Sindbad the Sailor: The Seventh Voyage
Also known as Sindbad Jahazi
- 4 minute read
- Ages 8-12
- Alif Laila Stories
Sindbad had no intention of going to sea a seventh time. He was old by then and rich beyond any use for more of it.
But the Caliph asked him to carry the reply to the King of Serendib, and you do not refuse the Caliph, so he went.
The outward journey was uneventful. He delivered the letter, was well received, and started home.
And on the way back, pirates took the ship.
Sold
They sold the crew, and Sindbad was bought by a merchant in a country he did not know.
The merchant looked him over.
"Can you shoot?"
"I can."
So he was given a bow and taken out to a great forest, and shown a tall tree, and told the rules of his new work.
He was to climb the tree before dark and stay in it all night. Elephants used a path through that part of the forest. When one passed under the tree he was to shoot it, and in the morning the merchant's men would come for the tusks. Ivory was the whole business of that country, and the merchant had done well out of it for years.
Sindbad climbed the tree.
Two months
He did what he was told for two months.
He shot from the branches at night and the men came in the morning with axes, and each time Sindbad sat in the tree afterwards and did not feel good about any of it.
Then one morning, before the men arrived, the forest filled with elephants.
There were more than he could count, coming from every direction, and they surrounded the tree completely and stood there. Sindbad went as high as he could go and held on.
The largest of them came forward, wound its trunk round the trunk of the tree, and pulled it out of the ground with Sindbad still in it.
It set the tree down. It picked him up.
And it carried him, not roughly, through the forest for a long way, with the whole herd walking behind, until they came to a hill.
The hill
They put him down on it.
The hill was made of bones and tusks. Not a few. Generations of them, the whole ivory of that forest going back further than the merchant's business or his father's, from elephants that had died where elephants die.
The herd stood round the edge of it and looked at him.
Nobody has ever been sure exactly what was being said. But Sindbad understood it well enough to walk down the other side of the hill without being touched, and to go straight to his master, and to tell him.
Afterwards
The merchant went out and saw it and could not speak.
There was more ivory on that hill than he could sell in his lifetime, and it had cost nothing, and there was no longer any reason at all to send a man into a tree with a bow.
He freed Sindbad on the spot and made him a partner, and the shooting stopped in that country from that year.
Sindbad went home to Baghdad with the ivory money, and this time he stayed, and told the whole seven to anybody who came to the house.
Moral of the story
Sometimes the other side is not fighting you but making an offer. Sindbad's last voyage ends because someone finally listened instead of shooting.
Questions and answers
- Why did Sindbad go to sea a seventh time?
The Caliph of Baghdad asked him to carry a reply to the King of Serendib, and he could not refuse.
- How did he become a slave?
Pirates captured the ship on the return journey and sold the crew.
- What work was he given?
To sit in a tall tree at night and shoot elephants passing below, so his master's men could take the tusks.
- What did the elephants do?
They surrounded the tree, pulled it out of the ground, and carried Sindbad to a hill made of the bones and tusks of generations of their own dead.
- What changed as a result?
The merchant freed Sindbad and made him a partner, and the hunting stopped in that country.
Word meanings
- Caliph
- The ruler of the Muslim world in the medieval period.
- uneventful
- With nothing unusual happening.
- tusks
- The long pointed teeth of an elephant.
- herd
- A group of large animals living together.
Questions about Sindbad the Sailor: The Seventh Voyage
How does the Sindbad cycle end?
With the seventh voyage. Sindbad returns to Baghdad, stays there, and spends the rest of his life telling the seven stories.
What is the moral of the seventh voyage?
That an opponent may be offering something rather than attacking. The elephants had a solution and only needed someone to understand it.
Is the elephant graveyard real?
No. Elephant graveyards are a persistent legend with no basis in fact, though elephants do show real interest in the bones of their dead.
Which is the best voyage to read aloud?
The fifth, with the Old Man of the Sea, and this one. Both are tense in the middle and end well, which reads better aloud than the darker third and fourth.