The Fisherman and the Genie
Four casts of a net, a brass jar sealed with lead, and one very good question
Page 1
There was once a poor fisherman who lived in a house of mud brick above a beach, with a wife and three children and almost nothing else. He had one net and one small boat and one rule, which he had kept for thirty years and never broken: four casts a day, and whatever the sea gave him on those four casts he took home, and he did not throw a fifth time, not ever, whatever the day had been like. Some mornings the four casts fed his family for a week. Some mornings they fed nobody. On the morning this story begins he came down to the shore before the sun was up, with his net over his shoulder, and stood for a moment looking at the flat grey water of the bay going slowly gold at the edges — and then he waded in to the waist and threw for the first time.
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The first cast came up so heavy that he thought his luck had changed for ever, and he hauled on it for a quarter of an hour, and what he dragged out of the water was a drowned donkey, tangled to the ears in his own net, and the net torn half across. He said what he had to say about that, and mended it, and threw again. The second cast came up heavier still, and it was a great jar full of mud and sand from the bottom of the bay. He emptied it, and rinsed the net, and threw a third time. And the third cast brought up broken pots, potsherds and bits of old green glass, and nothing else at all. The sun was fully up by then. He washed his net out, and spread his hands, and said what fishermen in that country say when there is nothing left to say — and then he waded back in, because he had one cast left.
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The fourth cast was heavy too, and he did not let himself hope, and he hauled it in slowly in case the net went again. And what came up out of the water, streaming and bright in the sun, was a jar. It was a jar of yellow brass, tall as his arm and sealed at the mouth with a thick stopper of lead, and on the lead was stamped a seal he had never seen before — a knot of writing in a ring, the seal of Solomon, pressed into it long ago and perfectly clear. It was heavy. He tipped it and something shifted inside. He sat down on the wet sand with it between his knees and turned it round and round, and thought that brass alone would buy a month's flour, and that whatever was in it was a bonus, and that he was going to be extremely careful about this. Then he took out his knife and began to work the lead out of the mouth.
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The lead came out. Nothing happened at all for a moment, and he tipped the jar to look inside, and there was nothing in it. And then a thread of smoke came out of the mouth of it, and then more, and then it came out in a column that went up and up into the sky over the beach — a great deal more smoke than that jar could possibly have held — and it spread and gathered and began to take a shape. It turned slowly in the air above the shore. It grew a chest, and arms, and a wild beard of drifting vapour, and two eyes like lamps a long way up. And when it was finished it stood over the beach as tall as the minaret of the mosque behind the village, and it looked down at the extremely small man standing at its feet beside an open brass jar, and the whole bay went quiet.
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The ifrit spoke, and its voice came off the rocks of the headland. It said that it had been shut in that jar by Solomon himself, eighteen hundred years ago, for refusing to obey him. It said that for the first hundred years it had sworn to make whoever freed it rich for ever. For the second hundred it had sworn to open all the treasures of the earth to him. For the third it had sworn to make him a king and grant him three wishes every day. And then, it said, four hundred years went by, and nobody came, and nobody came, and it swore a last oath: that it would kill whoever let it out, and allow him only one mercy — to choose how. The fisherman stood on the wet sand in front of this and said nothing for a long moment. Then he said that it was a hard thing to be killed for doing somebody a kindness, and that he had only one question he would like answered first.
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The question was this. The fisherman said that he did not believe the ifrit had ever been in that jar. He said that he had the jar in his hands and could see the inside of it, and that the ifrit's hand alone was bigger than the whole of it, and that whatever had happened eighteen hundred years ago, no creature of that size had ever been inside a vessel of this size, and that he would not believe it if he were told it by a hundred men. The ifrit was extremely offended. It said that it had been in the jar. The fisherman said that he would have to see it. And the ifrit — who had spent eighteen hundred years with nobody to argue with and could not bear to lose this one — dissolved itself back into smoke, and poured down out of the sky over the beach, and went back in through the neck of the jar; and the last of it called up, muffled, from inside, asking whether that was proof enough.
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He carried the jar down to the water's edge and stood there holding it over the sea, and said that he was going to throw it back where it came from and build a house on the beach and warn every fisherman in the bay never to cast a net there again. And then the ifrit began to talk — and the whole thing went into reverse. It swore. It swore by the seal on the lead and by every oath that binds its kind, that if it were let out again it would do the fisherman nothing but good, and would make him rich, and would never harm him or his; and the fisherman, who had been poor his whole life and had the thing in his hands, made it swear three times over, out loud, with the jar still held over the water. Then he pulled the lead, and the smoke came out, and the ifrit stood over the beach again — and the first thing it did was put one enormous foot through the brass jar and kick it into the sea, which the fisherman thought was a very good sign.
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Then the ifrit told him to pick up his net and follow, and it went inland, and he went after it — up off the shore, past the village, over the stony hills behind, through a cleft in the rock he had lived beside his whole life and had never once walked through. And on the other side of it there was a lake. It lay perfectly still among four bare mountains, and it had not been there yesterday, and there was no stream running into it or out of it. The ifrit told him to cast his net in it. He did, and he brought it up full of fish — but they were fish of four colours, and only four: one white, one red, one blue, one yellow, and nothing else. Take four of them to the Sultan, said the ifrit, one of each colour, and he will make you rich; and come to this lake four times only, once on each of four days, and never a fifth time. Then it struck the ground with one foot, and the earth opened and took it, and the fisherman was alone beside a lake that should not exist, with four coloured fish in his net.
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He took the four fish to the palace, and the Sultan had never seen anything like them and paid him four hundred gold pieces on the spot, and sent them down to the kitchen to be cooked. And that is where this tale slips sideways into another one. The cook laid the four fish in the pan — and the kitchen wall opened. It did not crack or fall; it opened, like a curtain, and a young woman came out of it in a blue silk gown with a wand in her hand, and she touched the pan and asked the fish, by name, whether they were keeping their covenant. And all four fish lifted their heads out of the oil and answered her, together, that they were. Then she turned the pan over, and the wall closed, and she was gone; and the cook sat down on the floor. They cooked four more the next day and the same thing happened, and the day after that, and on the fourth day the Sultan went down to the kitchen himself to see it, and then set off into the mountains to find out where on earth those fish were coming from — which is a long story, and a famous one, and it is not this one.
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The Sultan's business in the mountains ended well, and when he came back he did not forget where the fish had come from. The fisherman's eldest daughter was married into the palace household and his son was given a post, and he himself was given more money than he had made in forty years on that beach. He built a proper house above the shore, with a courtyard and a lemon tree and a room for every child. And he went on fishing. He went down to the water before sunrise just as he always had, with the net over his shoulder, because he was a fisherman and because he liked it — and he still threw four casts and no more, and he never once threw a fifth; and he never went back to the lake among the four mountains, not after the fourth day, not ever, because he had been told not to, and because he was the kind of man who does a thing properly the first time he is told.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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