THE STORY OF SINDBAD THE SAILOR
ON THE NINTH NIGHT
Sheherazade said:
… But tomorrow, my friends, Allah willing, I will tell you about the adventures of my third journey which is certainly much more interesting and more amazing than the first two!"
Then Sindbad was silent. Then the slaves served food and drink to all the guests, who were prodigiously astonished at what they had just heard. Then Sindbad the Sailor had one hundred pieces of gold given to Sindbad the Porter, who took them, thanking him very much, and went away calling on the head of his host the blessings of Allah, and arrived at his house marveling at what he had just seen and heard.
In the morning, the porter Sindbad got up, prayed the morning prayer, and returned to the rich Sindbad, as he had been asked. And he was received cordially and treated with much regard, and invited to take part in the feast of the day and in the rejoicings, which lasted all day. After which Sindbad the Sailor, amid the attentive and solemn guests, began his story in the following manner...
THE THIRD JOURNEY OF SINDBAD THE SAILOR
Know, O my friends, — but Allah knows things better than the creature! — that in the delightful life, I had been leading since my return from the second journey, amid wealth and fulfillment, I ended by completely losing the memory of the evils experienced and the dangers encountered, and by being bored with the monotonous idleness of my existence in Baghdad. So my soul ardently desired the change and the sight of the things of the journey. And I was again tempted by the love of commerce, of gain and profit. However, it is always ambition that is the cause of our misfortunes. I was soon to experience it most appallingly.
I therefore immediately put my project into execution, and, after having provided myself with rich goods from the country, I left Baghdad for Basra. There I found a great ship already full of passengers and merchants, all of whom were good, honest, good-hearted, conscientious people, able to render service and to live in the best of relations among themselves. So I did not hesitate to embark with them on this ship; and, immediately on board, we set sail, with the blessing of Allah on us and on our crossing.
Our navigation began, indeed, under happy auspices. In all the places where we approached, we did excellent business, while walking around and learning all the new things that we constantly saw. And really nothing was missing from our happiness, and we were at the limit of expansion and fulfillment.
One of the days, we were on the open sea, far from Muslim countries, when suddenly we saw the captain of the ship giving himself great blows in the face, after having scanned the horizon for a long time, tearing the hairs of his beard, tearing his clothes and throwing his turban on the ground. Then he began to lament, to moan, and to cry out in despair.
Seeing this, we all surrounded the captain and said to him: “What is it, O captain?" He replied: “Know, O passengers of peace, that the contrary wind has overcome us and made us deviate from our course and throw us into this gloomy sea. And, to put the last measure to our misfortune, fate makes us land on this island that you see in front of you and from which no one, after having touched it, has ever been able to get out with their lives saved. This island is Monkey Island! I feel, in the depths of my interior, that we are all lost without recourse!"
The captain had not yet finished these explanations when we saw our ship surrounded by a multitude of hairy beings like monkeys, more innumerable than an army of grasshoppers, while, on the shore of the island, other monkeys, in unimaginable numbers, uttered howls which froze us to the spot. And we dared not ill-treat, attack, or even drive away any of them, lest they all rush upon us and, thanks to their number, kill us to the last: for it is quite certain that numbers always overcome courage. So we didn't want to move, while on all sides we were invaded by these monkeys who were beginning to take everything that belonged to us. They were quite ugly. They were even uglier than anything ugly I had seen so far in my life. They were very hairy, with yellow eyes in black faces; their size was very small, hardly four spans long, and their grimaces and their cries more horrible than anything one could invent in that sense! As for their language, they spoke to us in vain and inveighed against us by clicking their jaws, but we hardly managed to understand it, although we paid the greatest attention to it. So we soon saw them put into execution the most disastrous of projects. They climbed the masts, unfurled the sails, cut all the ropes with their teeth, and finally seized the rudder. Then the ship, pushed by the wind, went to the coast, where it got stuck in the sand. And the little monkeys seized all of us, made us disembark one after the other, left us on the shore and, without paying any more attention to us, got back on the ship which they managed to push out to sea, and all disappeared with it out to sea.
So we, on the verge of perplexity, deemed it useless to stay like this on the shore looking at the sea, and we advanced into the island where we ended up discovering some fruit trees and running water, which allowed us to eat a little to delay as long as possible a death which seemed certain to us all.
While we were in this state, we seemed to see, between the trees, a very large building that looked abandoned. We were tempted to approach it; and when we got there, we found it was a palace...
At this point in her narration, Sheherazade saw the morning appear and quietly fell silent.
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