Page:Fairy tales from the Arabian nights.djvu/488

 senses, as plainly appeared by his asking everybody he met, at every house, if they had seen his palace, or could tell him any news of it.

These questions made everybody believe that Aladdin was mad. Some laughed at him, but people of sense and humanity, particularly those who had had any connection of business or friendship with him, really pitied him. For three days he rambled about the city after this manner, without coming to any decision, or eating anything, but what some good people forced him to take out of charity.

At last, as he could no longer, in his unhappy condition, stay in a city where he had formerly made so fine a figure, he quitted it, and took the road to the country; and after he had traversed several fields in frightful uncertainty, at the approach of night he came to a river-side. There, possessed by his despair, he said to himself,

'Where shall I seek my palace? In what province, country, or part of the world, shall I find that and my dear princess? I shall never succeed; I had better free myself at once from so much fruitless fatigue and such bitter grief.' He was just going to throw himself into the river, but, as a good Mussulman, true to his religion, he thought he could not do it without first saying his prayers. Going to prepare himself, he went first to the river-side to wash his hands and face, according to custom. But that place being steep and slippery, owing to the water's beating against it, he slid down, and would certainly have fallen into the river, but for a little rock which projected about two feet out of the earth. Happily also for him, he still had on the ring which the African magician put on his finger before he went down into the subterranean abode to fetch the precious lamp. In slipping down the bank he rubbed the ring so hard, by holding on the rock, that immediately the genie appeared whom he saw in the cave where the magician left him.

'What wouldst thou have?' said the genie, 'I am ready to obey thee as thy slave, and the slave of all those that have that ring on their finger; both I and the other slaves of the ring.'

Aladdin, agreeably surprised at an apparition he so little expected, replied, 'Save my life, genie, a second time, either by showing me to the place where the palace I have caused to be built