In a city in China there lived a tailor, a poor man, and his wife, and their son whose name was Alaeddin. The boy was, by any honest account, a thorough idler — one of those children who seems almost to make an art of avoiding usefulness. His father tried to teach him the tailor's trade; Alaeddin escaped to the streets the moment his father's back was turned. He ran with the gutter boys, played all day, came home only to eat, and learned absolutely nothing. His father, worn out with grief and disappointment, grew ill and died, and Alaeddin barely noticed. His mother sold the shop, took up spinning, and somehow scraped together enough to keep them both alive, while her son continued in his idle ways without the slightest sign of improvement.
This was the life Alaeddin was living on the afternoon a stranger came to town.
The stranger was a man from Morocco — from the far western edge of the world — and he was a sorcerer, a master of astrology and magic arts, who had spent forty years studying every occult science known to man. He had recently, through his calculations, discovered the existence of a treasure hidden beneath the ground in this very city of China: an enchanted hoard containing the greatest riches ever assembled, and at the heart of it, a lamp of such extraordinary power that its owner could surpass any king in the world. The hoard, his calculations told him, could only be opened by one specific person: a boy named Alaeddin, the son of a tailor.
He arrived in the city, found Alaeddin without difficulty, and approached him with his arms open and tears on his cheeks.
"My nephew!" he cried. "You must be my brother's son — I'd know that face anywhere." He pressed the bewildered boy to his chest, wept, and pressed gold coins into his hand. He told a long, affecting story about being the boy's long-lost uncle, kept away by years of travel in distant lands, returning now too late to see his beloved brother alive. He was charming and convincing and generous, and he invited himself to dinner.
Alaeddin's mother, who had never heard of any uncle on her husband's side, was suspicious. But the man cried so convincingly at the spot where her husband used to sit, and he ate with such appetite and spoke with such kindness about her son's future, promising to set him up as a merchant with a fine shop and good stock, that her suspicions softened. He came back several times; he bought Alaeddin fine clothes and took him to the baths and to see the city. He seemed, by all appearances, to be exactly what he claimed.
On the fourth or fifth day, he rose early and took Alaeddin for a long walk out through the city gates, through gardens and groves, further and further from the town, until they were climbing the bare rocky slopes of a hill far from any house or garden. Alaeddin, whose legs were aching, began to complain.
"Not far now," said the sorcerer. "Just ahead."
When they reached a particular bare patch of stony ground, the sorcerer stopped and told Alaeddin to gather dry sticks. When there were enough, he built a small fire, threw in incense and powder, and muttered words that Alaeddin could not follow. The ground trembled. Thunder rolled from a cloudless sky. The earth cracked open before them.
Alaeddin turned to run. The sorcerer caught him by the arm and struck him across the face so hard that the boy's knees buckled. "Stay where you are," the sorcerer said, very quietly. "This treasure is in your name. Only you can open it. Disobey me and I'll hit you harder."
He helped Alaeddin up and, in a gentler voice, explained what was to be done.
In the crack in the earth there was a stone slab with a copper ring set into it. Alaeddin pulled it up — it came more easily than it should have, as though it rose to meet his hands. Below was a staircase descending into darkness.
The sorcerer gave him careful instructions: descend the stairs, pass through four halls lined with jars of gold — do not touch them, do not even let your robe brush them. Pass through into a garden of jewel-bearing trees. Walk to the far end, enter a hall, climb a ladder, take the lamp hanging from the ceiling. Pour out whatever is in it, put it in your shirt, and come back. You may pick some fruit from the trees on your way out. He gave Alaeddin a ring from his own finger. "This will protect you if you are in danger," he said. "Now go."
Alaeddin went down.
The four halls were exactly as described — jars of gold stacked floor to ceiling, gleaming in the strange subterranean light. He passed them all without touching anything. He entered the garden and stopped.
Every tree in the garden was heavy with fruit, and every piece of fruit was a gemstone. Rubies hung where apples should have been; the size of plums; emeralds clustered like grapes, green fire in the dimness; diamonds caught what light there was and scattered it in every direction. Alaeddin, who had grown up poor in a tailor's house and had never held a gemstone in his life, looked at them and thought they were glass. Coloured glass, and rather beautiful. He stuffed his pockets full of them — he would take them home for decoration, for playthings — and then went on to the end of the garden.
He climbed the ladder, found the lamp exactly where the sorcerer had said, poured out its oil, tucked it in his shirt, and came back. He went up the stairs with his pockets bulging with what he took to be glass fruit, until he reached the last step — the highest of all, about an arm's length below ground level. He reached up his hand and found he couldn't pull himself out, not with the load he was carrying.
"Uncle," he said, looking up at the sorcerer's face above. "Give me your hand."
"Give me the lamp first," said the sorcerer.
"I'll give it to you the moment I'm out. It's in my shirt, underneath everything — I can't reach it from here."
"The lamp first."
"I can't get to it. Help me up."
They went back and forth like this until the sorcerer lost patience. He muttered something, threw more powder in the fire, and the stone slab swung back over the entrance. The earth smoothed itself over as if nothing had ever been there.
Alaeddin was alone in the dark underground.
He sat on the stairs for three days, weeping, praying, and eventually falling silent. He had eaten everything in his pockets that he could find, which turned out to be nothing — he had been filling them with glass beads, and glass is not edible under any circumstances. He was starving and despairing and very much alone.
At some point in this misery he wrung his hands together from sheer despair, and in doing so rubbed the ring the sorcerer had given him. The earth in front of him split and an enormous spirit stood before him, terrible and vast, looking down from a great height.
"What do you want?" said the spirit. "I am the servant of whoever wears that ring."
Alaeddin, once he had recovered from the shock of it, managed to say: "Get me out of here."
He found himself above ground, in sunlight, blinking and swaying, with the rock face sealed behind him as if it had never opened. He walked back to the city. He walked home to his mother. He came through the door and fainted from relief and hunger and exhaustion.
He told his mother everything, once he had eaten and slept and eaten again. He showed her the lamp — grubby and tarnished, worth perhaps nothing — and the pockets full of coloured glass he had picked in the underground garden. His mother looked at the lamp and said it needed a clean before they could sell it. She took a handful of sand and began rubbing the surface.
From the lamp rose a spirit ten times larger and more terrible than the one from the ring.
Alaeddin's mother fell down in a faint.
Alaeddin, who had now met two such spirits and was developing something like a policy for dealing with them, stepped over his mother, took the lamp from the floor, and said to the towering figure: "We haven't eaten. Bring us something."
Dinner appeared on a tray of hammered silver, served on twelve golden plates, with cups of fine wine and enough food for a week.
His mother, when she revived, found this both wonderful and deeply alarming. She begged him to throw the lamp and the ring into the sea. Alaeddin declined, pointed out that the lamp had just fed them both, and suggested she think of it as a kind of very powerful pantry. He put the lamp away somewhere she wouldn't have to look at it. She agreed to this arrangement, though she made a point of leaving the room whenever he used it.
They sold the golden plates one by one, and between the lamp and the plates they lived comfortably for a long while. Then one day something happened that changed everything.
The Sultan announced that his daughter, the Princess Badr al-Budur — whose name meant Full Moon of Full Moons, and whose face, it was said, justified the comparison — was to pass through the city on her way to the baths. The roads would be cleared; no one was to look upon her. This was the custom.
Alaeddin, who had never paid much attention to customs, hid himself in a doorway and watched as the procession passed. He saw the Princess for perhaps five seconds — her face turned briefly in his direction, the veil shifting — and that was enough. He went home dazed and incapable of thinking about anything else for three days.
When he surfaced from this state, he had made a decision. He wanted to marry her.
His mother was quiet for a moment after he told her. Then she said, reasonably: "We are poor people, Alaeddin. The Sultan's daughter."
"Take him these," said Alaeddin, and emptied his pockets onto the table.
What came out were the glass beads from the underground garden. What his mother saw, when she looked at them properly in good light, were emeralds and rubies and diamonds and pearls of a size and quality she had never imagined existing. She sat down slowly.
"Will you take those to the Sultan?" said Alaeddin.
She went. She waited in the audience hall for several days before she was called, and when she was finally admitted she presented the gems in a bowl covered with a cloth, explained that her son admired the Princess, and fell silent. The Sultan looked at the stones for a long time. His minister leaned over and looked at them. The Sultan's eyes moved from the stones to the old woman in her plain clothes, back to the stones, and said carefully that these things took time, and she should return in three months.
Three months passed. Alaeddin waited. When the three months were up, he heard through the city that the Sultan had decided to marry his daughter to the Vizier's son instead — the announcement was being made that very week.
Alaeddin rubbed the lamp.
"Stop that wedding," he said.
What happened on the wedding night, in the bedchamber of the Vizier's son, was something no one fully explained afterwards — a cold so bitter it seemed to come from the walls themselves, a darkness, sounds in the dark that sent the Vizier's son running from the room in his nightgown. This happened three nights in a row. On the fourth day the Sultan, persuaded by his daughter's distress and his minister's extreme embarrassment, dissolved the marriage on the grounds that something was clearly very wrong with the arrangement, and the Vizier's son agreed rather quickly.
Alaeddin sent his mother back to the Sultan with the bowl of gems.
This time the Sultan listened differently. He asked what kind of man this was who could command such riches and take so much time. His minister, whose son had just been very publicly humiliated, said that the man was probably a fraud and should be tested. The Sultan asked for forty basins of gold, carried by forty slave girls, before any betrothal would be discussed.
Alaeddin rubbed the lamp.
Forty slave girls arrived at the Sultan's palace, each carrying a basin of gold. The Sultan looked at them for a while. He told Alaeddin's mother that his daughter was his to give, and he gave her.
Alaeddin's mother came home that evening with the news. Alaeddin rubbed the lamp again.
"Build me a palace," he said to the spirit.
By morning, opposite the Sultan's palace, separated by a broad avenue, there stood a new building of extraordinary proportions — white marble and precious stone, with windows set in gold and silver lattice, stables full of horses, storerooms full of treasure, a household staff that seemed to materialise from nowhere. The Sultan looked out his window at dawn and stood there for a long time saying nothing.
The wedding took place amid festivities that the city talked about for years. Alaeddin rode through the streets throwing gold coins left and right, which endeared him to absolutely everyone. He was generous and brave and handsome and not at all as he had been at fifteen, when he had run away from the tailor's shop, and the Princess Badr al-Budur — looking at him at their wedding and remembering the Vizier's son trembling and fleeing from his own bed — thought she had been given rather good luck after all.
They lived in the new palace and were happy, and for a year or more everything was entirely well.
In Morocco, the sorcerer had been pacing.
He had thought Alaeddin dead. He had been almost certain of it — sealed underground with no food, no water, and no way out. But his calculations, when he finally made them, showed something different. The boy was alive. Not only alive: he was wealthy beyond imagination, married to a princess, master of a palace that the sorcerer recognised at once as the work of the lamp.
The lamp was in the palace. Not on Alaeddin's person — in the palace.
The sorcerer packed his things and made the journey to China.
He arrived, looked at the palace from across the street, and felt the fury of all those wasted years rise up in him like fire. He bought copper lamps — a whole basketful of bright new copper lamps — and went through the streets below the palace crying: "New lamps for old! Who will trade a new lamp for an old lamp?"
The Princess Badr al-Budur heard him from her window. She sent a slave to look. The slave came back and said there was a man offering new lamps in exchange for old ones. The Princess thought this amusing — what merchant gave new things for old? — and then a slave girl said that she had seen, in Alaeddin's apartment, an old battered lamp that he seemed to set great store by, though she couldn't imagine why.
The Princess didn't know about the lamp. Alaeddin had never told her. He had left it in his room without locking it away, which was, under the circumstances, an enormous mistake.
"Take the old lamp down," said the Princess, "and see if the man will exchange it."
He did.
The sorcerer walked out of the street, through the city gates, and out into the empty countryside until he was alone. Then he rubbed the lamp.
"Take this palace," he told the spirit, "with everything and everyone in it — including me — and put it down in Africa, in my own country."
He closed his eyes.
The Sultan looked out his window in the morning and saw empty ground where the palace had been.
He did not take this well. He sent for Alaeddin, who arrived to find the Sultan in his audience hall with his guard drawn up around him, his face white with rage. The Sultan ordered him to produce his daughter within forty days or be executed.
Alaeddin had no idea what had happened. He went to his room — what remained of his room, in the Sultan's palace — and rubbed his hands together in despair, and felt the ring on his finger, and rubbed it.
The ring spirit appeared.
"Where is my wife?" said Alaeddin.
"In Africa," said the spirit. "The Moroccan magician took the palace there. I can take you to Africa, but I can't move the palace — only the lamp can do that."
"Take me to Africa," said Alaeddin.
He found himself outside his own palace on an African hillside. Through the window he could see his wife. He called to her; she looked down, and her face — she had been weeping for days, locked in by the sorcerer who came every night to pressure her and whom she loathed with every part of her — her face changed entirely when she saw him.
She opened a window and he climbed in.
They sat together and Alaeddin he asked about the sorcerer. What did he do? When did he come? What did he want? She told him everything. The sorcerer came each evening, tried to press his case, was refused, and left.
"When he comes tonight," said Alaeddin, "give him wine. Be friendly. Put this in his cup." He had taken a small packet of sleeping powder from the palace stores. "Then call me."
That evening the Princess smiled at the sorcerer for the first time, said she had decided she must accept what had happened, and offered him wine. He was so delighted that he drank it quickly. She refilled his cup. He drank that too. His eyes grew heavy. He slid sideways off his cushion.
Alaeddin walked in from the next room, found the lamp in the sorcerer's pocket, and killed him. Then he rubbed the lamp.
The palace, with everything and everyone in it, arrived back in China before morning.
The Sultan looked out his window. He wept with relief. He ran to find his daughter. The city celebrated for a week.
There was, however, one more matter.
The sorcerer had a brother — also a sorcerer, also from Morocco — and he discovered through his own calculations what had happened. He came to China to avenge it. He was, if anything, more dangerous than his brother, being more patient and more inventive. He spent some time in the city learning about Alaeddin's household, and hit upon a plan involving a celebrated holy woman named Fatimah who lived in a cave outside the city and was regarded by everyone as a saint and healer.
He killed Fatimah, took her robe, painted her distinctive marks on his own face, and walked into the city as her. He was admitted to the palace to bless it and everyone in it. He pointed out, while wandering through the great hall, that the decoration was perfect in every respect except one: what the hall really needed, to be truly magnificent, was the egg of a rukh — the great mythical bird — hung from the centre of the ceiling.
The Princess, pleased with everything he had said about the palace, mentioned this to Alaeddin that evening. Alaeddin rubbed the lamp.
When the spirit appeared, Alaeddin asked for the rukh's egg.
The spirit's voice, when it answered, was not the usual warm and willing tone. It went very cold and very quiet, and said: "Is it not enough that I have served you in everything, done everything you have asked, moved mountains and palaces and armies for you — and now you ask me to bring you the egg of my master, to hang him from the ceiling of your hall for your decoration? If I were not sworn to serve the lamp I would burn this palace to ashes."
Alaeddin went very still. Then he said, "Tell me what you know."
The spirit told him about the false Fatimah.
Alaeddin found the sorcerer in the next room, still in the holy woman's robe, and that was the end of that.
After this, no more enemies came, and no more magicians, and the palace stayed where it was, which was where it was supposed to be. Alaeddin grew into the kind of man his father might have despaired of producing: generous, just, brave in battle when battle came, and beloved by everyone in the city from the Sultan down to the children in the streets. He never forgot where he had come from, and he kept his mother in comfort until the end of her days, and he and the Princess Badr al-Budur were happy together for a very long time.
The lamp he kept safe, and secret, and in a place where no one would think to look for it.
And this is the tale of Alaeddin and the Wonderful Lamp.