Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange (Hardcover Classics) Read Free Page A

by telling the story of ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is, which will surely lead the king ‘to hate scheming women and treacherous girls’. The blind man heard the story of ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is from his father, who heard it from his grandfather, a police chief, who heard about it from a man who was in prison for attacking women and who would rather stay there than re-encounter ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is. The prisoner then tells how, before he met ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is, he set out travelling as a merchant and after strange and supernatural adventures at sea he alone survived a shipwreck and came to be marooned on an island. After ten days a
jinni
arrived on the island with a lady in a glass chest. After spying on them and witnessing strange things, the merchant was eventually detected in his hiding place by the lady and he was forced to supply her with a ring, which she used to kill the
jinni
. A little later ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is tells the man the story of her birth, her subsequent adulterous and murderous career and how, after engineering many deaths, she was locked in a chest and pushed out to sea. Eventually the
jinni
rescued her from the wooden chest only to keep her captive in a glass chest. One of the stories she tells the merchant, purportedly to explain the making of the wooden chest she was cast out to sea in, is a story lifted from the Arabic
Alexander Romance
. In that story a king was trying to build a city on a coast, but night after night monsters came out of the sea to destroy it, until that king had talismanic images carved to repel the monsters, making it possible to complete the building of Alexandria. During her enforced sojourn with the
jinni
he told many stories of the wonders of the sea, and some of these she also relates to the marooned merchant. She also tells of how she got the
jinni
to use magic sand to destroy her home city and of her affair with another castaway and what happened to him after he raped a mermaid. Then she transmits the
jinni
’s story of how his father was killed by the monstrous
daran
and tells more about her time with her demonic captor and how she earlier tried to use the
daran
to kill him but failed. Finally, we are back in real time as, once her narrative has finished, the besotted merchant decides to stay with her and bring her to his home town. Though more sexual and homicidal adventures ensue, once they have left the island we have found our way out of the series of bizarrely boxedstories (though we never get back to the blind man who was relating all this to the bereaved king). The story describes itself as ‘a long, remarkable and curious story’, and it certainly is that.
    Although there are many overlaps and similarities between
Tales of the Marvellous
and the
Nights
, there are also subtle and not so subtle differences. The stories in the
Nights
often pretend to have a didactic aim, and in some cases that is clearly actually the case. The exordium of the manuscript of the
Nights
used by Galland boasted (not very convincingly) of its instructional purpose: ‘the purpose of writing this agreeable and entertaining book is the instruction of those who peruse it, for it abounds with highly edifying histories and excellent lessons for the people of distinction, and it provides them with the opportunity to learn the art of discourse, as well as what happened to kings from the beginnings of time’.
Tales of the Marvellous
makes no such claim, but only promises wonders and strangeness. Then, though both collections contain plenty of marvels and magic, arguably
Tales of the Marvellous
offers madder marvels, which come on thick and fast. There are other more incidental differences. The Umaiyad caliphs and their governors and generals feature more prominently in
Tales of the Marvellous
than in the
Nights
, and so do Christians. The fact that protagonists in
Tales of the Marvellous
frequently invoke the name of ‘Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, as well as the fact that