Liber Neptuni - Chapter 13

Verses

In the year when seven wells went bitter, a potter heard singing beneath a stone that had never known rain.

He struck the stone and a blue eye opened in the earth.

From it rose a jinn wearing a crown of wet reeds and complaining that the desert had been built over his bedroom.

The potter asked for gold. The jinn offered water. Thus began their first disagreement about wealth.

A striped cat drank first, because cats recognize miracles only as improvements in service.

The water showed each drinker a city beneath the sand where every fountain remembered a dead name.

Those who reached into the reflection felt hands reaching upward from the other side.

The potter covered the well and sold cups of ordinary water beside it for three copper coins.

The jinn called this blasphemy. The potter called it retail.

At night Nethuns passed under the dunes, and every buried spring turned in its sleep.

A prince came seeking immortality and was told to drink until he no longer knew which mouth was his.

He fled. The cat stayed and became, by local opinion, the wiser prince.

There are oceans under deserts, and deserts under oceans, and under both a door nobody has agreed to open.