Nothing happened, either then or for any word beginning with A. Doggedly Abdullah went on to B, and when that did no good, he went on again, through the whole dictionary. With the constant interruptions from portrait sellers, this took him some time. Nevertheless, he reached zymurgy in the early evening without the carpet’s having so much as twitched.

“Then it has to be a made-up word or a foreign one!” he cried out feverishly. It was that or believe that Flower-in-the-Night was only a dream after all. Even if she was real, his chances of getting the carpet to take him to her seemed slimmer by the minute. He stood there uttering every strange sound and every foreign word he could think of, and still the carpet made no move of any kind.

Abdullah was interrupted again an hour before sundown by a large crowd gathering outside, carrying bundles and big flat packages. The artist had to push his way through the crowd with his portfolio of drawings. The following hour was hectic in the extreme. Abdullah inspected paintings, rejected portraits of aunts and mothers, and beat down huge prices asked for bad drawings of nephews. In the course of that hour he acquired, beside the hundred excellent drawings from the artist, eighty-nine further pictures, lockets, drawings, and even a piece of a wall with a face daubed on it. He also parted with almost all the money he had left over after buying the magic carpet—if it was magic. It was dark by the time he finally convinced the man who claimed that the oil painting of his fourth wife’s mother was enough like a man to qualify that this was not the case and pushed him out of the booth. He was by then too tired and wrought up to eat. He would have gone straight to bed had not Jamal—who had been doing a roaring trade selling snacks to the waiting crowd—arrived with tender meat on a skewer.

“I don’t know what has got into you,” Jamal said. “I used to think you were normal. But mad or not, you must eat.”

“There is no question of madness,” Abdullah said. “I have simply decided to go into a new line of business.” But he ate the meat.

At last he was able to pile his 189 pictures onto the carpet and lie down among them.

“Now listen to this,” he told the carpet. “If by some lucky chance I happen to say your command word in my sleep, you must instantly fly with me to the night garden of Flower-in-the-Night.” That seemed the best he could do. It took him a long time to get to sleep.

He woke to the dreamy fragrance of night flowers and a hand gently prodding him. Flower-in-the-Night was leaning over him. Abdullah saw she was far lovelier than he had been remembering her.

“You really did bring the pictures!” she said. “You are very kind.”