closed over, and when it opened again, he stood upon strange earth under a strange sky in the far country of the Maghreb beneath the very walls of his own stolen palace. Under those foreign walls, Aladdin waited until the light thinned toward evening, and And then he crept close beneath a window he knew, one that looked out upon a garden the genie had made and carried whole across the world.

He dared not knock. He dared only wait. And it happened that Badrul Badur, who had spent her captive days moving from room to room without rest, came at last to that same window to breathe the cooler air. She looked down, and there below her stood her husband, the man she had feared lost forever, alive and near, and looking up at her. She pressed her hand to her mouth to keep from crying out, for the sorcerer was somewhere in the house and must hear nothing. Then she sent a trusted servant down by a small door, and by that door Aladdin came in quietly, and the two of them stood together in a private chamber and held one another, and for a little while neither could speak at all.

When words came, they came low and quick. asked her what had become of the old lamp, the battered one he had kept upon a shelf, and only then did the princess understand what she had done in her innocence. She told him how a peddler had passed below the walls in the first city, crying new lamps for old, and how she, thinking the dull thing worthless and the trade a small kindness, had sent the old lamp down and taken a bright one in its place. She wept to think that so small an act had carried them across the sea. Aladdin took her hands and told her that the fault was not hers, for she had never been told the lamp's secret, and that no blame lay upon a heart that meant only good. Then he told her that the whole matter turned now upon her and that he had a plan and that it asked of her a courage of a quiet and cunning kind. He asked her where the sorcerer kept the lamp and she answered that he carried it always in the breast of his robe, day and night, and never once set it down. So it could not be stolen while he waked. It must be taken while he slept, and he would not sleep unless he were made to.

Aladdin gave her a small paper of powder, a sleeping draught, and told her what she must do. She must put off her sorrow and put on a false warmth. She must send word to the sorcerer that she had ceased at last to grieve for her lost husband, that she saw the man was gone beyond returning, and that she would look now upon her captor with kinder eyes. She must invite him to sup with her alone. The princess did all of it, and did it well, for grief had taught her how to wear a face that was not her own.

She dressed as if for a feast, and she had her women set out a table with fine dishes and a wine the Magrebi loved, and she sent for him with soft and welcoming words. The sorcerer came, and he was glad, for he had long desired her, and had waited only for her heart to bend. He sat with her, and she smiled at him, and she praised his country and asked him of his travels, and she filled his cup with her own hand. When the moment was right and his eyes were upon her face and not upon the cup, she let Let the powder fall into the wine, and stirred it with a turn of her wrist.

And then she raised her own cup, and drank a little, and pressed him to drink deep in the manner of her country, as a pledge between them. He drank it all. In a few breaths his words grew thick, and his head grew heavy, and he slid down senseless where he sat, sunk in a sleep that lay near to death. Then the princess went to the door and opened it, and Aladdin came in, swift and silent. He knelt over the sleeping man and drew back the robe and found the lamp in its breast, and took it, and held it a moment in his two hands, the dull and battered thing that all this ruin had been made for.

What followed he did without cruelty and without delay, in the manner of the old tellers, who pass over such things quickly. The sorcerer of the Maghreb, who had come twice across the world to take what was not his, troubled the world no more. Then Aladdin rubbed the lamp, and the great genie rose before him, vast and patient, bound once again to the hand that held the thing. Aladdin commanded that the palace, with the princess and every servant and every jewel within it, and he himself, be lifted up and carried back across the deserts and the sea, and set down again in its own place in the land of China. Upon the bare ground beside the Sultan's house, where it had always stood, the genie bowed. In the space of a breath the whole house rose from the foreign earth and passed through the dark air, and came to rest so gently that not a cup was spilled and no sleep awoke. When morning came, the Sultan rose heavy with grief, for the days he had given Aladdin were almost spent, and he had begun to believe he would never see his daughter's face again. He went to his window out of old habit to look upon the empty ground where the palace had stood. He looked, and the palace was there. Its dome caught the first light exactly as it had used to do. Its fountains threw up their water. Its windows burned with the sun. The old man could not at first trust his own eyes. Then he ran, forgetting his years and his crown, down through his own halls and out and across to the door of his daughter's house. And Badrul Badr came out to meet him, and the two of them wept together in the doorway, holding fast, while the whole city gathered to see it.

The Sultan learned then the truth of all that had passed, and how it was no fault of Aladdin's that the house had flown, but the work of a wicked man now dead. And he took his son by the shoulders, and asked his pardon for the chains and the sentence. And there was feasting in that city for many days. So the matter seemed ended and the household settled again into its peace, and the danger was thought to be buried with the man who had carried it. Yet far away, in the Maghreb, there was one who had not heard the news, and when at last it reached him, it fell upon a heart harder and colder than the first. For the sorcerer had a brother, an elder brother, deeper in the black arts than he had ever been and crueler in the using of them.

This brother had a means of learning where his kinsman was and how he fared, and one day he read in his sand or his stars, that his younger brother was dead, poisoned and slain in a far country by a young man named Aladdin. He learned the whole of it—the lamp, the palace, the princess, and the city in the land of China, where it all now stood. A cold and patient rage rose in him. He would not be quick, as his brother had been quick, and and lose all by haste, he set out upon the long road east, and as he went, he laid a plan that leaned not upon force, but upon trust.

For he knew that trust is the door through which no wall can keep an enemy out. In the city that was Aladdin's home, there lived a holy woman, old and pious, who was was famed through all that quarter for her healing and her goodness. Fatima was her name in some of the tellings, and the sick were carried to her, and went away mended, and the people loved her and thought her near to a saint. The sorcerer's brother sought her out where she lived apart, and he came to her as a traveler seeking blessing, and when he had her alone and unguarded, he killed her quietly without witness.

Then he did a thing darker than the killing. He took her very clothing, her veil and her worn robe, and the beads she carried, and he put them on, and by his art he changed his own face and form until he wore her likeness as a man wears a borrowed cloak, bearded and hard beneath. He became to every outward eye the gentle old woman the city trusted, stooped and slow and holy, and thus disguised he walked into the streets where she had been known. No one looked twice, and no one saw the murderer beneath the saint.

He made his way toward the palace, walking veiled among the people, blessing those who bowed to him and laying his hand upon the heads of children. Word of the holy woman's presence came, as he meant it should, to the princess Badrulbadur, who had heard of her healing all her life and had long wished to look upon her. She sent servants to bring the saint within, and they found the seeming woman and led her gently through the great doors and into the very heart of the house. The princess received her with honor, seated her, spoke with her of holy things, and marveled at the mildness of her speech.

For the brother knew well how to counterfeit a soft and pious tongue, and the princess, thinking how blessed a thing it would be to keep such a woman near, and fearing sickness as the great often fear it, begged the saint to stay within the palace as her guest, to dwell there against the day that illness might come, so that healing would never be far. The disguised brother bowed his veiled head and, with every show of humble reluctance, agreed. So he was given a chamber within the walls and fed at the princess's own table, and honored as a holy guest, the murderer welcomed and lodged inside the very house he had crossed the world to destroy.

Now the great genie of the lamp watched over the household still, bound to the hand of its master, and no disguise of art or robe could hide from such a spirit the truth of what a thing was underneath. The genie saw a man of blood beneath the old woman's veil, and saw the malice folded in that meekness, and would not let its master sleep in ignorance of it. It came to Aladdin apart and spoke plainly. The holy healer the princess had taken in was no holy woman at all, but the brother of the dead sorcerer come in a murdered saint's clothing to work his revenge, and he would strike when the house was easy and off its guard.

The genie told him how the false saint might be known and armed him against this second enemy as it had aided him against the first, and it warned him to be quick and to be sure. Aladdin gave no sign that he knew. He went into the chamber where the seeming woman sat, and he greeted the guest his wife had honored, and he came near as though to ask a blessing or to speak of some pain in his own head that wanted healing, the disguised brother, thinking his hour had come and his hand about to be given the chance it wanted, leaned in close beneath the veil.

And in that nearness, Aladdin struck before the sorcerer could bring out whatever weapon he had hidden in the folds of the stolen robe, and the elder brother of the Magreb fell dead upon the floor. When the princess cried out in horror, thinking her husband had slain the holy woman who had done no wrong, Aladdin drew back the veil and showed her the bearded face beneath and told her all that the genie had told him, and her horror turned to trembling and then to a great and quiet relief.

Twice now the house had been marked for ruin, and twice the ruin had been turned aside. And after the death of the second brother, no enemy was left in all the world who had cause or power to trouble that household again. So the years came on in peace. The old Sultan, who had wept in the doorway to have his daughter home, grew full of days at last and died, mourned by his people. He left no son to follow him, and the throne passed to his daughter's husband, and thus Aladdin, who had once been the idlest boy in a poor lane, the son of Mustafa the tailor, a lad who would not learn a trade and loved only play, came to sit upon the seat of the Sultan and to rule the land. He ruled long and, so the old tellers say, he ruled well, with Badrul Badr beside him, she whose name means the full moon of full moons. And their story was told from that time onward, as one of the great tales of the nights, though it never truly belonged to the book at all.

And here, when the tale is done, an older puzzle waits, quieter than any genie, and harder to lay to rest. For all through the story, the teller names the land as China, one of the cities of ancient And yet, almost nothing within that land is Chinese. The ruler is called a sultan and never an emperor. The people fill their speech with the platitudes of Muslims, blessing and praising in the manner of the faith. A Jewish merchant buys the wares Aladdin brings to sell in the market. No Taoist walks those streets, no follower of Confucius, no monk of the Buddha, and none of the things a traveller would truly have found in the China of the world appear anywhere in the house of the tale.

The word China sits over a country that is Middle Eastern in every stone. Scholars have turned this puzzle over for a long while and have not agreed. Some have wondered whether the true land was meant to lie further west of China proper, in the reaches of Central Asia, among Turkic peoples who lived where the deserts run toward the setting sun. They point to the Kara-Khanids, a people of that region who took the faith of Islam and whose rulers styled themselves lords of the east and of China.

And they note that such a court would have had assaultant and Muslim subjects, and yet might loosely be called China by a distant teller. It is offered as a suggestion and no more. And even those who make it grant that a chancellor in such a court would have borne the title Hajib rather than vizier, so the fit is not exact. answer more simply, they say that China here was never a real place upon any map, but only a word for the far edge of the world, and elsewhere so remote that no listener would test it, the way an old story will send its hero beyond the seven seas without meaning any sea in particular. A teller who had never traveled would hardly have known the difference and perhaps he never meant one. There is one more question and it stands behind all the rest and it concerns not the land of the tale but the man who first told it. For this story, famous as it is, was never found in the old Arabic book of the Knights. It came into the world through a a Frenchman, Antoine Galand, who set it down in his great translation early in the 1700s.

And Galand himself had it from the lips of a traveller, a young man of Aleppo named Hannah Diab, a Maronite Christian who had journeyed all the long way from Syria to Paris and who told Galand, this tale and others by word of mouth. For a long time Diab was only a name in a margin, a source and nothing more. But some scholars now, among them Ruth Bötichheimer and Paolo Lemos Hötter, have argued that he was less a source than an author, that the shaping voice of the tale was his own, and that the rise of Aladdin, the poor young man carried by fortune from a mean lane to a palace and a throne, echoes the journey of the young man from Aleppo who crossed the world and walked among the great in a foreign capital.

Diab lived on, and in his old age, he set down the story of his own life. He wrote it around the year 1763, when he was near 75, and that account survives still, a manuscript kept in the library of the Vatican, its first pages lost. From it we know something of the man behind the tale, though it is a memory written down in age, and may not hold every fact exactly as it happened. As for a written Arabic source older than galland, none has ever been found that will bear the weight. Two Arabic copies of the tale were once kept in Paris and offered as proof of an older original. But a careful scholar named Morsin Mahdi studied them and showed that they were not sources at all, but back translations. Galen's own French turned back into Arabic after the fact. So So the story keeps no certain homeland and no proven cradle, neither in China nor in Arabia, but seems to belong most truly to the voice of the one who first spoke it aloud, a traveller far from home telling of a poor boy who rose.

And so the quiet mystery of this tale answers itself, though it answers softly the way a candle answers a dark room without ever raising its voice. For if you set the boy beside the story and look at them together, you find that they share one shape, and the shape is the same in both. Aladdin begins, as nothing that the world would notice. He is the son of Mustafa the tailor, a poor man of a poor street. And when his father dies, the boy has neither trade nor learning nor any prospect worth the naming.

He idols in the lanes. He is the kind of youth and careful mother despairs of, and a busy city forgets. by wonder and by a plain, untutored kindness, and by an oil lamp he scarcely understood when it first came into his hands, he climbs from that beggar's lane to a palace grander than the Sultan's own and at the last to a throne. He does not begin as a hero. He becomes one only because a small, overlooked thing was placed in his keeping and because he did not let it go. Now set the story itself beside him.

It too begins as nothing that the learned world would notice. It owns no ancient book. It stands apart from the true and original knights. an orphan without a proven Arabic cradle, a tale that entered the great collection through a side door rather than the front. Its whole beginning, so far as we can trace it, is a single evening of talk in a foreign city, a young traveller from Aleppo speaking aloud to a French scholar who wrote the words down. That is a slender root for so vast a tree. A conversation is a fragile thing. It leaves no monument, and most conversations vanish with the breath that made them.

Yet from that one fireside, the tale climbed as surely as the boy climbed, out of Paris and into print, and out of print and back into the living mouths of tellers, spreading across Europe and around the Mediterranean, into the Middle East and Central Asia, into India and the far islands of the Southern Seas, until there was scarcely a hearth in the world where some form of it was not known. Both rose from almost nothing. That is the truth the two of them keep between them. The lamp was dull and greasy when Aladdin carried it up out of the cave, so plain a thing that his mother thought only to scour it clean and sell it for the price of a little bread. She did not know she held a marvel. She judged it by its dented surface and its want of shine. And she was wrong, for the plainness was only a covering over power. So it has been with the tale. Wade as a document. It is a poor and doubtful thing, fatherless, undated, unsupported by any old parchment that will bear the weight.

weighed as a story, it has outshone a thousand grander and better attested works that sit unread upon their shelves. The palaces around it, the proud and pedigreed books with their certain authors and their honored names, have not been carried to so many firesides, nor loved by so many who never learned to read at all. A small and overlooked thing, once picked up and cherished, may outshine the palaces around it. The boy learned that lesson inside the story. The story has taught it again by simply refusing to be forgotten.

There is a kind of justice in that, quiet and unhurried, the sort that folk tales have always preferred to the loud justice of the world. The tale does not reward the sorcerer, who had all the learning and all the ambition and knew exactly what the lamp was worth. It rewards the idle boy, who barely understood his own good fortune, and the patient mother, who scoured a dull thing without knowing its name. and it rewards them because their hands were open rather than grasping. And in the wider history, the tale was carried farthest, not by scholars anxious to prove its bloodline, but by ordinary tellers who simply loved it and passed it on, one warm room to the next, asking no proof of anyone.

The heart of the matter was never the pedigree, it was the passing on. So let the figures be gathered now, gently, the way a household is counted over, before the lamps are put out, and the door is barred for the night. Let them each be named once more, so that they may go to their rest inside your memory and stay there. the boy, Aladdin, the tailor's son, who began in the lane with nothing and ended upon a throne, and who is easy to love precisely because he was never wise, only fortunate, and in the end brave enough.

Beside him Mustafa his father, the tailor who died early and left the boy to the streets, present in the tale mostly as an absence, a name and a grave, and a trade the sun never learned. And with them the mother, who has no name in the story and needs none, the patient woman who kept the poor house together, who wept over her idle son and fed him anyway, and whose plain hands, scouring a dull lamp for the price of a meal, first woke the mightier of the two spirits. Remember her especially. The whole marvel turns upon her humble labor, and she never asked for a marvel at all. Then the two who wished the boy ill, the sorcerer of the Maghreb, come the long way from the west with his charts and his charms, who wore the face of a loving uncle and named himself the brother of the dead tailor, and who wanted nothing of Aladdin but a pair of small hands to reach into a cave he dared not enter himself.

And behind him, when he was gone, his crueler brother, a darker and more powerful man of same craft, who came disguised as a holy woman, famed for healing, and who might have undone everything had he not been unmasked in time. Two brothers of the West, both greedy for a light they could not honestly hold. Then the two spirits of the tale, for there are two, and they are not the same, and the story is careful to keep them apart. The genie of the ring, the lesser of the two, who came when Aladdin in his despair rubbed the band the sorcerer had lent him, and who could carry a boy up out of a sealed cave, and later across the whole width of the world, but who could not simply undo the greater magic when it was turned against his master. And the genie of the lamp, the mightier, bound to serve whoever held that dull and dented thing, who raised palaces in a night, and moved them across the deserts, and stood ready to obey whatever hand had last taken up the lamp, for good or for ill. These were creatures of a kind the old belief knew well, spirits of thin and subtle substance, unseen unless they chose to be seen, shapers of their own forms, dwelling in societies of their own beyond the sight of men. In the tale they are servants of an object, and the whole danger of the story lies in that simple rule that the lamp obeys its holder and asks no questions about how the holding was come by. Then the court, the sultan, the ruler of that faraway city, who was won over in the end by the boy who had nothing, and whose throne Aladdin came at the last to inherit. His vizier beside him, counselor and doubter, who wished the honor and the marriage for his own son rather than for a stranger out of the lanes, and the vizier's son, who was promised the princess and lost her to a fortune he could not match. And at the center of the court, the reason for so much of the striving, Badrul Badur, the Sultan's daughter, whose name name means the full moon of full moons, a name that reaches for the brightest thing in the night sky and makes of it a measure of her beauty, as the old poets of those lands so often did. It was she, remember, whose quick wit in the sorcerer's own house helped win back the stolen lamp, so that she is no mere prize in the story but a hand that turns it.

And then, beyond the tale entirely, out past the edge of the fiction and into the daylight of real years, two men more who ought to be named tonight, because without them there There would be no tale to tell. Hannah Diab of Aleppo, the young marinite traveler who carried the story in his memory across the whole breadth of the world and spoke it aloud in Paris, and whom some now would honor not as a mere source but as the maker of the thing, a poor young man from the East, who told of a poor young man raised to greatness, and who may have poured something of his own long journey into the boys. And Antoine Gallant, the French scholar who listened and wrote it down and set it into his great translation of the nights, and so gave it to the printed page and to the centuries that followed. One man remembered it and one man recorded it, and between the two of them, at a single fireside long ago, they carried this small orphan tail out into the wider night, where it has wandered ever since and found no shortage of welcome. That is the whole company of the story. The boy and his father and his mother, the two brothers of the Maghreb, the spirit of the ring and the spirit of the lamp, the sultan and his vizier, and the full moon of full moons, and, standing quietly behind them all, the traveller and the scholar who let them live, let them settle now, their work is done, and they have earned the dark. And now let the tale itself be laid down, softly, as a well-loved thing is laid down and not dropped. Imagine the sealed cave and the jewelled palace far behind you now, the glitter of the underground trees, and the great grave weight of the palace, that a spirit raised in a single night, all of it drawing away into distance, its glitter and its danger no longer pressing on your thoughts.

The lamp is cool. The ring is still. The sorcerers of the west are laid to rest inside their own story and can trouble no one here. In your mind, reach back toward that whole world of lamp and ring, of cave and court and desert crossing, and close an invisible door upon it. Feel the door move on silent hinges, smooth and slow and sure, sealing every wonder and every sorcerer within, sealing the marvel and the menace alike in calm and order, so that nothing of it stirs or shines or whispers any longer. It is shut.

It is safe. It keeps until another night. Then see a single candle, its small flame steady in the darkness, unwavering, asking nothing of you but that you watch it a moment longer and with a slow, gentle breath blow that candle out and let the last curl of light fade into the night. Rest well, sleep deeply, and let the old tales carry you into the night.