Aladdin and the Magic Lamp

A boy who would not do anything

In a city a very long way east of here there lived a widow and her son, and the son was called Aladdin, and he was a great trial to her.

His father had been a tailor and had tried to teach him the trade, and Aladdin had not learned it. He would not learn anything. He spent his days in the street with the other idle boys, and his mother spun cotton late into the night to buy bread, and when she asked him to help he always meant to tomorrow.

This is the honest beginning of the story, and it matters, so I am telling it properly. He was not a hero yet. He was not really anything yet.

Then one afternoon a stranger came up to him in the market — a tall man in a traveling coat, with rings on his fingers — and said, "Are you not Aladdin, the son of the tailor?"

And Aladdin, who had never in his life been asked for by name by a rich man, said that he was.

The uncle who was not an uncle

The stranger embraced him and wept a little and said he was Aladdin's uncle, his father's own brother, home at last after forty years abroad.

He was nothing of the kind. He was a magician from the far west of the world, and he had come two thousand miles because his art had told him a particular thing lay buried near this city, and that only one particular boy could lift it out.

But he gave Aladdin's mother gold for dinner, and he bought Aladdin a fine new coat, and he spoke to him kindly all week, which nobody much had. So when the uncle said come walking with me tomorrow, I want to show you something, Aladdin went.

They walked a long way past the gardens and out between two hills, and there the magician lit a fire and threw a powder on it and said some words. The ground groaned and split. Under it was a flat stone with a brass ring in the middle.

"Lift it," said the magician.

"I can't."

"Say your own name and your father's name, and lift it."

Aladdin did, and the stone came up like a feather in his hand.

The cave, and the quarrel

Below was a stair going down into the dark.

"Go down," said the magician. "You will pass through three halls. Do not touch the walls. Do not touch anything at all, however it shines. Beyond them is a garden, and in the garden a lamp burning in a niche. Bring me the lamp. Nothing else."

Then he pulled a ring off his own finger and pushed it onto Aladdin's. "For safety," he said.

Aladdin went down.

The halls were full of silver and gold, piled loose, and he did not touch it. The garden had trees on it hung with fruit made of clear stones in every color, and those he did fill his pockets with, because he was twelve and they looked like glass and he thought they were pretty. And at the end he found the lamp, alight in its niche, and he blew it out and put it in his shirt and came back up the stair.

At the top he could not climb out. The steps were too high and his arms were too full.

"Hand me the lamp first," said the magician, leaning in.

"Pull me up first," said Aladdin, "and then I'll give it to you."

They said this to one another several times, each getting angrier, until the magician lost his temper entirely — and it was his temper, and nothing else, that ruined him. He threw his powder on the fire, said his words backwards, and the stone crashed down over the hole with Aladdin still under it.

Then he walked back to the far west of the world, two thousand miles, with nothing.

Two spirits, and a very large surprise

Aladdin sat in the dark for two days.

On the third, miserable and wringing his hands, he happened to rub the ring the magician had pushed onto his finger — and the dark filled up with an enormous figure that bowed and said: *What wouldst thou? I am the slave of the ring, and the slave of whoever wears it.*

Aladdin, when he could speak, asked to be taken home.

And he was.

His mother fed him and cried over him, and then, because there was nothing else in the house to sell, she took out the grubby little lamp to clean it up for market.

She rubbed it once.

The room went dark and then very bright, and a second spirit stood there, far larger than the first, and asked what she required — and Aladdin's mother fainted clean away on the floor, which is the only sensible thing anybody does in this story.

Aladdin picked up the lamp himself.

"Bring us something to eat," he said.

What he did with it, which took years

Here is the part people forget.

He did not ask for everything at once. He asked for dinner. Then, when the silver dishes it came on could be sold, he sold one — and he went and sat with the merchants in the market and found out, slowly and with some embarrassment, that he had been cheated the first four times because he had no idea what anything was worth.

So he learned. He learned what silver cost and what glass cost, and one day a jeweler looked at the fruit from the garden, still in the corner of the room, and went pale, because they were not glass at all.

He learned how to talk to people who were not idle boys. He learned what a man was supposed to say to a Sultan and how low to bow and when not to speak. It took him years, and the lamp could have done none of it for him, because a spirit can fetch a palace but cannot make anybody worth living in one.

By the time he asked the lamp for the great things — the palace, the horses, the forty trays of jewels carried to the Sultan's gate — he was a different person from the boy in the cave. That is the whole point of him.

The magician comes back

The magician, far away, looked into his sand one evening to gloat over a dead boy, and found him alive, and married, and living in a palace.

So he came back. He bought a basket of bright new lamps and walked under Aladdin's windows crying *new lamps for old!* — and the princess, who had never been told the story of the lamp because Aladdin had never quite got round to it, saw the battered old thing on its shelf and thought she was doing him a kindness.

The magician had the lamp, and the palace, and the princess, on a hillside in Africa by morning.

But he did not have the ring. Nobody had ever thought about the ring again, including Aladdin, who was standing in an empty square where his home used to be, wringing his hands — and who felt the metal turn on his finger and remembered.

The first spirit could not undo the second. It said so plainly. What it could do was carry one man two thousand miles before breakfast, and set him down outside a window, and leave the rest to him.

The rest took cleverness, and his wife's nerve, and a cup of something the magician should not have drunk. They were home by the end of the week.

And Aladdin, who had once not been able to be bothered to learn his father's trade, ruled that city for a very long time and was remembered as having been rather good at it.