Sindbad the Sailor: The Fifth Voyage

Also known as Sindbad Jahazi

• 4 minute read
• Ages 8-12
• Alif Laila Stories

On the fifth voyage Sindbad bought his own ship and hired his own crew, which he later said was the only sensible decision he made that year.

The egg

They stopped at an empty island and the passengers went ashore, and found a great white dome standing in a clearing.

Sindbad knew exactly what it was and said so, loudly.

Nobody listened. Somebody had already found a way to crack it, and by the time Sindbad reached them they had the chick out and a fire going.

He got them back to the ship as fast as he could, and they had barely cleared the reef when the sky darkened.

Two rocs came over the ship, circling, and then they went away, and everyone breathed out.

They came back carrying rocks.

The first missed. The second did not, and the ship went down in pieces, and Sindbad came up holding a plank and was the only one who did.

The old man

He washed ashore on an island with fruit and streams, and thought his luck had turned.

By a stream he found an old man sitting on the bank, very frail, who signed to him that he could not walk and asked to be carried across to the other side.

Sindbad, who had had a hard week and was glad to be useful, lifted him onto his shoulders.

On the far bank he knelt to let him down.

And the old man's legs, which had gone round Sindbad's neck, tightened and did not let go.

They were not a frail man's legs at all. They were dark and hard and gripped like rope, and Sindbad could not prise them apart, and could not throw him off, and could not reach behind to strike him.

Weeks

He rode Sindbad for weeks.

He steered him with his heels to whichever tree he wanted fruit from. He slept up there. He did not get down at all, not once, and Sindbad went where he was kicked and slept where he fell and could not get free.

Sindbad stopped fighting it, because fighting achieved nothing, and started thinking instead.

The gourd

He had noticed a vine of large gourds growing near one of the streams.

He picked one, hollowed it out, filled it with grapes and left it plugged in the sun for several days while the old man let him move about. When he came back to it the juice had begun to work, and Sindbad drank a little, and then more, and began to walk unsteadily and sing.

The old man kicked him to know what he was drinking.

Sindbad gave him the gourd.

He drank the whole of it, and after a while the legs round Sindbad's neck loosened, and then let go entirely, and he slid off onto the grass.

Sindbad walked to the shore and did not look back until he had put a hill between them.

A ship took him off some days later, and the captain heard where he had been and said that in all the years of that route nobody had ever come back off that island, and asked how he had done it.

"I gave up trying to get him off," said Sindbad, "and started thinking about what he might want."