The Bottle of the Ifrit
The sealed copper bottle cast up in the fisherman's net in the Thousand and One Nights tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni, from which a vast ifrit escaped in a pillar of smoke and, furious at his long imprisonment, threatened to kill the man who had freed him. The fisherman saved himself by doubting that so great a being could fit into so small a vessel, tricking the spirit back through its narrow mouth and sealing the bottle once more. In the tale the jar carries the seal of Solomon, whose name had trapped the ifrit in the deep for hundreds of years, and it is the loss of that power that let