The Tale of Prince Agib

“My story,” said the Third Calender, “differs from my two friends’. Fate took their right eyes; mine I lost by my own folly. My name is Agib, son of King Cassib, whose capital was a splendid seaport. When I succeeded to my father’s throne, I visited the mainland provinces and nearby islands to gain my subjects’ affection. These journeys gave me a taste for sailing. I ordered a fleet prepared and set out to explore more distant seas.”

Fair winds held for forty days. Then a storm drove us far off course for ten days. When the weather finally broke, the pilot confessed he knew no landmark on any chart. A sailor climbed the mast and reported a dark mass. The pilot grew pale as cloth and cried, “We near the Magnetic Mountain—its pull will draw every nail from the ship until she falls to pieces under our feet!” The sailors feared that they would die and began making their wills. Even as he spoke we heard the iron fly with a sound like a hail of stones; the planks opened; the sea came in. Men clutched spars and chests. I swam until my arms failed, swallowed water, rose again. After a long struggle I alone was cast on a low strip of land at the mountain’s foot, bruised, salt-stained, and alone—the rest, so far as I ever knew, gone to the deep.

Steps cut in the rock led straight upward—so narrow that a light breeze might have blown me into the sea, for there was no footing to either side. I climbed until I reached a brass dome and the statue of a brass horseman, exactly as the pilot had described in his last warning. Worn out, I slept. In a dream a figure stood over me: “Dig under the horseman’s feet; you will find a bow of brass and three arrows of lead. Shoot the statue in the breast; it will fall, and the sea will rise to the foot of the steps. A boat will come with a silent rower who holds an oar in each hand. Step aboard—but if you would see your kingdom again, do not speak the name of Allah.” I woke, dug, found the bow and arrows, and shot. The horseman toppled into the sea; the water climbed the steps; a boat appeared. I stepped in without a word, and the metal oarsman rowed for nine days without stopping. Then land appeared, and in my joy I forgot the dream and cried out, “Allah be praised!” At that very moment the boat and its rower sank beneath me. I swam and floated by turns for a day and a night, and when my strength was almost gone a great wave threw me onto a flat shore.

The island was green with fruit trees and streams, but there was no one on it, and the mainland lay far off. Next morning I saw a ship steering straight for it, so I hid in a thick tree. Ten servants came ashore with spades, dug in the middle of the island and lifted a trapdoor. They carried down furniture and food, and then an old man led a handsome boy of about fifteen down the steps. When they came up again the boy was not with them; they covered the trapdoor with earth and sailed away. I climbed down, dug until I found a stone with a ring in it, and went down a stair into a rich, candle-lit room. There on a heap of cushions sat the boy, frightened at the sight of a stranger. “Do not be afraid,” I said. “I am a king’s son, and I mean you no harm. Perhaps I was sent to free you from this tomb.”

The boy grew calm and told me his story. “My father is a rich jeweller who longed for a son. When I was born, the wise men all foretold that I would live happily until I was fifteen, and then face a great danger; if I escaped it, I would live to a great age. They said that when Agib, son of Cassib, threw the brass horseman into the sea, I would die by his hand fifty days later. My father heard yesterday that the horseman had fallen ten days before. He hid me here for the remaining forty days, until the danger should be past. Prince Agib is hardly likely to come looking for me here.” I laughed inwardly at the idea that I could ever harm this gentle boy, and I took good care not to tell him my name. I promised him my friendship and asked only that his father’s ship should carry me home.

For thirty-nine days we lived happily underground. I waited on him like a servant, and he grew fond of me. On the fortieth morning he woke full of joy that the danger was over and asked me to heat water for his bath, and later to cut him a melon. I could find no knife until he told me to look on the high ledge above his bed. As I reached for it my foot caught in the bedclothes; I slipped and fell on him, and the knife went into his heart. I cried out and tore my clothes in grief. Then, afraid his father would take me for a murderer, I climbed out, closed the stone behind me and hid in my tree again just as the ship came back.

The old man and his servants saw immediately that the earth was freshly turned, and they stopped and turned pale. They went down calling the boy’s name; then came a terrible cry, and the servants carried the old man up in a faint. When he came round they buried his son, loaded the furniture onto the ship and bore the father away on a litter of branches. Now I had the island to myself. For a month I walked the island every day, until I noticed that the sea was shrinking and the mainland drawing nearer. Soon only a narrow stream was left to cross, and after a long trudge over mud and sand I saw far off what I took for a fire. It was a castle of red copper.

At its gate an old man came to meet me with ten handsome young men, every one of them blind in the right eye. They greeted me kindly and asked my story, and when I had told it they took me inside to a hall with ten blue sofas for the young men and one in the middle for the old man. They seated me on the carpet and told me to ask no questions about anything I saw. After supper one of the young men asked to hear my story a second time, for it had amazed them all, and when I finished they told the old man that it was late and he should do his duty. He fetched ten covered basins full of ashes, coal-dust and lamp-black. The young men smeared their heads and faces with it, wept and beat their breasts, crying, “This is the reward of idleness and of our wicked lives!” They kept this up almost all night, then washed, changed their clothes and went to sleep.

Curiosity burned in me. Next day I begged them to tell me why they blackened their faces and how they had all lost the same eye. “Gentlemen,” I said, “I can keep silent no longer. You seem sensible men, yet you behave like madmen. Whatever happens to me, I must ask why you blacken your faces and how you all come to be blind in one eye.” They only said it was none of my business. That night the same ritual followed, and I pleaded with them a second time. “It is for your own sake we have refused,” said one, “to keep you from our fate. But if you wish to share it, we will delay no longer.” He warned me that even after I had lost my eye I could not stay with them, for their number was complete. I answered that I would be sorry to leave such good friends, but that I would take the consequences on my own head, whatever they were.

When they saw that I would not change my mind, my ten hosts killed a sheep, gave me a knife and told me I would soon need it. “We are going to sew you inside this sheepskin and leave you,” they said. “A bird of enormous size, called a roc, will see you from the sky and take you for a sheep. He will seize you and fly off with you, but do not be afraid. He will set you down safely on top of a mountain. As soon as you touch the ground, slit the skin with the knife and throw it off. When the roc sees a man, he will take fright and fly away. Then walk until you reach a castle covered with plates of gold and studded with jewels. Go boldly through the gate, which is always open. Do not ask us what we found there, because you will find out for yourself. We can tell you only this: it cost each of us his right eye, and it is the reason for our penance every night.”

They sewed me into the sheepskin and went back into the hall. A few minutes later the roc swooped down, caught me in its huge claws and carried me to the mountaintop as easily as if I had been a feather. This great white bird is so strong that it has been known to carry an elephant to its nest. The moment my feet were on the ground I cut the stitches and stepped out in my own clothes, and the roc, seeing me, spread its wings and fled.

After half a day of wandering I found the castle, and it was more glorious than anything I had ever imagined. The gate opened into a square courtyard with a hundred doors around it. Ninety-nine were made of rare woods, and one was made of gold. Through each I could glimpse lovely gardens or rooms full of treasure.

I went through one door that stood open and found myself in a great hall where forty young women, beautifully dressed, were resting. As soon as they saw me they stood up and welcomed me, and they made me sit in a seat higher than their own. One brought me splendid clothes, another poured scented water over my hands, and the others hurried to prepare food. When I had eaten and drunk, they gathered round and asked me to tell them all my adventures.

By the time I finished, night had come. They lit so many candles that the castle was brighter than day, and we ate a supper of dried fruits and sweets while some of them sang and others danced. I was so happy that I lost track of the hours, until one of them told me it was midnight and showed me to the room that had been made ready for me.

I spent thirty-nine more days in the same way. But on the fortieth morning the women came to my room in tears. “Prince,” they said, “we have to leave you. We are all princesses, each the daughter of a king, and we live here together as you have seen. But at the end of every year, duties we cannot speak of call us away for forty days. We will leave you our keys so that you have plenty to do while we are gone. Only one thing we beg of you: do not open the Golden Door. If you value your peace and your happiness, leave it shut. If that door is ever unlocked, we must say goodbye to you forever.” Weeping, I promised to be careful, and they went away.

Every day I opened two or three new doors, and there was so much to see behind them that I was never bored. One door led to an orchard whose fruit was larger than any in my father’s gardens. Another opened on a court planted with roses, jasmine, daffodils, hyacinths, anemones and a thousand flowers I could not name. There was an aviary full of singing birds, and a treasury heaped with precious stones. Whatever I found was perfect of its kind.

The thirty-nine days flew past. The princesses were due back the next morning, and by then I had explored every corner of the castle except the room behind the Golden Door. I had nothing left to amuse me. I stood in front of it for a long time, admiring it, and then I had what seemed a clever idea: if I unlocked the door, I need not go in. I could simply stand outside and look.

Arguing like this against my own conscience, I turned the key. A sweet, heavy scent rushed out and overpowered me, and I fell fainting across the doorway. Even that did not warn me. As soon as I recovered I stepped outside to clear my head, and then I walked straight in. The vaulted room was lit by candles scented with aloes and ambergris, in golden candlesticks, and gold and silver lamps hung from the ceiling.

Wonderful things were piled all around, but I hardly looked at them, because in one corner stood a magnificent black horse, the finest I had ever seen. His saddle and bridle were made of solid gold, finely worked, and one side of his trough held clean barley and sesame while the other held rose water. I led him outside and jumped on his back. When I shook the reins he did not move, so I tapped him with a switch I had picked up in the stable. At once he spread wings I had not noticed and flew straight up into the sky with me. When he had climbed to a terrible height, he dived back to earth and landed on the terrace of a castle. He threw me violently out of the saddle and struck me such a blow with his tail that he knocked out my right eye.

Dazed, I got to my feet, thinking of the ten young men, and watched the horse soar away into the clouds. I left the terrace and wandered until I reached a hall I knew at once by the ten blue sofas against the wall. It was the very hall from which the roc had carried me away.

The ten young men soon came in with the old man. They greeted me kindly and grieved for my misfortune, though they had expected nothing else. “Everything that has happened to you happened to us,” they said. “We would still be living in that happiness if we had not opened the Golden Door while the princesses were away. You were no wiser than we were, and you have paid the same price. We would gladly let you stay and share our penance, but, as we told you, our number is complete. Go to the court of Baghdad. There you will meet the one who can decide your fate.” They told me which road to take, and I left them.

On the way I had my beard and eyebrows shaved and put on the robe of a calender. After a long journey I reached this city this evening and met my two brother calenders at the gate, strangers like me. We were amazed to find that we were all blind in the same eye, but there was no time to share our troubles before we came here to ask for the kindness you have so generously shown us.

When he had finished, it was Zobeida’s turn to speak. “Go wherever you like,” she said to all three of them. “I forgive you all, but you must leave this house at once.”

Where this story comes from

Prince Agib’s adventure is the story of the Third Calender in Andrew Lang’s The Arabian Nights Entertainments (1898). A calender was a wandering dervish, and Agib tells his tale himself, as one of three one-eyed calenders in Baghdad. Lang’s edition was translated from Antoine Galland’s French and, as its preface says, shortened in places. It is an Arabian Nights tale, not an Indian one.

This page condenses Agib’s adventure, from the shipwreck at the magnetic mountain (Lang calls it the Black Mountain) to the castle of the forty princesses, the forbidden Golden Door and the winged horse that cost him his eye. The source’s accidental death of the merchant’s son is kept but told without dwelling on it.

Read the original: Andrew Lang, The Arabian Nights Entertainments (Project Gutenberg #128, The Story of the Third Calender, Son of a King)

For older readers: includes drowned crews, the accidental killing of a fifteen-year-old, self-punishing rituals and a violent eye injury. The magnetic mountain is a legendary hazard, not a realistic navigation account.

The teller judges his earlier self

Agib begins by blaming his own folly for his lost eye, but the preceding episodes involve different kinds of danger. An accidental cry of thanks breaks the boat’s rule; the boy dies in an accident despite Agib’s intention to protect him; the Golden Door is opened after a deliberate argument with himself. These are not identical choices.

His insistence that he cannot harm the boy also leads him to conceal his name, withholding information the boy and his father consider crucial. The story asks us to hear his remorse while still noticing how confidently he dismisses what he does not understand.

Separate the warning from the choice

Make three rows for the boat, the hidden boy and the Golden Door. Record what Agib knows, what he does and whether the result is intended. For the door, mark each new step after his claim that he will only look. Where could he still have stopped?

Talk about it

• What warning did the old man in Agib’s dream give him, and what happened when he forgot it?
• The prophecy about the boy came true even though Agib meant him no harm. Do you think it could have been avoided? Why?
• The ten young men warned Agib again and again. Why do you think he still wanted to know their secret?
• How did Agib talk himself into opening the Golden Door? Have you ever argued yourself into something you knew you should not do?

Related stories

• Sinbad the Sailor: The First Voyage — another Arabian Nights traveller shipwrecked far from home who tells his own tale
• The Barber’s Tale of His Sixth Brother — another story told inside the Arabian Nights by one of its own characters
• Scheherazade and the Sultan — the frame story of the Arabian Nights in which all these tales are told