Haroun and the Sea of Stories Read Free

in his most mysterious voice. ‘Now that’s something else again. That’s a Lake of Many Names, yes, sir, so it is.’
    Rashid went on trying to sound happy. He told Haroun about the Luxury Class Houseboat waiting for them on the Dull Lake. He talked about the ruined fairy castle in the silver mountains, and about the pleasure gardens built by the ancient Emperors, which came right down to the edge of the Dull Lake: gardens with fountains and terraces and pavilions of pleasure, where the spirits of the ancient kings still flew about in the guise of hoopoe birds. But after exactly eleven minutes Haroun stopped listening; and Rashid stopped talking, too, and they stared silently out of the window of the railway carriage at the unfolding boredom of the plains.
    They were met at the Railway Station in the Town of G by two unsmiling men wearing gigantic mustachios and loud yellow check pants. ‘They look like villains to me,’ Haroun thought, but he kept his opinion to himself. The two men drove Rashid and Haroun straight to the political rally. They drove past buses that dripped people the way a sponge drips water, and arrived at a thick forest of human beings, a crowd of people sprouting in all directions like leaves on jungle trees. There were great bushes of children and rows of ladies arranged in lines, like flowers in a giant flower-bed. Rashid was deep in his own thoughts, and was nodding sadly to himself.
    Then the thing happened, the Unthinkable Thing. Rashid went out on to the stage in front of that vast jungle of a crowd, and Haroun watched him from the wings—and the poor storyteller opened his mouth, and the crowd squealed in excitement—and now Rashid Khalifa, standing there with his mouth hanging open, found that it was as empty as his heart.
    ‘Ark.’ That was all that came out. The Shah of Blah sounded like a stupid crow. ‘Ark, ark, ark.’
    ~ ~ ~
     
    After that they were shut up in a steaming hot office while the two men with the mustachios and loud yellow check pants shouted at Rashid and accused him of having taken a bribe from their rivals, and suggested that they might cut off his tongue and other items also. —And Rashid, close to tears, kept repeating that he couldn’t understand why he had dried up, and promising to make it up to them. ‘In the Valley of K, I will be terrifico, magnifique,’ he vowed.
    ‘Better you are,’ the mustachioed men shouted back. ‘Or else, out comes that tongue from your lying throat.’
    ‘So when does the plane leave for K?’ Haroun butted in, hoping to calm things down. (The train, he knew, didn’t go into the mountains.) The shouting men began to shout even more loudly. ‘Plane? Plane? His papa’s stories won’t take off but the brat wants to fly! —No plane for you, mister and sonny. Catch a blasted bus.’
    ‘My fault again,’ Haroun thought wretchedly. ‘I started all this off. What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true . I asked that question and it broke my father’s heart. So it’s up to me to put things right. Something has to be done.’
    The only trouble was, he couldn’t think of a single thing.

Chapter 2
     

The Mail Coach
     

 
    The two shouting men shoved Rashid and Haroun into the back seat of a beaten-up car with torn scarlet seats, and even though the car’s cheap radio was playing movie music at top volume, the shouting men went on shouting about the unreliability of storytellers all the way to the rusting iron gates of the Bus Depot. Here Haroun and Rashid were dumped out of the car without ceremony or farewell.
    ‘Expenses of the journey?’ Rashid hopefully inquired, but the shouting men shouted, ‘More cash demands! Cheek! Cheek of the chappie!’ and drove away at high speed, forcing dogs and cows and women with baskets of fruit on their heads to dive out of the way. Loud music and rude words continued to pour out of the car as it zigzagged away into the distance.
    Rashid didn’t even bother to shake his