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And I say to thee, as said the physician Douban to King Younan, "Spare me, so God may spare thee!" The Afrit laughed and started off inland, saying to the fisherman, 'Follow me. So he followed him, trembling and not believing that he should escape, and the Afrit led him to the backward of the town: then crossing a hill, descended into a spacious plain, in the midst of which was a lake of water surrounded by four little hills.
What was that Frank curse his religion! to thee, that thou must go every hour only to watch the house where he lay ill? He had cast thee off, when I came and comforted thee. Yet is he dearer! O the disgrace to me to have offered my love and to be thus rejected! Would to Allah I had never seen thy dirty, ugly, wicked thy accursed face! It is the face of a pig, of an afrît; so now thou knowest!
I am the daughter of a King of Farther India, by name Efitamous, Lord of the Ebony Islands, who married me to my cousin, but on my wedding-night an Afrit called Jerjis ben Rejmous, the mother's sister's son of Iblis, carried me off and flying away with me, set me down in this place whither he transported all that I needed of clothes and ornaments and furniture and meat and drink and so forth.
Then said she, "O my brother, let us take him up and carry him to Cairo, that we may compare him with the damsel and see whether of them is the handsomer." "I hear and obey," answered the Afrit; "this is right well advised, and I will carry him."
Then he set the bowl on his head and going up to the palace, as the Afrit had bidden him, presented the fish to the King, who wondered at them greatly, for that he had never seen their like, in shape or kind, and said to his Vizier, 'Give these fish to the cookmaid that the King of the Greeks sent us, and tell her to fry them. Now this was a damsel that he had received as a present from the King of the Greeks three days before and of whom he had not yet made trial in cookery.
No! And the fisherman said, 'Yes! Yes! Then the Afrit made his voice small and humbled himself and said, 'What wilt thou do with me, O fisherman? 'I mean to throw thee back into the sea, replied he; 'since thou hast lain there already eighteen hundred years, thou shalt lie there now till the hour of judgment.
His head was like a dome, his hands like pitchforks, his legs like masts, his mouth like a cavern, his teeth like rocks, his nostrils like trumpets, his eyes like lamps, and he was stern and lowering of aspect. When the fisherman saw the Afrit, he trembled in every limb; his teeth chattered and his spittle dried up and he knew not what to do.
The Vizier rose, wondering, and entered the draught-house, where he found the hunchbacked groom with his head in the slit and his heels in the air. At this sight he was confounded and said, "This is none other than the hunchback." So he called to him, "Hallo, hunchback!" The groom made no answer but a grunt, thinking it was the Afrit who spoke to him.
By Allah, I will throw thee back into the sea and build myself a house hard by, and all who come hither I will warn against fishing here, and say to them, "There is an Afrit in these waters, that gives those who pull him out their choice of deaths and how he shall kill them." When the Afrit heard this and found himself shut up in the vessel, he knew that the fisherman had outwitted him and strove to get out, but could not, for Solomon's seal prevented him; so he said to the fisherman, 'I did but jest with thee. 'Thou liest, O vilest and meanest and foulest of Afrits! answered he, and rolled the vessel to the brink of the sea; which when the Afrit felt, he cried out, 'No!
Now the cemetery was haunted by true- believing Jinn, and presently a Jinniyeh came out and seeing Bedreddin lying asleep, marvelled at his beauty and grace and said, "Glory be to God! This can be no other than one of the children of Paradise." Then she rose into the air to fly about, as was her wont, and met an Afrit flying, who saluted her, and she said to him, "Whence comest thou?"
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