"Diana Wynne Jones - Castle In The Air (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

him to buy portraits. He went back to his suspicions of the stranger who
had sold him this carpet and to the enormous noise that just happened to
break out in Jamal's stall at the precise moment when the stranger
ordered the carpet to rise. He recalled that he had seen the man's lips
move both times but had not heard all that was said.

"That is if!" he cried out, smashing his fist into his palm. "A code
word needs to be spoken before it will move, which for reasons of his
own-no doubt highly sinister-this man withheld from me. The villain! And
this word I must have spoken in my sleep."

He rushed to the back of his booth and rummaged out the tattered
dictionary he had once used at school. Then, standing on the carpet, he
cried out, "Aardvark! Fly, please!"

22

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."