The Five Fakirs of Faizabad

by P. B. Kerr

  When he was recovered, John sat down on the carpet again and, with Rakshasas sitting beside him, he took off, flying as fast as he could and aiming squarely for a center spot on the north face of Kailash where the rock seemed bluest. But try as he might, John could hardly imagine that suddenly the rock was just going to transform itself into air. He’d seen a lot of strange and wonderful things since discovering that he was a djinn, but solid rock that had the power to change its shape and mass wasn’t one of them.

  Increasing speed, they rapidly neared the huge rock face. Thousands of feet below them lay the immense plateau. Thousands of feet above them rose the forbidding north face of Kailash. And the nearer they got, the less John thought that any climber alive could ever have scaled it. Kailash made an ascent of the north wall of the Eiger or the south face of Annapurna look like a stroll in the park.

  The sacred mountain now filled his whole field of vision. Ahead of him, everywhere he looked there was just the blue mountain and more blue mountain. And for the first time John began to understand how Mount Kailash could have been mistaken for the sky. The snow hugged the rock surface like thin cirrus clouds reflecting the blue sky against the silver granite rock face.

  When there were just a few hundred feet to go, Rakshasas sat up and barked loudly and John had the idea that the wolf was encouraging him to go even faster, although that seemed like suicide.

  If John got it wrong now, they would smash into the mountain and be dashed to pieces.

  “Blue sky thinking!” he yelled, and willed himself to think that the rock would turn to air.

  Rakshasas barked an excited bark and ran back and forth on the flying carpet as if he’d caught the scent of a rabbit.

  John tried to empty his mind of everything except flying the carpet and the outcome he was praying for.

  Suddenly, in his mind’s eye, he seemed to see an image of himself, cross-legged on the carpet, like some ascetic monk engaged in meditation. And for no reason he could think of he raised one hand in salutation to the mountain even as he thought they must crash into it.

  But instead of hitting a wall of solid rock, John now perceived how an optical illusion operated here, and that the apparently solid north face concealed a fissure about as wide as the length of a bus. Near its opening, the walls of the fissure were veined with abundant deposits of silver reflecting rock and sky like an enormous series of mirrors, more than enough to have persuaded any observer from the ground that the north face was one unbroken mass.

  “Milarepa’s Window! We found it!”

  At the same time it was plain to see why Rakshasas had urged John to focus all of his concentration on their flight into the north face of the mountain: The narrow fissure was cut into the rock at an acute angle and almost as soon as John navigated the carpet successfully through the opening, he had to swerve suddenly to the right. At the very same moment a strong gust of wind blew out of the fissure and if John had not been flying at speed, the carpet would have been flicked back out again like an old shuttlecock. As it was, the gust carried them several dozen feet up in the air so that a sharp outcrop of rock narrowly missed John’s head by inches.

  John uttered a cry of fright at this narrow escape and then a cheer, and Rakshasas howled triumphantly as the flying carpet sailed on through the fissure, like a silken thread through the eye of a needle. Out of the sunshine, the temperature dropped suddenly and John was glad of all the warm clothing he was wearing. But the djinn power that burned within him was still strong.

  “We did it,” he yelled, his voice bouncing back and forth between the steep walls of the fissure like a ball in a racket court.

  Rakshasas nipped John on the hand as if to remind him to pay attention to where they were going. And it was as well he did, for the fissure was full of sharp turns and twists and unexpected gusts of wind, and to John it seemed that their rapid passage through the rock was like the aerial equivalent of white-water rafting.

  After ten minutes of flying, they emerged not of the other side of the mountain but on the edge of an enormous, extinct volcano crater.

  “We made it,” said John, hugging Rakshasas close to him. “We’re through.”

  He was just about to punch the air and emit an exhilarated whoop when something hit them hard from below, and a second later they heard what sounded very like a gunshot.

  The carpet spun like a flying saucer, collided with the wall of the fissure they had just vacated, and then fell backward. John struggled to regain control while Rakshasas scrambled to stay aboard, and failed. The boy djinn turned, reached for the collar of fur around the wolf’s neck, missed, and then cried out as Rakshasas fell twenty or thirty feet down to the snow-covered ground. When he turned back, he had a brief view of a semi-ruined lamasery high on the side of the mountain he had collided with, and several people looking down at him and pointing as if he was an object of curiosity. A second later, the carpet still carrying John hit the ground a few yards from where Rakshasas was already lying. The snow cushioned the worst of the impact, which was still enough to loosen every filling in John’s mouth and, for a few minutes, he lost consciousness.

  He felt something sharp in his arm and when he opened his eyes he saw that he was surrounded by several pairs of polished black riding boots; a very tall man helped him to sit up, while another knelt in front of him and looked inquisitively into John’s eyes. The second man was wearing a curious little silver skull-and-crossbones badge on his hat and for a minute John wondered groggily if he was a pirate.

  John looked around for Rakshasas and didn’t see him. Then he blinked and rubbed his eyes and shook his head, convinced that he must be hallucinating: There were several men in a circle around him now, and they were talking in German, which, fortunately, was a language John already understood. They were all wearing a symbol he recognized only from his schoolbooks.

  “How many fingers?” The man with the skull-and-crossbones badge was holding up three fingers.

  “Three,” John heard himself mumble.

  The men seemed most concerned about his welfare and were already reproaching another man carrying a rifle for having shot down John’s flying carpet. But what concerned John was the idea — surely he was hallucinating, he told himself — that all of these men were wearing the distinctive black uniforms and Nazi armbands of Hitler’s SS.

  CHAPTER 34

  THE MAN IN BLACK

  The lamasery was situated high on a ridge inside the Kailash crater and reminded John of a goat trapped on an inaccessible mountain ledge. On the outside at least, the lamasery was typically Buddhist in its appearance: Made of white stone, there were five main halls separated by courtyards with high walls, small windows, and pagoda-like roofs. But on the inside, things were very different from a traditional Tibetan temple; the place was full of swastika banners and flags, and instead of images and statues of the Buddha, there were images and statues of Adolf Hitler — a man who would surely appear in everyone’s top ten of History’s Most Horrible Men.

  The Germans carried a still groggy John through the main gate and into a kind of hospital dispensary. The Tibetan wind blew under the door and through a gap in the window, like a sigh from some unseen spirit. There were glass cabinets filled with medicines, a couple of beds, and, on the wall — between a couple of medical charts — yet another picture of Hitler. It was a most unsettling place. A man in a white coat sat down in front of John and examined him for broken bones before taking his temperature.

  “Goodness,” he said, “you’re burning up.”

  “No, I’m fine,” insisted John. “This is my normal temperature.”

  “Nonsense,” said the man and, before John could prevent him, his warm fur hat and coat had been removed. Immediately, he felt his core temperature drop. “That’s better.”

  “Could I have my coat back?” said John. “I’m feeling kind of cold now.”

  “This thermometer says different,” said the man in the white coat. “Look. Ninety-eight point six.�
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  John, who thought it best not to mention that his normal body temperature was several degrees higher than that, nodded his agreement. At the same time he tried to gather his remaining body heat so that, in the event of the Nazi turning nasty, John might turn him into some kind of animal, but instead he found himself quite unable to focus his djinn power. Every time he tried to gather all of his concentration in one mental place, his mind seemed to wander off somewhere else.

  He remembered feeling something sharp in his arm outside on the snow.

  “Did you give me something?” he asked suspiciously.

  “When you were unconscious,” said the man in the white coat, “I gave you a shot to help you recover.”

  John nodded. That explained it.

  “Um, where’s my dog?” he said. John hesitated to use the word wolf; it hardly sounded normal. People were a bit funny about pet wolves.

  “One of our men who has veterinary experience is taking care of him,” said the man in the white coat.

  “Is he all right?”

  “Yes, he’ll be fine, I think. He has a concussion. Much like yourself, probably.”

  “I’d like to see him, please,” said John.

  “Just as soon as you answer a few questions,” said the man in the white coat. “Look, who are you and what are you doing here?”

  John shook his head. “That’s rich,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have one or two questions myself,” said John. “Such as, what the heck do you think you’re doing taking potshots at people like that? You could have killed me.”

  “I’m very sorry about that, but one of my men mistook you for a game bird,” said the man in the white coat. “We don’t get a lot of meat up here at the Mopu Lamasery. That’s what this place is called. I’m afraid he shot you for our pot before he realized his mistake. To be quite frank with you, we were all rather surprised to see a boy and a dog on a flying carpet. Even here, in the Kailash crater, where things can hardly be described as normal.”

  John nodded. “That’s fair enough,” he said. “All right. My name is John Gaunt. And I’m from the United States of America.”

  “An American? How is it that you speak perfect German?”

  John answered carefully. “My mother is German,” he lied. “We were brought up speaking German.”

  The man in the white coat shrugged. “Interesting,” he said. “But perhaps not as interesting as how it is that you come to be on a flying carpet in the first place.”

  “I’m still trying to work it out myself.” John, hardly wanting to admit that he was a djinn, felt obliged to keep on lying to the German. “I’m here on vacation with my father,” said John smoothly. “He’s a diplomat. Yesterday, while he was in an important meeting somewhere, I went to the marketplace in Lhasa, to buy a present to take back home to my mother. Anyway, I met this strange little man. His name was Daliah Lavi and he claimed he was a sort of holy man. He promised to sell me a very special carpet — a magic carpet — if I gave him all my money. At first I didn’t believe him. Then he showed me how the carpet could levitate itself and I was so impressed that I bought it.

  “I took the carpet back to the hotel room and laid it out on the floor. My father wasn’t very pleased when he saw it, especially when it didn’t levitate at all. He thought I’d been ripped off and threw the carpet out the window. Then he went to another diplomatic meeting. And I went to have lunch with someone. But when I came back the carpet was back in our room, which was when I figured that the holy man, Daliah Lavi, had perhaps been telling the truth after all. That it really was magic. So the dog and I sat on it, and the next thing, we were flying through the air. Which sounds fine, except that the carpet wouldn’t stop. Not for hours. Leastways not until your friend winged it with his gun.”

  The man in the white coat smiled patiently. “An interesting story,” he said quietly. “One might almost say, a fairy story. Indeed, I am reminded a little of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. In fact, it’s one of my favorites. But you’re hardly as stupid as Jack, I think.”

  John shrugged. “It’s the truth.”

  “Is it?” The man removed his white coat. Underneath, he was wearing a smart black SS uniform with lots of medals, including a little Iron Cross on a black-and-white ribbon. “Permit me to introduce myself.”

  The man brought the heels of his boots together with a loud click. He was tall with thin blond hair and a sunburnt, bony face that might have been called handsome. In front of one of his cornflower-blue eyes was a monocle, and there was a dueling scar on his cheek that was the shape of a check mark in a schoolboy’s exercise book, which gave the impression that a teacher had looked at his face and marked it “correct.”

  “I am Obersturmbannführer Dr. Heinrich Hynkell of the Waffen-SS and I have been wearing this uniform for long enough to know when someone is lying.”

  “Can you think of a better explanation?” said John.

  “No, I can’t.” Hynkell nodded thoughtfully. “Frankly, your story is a most reasonable explanation for how you come to be flying a carpet in the company of a wolf. Yes, a wolf. I know a wolf when I see one, John. I also know that carpets cannot fly except in fairy stories. And yet the fact remains that all of us saw you arrive here on a flying carpet. Hence, this is a situation in which the most reasonable explanation is perhaps the least likely to be true. Especially when one considers our proximity to Shamba-la and the very many magical things that happen there. In such a case as this one, where the impossible, however improbable, cannot be eliminated, then everything else, no matter how reasonable, must be discounted.”

  John shook his head and then yawned as he tried to hang on to the German’s impeccable logic.

  “Look,” said John. “A kid flying a carpet is hardly usual, I’ll grant you. But I’m telling you the truth.”

  “My men are examining the carpet now in the hope of finding out its secrets,” said Hynkell. “It would save a lot of time if you told us how you came to be flying on it. This might also save your pet wolf a great deal of pain, John. In addition to being a veterinarian, the man looking after him is a skilled torturer.”

  “Please don’t harm him,” said John. “I know this looks strange. But you’ve got to admit, I don’t exactly have the monopoly on what’s strange around here. It’s none of my business what you wear in this place, but you guys aren’t exactly dressed for the Sunday school picnic, are you? After all, you’re all dressed as Nazis.”

  “That’s because we are Nazis,” Hynkell said stiffly. “And what of it? Adolf Hitler was elected by the democratic will of the German people in January 1933. And while I prefer the name National Socialist to Nazi, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a Nazi.”

  “A lot of people might disagree with that,” said John. “What with the Second World War and everything.”

  “The Great War of 1914 to 1918, I have heard of,” said Hynkell. “But not this second war you speak of.”

  “Sure you have,” said John. “Everyone’s heard of the Second World War. 1939 to 1945?”

  “I’m beginning to think your concussion is more severe than I had supposed,” said Hynkell. “This is still 1938, John. And there will be no war. The British don’t want a war any more than we do.”

  John paused for a moment and tried once again to gather his thoughts. There seemed little point in arguing with Hynkell. Clearly, the German believed it was 1938 and John felt he would only have angered him with a contradiction about something as basic as the year in which they were living. Instead, he thought to come at an explanation from a different angle.

  “Do you mind me asking why you’re here?” he inquired of Hynkell.

  “I’ll ask the questions,” said Hynkell.

  “Very well.”

  “Let me tell you what I think.” “That’s not a question,” said John.

  “When I was a child, there was only one kind of being who could ride on a magic carpet. A genie.”


  “I read those stories, too,” said John.

  “I think we both know that they weren’t just stories.”

  “You can’t mean what I think you mean,” said John. “Listen to yourself. Please. You’re German. Surely that means something. You’re too sensible to believe in all that Aladdin stuff. Look, the carpet’s yours, Dr. Hynkell. Take it, with my blessing. After what happened to me, I never want to see the thing again.”

  “Well, that’s very generous of you,” said Hynkell. “But I think I should feel like a bit of an idiot if I gave up an object made of solid gold for something made of silver plate. What kind of fool would I be if I held on to a magic carpet and let a real-life genie slip through my fingers? Yes. In spite of what you say, I really do think you’re a genie, John.”

  “A genie?” John grinned. “You mean like out of a magic lamp? The whole Arabian Nights deal?” Hynkell nodded.

  “Come on. Do I look like a genie? I’m not even an Arab.”

  “A great German named Friedrich Nietzsche once said that appearances can be deceptive.”

  John sighed. He was getting nowhere fast. The German was about the first mundane he had ever met who seemed to believe in genies without ever having met one.

  “I feel tired,” he said. “What was in that shot you gave me?”

  “Just a mild stimulant,” said Hynkell. “It’s more likely the effects of the concussion that are making you feel tired.”

  John shook his head and yawned. “Look, if I really was a genie, do you think I’d sit here and let you push me around?” He yawned again. “You ask me, it’s you who’s talking like he’s had a bump on the head, doctor. Next thing, you’ll be asking me for three wishes.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll get to that.” Hynkell shook his head. “All in good time. But, you know something? When I was a boy, three wishes never seemed quite enough.”