Haroun and the Sea of Stories Read online

  Rashid went on trying to sound happy. He told Haroun about the Luxury Class Houseboat waiting for them on the Dull Lake. He talked about the ruined fairy castle in the silver mountains, and about the pleasure gardens built by the ancient Emperors, which came right down to the edge of the Dull Lake: gardens with fountains and terraces and pavilions of pleasure, where the spirits of the ancient kings still flew about in the guise of hoopoe birds. But after exactly eleven minutes Haroun stopped listening; and Rashid stopped talking, too, and they stared silently out of the window of the railway carriage at the unfolding boredom of the plains.

  They were met at the Railway Station in the Town of G by two unsmiling men wearing gigantic mustachios and loud yellow check pants. ‘They look like villains to me,’ Haroun thought, but he kept his opinion to himself. The two men drove Rashid and Haroun straight to the political rally. They drove past buses that dripped people the way a sponge drips water, and arrived at a thick forest of human beings, a crowd of people sprouting in all directions like leaves on jungle trees. There were great bushes of children and rows of ladies arranged in lines, like flowers in a giant flower-bed. Rashid was deep in his own thoughts, and was nodding sadly to himself.

  Then the thing happened, the Unthinkable Thing. Rashid went out on to the stage in front of that vast jungle of a crowd, and Haroun watched him from the wings—and the poor storyteller opened his mouth, and the crowd squealed in excitement—and now Rashid Khalifa, standing there with his mouth hanging open, found that it was as empty as his heart.

  ‘Ark.’ That was all that came out. The Shah of Blah sounded like a stupid crow. ‘Ark, ark, ark.’

  ~ ~ ~

  After that they were shut up in a steaming hot office while the two men with the mustachios and loud yellow check pants shouted at Rashid and accused him of having taken a bribe from their rivals, and suggested that they might cut off his tongue and other items also. —And Rashid, close to tears, kept repeating that he couldn’t understand why he had dried up, and promising to make it up to them. ‘In the Valley of K, I will be terrifico, magnifique,’ he vowed.

  ‘Better you are,’ the mustachioed men shouted back. ‘Or else, out comes that tongue from your lying throat.’

  ‘So when does the plane leave for K?’ Haroun butted in, hoping to calm things down. (The train, he knew, didn’t go into the mountains.) The shouting men began to shout even more loudly. ‘Plane? Plane? His papa’s stories won’t take off but the brat wants to fly! —No plane for you, mister and sonny. Catch a blasted bus.’

  ‘My fault again,’ Haroun thought wretchedly. ‘I started all this off. What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true. I asked that question and it broke my father’s heart. So it’s up to me to put things right. Something has to be done.’

  The only trouble was, he couldn’t think of a single thing.

  Chapter 2

  The Mail Coach

  The two shouting men shoved Rashid and Haroun into the back seat of a beaten-up car with torn scarlet seats, and even though the car’s cheap radio was playing movie music at top volume, the shouting men went on shouting about the unreliability of storytellers all the way to the rusting iron gates of the Bus Depot. Here Haroun and Rashid were dumped out of the car without ceremony or farewell.

  ‘Expenses of the journey?’ Rashid hopefully inquired, but the shouting men shouted, ‘More cash demands! Cheek! Cheek of the chappie!’ and drove away at high speed, forcing dogs and cows and women with baskets of fruit on their heads to dive out of the way. Loud music and rude words continued to pour out of the car as it zigzagged away into the distance.

  Rashid didn’t even bother to shake his fist. Haroun followed him towards the Ticket Office across a dusty courtyard with walls covered in strange warnings:

  IF YOU TRY TO RUSH OR ZOOM

  YOU ARE SURE TO MEET YOUR DOOM

  was one of them, and

  ALL THE DANGEROUS OVERTAKERS

  END UP SAFE AT UNDERTAKER’S

  was another, and also

  LOOK OUT! SLOW DOWN! DON’T BE FUNNY!

  LIFE IS PRECIOUS! CARS COST MONEY!

  ‘There should be one about not shouting at the passengers in the back seat,’ Haroun muttered. Rashid went to buy a ticket.

  There was a wrestling match at the ticket window instead of a queue, because everyone wanted to be first; and as most people were carrying chickens or children or other bulky items, the result was a free-for-all out of which feathers and toys and dislodged hats kept flying. And from time to time some dizzy fellow with ripped clothes would burst out of the mêlée, triumphantly waving a little scrap of paper: his ticket! Rashid, taking a deep breath, dived into the scrum.

  Meanwhile, in the courtyard of the buses, small dust-clouds were rushing back and forth like little desert whirlwinds. Haroun realized that these clouds were full of human beings. There were simply too many passengers at the Bus Depot to fit into the available buses, and, anyhow, nobody knew which bus was leaving first; which made it possible for the drivers to play a mischievous game. One driver would start his engine, adjust his mirrors, and behave as if he were about to leave. At once a bunch of passengers would gather up their suitcases and bedrolls and parrots and transistor radios and rush towards him. Then he’d switch off his engine with an innocent smile; while on the far side of the courtyard, a different bus would start up, and the passengers would start running all over again.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Haroun said aloud.

  ‘Correct,’ a booming voice behind him answered, ‘but but but you’ll admit it’s too much fun to watch.’

  The owner of this voice turned out to be an enormous fellow with a great quiff of hair standing straight up on his head, like a parrot’s crest. His face, too, was extremely hairy; and the thought popped into Haroun’s mind that all this hair was, well, somehow feather-like. ‘Ridiculous idea,’ he told himself. ‘What on earth made me think of a thing like that? It’s just plain nonsense, as anyone can see.’

  Just then two separate dust-clouds of scurrying passengers collided in an explosion of umbrellas and milk-churns and rope sandals, and Haroun, without meaning to, began to laugh. ‘You’re a tip-top type,’ boomed the fellow with the feathery hair. ‘You see the funny side! An accident is truly a sad and cruel thing, but but but—crash! Wham! Spatoosh!—how it makes one giggle and hoot.’ Here the giant stood and bowed. ‘At your service,’ he said. ‘My goodname is Butt, driver of the Number One Super Express Mail Coach to the Valley of K.’ Haroun thought he should bow, too. ‘And my, as you say, goodname is Haroun.’

  Then he had an idea, and added: ‘If you mean what you say about being at my service, then in fact there is something you can do.’

  ‘It was a figure of speech,’ Mr Butt replied. ‘But but but I will stand by it! A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight. But Butt’s a straight man, not a twister. What’s your wish, my young mister?’

  Rashid had often told Haroun about the beauty of the road from the Town of G to the Valley of K, a road that climbed like a serpent through the Pass of H towards the Tunnel of I (which was also known as J). There was snow by the roadside, and there were fabulous multicoloured birds gliding in the gorges; and when the road emerged from the Tunnel (Rashid had said), then the traveller saw before him the most spectacular view on earth, a vista of the Valley of Κ with its golden fields and silver mountains and with the Dull Lake at its heart—a view spread out like a magic carpet, waiting for someone to come and take a ride. ‘No man can be sad who looks upon that sight,’ Rashid had said, ‘but a blind man’s blindness must feel twice as wretched then.’ So what Haroun asked Mr Butt for was this: front-row seats in the Mail Coach all the way to the Dull Lake; and a guarantee that the Mail Coach would pass through the Tunnel of I (also known as J) before sunset, because otherwise the whole point would be lost.

  ‘But but but,’ Mr Butt protested, ‘the hour is already late …’ Then, seeing Haroun’s face begin to fall, he grin
ned broadly and clapped his hands. ‘But but but so what?’ he shouted. ‘The beautiful view! To cheer up the sad dad! Before sunset! No problem.’

  So when Rashid staggered out of the Ticket Office he found Haroun waiting on the steps of the Mail Coach, with the best seats reserved inside, and the motor running.

  The other passengers, who were out of breath from their running, and who were covered in dust which their sweat was turning to mud, stared at Haroun with a mixture of jealousy and awe. Rashid was impressed, too. ‘As I may have mentioned, young Haroun Khalifa: more to you than meets the blinking eye.’

  ‘Yahoo!’ yelled Mr Butt, who was as excitable as any mail service employee. ‘Varoom!’ he added, and jammed the accelerator pedal right down against the floor.

  The Mail Coach rocketed through the gates of the Bus Depot, narrowly missing a wall on which Haroun read this:

  IF FROM SPEED YOU GET YOUR THRILL

  TAKE PRECAUTION—MAKE YOUR WILL

  ~ ~ ~

  Faster and faster went the Mail Coach; the passengers started to hoot and howl with excitement and fear. Through village after village Mr Butt drove, at top speed. Haroun observed that in each village a man carrying a large mailbag would be waiting by the bus stop in the village square, and that this man would look at first confused and then furious as the Mail Coach roared by him without even slowing down. Haroun could also see that at the rear of the Mail Coach there was a special area, separated from the passengers by a wire mesh partition, that was piled high with mailbags just like those held by the angry, fist-shaking men in the village squares. Mr Butt had apparently forgotten to deliver or collect the mail!

  ‘Don’t we need to stop for the letters?’ Haroun finally leant forward to inquire. At the same moment Rashid the storyteller cried out, ‘Do we need to go so blinking fast?’

  Mr Butt managed to make the Mail Coach go even faster. ‘ “Need to stop?” ’ he bellowed over his shoulder. ‘ “Need to go so quickly?” Well, my sirs, I’ll tell you this: Need’s a slippery snake, that’s what it is. The boy here says that you, sir, Need A View Before Sunset, and maybe it’s so and maybe no. And some might say that the boy here Needs A Mother, and maybe it’s so and maybe no. And it’s been said of me that Butt Needs Speed, but but but it may be that my heart truly needs a Different Sort Of Thrill. O, Need’s a funny fish: it makes people untruthful. They all suffer from it, but they will not always admit. Hurrah!’ he added, pointing. ‘The snow line! Icy patches ahead! Crumbling road surface! Hairpin bends! Danger of avalanches! Full speed ahead!’

  He had simply decided not to stop for the mail in order to keep his promise to Haroun. ‘No problem,’ he shouted gaily. ‘Everybody gets other people’s correspondence anyhow in this country of so-many too-many places and so-few too-few names.’ The Mail Coach rushed up into the Mountains of M, swinging around terrifying curves with a great squealing of tyres. The luggage (which was all tied down on the roof rack) began to shift about in a worrying way. The passengers (who all looked alike, now that their perspiration had finished turning the dust that covered them to mud) began to complain.

  ‘My holdall!’ yelled a mud-woman. ‘Crazy buffalo! Looney tune! Desist from your speeding, or my possessions will be thrown to Kingdom Come!’

  ‘It is we ourselves who will be thrown, madam,’ a mud-man answered sharply. ‘So less noise about your personal items, please.’ He was interrupted angrily by a second mud-man: ‘Have a care! It is my goodwife you are insulting!’ Then a second mud-woman joined in: ‘So what? For so long she has been shouting-shouting in my husband’s goodear, so why should not he lodge complaint? See her, the dirty skinnybones. Is she a woman or a muddy stick?’

  ‘See here, this bend, what a tight one!’ Mr Butt sang out. ‘Here, two weeks ago, occurred a major disaster. Bus plunged into gully, all persons killed, sixty-seventy lives minimum. God! Too sad! If you desire I can stop for taking of photographs.’

  ‘Yes, stop, stop,’ the passengers begged (anything to make him slow down), but Mr Butt went even faster instead. ‘Too late,’ he yodelled gaily. ‘Already it is far behind. Requests must be more promptly made if I am to comply.’

  ‘I did it again,’ Haroun was thinking. ‘If we crash now, if we’re smashed to bits or fried like potato chips in a burning wreck, it will be my fault this time, too.’

  ~ ~ ~

  Now they were high in the Mountains of M, and Haroun felt sure that the Mail Coach was speeding up as they got higher. They were so high that there were clouds in the gorges below them, and the mountainsides were covered in thick, dirty snow and the passengers were shivering with cold. The only sound to be heard in the Mail Coach was the chattering of teeth. Everyone had fallen into a scared and frozen silence, while Mr Butt was concentrating so hard on his high-speed driving that he had even stopped yelling ‘Yahoo’ and pointing out the sites of particularly gruesome accidents.

  Haroun had the feeling that they were floating on a sea of silence, that a wave of silence was lifting them up, up, up towards the mountaintops. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt stiff and caked. Rashid couldn’t make a sound either, not even ark. ‘Any moment now,’ Haroun was thinking—and he knew that something very similar must be in the mind of each passenger—‘I am going to be wiped out, like a word on a blackboard, one swoosh of the duster and I’ll be gone for good.’

  Then he saw the cloud.

  The Mail Coach was streaking along the side of a narrow ravine. Up ahead the road swung so sharply to the right that it seemed they must plunge over the edge. Roadside notices warned of the extra danger, in words so severe that they no longer rhymed. DRIVE LIKE HELL AND YOU WILL GET THERE was one, and also: BE DEAD SLOW OR BE DEAD. Just then a thick cloud, shot through with impossible, shifting colours, a cloud from a dream or a nightmare, hopped up from the gorge below them and plopped itself down on the road. They hit it just as they went round the bend, and in the sudden darkness Haroun heard Butt slamming on the brakes as hard as he could.

  Noise returned: screams, the skidding of tyres. ‘This is it,’ Haroun thought—and then they were out of the cloud, in a place with smooth walls curving up around them, and rows of yellow lights set in the ceiling above.

  ‘Tunnel,’ Mr Butt announced. ‘At the far end, Valley of K. Hours to sunset, one. Time in tunnel, some minutes only. One View coming up. Like I said: no problem.’

  ~ ~ ~

  They came out of the Tunnel of I, and Mr Butt stopped the Mail Coach so that everyone could enjoy the sight of the sun setting over the Valley of K, with its fields of gold (which really grew saffron) and its silver mountains (which were really covered in glistening, pure, white snow) and its Dull Lake (which didn’t look dull at all). Rashid Khalifa hugged Haroun and said, ‘Thanks for fixing this up, son, but I admit that for some time I thought we were all fixed good and proper, I mean done for, finito, khattam-shud.’

  ‘Khattam-Shud,’ Haroun frowned. ‘What was that story you used to tell …?’

  Rashid spoke as if he were remembering an old, old dream.

  ‘Khattam-Shud’ he said slowly, ‘is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of Language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. “It’s finished,” we tell one another, “it’s over. Khattam-Shud: The End.” ’

  ‘This place is already doing you good,’ Haroun noted. ‘No more ark. Your crazy stories are starting to come back.’

  On the way down into the Valley, Mr Butt drove slowly and with extreme caution. ‘But but but there is no Need for Speed now that my service has been performed,’ he explained to the quivering mud-men and mud-women, who then all glared furiously at Haroun and Rashid.

  As the light failed, they passed a sign that had originally read WELCOME TO K; but somebody had daubed it with crude, irregular letters, so that it now said WELCOME TO KOSH-MAR.

  ‘What’s Kosh-Mar?’ Haroun wanted to know.

>   ‘It’s the work of some miscreant,’ shrugged Mr Butt. ‘Not every person in the Valley is happy, as you may find.’

  ‘It’s a word from the ancient tongue of Franj, which is no longer spoken in these parts,’ Rashid explained. ‘In those long-gone days the Valley, which is now simply K, had other names. One, if I remember correctly, was “Kache-Mer”. Another was this “Kosh-Mar”.’

  ‘Do those names mean anything?’ Haroun asked.

  ‘All names mean something,’ Rashid replied. ‘Let me think. Yes, that was it. “Kache-Mer” can be translated as “the place that hides a Sea”. But “Kosh-Mar” is a ruder name.’

  ‘Come on,’ urged Haroun. ‘You can’t stop there.’

  ‘In the old tongue,’ Rashid admitted, ‘it was the word for “nightmare”.’

  ~ ~ ~

  It was dark when the Mail Coach arrived at the Bus Depot in K. Haroun thanked Mr Butt and said goodbye. ‘But but but I will be here to escort you home,’ he replied. ‘Best seats will be kept; no question. Come when you’re ready—I will be steady—then we’ll go! Varoom! No problem.’

  Haroun had been afraid that more Shouting Men would be waiting for Rashid here, but K was a remote place and news of the storyteller’s disastrous performance in the Town of G had not travelled as fast as Mr Butt’s Mail Coach. So they were greeted by the Boss himself, the Top Man in the ruling party of the Valley, the Candidate in the forthcoming elections, on whose behalf Rashid had agreed to appear. This Boss was a fellow so shiny-faced and smooth, dressed in white bush-shirt and trousers so starchy-clean and neat, that the scruffy little moustache straggling over his upper lip seemed to have been borrowed from someone else: it was far too tawdry for a gent as slick as this.