Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/48

558 "He looked at the jug, then at me, then back at the jug. 'I'll fix that,' he said, and got the fire-shovel from the wood-bin and kicked the jug onto it. The floor was charred where the jug had lain.

walked over to the nearest chair, and, slumping into it heavily, sat staring at the charred spot on the floor. 'That's why I've been drinking,' he explained then, simply. 'Living with that jug for two months has done things to me.'

"After a while his gaze lifted to my face. Until that moment I would never have believed that a man's eyes could carry such a concentration of mingled horror and fascination in them.

"He began, almost dreamily, to talk, to hazard conjecture upon conjecture, to speculate upon the nature of the thing in the jug.

Bowen,' he said, and I could see that look of fascinated horror deepening in his eyes, 'you've read The Arabian Nights, of course. You remember those tales of the Jinn?' He laughed jerkily. 'The thought has occurred to me that I might have one of those boys cooped up in that jug. Fantastic notion, eh? The Jinn are supposed to have been both malevolent and benign; let's hope that the fellow over there on the fire-shovel—look at him jump! — is of the latter variety. He might get out of his jug some day, and if I were in the vicinity I'd prefer to have him in an amiable mood.' He paused, and a moody grin twisted across his face. 'I guess I've aggravated him some, with those toastings. He doesn't seem to like them.'

My conception of the Jinn has always been that they were flame demons,' I interrupted. 'It doesn't seem plausible that a little fire like yours could bother such an entity to any extent. Of course—just to keep the record clear—I want you to understand that I think you've got bats in your belfry. You'll probably be able, in time, to explain your Mexican jumping-bean jug without any recourse to Jinn, or afreets, or The Arabian Nights, either.'

"His moody grin returned. 'It may interest you to know,' he continued dreamily, and I could see that he really didn't care whether I was there or not, that he would have gone on talking to himself, speculating, advancing and weighing various theories in his own mind were I not there at all, 'that your notion of the Jinn is pure Mohammedan superstition. Of course any conception of flame creatures is nonsense—as untenable as Empedocles' theory of the elements; earth, air, fire, and water. In ancient Arabian belief the Jinn were quite different. True, they were volatile as smoke, but they were corporeal; you remember that they could be confined—even in a jug. The real Jinn were not supernatural; they were merely creatures of such rarity that their purely natural attributes seemed to the Arabs to partake of the supernatural. All the demonology in the world had its origin in fact, Bowen. It's not impossible—just because such creatures don't exist today—that there was on this earth at some time in the remote past a race of creatures possessing the ability to change their shape and distend their beings at will; creatures which the early Arabs knew as the Jinn. Good God! we have plants today that live wholly upon the moisture in the air, and grow with tremendous rapidity, too. Who can