Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange (Hardcover Classics) (4 page)

In ‘Julnar’ Badr is turned into a stork and later he succeeds in turning Queen Lab into a mule. In ‘The Forty Girls’ the prince encounters the sister of the sorceress who has been turned into a horse. The scrawny ape in ‘Abu Muhammad the Idle’ turns out to be a
jinni
under enchantment. In ‘Mahliya and al-Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’ a princess in love allows herself to be transformed into a gazelle. Towards the very end of the same story Mauhub is turned into a crocodile.
Therianthropy, the transformation of a human into an animal, is usually presented by storytellers as a form of imprisonment. Rescue usually comes from anagnorisis (recognition), as when a king’s daughter divines Badr’s humanity beneath his appearance as a stork.

Medieval Arabs seem to have been fascinated by the people who lived in the sea. Captain Burzug ibn Shahriyar’s
Book of the Wonders of India
had this to say on the subject: ‘Someone who had been to Zaila and the land of the Ethiopians told me that in the Ethiopian Sea there is a fish just like a human being, in body, hands and feet.’ Lonely fishermen ‘hold congress with the females. From them are born beings that look like men, and live in the water and in the atmosphere.’
¹¹
The story of ‘ ‘Abdallah the Fisherman and Abdallah the Merman’ is found in the
Nights
. ‘The Story of Julnar’ is found in both the
Nights
and in
Tales of the Marvellous
. Vengeful mermaids feature in ‘ ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is’. On the other hand, the crew on the Second Quest for treasure enjoy pleasant sex with scaly-skinned but friendly mermaids. More generally, those on the Second and Third Quests for treasure encounter many wonders of the sea, including strange fishes, a boiling sea and an island white as camphor.

‘ ‘Arus al-‘Ara’is’ also has a marvels of the sea prelude, and later the
jinni
who holds her captive likes to entertain her by telling her of the marvels that he has encountered.

While I was staying with the
jinni
, one day when he was sitting and telling me about the marvels of the sea and its islands, he told me about a bird like a swift whose excrement if applied to the eyes would produce instant blindness, while on another island was a tree whose fruit if eaten by a woman would cause her to give birth to a son. He told me of herbs that would harm men and others that would help against every illness, of a type of kohl that would clear the sight and another that would blind it …

The sea also acts as a kind of roulette wheel, its chance operations giving men good fortune or ruining them. Carefully accumulated treasures are lost to the stormy deep, and powerful tides carry men who are close to drowning to strange islands and new fortunes.

The fictional treatment of treasure hunting evolved in parallel with non-fictional treatises devoted to the same subject.
Matalib
, the purported science of treasure hunting, was an established genre of writing, and in medieval Egypt professional treasure hunters had set themselves up as a guild. The fourteenth-century North African philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun had this to say on the subject:

It should be known that many weak-minded persons in cities hope to discover property under the surface of the earth and to make some profit from it. They believe that all the property of the nations of the past was stored underground and sealed with magic talismans. These seals, they believe, can be broken only by those who chance upon the necessary knowledge and can offer the proper incense, prayers, and sacrifices to break them.
¹²

In the course of a sceptical and coruscating account of treasure hunting, Ibn Khaldun wondered ‘why should anyone who hoards his money and seals it with magical operations, thus making extraordinary efforts to keep it concealed, set up hints and clues as to how it may be found by anyone who cares to?’
¹³
Many of the ‘professional’ treasure hunters were really con men who preyed upon the gullible, and Jawbari’s thirteenth-century manual on rogues’ tricks, the
Kashf al-Asrar
(
Unveiling of Secrets
), described them as ‘masters of a thousand and one dodges’.
¹⁴
Additionally, many treasure-hunting manuals are so full of wondrous accounts of magical spells, death-dealing automata and stories about ill-fated earlier seekers after treasure that they should really be reassigned to the category of entertaining fiction.

In fiction, as in purported fact, one needed more than a good map and a shovel in order to unearth ancient treasures, for the treasure hunter might expect to encounter guardian monsters, killer statues and magical traps, and that is indeed what the participants in the Quests included in
Tales of the Marvellous
do encounter. As the leader of the First Quest asserts, ‘He who dares wins.’ Their perilous adventures can be compared to those of Indiana Jones, though the supernatural features more prominently in the medieval stories. The treasure-hunting stories bear witness to the awe experienced by the medieval Arabs when they
contemplated the wonders of antiquity and they asked themselves what had happened to the fabulous wealth of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as of the Pharaohs and Persian emperors – and besides material treasures there was also thought to be a lost knowledge that could only be acquired at a price. The ancients were believed to have anticipated global catastrophes and taken steps to preserve their secrets in some form that would survive fire and water. The pyramids were commonly thought to be storehouses of esoteric wisdom, but in ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim’ we learn how Adam, foreseeing the Deluge, had his secret knowledge written down on baked clay tablets, which were then sealed in a cave.

As the stories of dangerous automata suggest, medieval storytellers envisaged advanced technology not as something that would be achieved in the future, but rather as something whose secrets were lost in the distant past. The statue of Memmon, king of Ethiopia, near Thebes in Egypt was reported to sing when struck by the sun’s rays at dawn. It was said that the Greek artificer Daedalus constructed moving statues that were animated by quicksilver and which walked in front of the Labyrinth that he had also constructed. In
Tales of the Marvellous
death-dealing automata guarded the treasures sought by the protagonists of the Quest stories. Unusually, in ‘Julnar’ the sorceress Queen Lab is mistress of a group of singing automata. Statues were dangerous. They hardly ever featured as objects of art in medieval Arab literature. Instead, some were characterized as evil-averting talismans or guardians of treasure, while others were human beings or animals who had been turned to stone. In several of the tales in
Tales of the Marvellous
demons enter the statues and speak through them. Stone monks guard treasure in the first of the four treasure-hunting stories. A statue on the Talisman Mountain has the power to immobilize ships. Such things, neither alive nor dead, are intrinsically uncanny.

Treasure-hunting stories are full of marvels and excitement, but, as with the
Nights
story ‘The City of Brass’, they also carry a lot of moralizing about the transience of worldly wealth and the vanity of earthly power. For example, the treasure seekers on the First Quest enter a gallery in which there is a sarcophagus in which:

there was a dead man surrounded by piles of dinars with a golden tablet by his head. This had an inscription: ‘Whoever wishes this rubbish, doomed as it is to perish, let him take what he wants of it, for he will leave
it behind as I have done and die as I have died, while his actions will be hung around his neck.’

Then again, those on the Second Quest encounter a shrouded corpse with a tablet of green topaz at its head, on which was the following inscription:

‘I am
Shaddad
the Great. I conquered a thousand cities; a thousand white elephants were collected for me; I lived for a thousand years and my kingdom covered both east and west, but when death came to me nothing of all that I had gathered was of any avail. You who see me, take heed for Time is not to be trusted.’

In the fourth story, that of the golden tube, the message in the tube runs as follows:

‘In the Name of God Almighty – This world is transient while the next world is eternal. Our actions are tied around our necks; disasters are arrows; people set themselves goals; our livelihood is apportioned to us, and our appointed time is decreed. The world is filled with hope, and good deeds are the best treasures for a man to store up. Toleration is an adornment and hastiness is a disgrace … A man’s wife is the sweet flower of his life and finds acceptance as many such flowers do.’

A treasure hunter might hope to end up rich: he should certainly end up conventionally pious.

In Sura 89 of the Qur’an, Muslims and unbelievers are admonished:

Hast thou not seen how thy Lord did with Ad,

Iram of the pillars,

the like of which was never created in the land,

and Thamood, who hollowed the rocks in the valley,

and
Pharaoh
, he of the tent-pegs,

who were all insolent in the land

and worked much corruption therein?

Thy Lord unloosed on them a scourge of chastisement;

surely thy Lord is ever on the watch.

So also in
Tales of the Marvellous
a good Muslim should take warning from what befell the great kings in the pagan past.

The golden tube also contains a promise: ‘Whoever wishes to see a wonder should go to the Scented Mountain.’ One gets the sense that the treasure hunters are not so much seeking tangible treasures but really they are on a quest for adventure and strangeness. The story of a quest for treasure turns out to be the story of the quest for a story. As the man on the Third Quest says, when the centaur tries to bribe him not to see the magical crown, ‘We only want to look at marvels and to see what we have never seen before, and if we see the crown we can put it back in its place.’ (The plot of the Third Quest has a faint but eerie resemblance to Kipling’s story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’).

The history of medieval Egypt took place in the shadow of the pyramids. Shepherds took their flocks through the outlying rubble of Karnak, and women washed clothes in the shade of the ruins of Philae. Since knowledge of hieroglyphs and the real history of Egypt had been lost, a fantasy history was constructed. The scale of the ruins, far beyond the ability of any medieval sultan to match, suggested the supernatural power and fabulous wealth of the bygone dynasties of pre-Islamic times. One of the glories of Egypt was the number of marvels it contained. At the beginning of ‘Mahliya and al-Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’ the Arab general ‘Amr ibn al-‘As marvels at a great ruin at Heliopolis in Egypt. He ‘saw a huge old building bigger than any he had ever seen, surrounded by remarkable remains’. This leads him on to ask the hermit Matrun for its story. According to Muslim lore Ikhmim in Upper Egypt was the capital of the country’s sorcerers (though in the story of Mahliya this pre-eminent role has been usurped by
Samannud
). The sheer wild inventiveness of this story, with its jumbling of Muslim, Christian and pagan beliefs and rituals, cannot pass without comment. Here we have a mechanical vulture, visionary dreams, conversation with a pagan god, magical transformations, thrones of wrath and of mercy, an enchanted gazelle, a herder of giant ostriches, lustful
jinn
, speaking idols, a queen of the crows, a weeping lion, a fortress guarded by talismans, a crocodile with pearls in its ears, the sacrifice of virgins to the Nile and much else. The narrative is one long carnival of extravagant fantasy. (Al-Maqrizi and other Arab historians told the story of how every year a virgin was sacrificed to the Nile in order to ensure its
flooding, until the Arabs conquered Egypt and ‘Amr ibn al-‘As put a stop to the practice. But the story is probably an anti-Coptic libel.)

One of the conventions of medieval Arab storytelling is that if an astrologer makes a prophecy, it invariably becomes true. One cannot beat fate. Unusually, the astrologer’s prophecy in the opening of ‘The King of the Two Rivers’ does not in the end come true, though it serves to get the story moving. Also the prince’s prediction that he will attack his father with a great army is never fulfilled, though it serves to explain why he was sent out in the desert. ‘Abu Disa’ sends up astrology mercilessly. The message of that story is perhaps that as long as one trusts in God everything will work out all right. In one of the more bizarre scenes in ‘Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle’, set in a church in
Baalbek
(in what is now Lebanon), the pagan god
Baal
addresses Mauhub with the following words:

Great king and leader, you will meet sorrows, difficulties and dangers, grave matters, the revelation of hidden secrets, heavy cares and troubles following one after the other. All this will be thanks to a beautiful gazelle acting as a lover wounded at heart. Take your time in dealing with this affair, Mauhub, and now, farewell, great king.

Here prophecy serves as prolepsis, since it promises ordeals and adventures to come.

According to Ulrich Marzolph, who has made a close study of these tales, ‘Sa‘id Son of Hatim al-Bahili’ ‘is the most remarkable story in the collection’.
¹⁵
It certainly is rather strange, and I believe that it has no other close parallel in Arab literature. A narrative to comfort a sleepless caliph, it starts off as a fairly conventional tale about the wonders of the sea and the conquest of part of India but then turns into something quite different, for the Muslim expeditionary force encounters an incredibly ancient hermit, Simeon, who declares himself to be the disciple and former companion of the biblical prophet Daniel. However, while Daniel is long dead, Simeon has succeeded in living on into Islamic times.