Contes Arabes Modernes.[1] There a Moghrebbin, who is also a magician, gives a childless king two bonbons, one for his wife and the other for himself, on the bargain that the king will yield in return his first son. In due time the Moghrebbin fetches the boy to his underground palace, and gives him a book to read, of which he cannot decipher a single word. The magician accords him thirty days to learn it by heart, threatening that in default he will cut off the hero's head. Failing to decipher the mystic volume the latter wanders on the last day but one of the allotted period into the garden, where he finds a maiden hung up by the hair. She tells him that she has been thus punished by the Moghrebbin for succeeding in learning the book. She reveals the secrets to him, warning him to feign ignorance. Ultimately the hero and heroine flee on two horses, which they have obtained by reading the last three leaves of the volume. The hero's mother performs the part of the old woman in the former story; and his final transformation is into a poniard which stabs to death the magician while seeking in the form of a cock to devour all the seeds of a pomegranate—the hero's last previous shape. Here the Forbidden Chamber appears as a garden, and the prohibition to enter it is only to be inferred from the secrecy of the hero's visits and the fact that the contents enable him to outwit his master. In other versions, however, a nearer approach is made to the Bluebeard type. A variant recorded by Von Hahn[2] makes the hero the youngest of three disobedient sons of a poor woman, who, gathering sticks in a wood, meets an ogre and complains of her undutiful children. The ogre offering to take one, she gives them up to him successively, to be brought up to a handicraft. The ogre's den contains a Forbidden Chamber full of murdered men; and the test of disobedience is an apple which is dropped and covered with blood. The hero alone obeys the prohibition; but one day, performing the service (so common in stories from the Mediterranean
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THE FORBIDDEN CHAMBER.
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