Aladdin and the Magic Lamp
Now a genie enters the scene. But it is not the genie of the lamp. And he rescues Aladdin from a certain death.
There are several terms for fictional magical beings that are typically bound to obey the commands of a mortal possessing some device they are linked to. In addition to genie or jinn, we also find ifrit.
When Aladdin returned to his mother's house, dead tired, he may believe that it is the end of his adventure. But far from it, there are a lot of events that will happen to him: he has not yet discovered that the lamp is magic!
ON THE TENTH NIGHT
Sheherazade said:
So, when the desperate Aladdin had unwittingly rubbed the ring he had on his thumb, the virtue of which he was unaware, he suddenly saw rising in front of him, as if rising from the ground, an immense and gigantic genie, like a very dark black man, with a head like a cauldron and a dreadful face and red eyes, huge and blazing, who bowed before him and, in a voice as resounding as rolling thunder, said to him: "Between your hands here, your slave here! Speak, what do you want? I am the servant of the ring, on earth, in the air, and on the water! »
At this sight, Aladdin, who was not very brave, was very terrified; and, in any other place or under any other circumstances, he would have fallen unconscious or exposed his legs to the wind. But, in this vault where he saw himself already dead of hunger and thirst, the intervention of this frightful ifrit seemed to him of great help, especially when he had heard the question he was asking him. And he was able to move his tongue and answer: “O great sheik of the ifrits of air, earth, and water, quickly get me out of this vault!"
No sooner had Aladdin uttered these words than the earth stirred and parted above his head, and he found himself in the twinkling of an eye transported out of the vault, to the very place where the Maghrebi had lit the fire. As for the ifrit, he had disappeared.
So Aladdin, still trembling with emotion, but very happy to have returned to the open air, thanked Allah the Benefactor who had delivered him from certain death and saved him from the pitfalls of the Maghreb. And he looked around him and saw, in the distance, the city in the middle of its gardens. And he hastened to resume the path by which the magician had led him, without once turning his head back, towards the valley. And he arrived in the middle of the night, exhausted and out of breath, at the house where his mother, very anxious about his delay, was waiting for him, lamenting. And she ran to open the door for him, and had just time to take him in her arms, where, unable to bear the emotion any longer, he had fallen unconscious.
When Aladdin, by dint of care, had recovered from his fainting, his mother again gave him a little rose water to drink. Then, very anxious, she asked him how he felt. And Aladdin answered: “O my mother, I am very hungry! So please give me something to eat, because since this morning I haven't eaten anything!" And Aladdin's mother ran to bring him everything in the house. And Aladdin began to eat with such haste that his mother, fearing that he would choke, said to him: "Don't be in a hurry, my son! your throat will burst! And if you eat so quickly to tell me sooner what you have to tell me, know that we have all the time! As long as I see you again, I'm at peace! but Allah knows what my anxiety was when I saw the night advancing without your returning!" Then she broke off to say to him: “Ah! my son, please moderate yourself! take smaller pieces! And Aladdin, who had quickly devoured everything in front of him, asked for a drink, took the pitcher of water, and emptied it down his throat, without stopping. After which he was happy, and said to his mother: "I will finally be able, o my mother, to tell you everything that happened to me with the man you thought was my uncle and who made me see death very close to my eyes! Ah! you didn't know that he wasn't my uncle at all, my father's brother, that deceiver who caressed me so much and kissed me so tenderly, that cursed man, that Maghrebi, that sorcerer, that liar, that cheat, this roué, this twister, this dog, this dirty, this demon who has no equal among demons on the face of the earth! Gone be the Devil!" Then he added: “Listen rather, O my mother, to what he has done to me!" And he said again: “Ah! how glad I am to be delivered from his hands!" Then he stopped for a moment, took several breaths, and suddenly, all in one breath, he began to recount everything that had happened to him, from the beginning to the end, including the bellows, the insult, and the rest, without omitting a single detail. But there is no point in repeating it.
And, when he had finished his story, he undid his belt and let fall on the mattress stretched on the ground the marvelous supply of the transparent and colored fruits which he had gathered in the garden. And the lamp was also in the heap, in the middle of the balls of jewels.
And he added, in conclusion: “Here, o mother, is my adventure with this accursed magician, and here is all that my journey to the underground has brought me!" And, speaking thus, he showed his mother the marvelous spheres, but with a very contemptuous pout which meant: "I am no longer a child to play with glass spheres!"
Now, during all the time that her son Aladdin had spoken, the mother had listened, throwing, in the most surprising or the most touching places of the story, cries of anger against the magician and of commiseration for Aladdin. And, as soon as he had finished telling this strange adventure, she could not restrain herself any longer, and burst into insults against the Maghrebi, calling him by all names but the indignation and anger of a mother who almost losing one's child can qualify the abuser's conduct. And, when she had discharged herself a little, she hugged her son Aladdin to her chest and kissed him crying and said: "Thank Allah, o my son, who rescued you safe and sound from the hands of this Maghrebian sorcerer! Ah! the traitor, the accursed! He wanted you dead, no doubt, to possess that wretched copper lamp that isn't worth half a drachma! How I hate him! How I abominate him! My poor child, my son Aladdin, I find you! But what danger did you not run through my own fault, I who should have guessed, from the squint eyes of this North African, that he was neither your uncle nor anything like it, but a cursed magician and a miscreant!"
And, while speaking thus, the mother had taken her son Aladdin close to her, on the mattress, and kissed him and rocked him gently. And Aladdin, who hadn't slept for three days, busy as he had been with his adventure with the Maghrebi, wasted no time, lulled in this way, to close his eyes and fall asleep on his mother's lap. And she laid him down with a thousand precautions on the mattress and was not long in lying down beside him and falling asleep.
But the next day, when they woke up...
— At this point in her narration, Scheherazade saw the morning appear and quietly fell silent.
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