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"Wilt thou bargain with me yet further?" "My excellent friend," said Horace quietly, "you know perfectly well that you can't get yourself safely sealed up again in that bottle without my assistance. If you don't like my terms, and prefer to take your chance of finding an Efreet who is willing to brave the Lord Mayor, well, you've only to say so."
He furnishes in part the conceptions of Boots and Reynard; he is the prototype of Paul Pry and peeping Tom of Coventry; and in virtue of his ability to contract or expand himself at pleasure, he is both the Devil in the Norse Tale, whom the lad persuades to enter a walnut, and the Arabian Efreet, whom the fisherman releases from the bottle.
He was palpably anxious that Cairn should have confirmation of the Efreet story from the Indian.
He considered the ground of discussion an unhealthy one; this was the territory adjoining that of insanity. A fortune-teller from India proffered his services incessantly. "Imshi! imshi!" growled Sime. "Hold on," said Cairn smiling; "this chap is not an Egyptian; let us ask him if he has heard the rumour respecting the Efreet!" Sime reseated himself rather unwillingly.
"And where," said the sheikh, "is the way to the City of Brass, and the place wherein are the bottles? What distance is there between us and it?" The efreet answered: "It is near."
That makes two of them." "Surely I have spoken of him to thee as my deadliest foe? It is true that he is a powerful and vindictive Efreet, who hath long persecuted the beauteous Bedeea with hateful attentions. Yet it may be possible, by good fortune, to overthrow him." "Then I gather that any suitor for Bedeea's hand would be looked upon as a rival by the amiable Jarjarees?"
He found a full account of the combat with the Efreet in "The Story of the Second Royal Mendicant" in the first volume, and was unpleasantly surprised to discover that the Efreet's name was actually given as "Jarjarees, the son of Rejmoos, the son of Iblees" evidently the same person to whom Fakrash had referred as his bitterest foe.
"Far is he from being of an amiable disposition," answered the Jinnee, simply, "and he would be so transported by rage and jealousy that he would certainly challenge thee to mortal combat." "Then that settles it," said Horace. "I don't think any one can fairly call me a coward, but I do draw the line at fighting an Efreet for the hand of a lady I've never seen. How do I know he'll fight fair?"
"If Fakrash can shove me through all that without a fatal hitch somewhere," Ventimore told himself, "I shall be agreeably disappointed in him," But, after reading a few more lines, he cheered up. For the Efreet finished as a flame, and the Princess as a "body of fire." "And when we looked towards him," continued the narrator, "we perceived that he had become a heap of ashes."
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