Scorpion Soup by Tahir Shah Page A

dilly-dally,’ said the king, ‘tell me one now.’
    But the miser had already begun:

Scorpion Soup
    Four wizened old witches were clustered around their cauldron one night under the stars. Behind them was a sheering rock cliff face, impenetrable and bleak. And a short distance ahead was a chasm filled with thunder clouds and rain.
    One of the hags was stirring the brew with a dead man’s hand, the others tossing in ingredients for the spell.
    ‘Blood from a murdered child,’ said one.
    ‘Pickled eye of an ostrich,’ croaked another.
    ‘Egg of an albino crocodile,’ hissed a third.
    The hand stirred seven times to the right, then seven to the left.
    After a long span of silence, the first witch raised the hand in the air.
    ‘It is ready,’ she said. ‘But who will be the first to taste?’
    Each of the witches jostled forwards. But the one who was stirring thrust the dead man’s hand deep into the piping hot brew.
    Holding its cupped palm to her mouth, she drank.
    No sooner had the potion touched her lips, than the witch collapsed.
    ‘She is dead!’ cackled one.
    ‘ Hah !’ hooted the next.
    But the third fell silent. She jabbed a finger at the ground.
    ‘ L-l-l-l-look !’ she stammered.
    The witches peered down at their sister’s body.
    Its appearance began to change.
    The layers of skin were peeling slowly back and vanishing. The blood vessels became visible first, then the muscles, the tendons and the nerves. As each of them fell away, the jawline and the skull were exposed, and a gleaming white skeleton beneath.
    Her sisters gasped in both horror and delight.
    ‘She is being reborn,’ said one.
    ‘Purity,’ said the next.
    ‘And when she is pure she will have pure sight.’
    Only when every trace of flesh had disappeared, did the skeleton begin to move. Sitting upright, the torso scratched a hand to its face, and the legs struggled to stand.
    As it did so, the three sisters sat motionless, the cauldron’s fire giving glow to their rapt expressions.
    Very slowly, the witch skeleton stood upright, as if hampered by the loss of muscle and flesh. She examined her arm, the empty eye sockets scanning the lengths of bone from elbow to wrist, before moving on to the hand. Then, glancing around her, she recognised her sisters, who looked both hopeful and timid.
    ‘The potion has worked, my sisters,’ said the skeleton witch. ‘I am ready to open the door.’
    Turning, she strode fitfully to the sheering cliff face and held out her arms.
    ‘Mountain! O mountain,’ she cried, ‘I command you to open your sacred sanctuary and welcome me in!’
    A minute passed. Then another.
    And, gradually, a grand doorway was revealed, a portico above it adorned with supernatural symbols. The skeleton witch clapped her hands together three times and the door opened.
    Beyond it lay a passage, lit by fiery torches.
    The witch stepped forwards across the threshold. As she did so, the door closed shut and the doorway itself disappeared.
    Squatting around the cauldron outside, the other witches looked on as their skeleton sister vanished. With their impure sight, they had not seen the doorway, or what lay beyond it.
    Inside the mountain, the skeleton witch paced through the low tunnel, the torch flames throwing shadows over her bones. Eventually she arrived at a staircase carved from the granite, the steps covered in a sea of tarantulas.
    She descended the stairs, the bones of her feet crushing the spiders as she took the steps one by one.
    The stairway ended in a sheering wall of carved lapis lazuli. The witch skeleton clapped her hands together once again, the stone barrier shattered, revealing a gigantic cavern – illuminated by phosphorescent fires.
    A boiling stream ran through the middle of the cavern, its waters yellow and sulphurous. Around its edge there were hundreds of large turquoise urns, all of them adorned with Chinese characters, each one brimming with the ingredients for supernatural spells.
    And, at the