We Others (38 page)

Now when I had descended four of the stairs I replaced the stone over my head, for fear the waters of the sea would rush down on me; after which I continued down the stairway, till the steps of stone grew wet and I came to a dark stream, into which the steps passed. Presently I saw floating on that stream a raft whereon sat an old man of reverend aspect who wore black robes and a black turban, and I cried out to him, but he spake not a word; and stopping at the steps he waited till I sat down behind him. Then we two set forth along the dark stream, which flowed between walls of black marble. Though I accosted him, he turned not his head toward me, nor uttered a word; so in silence we passed along that stream for two days and two nights, till waking on the third day I saw that our way was along the banks of a broad river in sunlight, past date groves and palm groves and stately gardens that came down to the river. Then I saw white minarets and the gilded domes of mosques, and I cried out in astonishment and wonder, for it was Baghdad-city. So I called out to people passing over a bridge, but no one took notice of me; and seizing the pole from the old man, who made no motion to resist, I pushed to shore. Then I passed along the riverbank till I came to the bridge-gate that led into the market street, where I saw people passing; and though I cried out to them, none answered me, nor looked at me; nor did I hear any sound of voices or of passing feet, but all was still as stone. And a great fear coming over me, I wept over myself, saying, “Would Heaven I had died at the bottom of the sea.”

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bove the rows of orange trees that border the south and west sides of the courtyard, Sinbad sees the tops of pink marble pillars. The deep, pillared corridor runs along all four sides of the courtyard and is surmounted by a gallery upon which all the rooms of the upper story open. Beyond the south wall is a second courtyard with a corridor of pillars, and beyond that a garden, and beyond the garden wall a grove of date palms and orange trees, leading down to the Tigris. The seven voyages have enriched him. In the warm shade and stillness of the garden, it seems to Sinbad that the dreamlike roc’s egg, the legendary Old Man of the Sea, the fantastic giant, the city of apes, the cavern of corpses, all the shimmering and insubstantial voyages of his youth, have been pressed together to form the hard marble of those pillars, the weight of that orange bending a branch, that sharp-edged shadow. Then at times it is quite different: the pillars, the gallery, the slave girls and concubines, the gold-woven carpets, the silk-covered divans, the carved fruits and flowers on the ceilings, the wine-filled flagons shimmer, tremble, become diaphanous, and dissolve to reveal the unwound turban binding his waist to the leg of the roc, the giant’s sharp eyeteeth the size of boar’s tusks, the leg bone of the corpse with which he smashes the skulls of wives and husbands buried alive in the cavern, the shadow of the roc darkening the sun, the jewels torn from the necks of corpses, the legs of the clinging old man black and rough as a buffalo hide.

The three major English translations of
The Arabian Nights
are by Edward William Lane (three volumes, 1839–41), John Payne (nine volumes, 1882–84), and Richard Burton (ten volumes, 1885; six supplemental volumes, 1886–88). The translation by Lane contains roughly two-fifths of the original material; the tales he does include are heavily bowdlerized. In the story of Sinbad, for example, the episode of the mating horses in the first voyage is omitted. The translation by John Payne is the first complete and unexpurgated version in English. Burton’s translation is likewise complete and unexpurgated; it relies so heavily on Payne, borrowing entire sentences and even paragraphs, that Burton cannot escape the charge of plagiarism. “Burton’s translation,” Gerhardt states, “really is Payne’s with a certain amount of stylistic changes.” Burton, in his “Terminal Essay” (vol. X), defines the difference between Payne’s translation and his own thus: “Mr. Payne’s admirable version appeals to the Orientalist and the ‘stylist,’ not to the many-headed; and mine to the anthropologist and student of Eastern manners and customs.” He is here calling attention to his voluminous footnotes. Burton, who never fails to praise Payne’s style, is less kind to Lane, referring to his “curious harsh and latinized English, at once turgid and emasculated.” Gerhardt finds Lane’s style “plodding but honest”; he says of Payne’s translation that it is written in “a tortured and impossible prose, laboriously constructed out of archaic and rare words and turns.” Campbell finds Payne’s translation “superb” and calls it the “most readable” version in English, which “omits, moreover, not a syllable of the vigorous erotica.” Gerhardt judges Burton’s translation to be generally reliable but adds: “The English prose in which it is written, however, is doubtless still worse than Payne’s.”

So as I walked about the streets of the city I came to the gate of a great house, with a stone bench beside the door, and within the gate I saw a flower garden. Now at this sight my wit became dazed, and a trembling came over me; and I passed within the gate and through the garden. Then I entered the house and passed from room to room, wherein I saw pages and slave girls and servants and attendants, but none took notice of me, till coming to a wide door I stepped forth from the house into the inner courtyard. There I saw orange trees and date trees, and an abundance of sweet-smelling flowers, and marble fountains, and a sundial in red sand; and beneath an orange tree sat a man whose eyes were closed and whose beardsides were streaked with white. Then I was confounded, and I fell to trembling, and knew not what to do; and all was silent in that place. So after a time I cried out “Sinbad!” but he stirred not. Then I fled from that garden, and passing through many rooms I came to an orchard of date trees, which led down to the river. And finding a boat at the riverbank I seized the oars and rowed along the water, till my arms ached and my hands were sore; and as my course continued, the channel grew straiter and the air darker, and I saw banks of stone rising high on both sides. Then a voice called out to me from the bank, and I saw an opening in the stone, where an old man squatted on a rock; and he said, “Who art thou and whence farest thou? How camest thou into this river?” Then I answered him, “I am the merchant Sinbad, whose ship went down to the bottom of the sea, and there I found a stairway leading to this place. What city is that behind me, which I have seen?” Quoth he, “Unhappiest of mortals, that is a demon-city. Better it is, never to have seen that city, than to find a ship filled with pearls.” Then seeing my unhappiness, and seeing that I was weak from thirst and hunger, he offered to lead me to his city, that I might rest and refresh me, whereat I thanked him; after which he hopped from the rock into my boat beside me, which was great wonder to see, for his legs were as the legs of frogs; and squatting beside me he bade me enter the opening in the cliff.

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n the warm shade of the orange tree, leaning back against the silk pillows of the divan, Sinbad half dreams of the telling of the voyages. At first the telling had made the voyages so vivid to him that it was as if the words had given them life, it was as if, without the words, the voyages had been slowly darkening or disappearing. Thus the voyages took shape about the words, or perhaps took shape within the words. But a change had been wrought, by the telling. For once the voyages had been summoned by the words, a separation had seemed to take place, as if, just to one side of the words, half-hidden by their shadows, the voyages lay dreaming in the grass. In the shade of the orange tree Sinbad tries to remember. Are there then two septads of voyages, the seven that are told and the seven that elude the telling? Before the telling, what were the voyages? Unspoken, did they exist at all? Are there perhaps three septads: the seven voyages, the memory of the seven voyages, and the telling of the seven voyages? Sinbad shifts in his seat. From a bough a blackbird shrills.

The seven voyages of Sinbad are cast as first-person narratives, told by the protagonist (Sinbad). But it is important to remember that Sinbad himself is a character in a story narrated “in time long gone before” (Burton) by Scheherazade to King Shahriyar of Persia. Scheherazade in turn is a character in
The Arabian Nights
. The unnamed omniscient narrator of
The Arabian Nights
recounts the story of Scheherazade, the well-read daughter of the King’s vizier, who over the course of one thousand and one nights tells nearly two hundred stories to the King to prevent him from killing her; during the course of the thousand and one nights, she bears him three children. In what sense therefore may we say that Sinbad narrates his voyages? Scheherazade, who reports his words, has a strong motive for her storytelling, which has nothing whatever to do with Sinbad and his storytelling. Perhaps she inserts words in his mouth that serve her own purposes. Each night of storytelling begins with the words: “She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that …”—a formula that invites speculation. We may wonder whether Sinbad’s words are his own or Scheherazade’s, we may wonder whether Scheherazade has omitted details for the sake of shaping her tale effectively, we may wonder whether there are episodes from the seven voyages, or even entire voyages, that did not reach her.

Then we passed along the stream and came to a town built on one side of the water, and on the other side was a great marsh; and I was received courteously by the folk of that town, and ate and drank till my strength returned. Now the inhabitants of that place lived there by day, but by night they swam across the water to the marsh, for they were frog folk with sinewy and slick legs like the legs of marsh frogs; and they moved by hopping from one place to another. Yet by day they lived in fine houses and drank wine from cups and listened to the music of flutes and had servants and slaves and were in all ways courteous and kind. These folk fed on fish, which they hunted in strange wise. They concealed themselves in hollow dwellings at the bottom of the river, for they were amphibious folk that could breathe under water, and they swam out through a cunning door hidden in the side of the dwelling and thrust sharp sticks at fish that swam there. And though they were exceeding kind, yet when I enquired how I might return to Baghdad, they knew naught of it, nor how I might return there. I abode with the frog folk for many days and nights, remaining alone in the town when they swam across the river to the marsh, till one night, when I could not sleep for sorrow, I rose from the floor and walked for solace into the meadow behind the town. There I sat down and bemoaned myself, saying, “Would Heaven I had been drowned in the sea! That were better than to live among frog folk to the end of my days. But what the Lord willeth must come to pass, for there is no Majesty and there is no Might save in Allah the Glorious.” Scarcely had I spoken when I heard a fluttering in that field and saw not far distant a flock of low-flying birds. Then I rose and went over to those birds, to see what sort they were, and behold, they were no birds, but strange creatures such as I knew not, for they had no wings, nor tails, nor feathers, nor faces, yet they flew in the air. So as I drew near I saw some settling in the grass, and I approached them warily, for fear they might attack me and put out my eyes.

T
hrough half-closed eyes heavy with heat and shadow, Sinbad watches the brilliant column of the sundial in its hexagon of red sand. Dim cries sound from the river beyond the date grove. Murmur of insects, sweet smell of rotting orange blossoms. Dark blue shadows of leaves on the white rim of the fountain. Slowly a great bird descends. It settles on the sundial and folds its dark blue wings. Its long tail touches the sand. Sinbad has never seen such a bird before and rising from the divan he steps over to touch its shimmering, warm side. The bird lifts a wing, sweeping Sinbad onto its back, and at once rises into the air. Sinbad clutches the thick oily feathers as the bird flies over the city. Far below he can see the brown river with its boats and barges, the shadow of the bridges on the water, the palm trees the size of date stones, the slender white towers, the gilded onion domes like scattered gold dinars, the little green gardens, the little dromedaries in the little streets. Slowly the bird descends, the garden rises, Sinbad slides from the back of the bird and watches as it lifts its wings and soars into the fierce blue sky. In the warm shade of the orange tree he watches the brilliant column of the sundial in its hexagon of red sand. The mysterious, the magical, the unexpected do not happen in his garden, and after deep thought he concludes that the bird was a dream or illusion, summoned by the heat, the flicker of leafshade, an old man’s weariness.

The frontispiece of Burton’s Volume VI (Illustrated Benares Edition) shows an engraving of two rocs attacking a ship. These are not the rocs of the second voyage, who nest above the Valley of Diamonds, but the two rocs of the fifth voyage, who drop great boulders on Sinbad’s ship. The female roc is shown grasping a boulder in her claws. One of her wings is as long as the two-masted ship below, and the boulder is as thick as the height of the men cowering on deck. The roc resembles a great eagle, but with a long neck; at the top of the hooked beak, between the eyes, is a disturbing hump. The male roc, at the top of the engraving, is closer to the viewer and is visible only as a pair of immense talons and some half-dozen feathers. The talons resemble the feet of roosters and have sharp, curved nails on each long toe. They have just released their boulder, as indicated by a splash beside the ship’s bow in the lower left-hand corner of the engraving. We know from the story that the second boulder will strike the ship. One little man holds up his arms as if to ward off a blow; another lies face down on the deck; a third is diving over the side. The water about the ship is mostly white, with several curving lines indicating agitation; in the background the water is darker, drawn with many lines, and appears thick.

Now when I drew close to those creatures in the grass, suddenly they rose up and flew a little distance away, whereat I followed; and in this manner I drew farther and farther from the town, till looking about me I saw I had lost my way. I was among steep hills, which rose up on all sides; and I was as a dead man for weariness, and knew not what to do. So looking about, I saw those creatures rise from the grass, and I followed them into a nearby valley, where I beheld a marvelous sight. The valley was filled with flying creatures, which made a noise as of many winds. Then I saw that one lay in the grass not far from where I stood, and when I descended a small way to see what it was, all unknowing I stumbled on one hidden in the grass, and fell upon it fearfully, and lo! it rose in the air bearing me on its back. And I saw that it was a carpet, that flew like a bird; and I was in a valley of flying carpets, that flew to and fro. So lying on my stomach and quaking in great fear, for I knew not whether I would plunge to destruction, I gripped the sides of my carpet and flew down into the valley. And the valley was so thick with those flying creatures that I felt them brush against my cheeks and fingers; and I held tight with one hand, and covered my face with the other. At the bottom of the valley there was an opening in the hillside, and thither my carpet carried me; and I entered a great dark cavern. Now at the bottom of the cavern sat three men with beards who worked at three looms. And one, seeing me, cried out as if in anger; and that old man picked up a stone and threw it at me, striking the underside of the carpet, so that I felt a blow in my ribs. Then another called up to me coaxingly, saying, “Come down, and we will reward you”; but I trusted them not.