Read Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange (Hardcover Classics) for Free Online

white elephants were collected for me; I lived for a thousand years and my kingdom covered both east and west, but when death came to me nothing of all that I had gathered was of any avail. You who see me, take heed for Time is not to be trusted.’
    In the fourth story, that of the golden tube, the message in the tube runs as follows:
‘In the Name of God Almighty – This world is transient while the next world is eternal. Our actions are tied around our necks; disasters are arrows; people set themselves goals; our livelihood is apportioned to us, and our appointed time is decreed. The world is filled with hope, and good deeds are the best treasures for a man to store up. Toleration is an adornment and hastiness is a disgrace … A man’s wife is the sweet flower of his life and finds acceptance as many such flowers do.’
    A treasure hunter might hope to end up rich: he should certainly end up conventionally pious.
    In Sura 89 of the Qur’an, Muslims and unbelievers are admonished:
Hast thou not seen how thy Lord did with Ad,
    Iram of the pillars,
    the like of which was never created in the land,
    and Thamood, who hollowed the rocks in the valley,
    and Pharaoh , he of the tent-pegs,
    who were all insolent in the land
    and worked much corruption therein?
    Thy Lord unloosed on them a scourge of chastisement;
    surely thy Lord is ever on the watch.
    So also in
Tales of the Marvellous
a good Muslim should take warning from what befell the great kings in the pagan past.
    The golden tube also contains a promise: ‘Whoever wishes to see a wonder should go to the Scented Mountain.’ One gets the sense that the treasure hunters are not so much seeking tangible treasures but really they are on a quest for adventure and strangeness. The story of a quest for treasure turns out to be the story of the quest for a story. As the man on the Third Quest says, when the centaur tries to bribe him not to see the magical crown, ‘We only want to look at marvels and to see what we have never seen before, and if we see the crown we can put it back in its place.’ (The plot of the Third Quest has a faint but eerie resemblance to Kipling’s story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’).
The Pagan Past
    The history of medieval Egypt took place in the shadow of the pyramids. Shepherds took their flocks through the outlying rubble of Karnak, and women washed clothes in the shade of the ruins of Philae. Since knowledge of hieroglyphs and the real history of Egypt had been lost, a fantasy history was constructed. The scale of the ruins, far beyond the ability of any medieval sultan to match, suggested the supernatural power and fabulous wealth of the bygone dynasties of pre-Islamic times. One of the glories of Egypt was the number of marvels it contained. At the beginning of ‘Mahliya and al-Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’ the Arab general ‘Amr ibn al-‘As marvels at a great ruin at Heliopolis in Egypt. He ‘saw a huge old building bigger than any he had ever seen, surrounded by remarkable remains’. This leads him on to ask the hermit Matrun for its story. According to Muslim lore Ikhmim in Upper Egypt was the capital of the country’s sorcerers (though in the story of Mahliya this pre-eminent role has been usurped by Samannud ). The sheer wild inventiveness of this story, with its jumbling of Muslim, Christian and pagan beliefs and rituals, cannot pass without comment. Here we have a mechanical vulture, visionary dreams, conversation with a pagan god, magical transformations, thrones of wrath and of mercy, an enchanted gazelle, a herder of giant ostriches, lustful
jinn
, speaking idols, a queen of the crows, a weeping lion, a fortress guarded by talismans, a crocodile with pearls in its ears, the sacrifice of virgins to the Nile and much else. The narrative is one long carnival of extravagant fantasy. (Al-Maqrizi and other Arab historians told the story of how every year a virgin was sacrificed to the Nile in order to ensure itsflooding,