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“Hang on, wait a minute!” Sorrel clutched his tail. “It’s all very well for you! You’re not up to your chin in all these leaves. Although,” she said, taking an experimental bite out of one, “they taste delicious. Absolutely yummy.”
“Want to get on my back again?” asked Firedrake, turning around.
“No, no,” said Sorrel dismissively. “It’s all right. I’ll manage on my own. Yum. Honest I will.” She was pulling leaf after leaf off the plants and stuffing them into her backpack. “These leaves are very, very tasty.”
Ben put Twigleg on his shoulder and grinned.
“Come along, Sorrel,” said Firedrake, impatiently swishing his tail back and forth. “You can stock up on provisions once we’ve found the djinn.”
He turned and went on. Ben followed, and the two of them had soon disappeared among the trees.
“I call that really mean of him!” said Sorrel crossly, trudging along behind them. “As if that djinn couldn’t wait another five minutes. It’s not as if I lived on nothing but moonlight. Does he want me to get so faint with hunger that I fall off his back?”
Firedrake was making his way along the river. The farther they went, the narrower the ravine became. At last a huge, fallen palm tree barred the dragon’s way. An untidy tangle of roots stuck up in the air, but its tall trunk rested on a couple of large boulders in the riverbed, so that it was lying like a bridge across the water.
“Wait a moment!” Ben put Twigleg down on Firedrake’s tail, climbed up on the trunk of the fallen tree, and clambered a little way along it.
“Look!” he called, pointing to the opposite bank. “There, among the red flowers!”
Firedrake took a step into the water and stretched his neck.
Yes, there it was. A large gray car overgrown with creepers and covered with fallen flower petals. Lizards basked on its hood in the sun.
Ben made his precarious way along the tree trunk and jumped down on the opposite bank. The dragon waded through the shallow water with Sorrel and Twigleg and then waited on the bank with them. Ben pushed the creepers aside and peered cautiously into the car. A large lizard sitting on the front seat hissed at him when he looked through the side window. Ben jumped back in alarm. The lizard rapidly disappeared between the seats.
“No glass in the windows,” said Ben quietly. “Just as the professor told us.”
Cautiously he put his head in through the car window again. There was no trace of the lizard now, although two snakes were coiled up on the backseat. Ben tightened his lips, put his hand through the window, and pressed the horn. Then he rapidly moved back.
Flocks of birds flew up, squawking. The lizards shot off the hot metal of the car and disappeared into the twining undergrowth.
All was silent again.
Warily Ben stepped back. The professor had told them to wait seventeen paces away from the car. Ben counted his footsteps. One … two … three … four … Seventeen paces were a lot. On purpose, he did not make his steps too large. After the seventeenth, he sat down on a rock and waited while Firedrake lay down behind him among the flowers and leaves. Sorrel and Twigleg sat on the dragon’s paws. They all stared at the car as if spellbound.
Asif didn’t keep them waiting long.
Blue-tinged smoke billowed out of the car and streamed higher and higher. Ben had to crane his neck to look up at the vast spiral. The drifting wisps merged together among the treetops, whirling around one another faster and faster until the gigantic pillar of smoke formed into a body, a body as blue as the night sky and so large that its shadow darkened the entire ravine. Asif’s thousand eyes, small and bright as jewels, sparkled all over his skin, his shoulders, his arms, and his fat belly.
Ben retreated until he felt Firedrake’s scales behind him. Sorrel and Twigleg huddled on the dragon’s back. Only Firedrake did not move but raised his head and gazed up at the djinn.
“Well, well! Look at this, then!” The djinn bent over them. A thousand eyes with a thousand images in them shone above their heads, and as he spoke Asif’s breath blew like the hot desert wind from one end of the ravine to the other.
“So what have we here?” boomed the djinn. “A dragon, a genuine dragon. Well, well, well!” His voice was as hollow as an echo, resounding from wall to wall of the rocky ravine. “So it was you making my skin itch so much that a thousand servants had to scratch it for me.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose, djinn!” Firedrake called. “We’ve come to ask you a question.”
“Aaaaah!” The djinn’s mouth stretched into a smile. “I answer only human questions.”
“We know!” Ben jumped up, pushed the hair back from his forehead, and looked up at the huge djinn. “I’m going to ask you the question, Asif.”
“Oooooh!” breathed the djinn. “So this little fellow knows our name! What kind of a question is it? You know the rules?”
“Yes,” replied Ben.
“Good.” The djinn leaned a little farther down, his breath as hot as the steam rising from a saucepan. Perspiration was dripping off the end of Ben’s nose.
“Ask away!” breathed Asif. “I could just do with another servant! Someone small to clean my ears, for instance. Now you would be the ideal size for that.”
