by A. S. Byatt
41. Arab. “Ghul,” here an ogre, a cannibal. I cannot but regard the “Ghul of the waste” as an embodiment of the natural fear and horror which a man feels when he faces a really dangerous desert. As regards cannibalism, Al-Islam’s religion of common sense freely allows it when necessary to save life, and unlike our mawkish modern sensibility, never blames those who
Alimentis talibus usi
Produxere animos.
42. For Cannibals, see the Massagetæ of Herod (i.), the Padæi of India (iii.), and the Essedones near Mæotis (iv); Strabo (lib. iv.) of the Luci; Pomponius Mela (iii. 7) and St. Jerome (ad Jovinum) of Scoti. M. Polo locates them in Dragvia, a kingdom of Sumatra (iii. 17), and in Angaman (the Andamanian Isles?), possibly the ten Maniolai which Ptolemy (vii.), confusing with the Nicobars, places on the Eastern side of the Bay of Bengal; and thence derives the Heraklian stone (magnet) which attracts the iron of ships (See Serapion, De Magnete, fol. 6, Edit. of 1479, and Brown’s Vulgar Errors, p. 74, 6th Edit.). Mandeville finds his cannibals in Lamaray (Sumatra) and Barthema in the “Isle of Gyava” (Java). Ibn Al-Wardi and Al-Kazwini notice them in the Isle Saksar, in the Sea of the Zanj (Zanzibar): the name is corrupted Persian “Sag-Sar” (Dogs’-heads) hence the dog-descended race of Camoens in Pegu (The Lus. x. 122). The Bresl. Edit. (iv. 52) calls them “Khawárij = certain sectarians in Eastern Arabia. Needless to say that cocoanut oil would have no stupefying effect unless mixed with opium or datura, hemp or henbane.
43. Black pepper is produced in the Goanese but we must go south to find the “Bilád al-Filfil” (home of pepper) i.e., Malabar. The exorbitant prices demanded by Venice for this spice led directly to the discovery of the Cape route by the Portuguese; as the “Grains of Paradise” (Amomum Granum Paradisi) induced the English to explore the West African Coast.
44. Arabic “Kazdír.” Sanskrit “Kastír.” Greek “Kassiteron.” Latin “Cassiteros,” evidently derived from one root. The Hebrew form is “Badih,” a substitute, an alloy. “Tanakah” is the vulgar Arabic word, a congener of the Assyrian “Anaku,” and “Kala-i” is the corrupt Arabic term used in India.
45. Our Arabian Ulysses had probably left a Penelope or two at home and finds a Calypso in this Ogygia. His modesty at the mention of womankind is notable.
46. These are the commonplaces of Moslem consolation on such occasions: the artistic part is their contrast with the unfortunate widower’s prospect.
47. Lit. “a margin of stone, like the curb-stone of a well.”
48. I am not aware that this vivisepulture of the widower is the custom of any race, but the fable would be readily suggested by the Sati (Suttee) rite of the Hindus. Simple vivisepulture was and is practised by many people.
49. Because she was weaker than a man. The Bres. Edit. however, has “a gugglet of water and five scones.”
50. The confession is made with true Eastern sang-froid and probably none of the hearers “disapproved” of the murders which saved the speaker’s life.
51. This tale is evidently taken from the escape of Aristomenes the Messenian from the pit into which he had been thrown, a fox being his guide. The Arabs in an early day were eager students of Greek literature. Hole (p. 140) noted the coincidence.
52. Bresl. Edit. “Khwájah,” our “Howajee,” meaning a schoolmaster, a man of letters, a gentleman.
53. And he does repeat at full length what the hearers must have known right well. I abridge.
54. Island of the Bell (Arab. “Nákús” = a wooden gong used by Christians but forbidden to Moslems). “Kala” is written “Kela,” “Kullah” and a variety of ways. Baron Walckenaer places it at Keydah in the Malay peninsula opposite Sumatra. Renaudot identifies it with Calabar, “somewhere about the point of Malabar.”
55. Islands, because Arab cosmographers love to place their speciosa miracula in such places.
56. Like the companions of Ulysses who ate the sacred oxen (Od. xii.).
57. So the enormous kingfisher of Lucian’s True History (lib. ii.).
58. This tale is borrowed from Ibn Al-Wardi, who adds that the greybeards awoke in the morning after eating the young Rukh with black hair which never turned white. The same legend is recounted by Al-Dimiri (ob. A.H. 808 = 1405-6) who was translated into Latin by Bochart (Hierozoicon, ii. p. 854) and quoted by Hole and Lane (iii. 103). An excellent study of Marco Polo’s Rukh was made by my learned friend the late Prof. G. G. Bianconi of Bologna, Dell’Uccello Ruc, Bologna, Gamberini, 1868. Prof. Bianconi predicted that other giant birds would be found in Madagascar on the East African Coast opposite; but he died before hearing of Hildebrand’s discovery.
59. Arab. “Izár,” the earliest garb of Eastern man; and, as such preserved in the Meccan pilgrimage. The “waist-cloth” is either tucked in or kept in place by a girdle.
60. Arab. “Líf,” a succedaneum for the unclean sponge, not unknown in the “Turkish Baths” of London.
61. The Persians have a Plinian monster called “Tasmeh-pá” = Strap-legs without bones. The “Old Man” is not an ourang-outang nor an Ifrít, but a jocose exaggeration of a custom prevailing in parts of Asia and especially in the African interior where the Tsetse-fly prevents the breeding of burden-beasts. Ibn Batútah tells us that in Malabar everything was borne upon men’s backs. In Central Africa the kinglet rides a slave, and on ceremonious occasions mounts his Prime Minister. I have often been reduced to this style of conveyance and found man the worst imaginable riding: there is no hold and the sharpness of the shoulder-ridge soon makes the legs ache intolerably. The classicists of course find the Shaykh of the Sea in the Tritons and Nereus, and Bochart (Hiero. ii. 858, 880) notices the homo aquaticus, Senex Judæus and Senex Marinus. Hole (p. 151) suggests the inevitable ourang-outang (man o’ wood), one of “our humiliating copyists,” and quotes “Destiny” in Scarron’s comical romance (Part ii. chap. 1) and “Jealousy” enfolding Rinaldo. (O.F. lib. 42.)
62. More literally “The Chief of the Sea (-Coast),” Shaykh being here a chief rather than an elder (eoldermann, alderman). So the “Old Man of the Mountain,” famous in crusading days, was the Chief who lived on the Nusayriyah or Ansári range, a northern prolongation of the Libanus. Our “old man” of the text may have been suggested by the Koranic commentators on chap. vi. When an Infidel rises from the grave, a hideous figure meets him and says, “Why wonderest thou at my loathsomeness? I am thine Evil Deeds: thou didst ride upon me in the world and now I will ride upon thee.” (Suiting the action to the words.)
63. In parts of West Africa and especially in Gorilla-land there are many stories of women and children being carried off by apes, and all believe that the former bear issue to them. It is certain that the anthropoid ape is lustfully excited by the presence of women and I have related how at Cairo (1856) a huge cynocephalus would have raped a girl had it not been bayonetted. Young ladies who visited the Demidoff Gardens and menagerie at Florence were often scandalized by the vicious exposure of the baboons’ parti-coloured persons. The female monkey equally solicits the attentions of man and I heard in India from my late friend, Mirza Ali Akbar of Bombay, that to his knowledge connection had taken place. Whether there would be issue and whether such issue would be viable are still disputed points: the produce would add another difficulty to the pseudo-science called psychology, as such a mule would have only half a soul and issue by a congener would have a quarter-soul. A traveller well known to me once proposed to breed pithecoid men who might be useful as hewers of wood and drawers of water: his idea was to put the highest races of apes to the lowest of humanity. I never heard what became of his “breeding stables.”
64. Arab. “Jauz al-Hindi”: our word cocoa is from the Port. “Coco,” meaning a “bug” (bugbear) in allusion to its caricature of the human face, hair, eyes and mouth. I may here note that a cocoa-tree is easily climbed with a bit of rope or a handkerchief.
65. Tomb-pictures in Egypt show tame monkeys gathering fruits and Grossier (Description of China, quoted by Hole and Lane) mentions a similar mod
e of harvesting tea by irritating the monkeys of the Middle Kingdom.
66. Bresl. Edit. Cloves and cinnamon in those days grew in widely distant places.
67. In pepper-plantations it is usual to set bananas (Musa Paradisiaca) for shading the young shrubs which bear bunches like ivy-fruit, not pods.
68. The Bresl. Edit. has “Al-Ma’arat.” Langlès calls it the Island of Al-Kamárí. See Lane, iii. 86.
69. Insula, pro. peninsula. “Comorin” is a corrupt. of “Kanyá” (= Virgo, the goddess Durgá) and “Kumári” (a maid, a princess); from a temple of Shiva’s wife: hence Ptolemy’s and near it to the N. East , “Promontorium Cori quod Comorini caput insulæ vo-cant,” says Maffæus (Hist. Indic. i. p. 16). In the text “Al ’úd” refers to the eagle-wood (Aloekylon Agallochum) so called because spotted like the bird’s plume. That of Champa (Cochin-China, mentioned by Camoens, The Lus. x. 129) is still famous.
70. Arab. “Birkat” = tank, pool, reach, bight. Hence Birkat Far’aun in the Suez Gulf. (Pilgrimage, i. 297.)
71. Probably Cape Comorin; to judge from the river, but the text names Sarandib (Ceylon Island) famous for gems. This was noticed by Marco Polo, iii. chap. 19; and ancient authors relate the same of “Taprobane.”
72. I need hardly trouble the reader with a note on pearl-fisheries: the descriptions of travellers are continuous from the days of Pliny (ix. 35), Solinus (chap. 56) and Marco Polo (iii. 23). Maximilian of Transylvania, in his narrative of Magellan’s voyage (Novus Orbis, p. 532) says that the Celebes produce pearls big as turtle-doves’ eggs; and the King of Porne (Borneo) had two unions as great as goose’s eggs. Pigafetta (in Purchas) reduces this to hen’s eggs and Sir Thomas Herbert to dove’s eggs.
73. Arab. “Anbar” pronounced “Ambar;” wherein I would derive “Ambrosia.” Ambergris was long supposed to be a fossil, a vegetable which grew upon the sea-bottom or rose in springs; or a “substance produced in the water like naphtha or bitumen” (!): now it is known to be the egesta of a whale. It is found in lumps weighing several pounds upon the Zanzibar Coast and is sold at a high price, being held a potent aphrodisiac. A small hollow is drilled in the bottom of the cup and the coffee is poured upon the bit of ambergris it contains; when the oleaginous matter shows in dots amidst the “Kaymagh” (coffee-cream), the bubbly froth which floats upon the surface and which an expert “coffee servant” distributes equally among the guests. Argensola mentions in Ceylon, “springs of liquid bitumen thicker than our oil and some of pure balsam.”
74. The tale-teller forgets that Sindbad and his companions have just ascended it; but this inconséquence is a characteristic of the Eastern Saga. I may note that the description of ambergris in the text tells us admirably well what it is not.
75. This custom is alluded to by Lane (Mod. Egypt, ch. xv): it is the rule of pilgrims to Meccah when too ill to walk or ride (Pilgrimage, i. 180). Hence all men carry their shrouds: mine, after being dipped in the Holy Water of Zemzem, was stolen from me by the rascally Somal of Berberah.
76. Arab. “Fulk;” some Edits. read “Kalak” and “Ramaz” (= a raft).
77. These underground rivers (which Dr. Livingstone derided) are familiar to every geographer from Spenser’s “Mole” to the Poika of Adelberg and the Timavo near Trieste. Hence “Peter Wilkins” borrowed his cavern which led him to Grande-volet. I have some experience of Sindbad’s sorrows, having once attempted to descend the Poika on foot. The Classics had the Alpheus (Pliny v. 31; and Seneca, Nat. Quae. vi.), and the Tigris-Euphrates supposed to flow underground: and the Mediævals knew the Abana of Damascus and the Zenderúd of Isfahan.
78. Abyssinians can hardly be called “blackamoors,” but the arrogance of the white skin shows itself in Easterns (e.g., Turks and Brahmans) as much as, if not more than, amongst Europeans. Southern India at the time it was explored by Vasco da Gama was crowded with Abyssinian slaves imported by the Arabs.
79. “Sarandib” and “Ceylon” (the Taprobane of Ptolemy and Diodorus Siculus) derive from the Pali “Sihalam” (not the Sansk. “Sinhala”) shortened to Silam and Ilam in old Tamul. Van der Tunk would find it in the Malay “Pulo Selam” = Isle of Gems (the Ratna-dwípa or Jewel Isle of the Hindus and the Jazirat al-Yakút or Ruby-Island of the Arabs); and the learned Colonel Yule (Marco Polo, ii. 296) remarks that we have adopted many Malayan names, e.g., Pegu, China and Japan. Sarandib is clearly “Selan-dwípa,” which Mandeville reduced to “Silha.”
80. This is the well-known Adam’s Peak, the Jabal al-Ramun of the Arabs where Adam fell when cast out of Eden in the lowest or lunar sphere. Eve fell at Jeddah (a modern myth) and the unhappy pair met at Mount Arafat (i.e., recognition) near Meccah. Thus their fall was a fall indeed. (Pilgrimage, iii. 259.)
81. He is the Alcinous of our Arabian Odyssey.
82. This word is not in the dictionaries; Hole (p. 192) and Lane understand it to mean the hog-deer; but why, one cannot imagine. The animal is neither “beautiful” nor “uncommon” and most men of my day have shot dozens of them in the Sind-Shikárgáhs.
83. M. Polo speaks of a ruby in Seilan (Ceylon) a palm long and three fingers thick: William of Tyre mentions a ruby weighing twelve Egyptian drams (Gibbon ii. 123), and Mandeville makes the King of Mammera wear about his neck a “rubye orient” one foot long by five fingers large.
84. The fable is from Al-Kazwini and Ibn Al-Wardi who place the serpent (an animal sacred to Æsculapius, Pliny, xxix. 4) “in the sea of Zanj” (i.e., Zanzibar). In the “garrow hills” of N. Eastern Bengal the skin of the snake Burrawar (?) is held to cure pain. (Asiat. Res. vol. iii.)
85. For “Emerald,” Hole (p. 177) would read emery or adamantine spar.
86. Evidently Maháráj = Great Rajah, Rajah in Chief, an Hindu title common to the three potentates before alluded to, the Narsinga, Balhara or Samiry
87. This is probably classical. So the page said to Philip of Macedon every morning, “Remember, Philip, thou art mortal;” also the slave in the Roman Triumph,
Respice poste te: hominem te esse memento!
And the dying Severus, “Urnlet, soon shalt thou enclose what hardly a whole world could contain.” But the custom may also have been Indian: the contrast of external pomp with the real vanity of human life suggests itself to all.
88. Arab. “Hút;” a term applied to Jonah’s whale and to monsters of the deep, “Samak” being the common fishes.
89. Usually a two-bow prayer.
90. This is the recognized formula of Moslem sales.
91. Arab. “Walímah;” similar to our wedding breakfast but a much more ceremonious and important affair.
92. i.e., his wife (euphemistically). I remember an Italian lady being much hurt when a Maltese said to her “Mia moglie—con rispetto parlando” (my wife, saving your presence). “What,” she cried, “he speaks of his wife as he would of the sweepings!”
93. The serpent in Arabic is mostly feminine.
94. i.e., in envying his wealth, with the risk of the evil eye.
95. I subjoin a translation of the Seventh Voyage from the Calc. Edit. of the two hundred Nights which differs in essential points from the above. All respecting Sindbad the Seaman has an especial interest. In one point this world-famous tale is badly ordered. The most exciting adventures are the earliest and the falling off of the interest has a somewhat depressing effect. The Rukh, the Ogre and the Old Man o’ the Sea should be last in order.
THE CITY OF BRASS
1. This is a true “City of Brass.” (Nuhás asfar = yellow copper). It is situated in the “Maghrib” (Mauritania), the region of magic and mystery; and the idea was probably suggested by the grand Roman ruins which rise abruptly from what has become a sandy waste. In Egypt Nuhás is vulg. pronounced Nihás.
2. The Bresl. Edit. adds that the seal-ring was of stamped stone and iron, copper and lead. I have borrowed copiously from its vol. vi. pp. 343, et seq.
3. As this was a well-known pre-Islamitic bard, his appearance here is decidedly anachronistic, probably by intention
.
4. The first Moslem conqueror of Spain whose lieutenant, Tárik, the gallant and unfortunate, named Gibraltar (Jabal al-Tarik).
5. The colours of the Banú Umayyah (Ommiade) Caliphs were white; of the Banú Abbás (Abbasides) black, and of the Fatimites green. Carrying the royal flag denoted the generalissimo or plenipotentiary.
6. i.e., Old Cairo, or Fustat: the present Cairo was then a Coptic village founded on an old Egyptian settlement called Lui-Tkeshroma, to which belonged the tanks on the hill and the great well, Bir Yusuf, absurdly attributed to Joseph the Patriarch. Lui is evidently the origin of Levi and means a high priest (Brugsh ii. 130) and his son’s name was Roma.
7. I cannot but suspect that this is a clerical error for “Al-Samanhúdi,” a native of Samanhúd (Wilkinson’s “Semenood”) in the Delta on the Damietta branch, the old Sebennytus (in Coptic Jem-nuti=Jem the God), a town which has produced many distinguished men in Moslem times. But there is also a Samhúd lying a few miles down stream from Denderah and, as investigation of its mounds proves, it is an ancient site.