As quickly as he was brought away the day before, just so speedily now was he transported into his own dwelling. Next morning the Caliph for One Day woke up again as Abu Hassan, and found himself in his old circumstances. In spite of all his calls and shouts, neither the slaves nor the court officers of yesterday hurried to him to ask his wishes. He was sadly perplexed at first at this new change, but he soon got over it, and consoled himself with thinking that at least he had had a beautiful dream. When his mother told him that he had in fact disappeared for a whole day, and when he also learned that the Imam and his fellows had been punished exactly as he had ordered when Caliph, he did not know what to think of the whole adventure at all.
Finally, he leaned to his mother's view, who explained it by saying that some spirit had taken him away and had executed the Imam's punishment. He was thankful indeed to be rid of his rascally neighbors, but he could never give himself an explanation of what had moved the spirit to help him. In the end, however, he put the whole story out of his mind, and became again what he had been before—Queer Abu Hassan, or the Caliph for One Day.
—Arabian Nights.
[THE FIRST POTTER]
Ang was a mighty hunter and also a priest of Odin, but Oma was a famous housewife or cave-wife, and not only Suta, the wife of Wang, came to take lessons of her, but many other women who had heard of her wonderful skill in cooking old food in new ways and discovering new foods which the magic of the fire made palatable. She had learned not merely how to cook the meat which Ang brought, but to dry it so that it would keep for a long time. She discovered how to make a coarse flour from nuts and acorns and to bake cakes on flat stones. At the fire feast the cooking of Oma made as great an impression as the wisdom and strength of Ang.
But her greatest discovery was the art of making pottery dishes out of clay and baking them before the fire. For a long time women had made baskets of reeds and willow twigs in which they could carry dry foods, but the problem was to get something in which they could carry liquids. Sometimes they used skin bottles, but they soon leaked and the water rotted them out. Then some clever woman smeared the inside of a closely woven basket with resinous pitch. Another lined her baskets with clay and baked them in the sun, but water would soon soften the clay. Then came Oma and the fire and the art of baking clay. This is the way it happened. Oma had been lining some baskets with clay, and little Om tried to imitate her. Since it was cold he sat as near to the fire as he could, and after he had finished one, he would put it on a stone near the fire until he had a row of them. Then the wind changed suddenly and blew the fire towards him, and he had to move quickly, leaving his clay baskets on the rock. He called to his mother to get them, but she had no notion of getting burned for so small a cause and she was too busy to bother, as mothers often are.
That night after Om had gone to sleep she sat by the fire with Ang, and her eyes spied the little row of clay baskets. She picked one up to show the father what a clever boy his son was getting to be. As she touched the clay, she found it dry and hard as no clay she had ever touched before. Some of the baskets were dry and crumbly, but two or three in the center were hard as stone. A thought came to her. She ran to the brook and filled the hardest with water and brought them back to the fire. They did not soften or leak. Then she put them on a flat stone and pushed them almost into the fire. Soon the water in them began to bubble and steam.
"Look!" cried Oma. "At the touch of the Red One a little Cloud Spirit goes up to the great Cloud Spirits that fly in the blue above us."