Sindbad the Sailor: The Sixth Voyage

Also known as Sindbad Jahazi

• 4 minute read
• Ages 9-13
• Alif Laila Stories

The sixth voyage began badly. The captain lost his reckoning in bad weather, and by the time he found it again the ship was in a current he could not get out of.

He came down from the mast and threw his turban on the deck.

"There is a mountain ahead," he said. "The current runs into the cliff at its foot. Every ship that enters this water goes onto that rock. I am sorry."

He was right. They struck, and the ship broke up, and most of the crew were lost.

The beach of bones

Sindbad and a few others came ashore on a narrow beach at the foot of the cliff.

It was covered in wreckage. Not one ship. Dozens, from every country he knew and several he did not, piled along the tideline going back years, along with everything they had carried: bales of silk, chests, spices, and a great scatter of ambergris and jewels among the stones, because this was where the current had been depositing the world's cargo for a very long time.

There was more wealth on that beach than in most cities, and there was no food.

The cliff went straight up behind them with no way out.

One by one the others died, and Sindbad buried each of them, and then he was alone.

The river

At the back of the beach a river came out from under the mountain.

It ran into a low arch in the rock and went in, and nobody knew where it went. It might come out the other side. It might go down for ever.

Sindbad sat and looked at that arch for a long time.

Then he built a raft.

He built it from the timbers of the wrecked ships, and he loaded it with as many jewels as it would carry without sinking, and he lashed himself to it with rope, and he pushed off into the arch with a paddle in his hands.

The dark came over him like a lid.

Under the mountain

He did not know how long he was under there.

The roof came down until he had to lie flat on the raft with his face against the wood, and then it came down further, and there was a time when he could feel rock scraping the back of his head and could not lift it at all. He stopped paddling. There was no room to paddle.

At some point he stopped being awake.

Serendib

He woke in daylight with people around him.

The river had come out on the other side of the mountain into open country, and a group of villagers had seen a raft drifting with a man tied to it and had pulled it in.

They were the people of Serendib, and they were kind to him, and their king wanted to meet the man who had come down the river out of the mountain, because in living memory nobody ever had.

Sindbad told him the whole of it.

The king had it written down and put in the royal library, and when Sindbad went home to Baghdad he went as an ambassador with a letter and a gift from one king to another, on a ship, in a cabin, which he said was the best part of the entire voyage.