The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade
“The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” is a short-story by American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). It was published in the February 1845 issue of Godey's Lady's Book and was intended as a partly humorous sequel to the celebrated collection of Middle Eastern tales One Thousand and One Nights. [1]
Plot summary
The tale depicts the eighth and final voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, along with the various mysteries Sinbad and his crew encounter; the anomalies are then described as footnotes to the story. While the King is uncertain — except in the case of the elephants carrying the world on the back of the turtle — that these mysteries are real, they are actual modern events that occurred in various places during, or before, Poe's lifetime. The story ends with the king in such disgust at the tale Scheherazade has just woven, that he has her executed the very next day.
Wonders and anomalies described
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- Coralite ("an island, many hundreds of miles in circumference ... built in the middle of the sea by a colony of little things like caterpillars")
- Maelzel's Chess Player ("a man out of brass and wood, and leather ... with such ingenuity that he would have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind")
- Antlion pits ("myriads of monstrous animals with horns resembling scythes upon their heads ... dig for themselves vast caverns in the soil, of a funnel shape)
- Mammoth Cave ("a cave that ran to the distance of thirty or forty miles within the bowels of the earth ... far more spacious and more magnificent palaces ... there flowed immense rivers as black as ebony, and swarming with fish that had no eyes")
- Babbage's calculating machine ("constructed ... a creature ... so great were its reasoning powers that, in a second, it performed calculations of ... the united labor of fifty thousand fleshy men for a year")
References
- ^ Sova, Dawn B. (2001). Edgar Allan Poe A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work (Paperback ed.). New York: Checkmark Books, pg 237. ISBN 978-0-8160-4161-9.
External links
The full text of The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade at Wikisource
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Raven Edition, Volume 2 public domain audiobook at LibriVox
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