The Five Fakirs of Faizabad Read Online Free

the Pompeii souvenir shop, Silvio was currently being observed at a safe distance by a team of scientists from Princeton University who were studying global consciousness in an effort to determine if the effects of random or so-called unlucky events could be measured scientifically.
    Of course the Princeton people were not the only ones watching Silvio Prezzolini: Philippa, too, was watching to see what kind of person he was. Just as she had done with the Kidz with Gutz awards ceremony. After all, just because a person has had a lot of bad luck in his life doesn’t mean that by default he is a good person. Even bad people have bad luck.
    Much to Philippa’s relief, what she saw in Silvio Prezzolini was a small, balding man with a limp and a big smile, who was kind to animals and children. The more she observed him, the more Philippa was inclined to believe that if anyone looked like he deserved to be granted three wishes, it was surely Silvio Prezzolini.
    Philippa knew he spoke good English, so the only problem that faced her — that faces any djinn granting a mundane three wishes — was how to make the poor man believe what she was saying without scaring him half to death and without him wasting one important wish.
    Careful observation of Silvio revealed that he started each day in the souvenir shop by conscientiously dusting all of the merchandise. Mostly this was plastic junk, but there were some rather nice-looking reproductions of Roman cameo glass featuring scenes from Pompeii that Silvio treated with extra attention, polishing them all very carefully.
    And this gave Philippa an idea as to how she might reveal herself to Silvio as a djinn ready to give him three wishes. She decided that perhaps the old-fashioned, traditional way of doing this was the best way, after all; and so, one morning, before he arrived in the shop, she transubstantiated herself into a cloud of smoke and hid herself in one of the Roman vases.
    As soon as Silvio started to polish the vase containing Philippa, she turned herself back into human form, just like a djinn from the pages of the
Arabian Nights.
But by the time she had collected every smoky atom of herself so that she could talk to him, he had dropped the vase and was running away, and poor Philippa was obliged to run after him.
    “It was never like this in the
Arabian Nights,”
she puffed as she followed him across the Forum. “Who ever heard of a djinn chasing someone to give them three wishes?”
    But Silvio wasn’t very fit and Philippa soon caught up with him trying to hide in the Garden of the Fugitives — sonamed because here there were plaster casts of thirteen dead people who had made a futile attempt to seek refuge from the volcanic ash from the eruption of Vesuvius.
    “Who are you?” squeaked Silvio, cowering in a corner. “What do you want with me?”
    “Why are you running away?” Philippa asked Silvio breathlessly. “I’m here to help you.”
    Hearing her speak, he seemed to relax a little. “You’re not from the volcano then,” he observed. Silvio stood up and brushed some of the dust of Pompeii off his clothes.
    “No,” said Philippa. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
    “Only the fact that you appeared out of a cloud of thick gray smoke,” said Silvio. “You want to be careful about doing that kind of thing around here. People will get the wrong idea, that you’re some kind of localized eruption. Or that you’re something to do with Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and volcanoes.”
    “No, I’m nothing to do with him, or the volcano,” said Philippa. “I’m a djinn. A genie, you might say. And I’ve come to grant you three wishes.”
    “You mean like in the fairy stories?”
    “If you like,” said Philippa.
    Silvio regarded the girl standing in front of him skeptically. He supposed she was about fourteen years old. She wasn’t very tall, with reddish hair, and glasses that made her look clever rather than magical. And undeniably she was an