Then Aladdin began to tell his mother all that happened to him from Friday, when the magician took him to see the palaces and gardens about that town, and what fell out in the way, till they came to the place between the two mountains, where the great prodigy was to be performed; how, with incense which the magician threw into the fire, and some magical words which he pronounced, the earth opened, and discovered a cave which led to an inestimable treasure. He forgot not the blow the magician gave him, and in what manner he softened again, and engaged by great promises, and putting a ring on his finger, to go down into the cave. He did not omit the least circumstance of what he saw in crossing the three halls and the garden and his taking the wonderful lamp, which he pulled out of his bosom and shewed to his mother, as well as the transparent fruit of different colours, which he had gathered in the garden as he returned, two purses full of which he gave to his mother. But though these fruits were precious stones, brilliant as the sun, and the reflection of a lamp which then lighted the room might have led them to think they were of great value, she was as ignorant of their worth as her son, and cared nothing for them. She had been bred in a middling rank of life, and her husband’s poverty prevented her being possessed of such things, nor had she, or her relations or neighbours ever seen them, so that we must not wonder that she looked on them as things of no value, and only pleasing to the eye by the variety of their colours.
Aladdin put them behind one of the cushions of the sofa he sat upon, and continued his story telling his mother that when he returned and presented himself at the mouth of the cave, upon his refusal to give the magician the lamp till he had got out, the stone, by his throwing some incense into the fire, and using two or three magical words, stopped it up, and the earth closed again. He could not help bursting into tears at the representation of the miserable condition he was in, to find himself buried alive in a dismal cave, till by the touching of his ring, the virtue of which he was then an entire stranger to, he, properly speaking, came to life again. When he had made an end of his story, he said to his mother, “I need say no more; you know the rest. This is my adventure, and the danger I have been exposed to since you saw me.”