"With love and good will."--It hath reached me, O King of the
Age, that Alaeddin could not get at the Lamp so as to hand it to
his uncle the Maghrabi, that false felon, so the Magician waxed
foolish with fury for that he could not win to his wish. Yet had
the lad promised truthfully that he would give it up as soon as
he might reach ground, without lying thought or ill-intent. But
when the Moorman saw that he would not hand it over, he waxed
wroth with wrath exceeding and cut off all his hopes of winning
it; so he conjured and adjured and cast incense amiddlemost the
fire, when forthright the slab made a cover of itself, and by the
might of magic ridded the entrance; the earth buried the stone as
it was aforetime and Alaeddin, unable to issue forth, remained
underground. Now the Sorcerer was a stranger, and, as we have
mentioned, no uncle of Alaeddin's, and he had misrepresented
himself and preferred a lying claim, to the end that he might
obtain the Lamp by means of the lad for whom his Hoard had been
upstored. So the Accursed heaped the earth over him and left him
to die of hunger. For this Maghrabi was an African of Afrikiyah
proper, born in the Inner Sunset-land, and from his earliest age
upwards he had been addicted to witchcraft and had studied and
practiced every manner of occult science, for which unholy lore
the city of Africa[FN#97] is notorious. And he ceased not to read
and hear lectures until he had become a past-master in all such
knowledge. And of the abounding skill in spells and conjurations
which he had acquired by the perusing and the lessoning of forty
years, one day of the days he discovered by devilish inspiration
that there lay in an extreme city of the cities of China, named
Al-Kal'as,[FN#98] an immense Hoard, the like whereof none of the
Kings in this world had ever accumulated: moreover, that the most
marvellous article in this Enchanted Treasure was a wonderful