It was, it has to be said, a chaotic and noisy scene. There was a moaning and a howling and a groaning and a growling, and that honking sound elephants (and ducks) make when they are in distress. Dog the bear kept saying that if bears had been meant to fly they would have grown wings, and he mentioned, too, that when bears sat on carpets it made them think of bearskin rugs, but mainly it was the flying thing that was the problem; and Bear the dog was babbling anxiously and without stopping as he rolled around the rug, and his monologue went something like this: I’m going to fall off, aren’t I? I am, don’t let me fall, am I going to fall off? I am, I can tell, I’m going to fall off, any second now, I’ll fall; even though in fact the carpet carefully curved itself upwards whenever any of the travellers lurched too close to an edge, and deposited them safely back at, or near, the centre.
As for the Elephant Birds, they kept asking each other why they were there at all. In the excitement of the departure from the Respectorate, they had somehow been swept aboard along with the Argo, but they couldn’t remember being asked if they would actually like to come. ‘And if we can’t remember it, it didn’t happen,’ said the Elephant Drake. They felt kidnapped, shanghaied, dragged along on an adventure that had nothing to do with them and was very probably extremely dangerous, and yes, they thought they might fall off the rug as well.
Of course the Insultana Soraya abused the lot of them roundly, as it was in her nature to do, calling them babies and girls and boobies and not-ducks-but-geese; she told them they were scaredy-cats and namby-pambies, sissies and yellow-bellies, milksops and Milquetoasts and candy-asses (a term with which Luka was not familiar, though he thought he could probably work out what it meant). She made chicken noises at them to call them cowards, and the worst part of all was when she squeaked at them contemptuously, which meant she was calling them mice.
Nobodaddy, naturally, handled the flying-carpet ride effortlessly, and stood coolly and with perfect assurance beside the Insultana, and that made Luka determined to find his ‘carpet legs’ as soon as possible. After a while he did, and stopped falling over; and after a further while the four animals found their twelve legs as well, and then, at last, the moaning and groaning stopped and things settled down, and nobody had actually been sick.
Once he could stand up and keep his balance on the flying carpet, Luka noticed that he was getting extremely cold. The carpet was beginning to fly higher and faster, and his teeth were beginning to chatter. The Insultana Soraya did not seem to be affected by the cold, even though she was wearing floaty garments that appeared to be constructed out of cobwebs and butterflies’ wings, and neither did Nobodaddy, who stood beside her in Rashid Khalifa’s short-sleeved vermilion bush shirt, looking quite unconcerned. Dog the bear seemed fine under all that hair, and the Elephant Drake and Duck had their downy feathers to keep them warm, but Bear the dog looked shivery and Luka was getting very cold indeed. ‘Who would have thought,’ Luka mused, ‘that this business of flying through the air would present so many practical problems?’ Inevitably the Insultana called him a whole set of new names when she saw that he was freezing to death. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that you expected this flying carpet to have central heating and whatnot. But this, my dear, is no modern softie’s suburban deep-shag-pile rug. This, I’ll have you know, is an antique.’
When Soraya had finished teasing Luka, however, she clapped her hands, and at once an old oak chest – which Luka had not noticed until that moment, but which had apparently been aboard the flying carpet the whole time – sprang open, and out flew two seemingly flimsy shawls. One shawl flew into Luka’s hands and the other wrapped itself around Bear. When Luka put the shawl around him he immediately began to feel as if he had been transported to somewhere in the tropics – almost too warm, almost as if he would prefer it to be a little cooler. ‘Some people are never satisfied,’ said the Insultana, reading his mind, and she turned away from him to hide her affectionate grin.
Now that he was warm as well as balanced, Luka was able to take in the wonderful sight that lay before him. The flying carpet was following the course of the River of Time. The World of Magic lay spread out on both banks of the River, and Luka, the storyteller’s son, began to recognise all the places he knew so well from his father’s tales. The landscape was dotted with cities, and with a rising excitement and a pounding heart Luka recognised them all, Khwáb, the City of Dreams, and Umeed Nagar, the City of Hope, and Zamurrad, the Emerald City, and Baadal-Garh, the Fortress City built upon a Cloud. In the distance to the east, rising up against the horizon, were the blue hills of the Land of Lost Childhood, and in the west lay the Undiscovered Country, and there – over there – was the Place Where Nobody Lived. Luka recognised with a thrill the crazy architecture of the House of Games and the Hall of Mirrors, and beside them the gardens of Paradise, Gulistan and Bostan, and, most exciting of all, the large Country of Imaginary Beings, Peristan, in which the peris, or fairies, endlessly did battle with malevolent ogres known as devs or bhoots. ‘I wish I wasn’t in such a hurry,’ Luka thought, because this was the world he had always thought of as being even better than his own, the world he had drawn and painted all his life.
He also saw, now that he was aloft and could take it all in, the enormous size of the Magic World, and the colossal length of the River of Time; and he understood that he would never have been able to get where he needed to go if he had had to rely on the Memory of the Elephant Birds for fuel, and their pulling power for speed. But now the Flying Carpet of King Solomon was carrying him at a great rate towards his goal, and even though he knew there would be dangers ahead he entered a state of high excitement, because, thanks to the Insultana of Ott, the impossible had just become a little more possible. And then he saw the Mists of Time.
At first they were no more than a white, cloudy mass on the horizon, but their true immensity became apparent as the carpet hurtled towards them. They stretched from horizon to horizon like a soft wall across the world, flowing across the River’s course and swallowing it up, engulfing the enchanted landscape and gobbling the sky. Any moment now they would fill Luka’s entire field of vision, and then there would be no Magic World left, only these clammy Mists. Luka felt the optimism and excitement drain out of him and a cold, bad feeling crept into the pit of his stomach. He felt Soraya’s hand on his shoulder, but did not feel reassured.
‘We have reached the Limits of Memory,’ Nobodaddy announced. ‘This is as far as your hybrid, surf-and-turf friends here would have been able to bring you.’ The Elephant Birds were most displeased. ‘We are not accustomed,’ said the Elephant Duck with immense dignity, ‘to being described as menu items.’ (That had been the true Nobodaddy speaking, Luka realised, the creature he didn’t like, and indeed had every reason not to like. His own father would never have said such a thing.) ‘Also,’ said the Elephant Drake, ‘may we remind you of the old cautionary saying regarding what you should do when you reach the Limits of even an elephantine Memory?’
‘What should you do?’ Luka asked.