Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/123

Rh Leaving the simplest form of the Forbidden Door, we have next to consider two very similar stories—The Man who never Laughed again and The Third Kalandar. In the former tale a young spendthrift, who is reduced to beggary, is hired to wait on eleven old men, who live together in a grand house, dress in mourning, and weep and lament. One by one they die, and the last cautions the youth not to open a particular door. This also is covered with cobwebs, and is fastened with steel padlocks. The youth opens it, and it leads him through a long passage to the shore of a sea (or river, in some versions), where a great eagle pounces upon him and carries him to an island. He is taken up by a ship, and conveyed to a country inhabited only by women, where he is married to a beautiful queen, and acknowledged as king. The queen again forbids him to open a particular door, but, after seven years, he ventures to do so, thinking to behold greater treasures than he had yet seen, but he finds only the bird within, which carries him back to the seashore. He returns to the house where he had lived with the old men, pines away with vain regrets, and dies. Mr. Hartland (Folk-Lore Journal, vol. iii. p. 230) thinks that there was probably only one forbidden door in the original form of the story, and that the absence of any allusion to the harem may be regarded as a sign of antiquity. Mr. Clouston (Book of Sindibad, pp. 308-310) refers to several cognate Indian stories. Sir Richard Burton once remarked to me that he considers the forbidden door as a test of whether the real hero, destined to perpetual felicity, has arrived. If he resisted the temptation and did not open the door, he would simply live happy ever afterwards, and there would be no story to relate.

The story of the Third Kalandar is on nearly the same lines as that of the man who never laughed again. Here a wandering prince arrives at a palace inhabited by one old man and ten young men all blind of the left eye, who lament and smear their faces with soot and ashes every night. On asking for an explanation of these strange things, the prince is sewn up in the skin of a ram, and carried by a rukh to another palace inhabited by forty damsels, with whom he remains till the end of the year, one or other being always at his disposal. At the beginning of the new year they leave him for forty days, strictly