The City of Brass

Also known as Shehr-e-Barnjeen

• 5 minute read
• Ages 10-13
• Alif Laila Stories

An expedition went out from Damascus into the desert to look for something the Caliph wanted: the brass vessels in which Solomon was said to have sealed the jinn, long ago.

It was led by an emir, with a guide who had crossed that country as a young man, and it went south for a month and then west into ground where nothing grew.

The pillar

They found a black stone pillar standing alone with a figure sunk into it up to the chest, and words carved beneath.

The guide read them out.

They said that the figure had been a king, and had ruled a great deal, and that everything he had built and everything he had taken was gone, and that whoever read this should look at him and consider it.

The emir wrote the words down and they went on.

The city

Two days later they came over a ridge and saw it.

A city of brass, entire, standing in the sand with its walls unbroken and its towers up and its gates shut. Nothing had fallen. Nothing had been taken. It shone in the afternoon light exactly as it must have shone on the day it was finished.

There was no sound coming from it at all.

They rode round the whole circuit of the wall and found no gate that would open and no gap and no way in. The walls were smooth and far too high.

So they built a ladder. It took them two days.

The men on the wall

The first man went up.

At the top he stood and looked down into the city, and then he began to laugh, and then he clapped his hands and jumped down inside.

They called to him and there was no answer.

The second man went up and did the same thing. Then a third.

The emir stopped it there and would not let anyone else climb.

An old sheikh with the party said that whatever was doing it was showing each man something he wanted, and that the only person who could go up was someone who could see it and know what it was.

He went up himself, reciting steadily, and did not stop reciting, and at the top he stood for a while and then came down again, and would not say what he had seen.

Then he found the stair inside the gatehouse and opened the city from within.

Inside

The city was perfect and empty.

The markets had goods still stacked in them. There was cloth on the counters that had not rotted. The lamps were in place. There was no dust, because there was no wind inside the walls, and no bones anywhere, and no sign that anyone had left in a hurry or at all.

In the palace they found tablets that told them what had happened.

There had been a drought. It had gone on for years. The city had spent its gold on grain, and when there was no grain to buy it had spent it on nothing, and the tablets ended with a queen writing that she had shut the gates and that anyone reading this should understand that her people had died in a treasury.

The emir read all of it.

Then he took his men out through the gate, and had it closed behind them, and took nothing from that city at all except the writing.

Afterwards

They found the brass vessels eventually, further south, in the hands of fishermen who pulled them out of the sea, and they carried them back to Damascus and the Caliph had what he had asked for.

But it was not the vessels the emir talked about afterwards.

It was the counters with the cloth still on them.