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

angels-again regardless of reality. And my third reason is that I think
you are mad, my most noble of customers, and to exploit you would be
unlucky."

It became known almost immediately, all over the Bazaar, that young
Abdullah, the carpet merchant, had lost his reason and would buy any
portraits that people had for sale.

This was a great nuisance to Abdullah. For the rest of that day he was
constantly being interrupted by persons arriving with long and flowery
speeches about this portrait of their grandmother which

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only poverty would induce them to part with; or this portrait of the
Sultan's racing camel which happened to fall off the back of a cart; or
this locket containing a picture of their sister. It took Abdullah much
time to get rid of these people-and on several occasions he did actually
buy a painting or drawing if the subject was a man. That, of course,
kept people coming.

"Only today. My offer extends only until sunset today," he told the
gathering crowd at last. "Let all with a picture of a man for sale come
to me an hour before sunset and I will buy. But only then."

This left him a few hours of peace in which to experiment with the
carpet. He was wondering by now if he was right to think that his visit
to the garden had been any more than a dream. For the carpet would not
move. Abdullah had naturally tested it after breakfast by asking it to
rise up two feet again, just to prove that it still would. And it simply
lay on the floor. He tested it again when he came back from the artist's
booth, and still it just lay there.

"Perhaps I have not treated you well," he said to it. "You have remained
with me faithfully, in spite of my suspicions, and I have rewarded you
by tying you around a pole. Would you feel better if I let you lie free
on the floor, my friend? Is that it?"

He left the carpet on the floor, but it still would not fly. It might
have been any old hearthrug.

Abdullah thought again, in between the times when people were pestering
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