Aladdin and the Magic Lamp

In a faraway city, where the rooftops glittered in the sun and the streets smelled of cinnamon and roasted chestnuts, there lived a boy named Aladdin. He and his mother were poor: she spun cotton, while Aladdin spent whole days chasing around the bazaar with the other boys and would not learn any trade.

“Son,” his mother would sigh, “when will you finally come to your senses?”

“Tomorrow, Mama,” Aladdin would smile. And tomorrow he ran around the bazaar again.

One day a stranger came up to him, in a dark cloak, with a pointed little beard and eyes that darted about like black beetles. He was a sorcerer from faraway Maghreb, from the land beyond the desert. He looked Aladdin over for a long time, and then he spread his arms wide.

“My nephew! I am your uncle, your father’s brother. I have wandered for forty years and at last found you!”

Aladdin was surprised: he had never heard of any uncle. But the stranger brought his mother a basket of dates, bought Aladdin a new kaftan and promised to set him up with a shop. His mother wept for joy, and the boy never stopped to wonder why a stranger would go to so much trouble.

The next morning the “uncle” led Aladdin out of the city. They walked a long time, until the gardens were far behind them and bare grey mountains rose all around. In a narrow gorge the sorcerer told Aladdin to light a fire, threw a pinch of powder into it and muttered something nobody could understand. The ground shook — boom! — and split open. At the bottom of the pit lay a stone slab with a copper ring.

“There is treasure under this slab,” the sorcerer whispered. “But only you can lift it. Pull the ring and say the names of your father and grandfather.”

Aladdin pulled, and the slab rose as easily as the lid of a chest. Steps led down into the dark.

“Listen carefully,” said the sorcerer, and he slipped a ring onto Aladdin’s finger. “This ring will keep you safe. You will pass through three halls where jars of gold stand. Touch nothing, not even brushing the wall with the hem of your kaftan. Beyond them lies a garden, and in it an old lamp burns on a ledge. Put it out, pour out the oil and bring it to me. Nothing more is needed.”

Aladdin went down. The three halls were silent and cold, and the jars gleamed in the darkness, but the boy walked on with his kaftan gathered up and touched nothing. Beyond the last door a garden opened up, such as he had never seen. On the trees, instead of apples and plums, hung gems: red as cherries, green as spring grass, clear as dew. Aladdin did not know they were precious stones and thought they were coloured glass. But they were so pretty that he stuffed his shirt full of them.

The lamp stood on a ledge, plain, copper and sooty. Aladdin put it out, poured away the oil and tucked it inside his shirt, among the glass apples, as he thought.

By the time he reached the steps, it was already getting dark above.

“Hand me the lamp, nephew!” the sorcerer called.

“Give me your hand, uncle, the step is high and my shirt is full. I’ll climb out and hand it over.”

“First the lamp!”

“First your hand!”

They argued like this until the sorcerer lost his temper. He threw powder into the fire again, shouted his word — and the slab crashed back into place. It was dark, completely dark.

Aladdin shouted, pounded on the stone and called for his mother. No one answered. The door to the garden had vanished too. For two days he sat in the black silence, hungry and cold, and only now did he understand that this was no uncle at all. The sorcerer needed the lamp, but he could not take it himself — he could only receive it from someone else’s hands.

On the third day Aladdin folded his hands to pray and, without meaning to, rubbed the ring. Whoosh! A green light split the darkness, and a giant rose up before him in a cloud of mist.

“I am the spirit of the ring! What is your wish, master?”

“Home!” was all Aladdin could cry.

And that very moment he was standing on the road outside the city, under the warm evening sky.

His mother wept and laughed at the same time when he stepped over the threshold. Aladdin ate until his ears wiggled, and then he told her everything. They tipped the gems into a basket under the bench — what use was all that glass? But his mother picked up the lamp and shook her head.

“What a dirty thing. I’ll clean it up and sell it, and we’ll have bread.”

She took some sand and a rag and had barely rubbed the side of the lamp when the house filled with smoke. The smoke swirled, rose to the ceiling and became a giant so enormous that his head bent against the beams. He was smoky gold, like the sun through dust, with eyes like two glowing embers.

“I am the spirit of the lamp!” he thundered. “I and all the spirits of the lamp serve whoever holds it in their hands. What is your wish?”

Aladdin’s mother simply sat down on the floor. But Aladdin, who had already seen one giant, caught up the lamp and said:

“We are hungry. Bring us something to eat.”

The genie vanished and came back in a moment with twelve silver platters piled with food, with bread, and with a jug of cool sherbet.

From then on they never went hungry. But Aladdin did not ask the genie for palaces or chests of treasure. When the money ran out, he sold one silver platter, and they lived simply. He no longer ran around the bazaar. Instead he walked among the shops of goldsmiths and jewellers, listening, asking, learning. That is how he found out that his “glass apples” were gems, finer than any king owned.

One day news raced through the city: the Sultan’s daughter, Princess Badr al-Budur, was going to the baths, and everyone must close their shops and stay off the streets. Aladdin saw her only for a moment, from behind a door, when the wind lifted the edge of the curtain on her litter. Her face was bright as the full moon — no wonder her name meant “Full Moon.” From then on Aladdin could think of nothing else.

“Mother,” he said that evening, “go to the Sultan and ask for the princess’s hand for me.”

“Son, have you lost your mind?” His mother threw up her hands. “Who would let a poor spinner into the palace?”

“They will let us in,” Aladdin smiled, and he poured the gems from the basket onto a porcelain tray.

For a whole week his mother stood in the hall where the Sultan heard his people, and every day nobody called her. Only on the seventh day did the Sultan himself notice a woman with a tray under a shawl.

When the shawl was lifted, the hall gasped: the gems shone so brightly that the courtiers squinted. The Sultan turned a red stone the size of a pigeon’s egg between his fingers for a long time.

“Whoever makes such gifts is worthy of my daughter,” he said. “But let him wait three months.”

And the Grand Vizier, who dreamed of marrying the princess to his own son, kept whispering in the Sultan’s ear. When the three months had passed, the Sultan, wanting to get rid of the suitor, named a price that surely no one could pay: forty golden bowls full of gems, carried by forty servants dressed in silk.

Aladdin simply rubbed the lamp.

The next morning a procession such as the city had never seen passed through the streets. Forty servants in silk robes carried golden bowls on their heads, and in every bowl the precious stones blazed like fire. People ran out of their houses, and children ran alongside. The Sultan stood on the steps and could not find any words. The Vizier only chewed his moustache.

“Call the suitor!” ordered the Sultan.

Aladdin rode up on a white horse, wearing clothes the genie had brought him, and bowed simply and politely, as he had learned among the merchants. The Sultan liked him at once.

“Allow me, my lord, to build a house for the princess opposite your palace,” Aladdin asked. “So that she can see her father’s windows every morning.”

In a single night the genie of the lamp raised a palace of white marble on the empty ground. In the middle was a round hall with twenty-four windows, and the windows were framed with emeralds, rubies and diamonds. Only one window Aladdin had purposely ordered left unfinished.

In the morning the Sultan looked out of his window, rubbed his eyes and called the Vizier.

“Well, what do you say now?”

The Vizier said it must be sorcery. But the Sultan was no longer listening. He went to see the marvel and stopped in front of the unfinished window.

“Why is this one without ornaments?”

“I left it for you, my lord,” Aladdin answered. “So that you can adorn it yourself, like a father who gives his daughter a gift.”

The Sultan summoned all his jewellers. They worked for a month, spent all the Sultan’s treasure — and did not finish even half. Then Aladdin thanked them and sent them away, and that night the genie finished the window. The Sultan laughed and embraced his son-in-law.

The wedding feast lasted forty days. And Badr al-Budur, who had looked at her bridegroom with fear at first, soon saw that he was kind, cheerful and generous to the poor, and she loved him with all her heart.

Meanwhile, far beyond the desert, in Maghreb, the sorcerer spread his signs on the sand and went still. The signs said: Aladdin is alive, rich, and has the lamp.

“Ah, you little brat!” he hissed. “Just you wait.”

He came to the city and waited until Aladdin went off on a hunting trip of several days. Then he bought a dozen brand-new shiny lamps from a coppersmith and walked beneath the palace, calling out:

“I exchange old lamps for new! Old for new!”

People laughed: some fool. The princess’s maids laughed too, leaning out of the windows. And one of them remembered:

“There is an old, sooty lamp on a shelf in the hall. Let’s trade it, and we’ll have a new one!”

The princess did not know what lamp it was. Aladdin had never told anyone about it. She laughed and waved her hand: go ahead, trade.

The sorcerer snatched the old lamp, thrust a new one at the maid and that same evening, outside the city, rubbed it. And in the night the genie of the lamp, who obeys whoever owns it, lifted the palace with the princess inside and carried it across the desert to faraway Maghreb.

In the morning the Sultan looked out of his window — and there was only emptiness.

His anger was terrible. He ordered Aladdin brought back from the hunt, and the guards, though they were fond of him, had to bring him before the throne.

“Where is my daughter?” the Sultan thundered.

Aladdin looked at the empty place and turned pale.

“Give me forty days, my lord. If I do not bring the princess back, do with me as you wish.”

For forty days he wandered and asked everyone he met, but nobody had seen where the palace had flown. One evening, sad and tired, he went down to a river to wash his face, leaned on a rock — and rubbed the ring.

“I am the spirit of the ring! What is your wish, master?”

“Bring back the palace and the princess!”

“This I cannot do,” said the giant, bowing his head. “The palace was carried off by the spirit of the lamp, and he is stronger than I.”

“Then carry me to where they are.”

And that very moment Aladdin found himself beneath the windows of his white palace in a foreign land, where the wind blew sand and the air smelled of dry herbs.

At dawn one of the maids looked out of the window and cried out. The princess ran over and saw Aladdin below. She opened a little door in secret, and they hugged as if they had not seen each other for a hundred years.

“Where is the old lamp that stood on the shelf?” asked Aladdin.

“Oh,” whispered the princess, and she lowered her eyes. “I gave it away. And now the sorcerer comes every day and wants me to forget you. He carries the lamp on him, in his shirt. He never lets it go.”

Aladdin thought.

“Then let him release it himself. Be kind to him today. Invite him to supper.”

He ran into the city and bought a powder from an herbalist, the kind that makes one sleep soundly. In the evening the princess put on her finest dress, and the sorcerer, delighted that she was finally smiling, sat down at the table.

“Taste my sorbet,” said the princess, and she handed him a cup.

The sorcerer drank it in one gulp. He wanted to say something — and did not. His head sank onto the table, and a moment later the hall was filled with snoring: hrrr, phew-w-w.

Aladdin came out from behind the curtain, carefully drew the lamp from the sorcerer’s shirt and rubbed it.

“I am here, master,” rumbled the smoky-golden giant.

“Take this man far, far beyond the desert, to where no roads lead to people. Let him wake up there and live as he can. And return the palace, with everyone in it, to its place.”

The giant took the sleeping sorcerer on his palm like a little bag of feathers and vanished. And the palace swayed gently, like a boat — and flew.

From then on the sorcerer was seen neither in Maghreb nor anywhere else in the world.

That morning the Sultan, as every day, looked sadly out of his window — and could not believe his eyes. The white palace stood in its place, twenty-four windows shone against the sun, and on the steps his daughter was waving to him.

The Sultan ran down the stairs, forgetting his crown. He hugged his daughter, hugged Aladdin and begged him to forgive his anger.

After that the lamp never left the house again. But Aladdin rarely rubbed it: whatever he needed, he now knew how to get himself — he had learned that in the bazaar, among merchants and craftsmen. And when the old Sultan passed away, Aladdin and Badr al-Budur ruled for many long years, wisely and fairly, and people said they had never had so good a ruler.

Late one evening Aladdin stood at the window of his palace. Below, the bazaar was falling asleep, where he had once run barefoot between the stalls. On a shelf stood the old copper lamp, dark and plain. Aladdin looked at it, smiled — and lit an ordinary candle.