Sindbad the Sailor: The Fourth Voyage

Also known as Sindbad Jahazi

• 4 minute read
• Ages 10-13
• Alif Laila Stories

The fourth voyage began with a storm that broke the ship apart, and Sindbad came ashore on a plank with a handful of others.

The kingdom

The people who found them were friendly. They took them to their king, who liked Sindbad, and gave him a house and a position and treated him extremely well.

Sindbad learned the language. He noticed, along the way, several small things that struck him as odd, including that nobody there rode with a saddle. He made one, and then a bridle, and the king was so delighted with it that saddles became the fashion of the entire country and Sindbad became rich again without trying.

After a year the king said that Sindbad should marry, and found him a wife from a good family, and Sindbad was happy.

He had been happy for some months when a neighbour's wife died.

The custom

He went to comfort the man and found the whole household preparing for something, and asked what.

And they explained the custom of that country, which nobody had thought to mention to him because everybody there had known it since childhood.

When a husband or a wife died, the one still living was lowered into the burial cave with them. That was simply how it was done. It was not a punishment and nobody argued about it.

Sindbad went to the king that afternoon and asked whether the law applied to foreigners.

The king was very sorry about it. But yes.

The cave

Some months later Sindbad's wife fell ill, and did not recover.

And they came for him, kindly and with great ceremony, and lowered him on a rope into a great cavern in the rock with seven loaves of bread and a jug of water, and put the stone back over the opening.

It was completely dark.

He sat where they had left him for a long time. Then he made himself get up, because sitting still was not going to do anything, and he began to feel his way along the wall.

The draught

He walked for hours in the dark, keeping one hand on the rock.

And somewhere a long way in, he felt cold air on his face.

It was moving. Air that moves has to come from somewhere, so he followed it, and it took him through a low passage he had to crawl along on his stomach for a distance he could not measure, and it got colder, and then he could hear something.

It was the sea.

The passage came out on a ledge in the cliff face on the far side of the mountain, above a beach.

He climbed down and he lived on that beach for days, and he built a signal fire, and a passing ship took him off.

What he brought home

He brought back a great deal from that cavern, because the people of that country buried their dead with everything they had owned, and there had been a long time and a great many of them.

He never said much about the days in the dark. In Baghdad afterwards he would tell the whole of the fourth voyage in about four sentences and then change the subject, and his friends learned not to press him about it.