Sindbad the Sailor: The Second Voyage

Also known as Sindbad Jahazi

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

Sindbad stayed at home in Baghdad for a while after the first voyage, and then the house began to feel small, and he bought goods and went to sea again.

Left behind

The ship stopped at a green island to take on water.

Sindbad went ashore, found a shaded place, ate the food he had brought and fell asleep in the warm afternoon.

When he woke, the sea was empty.

The ship had gone. Nobody had counted him, nobody had missed him, and it was already too far out to hear anything he shouted. He was alone on an island with no people on it and no way to leave.

He walked inland to see what there was, and after some time he came to a great white dome standing in a clearing, smooth and enormous, with no door in it anywhere.

He was walking round the base of it when the light went out.

The roc

He looked up and the sky was gone, because something was landing on top of him.

It was a bird the size of a hill. Its wings blocked out the whole sky and the wind from them flattened the grass, and it came down on the white dome and settled, and Sindbad understood at last what the dome was.

It was an egg.

He lay very still until the bird had settled itself. Then he crawled to one of its legs, which was as thick as a tree trunk, and unwound his turban and tied himself to it as tightly as he could.

And he waited all night.

Down into the valley

At dawn the roc rose.

It went up so fast that Sindbad could not see, and then it flew, and the sea and the islands went by underneath him faster than any ship could travel. He held on and did not look down more than he had to.

It came down at last in a deep valley between cliffs, and Sindbad untied himself and let it go. The bird lifted again with a snake in its claws and was gone.

He looked around him.

The floor of the valley was made of diamonds.

Not scattered among the stones. The stones were diamonds, in every direction, ankle deep in places. And moving through them, in and out of the cracks, were snakes big enough to swallow an elephant, which came out at night.

The walls of the valley were sheer. There was no way up.

The meat

Sindbad sheltered in a cleft in the rock all night with a stone rolled across it, and in the morning something fell into the valley near him.

It was a large piece of raw meat.

Then another, further off, and another. Somebody was throwing them down from the cliffs above.

And Sindbad remembered a story he had heard as a boy, from a traveller his father knew, about how the diamonds were gathered from a valley no man could enter. The merchants throw down meat. The diamonds stick to it. The eagles that nest above the valley come down and carry the meat up to their nests, and the merchants drive the birds off and take the stones.

He filled his bag with the largest diamonds he could reach. Then he tied himself, face up, underneath the biggest piece of meat, with his turban again, and lay still.

An eagle took him.

Baghdad

At the nest the merchant who came shouting to drive the bird off found a man tied under his meat, and sat down on a rock, and could not speak for some while.

Sindbad gave him the best diamond in his bag for the meat he had used, which the merchant said was far too much, and then gave him another for showing him the road down.

He came home to Baghdad rich enough to stop, and said that he would.