Read "The Shaving of Shagpat" by George Meredith online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Now, in the City of Shagpat, Kadza, spouse of Shagpat, she that had belaboured Shibli Bagarag, had a dream while these things were doing; and it was a dream of danger and portent to the glory of her eyes, Shagpat. So, at the hour when he was revealed to Shibli Bagarag, made luminous by the beams of Aklis, Kadza went to an inner chamber, and greased her hands and her eyelids, and drank of a phial, and commenced tugging at a brass ring fixed in the floor, and it yielded and displayed an opening, over which she stooped the upper half of her leanness, and pitching her note high, called "Karaz! " After that, she rose and retreated from the hole hastily, and in the winking of an eye it was filled, as 'twere a pillar of black smoke, by the body of the genie, he breathing hard with mighty travel. So he cried to her between his pantings and puffings, "Speak! where am I wanted, and for what?"
Now, Kadza was affrighted at the terribleness of his manner, and the great smell of the genie was an intoxication in her nostril, so that she reeled and could just falter out, "Danger to the Identical!"