"'Washish squashish squeak, Sinbad, hey-diddle diddle, grunt unt grumble, hiss, fiss, whiss,' said he to me, one day after dinner- but I beg a thousand pardons, I had forgotten that your majesty is not conversant with the dialect of the Cock-neighs (so the man-animals were called; I presume because their language formed the connecting link between that of the horse and that of the rooster).
"It is, in fact, very surprising, my dear queen, that you omitted, hitherto, these latter adventures of Sinbad. Do you know I think them exceedingly entertaining and strange?"
"Sinbad went on in this manner with his narrative to the caliph- 'I thanked the man-animal for its kindness, and soon found myself very much at home on the beast, which swam at a prodigious rate through the ocean; although the surface of the latter is, in that part of the world, by no means flat, but round like a pomegranate, so that we went -- so to say -- either up hill or down hill all the time.'
"'The beast,' continued Sinbad to the caliph, 'swam, as I have related, up hill and down hill until, at length, we arrived at an island, many hundreds of miles in circumference, but which, nevertheless, had been built in the middle of the sea by a colony of little things like caterpillars'"
"Hum!" said the king, again; but Scheherazade, paying him no attention, continued in the language of Sinbad.
Also impressive are Amy Tregellis (
Sinbad), Shona Tulloch (Princess Elene), George Wyton (Shazaman, the sorcerer) and Phoebe Ash (The Old Witch of the Sea), and there is a really slick routine to the song If I Were Not Upon This Boat.
