'It happened that the Sultan Solymon, in form and face an old man, bent with years and clad in tattered garments, was wandering in hunger and destitution, along the sands, eating shell-fish, when he espied this large and silvery tenant of the deep, writhing on the shore; he straightway killed it by a stone, and making a fire of the wood called markh, which if rubbed together will burn, be it ever so green, he prepared to cook it, and lo! from its belly there dropped the golden ring—the magic signet by which the power of all Assyria was held—and with a prayer of joy he placed it on his finger!
'In a moment he recovered his stately stature, his manly beauty, his youthful face and curling beard; and by uttering a wish, found himself in the hall of his palace at Mecca, where he gave thanks unto Allah, and proceeded at once to punish Jerada and the evil Geni Sakhur. The beautiful daughter of Sidon he enclosed in a flinty rock on Mount Horeb, and there, by a touch of his ring, sealed her up for ever. The Geni, by a whispered wish, he dragged shrieking through the air from the far and snowy recesses of Kaf. Then tying a huge stone to his neck, he flung him headlong into the lake of Tiberias in Galilee, near which stands a town built by Herod; but the Geni instantly changed his form, and arose from the lake in the form of a small worm, which crept towards Solymon, intent on revenge.
'Now, as we all know, it would take a small worm a great many years to creep from the Lake of Tiberias to Jerusalem, where the Sultan Solymon was then finishing the great temple which was to stand there for ever in lieu of the tabernacle of Moosa. He employed a million of Genii to complete the work, and they toiled at it day and night, and over every Genii was a warden, who made his secret mark upon their work, and these spirits had secret signs and words by which they knew each other—the signs and words that were written on the seal of Solymon. But this mighty sultan perceiving that he was becoming aged, and that his end was drawing nigh, prayed to Allah, that, when he died, his death might be concealed from the Genii, who, if they discovered it, would all fly back to Kaf, and leave unfinished that gorgeous temple, which was yet to be the wonder of the world.
'And kind Allah ordained it should be thus.
'When Solymon died—for who among us would live for ever?—his spirit passed away as he stood at prayer, leaning on his long staff of plane-tree—the wood of the ark—and this staff supported his dead body erect and fresh, and comely as when in life, and as if he was still overseeing the work, for a year and a day, until the Genii were placing the last golden pomegranate on the shining summit of the temple, in the centre of which shone a vast eye that seemed to be behold everything; and all this while, the impatient worm was still creeping towards the dead Sultan.
'The worm reached the staff and gnawed it through; then on the very instant the temple was completed in all its parts, the body of the Sultan fell heavily to the ground; his golden crown rang on the marble pavement; and now, with a yell of rage, the overtasked Genii found that they had been deluded, and that their master had been dead for a year and a day!
'Thus it is that the twenty-fourth chapter of the Koran saith these words:—
'"When we decreed that Solymon should die, nothing revealed his death unto them except the creeping thing of the earth, which gnawed his staff, and then his body fell down."
'Such was the story of the Wise King and the Wicked Geni.'
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