THE LAST VOYAGE
OF
SOMEBODY THE
SAILOR

OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN BARTH

The Floating Opera
The End of the Road
The Sot-Weed Factor
Giles Goat-Boy
Lost in the Funhouse
Chimera
LETTERS
Sabbatical: A Romance
The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction
The Tidewater Tales: A Novel

THE LAST VOYAGE
OF
SOMEBODY THE
SAILOR

JOHN BARTH

Anchor Books
doubleday
New York   London   Toronto   Sydney   Auckland

An Anchor Book
published by doubleday
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 113

Anchor Books, Doubleday, and the portrayal of an anchor are trademarks of
Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor was originally published in hardcover by Little,
Brown and Company in 1991. The Anchor Books edition is published by
arrangement with Little, Brown and Company.

This is a work of fiction and the characters and events are imaginary. The author is,
however, indebted to the nautical explorer Tim Severin, who appears in this book as a
fictional character and whose own voyage and writing provided some of the
background information about Sindbad's voyages and certain travels of the main
character, Simon William Behler, as he re-creates them. With this exception, any
similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended
by the author.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Barth, John.
The last voyage of Somebody the Sailor / John Barth.—1st Anchor
Books ed.
p.   cm.
I. Title.
[PS3552.A75L37  1991b]        91-32772
                  813'.54—dc2           CIP
ISBN -385-4222-2
Copyright  © 1991 by John Barth

all rights reserved
printed in the united states of america
first anchor books edition: february 1992

135791   8642

for Shelly

CONTENTS

            

The Familiar Stranger	3
The Destroyer of Delights; or, The Last Story of
Scheherazade, as Told by the Narrator of the Foregoing 	7
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor	11
Somebody’s First Voyage	27
Seven Interludes	60
Somebody’s Second Voyage	82
Six Interludes	135
Somebody’s Third Voyage	192
Five Interludes	245
Somebody’s Fourth Voyage	304
Four Interludes	338
Somebody’s Fifth Voyage	394
Three Interludes	431
Somebody’s Sixth Voyage	475
Two Interludes	529
Somebody’s Next Voyage	560
Interlude: The Last Words of Somebody the Sailor	570
The Destroyer of Delights; or, The Familiar Stranger	573

THE LAST VOYAGE
OF
SOMEBODY THE
SAILOR

2

THE FAMILIAR
STRANGER

            

The machinery’s rusty, I acknowledge to my half-expected guest, but
it hasn’t seized up altogether. “I could tell you one about the death of
Scheherazade. …”
“I’ve heard it.”
“Not this version.”
My visitor crosses her nyloned legs with stern self-assurance and
smooths her skirt-pleats. I was rather expecting an elder man, cordially
disposed but skeptical, like my late uncle Josh, or like Sindbad the
Sailor’s old navigator, my friend Mustafa mu-Allim. The young
woman eases back — sits back, anyhow — in the room’s one chair.
“I’ve heard them all.”
“Those were King Shahryar’s very words,” I declare to her. “In fact,
his last words. Age eighty-five, the story goes, and healthy as a horse
till just a few months before. Then bingo: perforated ulcers with com-
plications. Queen Scheherazade was standing by, sixty-eight herself by
then and a grandmother several times over. The king had been deliri-
ous for three days: uremic poisoning, complications. He had got to
thinking he was thirty-five again, back in the days of his thousand and 

3
The Familiar Stranger

one nights. ‘By Allah,’ he would say to whoever was in the room, ‘I
won’t kill her till I’ve heard the end of her story,’ and the busy nurses
and orderlies would say, ‘Right.’ ”
My caller’s eyes are greener than her hospital tunic: an almost re-
proachful green. She turns them from me, not for long.
“Finally Scheherazade got the doctors to catheterize him and
change his prescription. That same night his head cleared, but it was
too late to save him. He recognized his wife in the dark, gave her hand
a squeeze, and said, ‘Anyhow, I’ve heard a mess of stories. I guess I’ve
heard them all.’ She kissed his turban and sent word for their two
grown sons to get there fast. The king died quietly just as the muez-
zins were calling from the palace minarets that prayer is better than
sleep. A good death, all hands agreed — but those last words of his
were wrong.”
Down the line, some poor devil or his victim is howling again. My
visitor fiddles with her stethoscope as if it were an amulet. “Sounds
familiar.”
“So it sounds familiar. You look familiar.”
Those eyes are on me again, through me, briefly. She gives her
auburn hair a toss. “I’m in the halls.”
“Anyhow, that wasn’t Scheherazade’s death yet, right?”
She regards her fingers, interlaced in her lap. No ring. “You’re the
storyteller.”
Regarding her, I twist my own ring, charmed, bemused: “Once
upon a time …”
Now she checks her wristwatch, one of those multifunction digi-
tals. I used to do that, plenty, whether I was in a hurry or not; but
mine’s an old-fashioned analog with a calendar window that you have
to set forward in months with fewer than thirty-one days; also a ro-
tatable bezel for measuring elapsed time. In better days I’ve used this
watch for everything from navigating sailboats to barbecuing lamb.
This watch …
Do you know where you are? she’s asking me. What day is today?
What’s your full name?
The days go by, I could tell her: Tuesday, Saturday, the American
century. My watch isn’t right. Do I complain? On with the story! Test
me on the general time of day, I could say to her; you’ll, see I’m com-
pos mentis. Evening shift ready to punch out, right? Graveyarders

4
The Familiar Stranger

punching in but not on the halls yet. Century ending, maybe ended
by now. Luckier folks asleep.
But listen, Doctor, I want to tell her: you’re more than welcome.
Sleep isn’t what it used to be. I have a daughter your age, I want to
tell her: biologist, married, out on the Coast. I don’t suppose you’re
her, or here is there? There’s a rivershore out front of here, right? Big
tidewater river, running out just now, and crossing that river a two-
mile bridge, which it would be useful indeed to know whether is to
our left or to our right, for position-fixing, as there’s more than one
kind of hospital along this shore — but don’t get up. And once upon
a time (Saturday, Tuesday) I had a lover her age, handsome as your-
self; even strikingly beautiful, as they say, and sharp and spirited as a
young Scheherazade.
Another story — of the sort once told by Simon William Behler,
a.k.a. “Baylor,” the once-sort-of-famous “New Journalist,” of whom
you may … never mind.
I had half imagined you would be a chorus or a jury, maybe a
spectrum of my major women: dear Aunt Rachel, Crazy Daisy Moore
and her green-eyed sister Julia; my first wife, Jane, I suppose, and
maybe Juliette — our biological daughter, so to say. And Yasmin, Yas-
min, Yasmin. Plus one other: the one who, in fact, young lady, might
tell us my proper name, might even have told “Bill Baylor,” before he
dropped out of the American century and into Sindbad’s, who he is.
Was?
Another story. Baylor calls this one (stop him if you’ve heard it)

5

6

THE DESTROYER OF
DELIGHTS

or,
The Last Story of Scheherazade,
as Told by the Narrator of the Foregoing

She had done her thousand and one, Ms. Scheherazade had, and then
some — told them all over again for the scribes after the king made an
honest woman of her and she an honorable man of him, cooked up all
new ones for their children’s bedtimes and retold them to each grand-
child in turn, plus recapping her fans’ old favorites at state dinners:
Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sindbad’s seven voyages. And more than once, in
their middle years, she and King Shahryar had pretended in bed that
her life was on the line again, as it had been for those first thousand
nights of their story — a touch of the old fire, the familiar terror of
once upon a time.
But by when Shahryar was translated, as they say, to the ruth of
almighty Allah, his widow was told out and no regrets. She was a
handsome, healthy-enough woman still, though rich in minor physical
complaints. She lived on and on in the palace until she wasn’t so hand-
some and healthy anymore, and on and on after that until she was a
bedridden, pain-wracked crone, and on and on after that. The De-
stroyer of Delights and Severer of Societies, as folks spoke of him
thereabouts, had paid a call decades before upon her youngest son,

7

The Destroyer of Delights

always the least robust of the three, and then upon her father, the ex-
grand vizier, and then upon her old husband, as aforenarrated, and
later on upon her younger sister, Dunyazade, not so young by that
time, and presently upon her husband, and after that upon one of the
other grown-up sons and even upon one of the grandchildren, not to
mention the house staff and any number of ordinary citizens. It
seemed to Scheherazade that that dismal fellow came to and went
from the place more often than the painters and the plumbers. Several
times in latter years, when pain and pointlessness were roughing her
up more than usual, she had caught sight of him going by in the
corridor and called out to him, the way you yell for the nurse who’s
supposed to bring your pills and doesn’t. But his appointment was
always with somebody else.
“For pity’s sake,” she had proposed one late evening years ago,
when he came for her first granddaughter: “take me instead!” He had
smiled her way, not triumphantly, and shaken his head. Nowadays it
was “For pity’s sake, take me, too!”
No deal.
The night it finally occurred to her, through the noise of her mis-
ery, that her current situation was just the reverse of her original one,
she must have cried out to him in a different tone; he actually paused,
silhouetted by backlight, and leaned his shoulder against her door-
jamb. Right away the racket quieted. Her body felt thirty years
younger, a healthy sixty-at-most, and she was able to speak and regis-
ter things almost normally for the first time since who knew when. It
struck her, for example, now that she could see him, that the fellow
looked tired, though he is famously tireless: an elderly, gray-bearded,
serious-faced chap after all (the sort “Baylor” had expected, gentle
listener), neatly dressed but rumpled, the way travelers get on the final
leg of their journey or medical residents toward the end of their shift.
A little break in his rounds.
When she had put her case, he said, “What do you mean, ‘die’?”
His tone was … oh, challenging but not unsympathetic. “You’ve been
kaput for years. When was the last time you told anybody a story?”
“Who’s left to tell to?” she came right back, warming to it, and
gestured toward the bedside miniatures of Shahryar, Dunyazade, the
other dear departeds. “Job enough to get my bedpan changed.”

8
The Destroyer of Delights

 “Forget bedpans,” her visitor advised. “You’re through with all
that. Mind if I sit.”
She didn’t mind, in fact, but he hadn’t put the question as a ques-
tion. She sat, too — up, in bed — understanding in her bones that
she was indeed through with all that, hallelujah, and that there re-
mained now only a bit of bargaining, an exercise in negotiation. She
straightened her hair and the neck of her gown, said, “I’d offer you
mint tea, but it’s the maid’s day off.”
She saw his tired eyes follow her movements. “No mint tea, Sche-
herazade.” At mention of her name — a long while since she’d heard a
male voice sound those syllables! — she was aware for the first time in
ages of the city round about her: a late-summer night in the busy town
she had once saved with her young-womanhood. A town that now,
no doubt — absorbed in new, more glittering distractions — scarcely
remembered those old tales and their teller.
“Once upon a time,” she said, inspecting her wedding ring with a
disingenuous sigh, “I could have offered more. But that time’s long
past.”
She paused for acknowledgment: who could say what such a man’s
tastes might not include? When he agreed with her — a tiny wince of
the eyebrows — she went on smoothly (delicious, once again to go
on smoothly): “And the coin of the realm, I assume, is not your coin.”
“No.”
“So, then.” She clasped her hands in her lap, looked him full in the
face with those once-again-astonishing eyes. “What’s my ticket price?”
And wearily, but not simply wearily, he returned that look. “You
know as well as I do, Scheherazade.”
“You’re not serious. Well, you are, if anybody is. But what a thing
to want, this late in the day!”
“It may be earlier than you think.” He consulted his wrist. “How-
ever, if the well really has gone dry …”
“Just you hold on, now. This particular well ran out so long ago
that nobody’s checked lately to see what’s what.” She … sighed. “So:
the shoe really is on the other foot.”
And he … shrugged, okay? “If it fits, et cetera. But listen: no Ali
Baba and company. Your first audience wanted virgin girls and hand-
me-down stories. What your last one’s after is a virgin story.”

9
The Destroyer of Delights

 “From a hand-me-down teller. But Allah preserve us: a virgin
story! There can’t be anything you haven’t heard!”
He put his hands on the chair-arms. “Then I won’t keep you.”
“I bet you’ve even heard the one called The Last Voyage of Some-
body the Sailor.”
He smiled, turned down the lamp, sat back, and crossed his legs,
twitching his already uncreased trouser-crease out of harm’s way. “If I
have, you won’t stop me.”
“And if you haven’t,” said Scheherazade, more confident with every
sentence, “then this last tale of mine will be a virgin story in both
respects, for it’s about virginity, too, you might say, as was my own
story … once upon a time …”
We may imagine then, you and I — may we not? — that she goes
on to tell her familiar stranger (with a little help from yours truly,
ma’am: “Baylor” the Taler of Behler the Failer) the whole time-
straddling story of

10

THE LAST VOYAGE
OF
SOMEBODY THE SAILOR

            

The story goes (in its official version) that the next-to-last voyage of
Sindbad the fabulous Seaman — as recounted by that fortunate fellow
himself to his dinner guests at the end of the holy month of Ramadan
for the benefit of the beggar called Sindbad the Landsman — was
little more than a replay of the five voyages before it. He goes down
per usual from the city of Baghdad to the port of Basra. Per usual he
sets out (but this time with a particular urgency, explained anon) with
a clutch of other merchants, to score in the silk-and-spice trade, or
whatever. Their captain loses his way, per usual; the usual storm dis-
ables their vessel and piles her up on some uncharted island. Most of
the passengers and crew go under, but old Sindbad, as he’ll tell it, is
so accustomed to this routine by now that as soon as the skipper ad-
mits they’re lost, he climbs into his faithful laundry tub, his Tub of
Last Resort, and waits on the afterdeck for the squall and the foun-
dering. He makes it to shore, as always, this time with a handful of
others, whose next job in his story is to die and leave him the sole
survivor.
No need to tell them that: let them praise Allah for their deliverance from the Destroyer of Delights and for the fact that the shore is strewn

11
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

with supplies and merchandise from other shipwrecks, enough to
open a bazaar with if there were any customers besides themselves.
Let them marvel to their hearts’ short-lived content that the beach
they’re stranded on has jewels for pebbles: they’d all be wealthy men
if they weren’t the wretched castaways they are.
So all except Sindbad pile up the goods, each man guarding his
hoard day and night and looking for a chance to pilfer his neighbor’s.
Seasoned old Sindbad, however, ignoring them and theirs, patiently
gathers spars and lashings from the wrecks. His erstwhile shipmates
laugh at him, ha ha, and catch castaway’s colic and die. Each new
victim’s pile is scrabbled after by the survivors, until the last of them
besides Sindbad has the whole inventory to himself.
He kicks, too. Whereupon Sindbad loads the raft he’s just com-
pleted per program with as much of the stuff as it can safely carry and
sets out, not to sea but up the tidal estuary he has long since spotted
on his beachcombing expeditions. It leads into a cave in the nearest
mountain and thence (he presumes from past experience) to some
marvelous realm where he’ll either cope ingeniously with monsters or
become the king’s favorite (also his financier) or both, but from which
he will in any case make his way eventually back home with yet an-
other fortune.
Turns out it’s the King’s-Favorite scenario — by far Sindbad’s fa-
vorite scenario, too, this late in the story of his life. No rocs, no can-
nibals, no giant serpents; Sindbad regales the king-of-the-moment
with travelogues of his six times out and anecdotes about his home-
town caliph, the great Haroun al-Rashid, Commander of the Faithful,
until the king takes the hint and proposes establishing diplomatic re-
lations between the Caliphate of Baghdad and this Magic Isle of Ser-
endib. He dispatches our man to do the job, with a royal present from
king to king and Sindbad’s treasure stashed in the hold. No naviga-
tional problems this time, because if S. the S. doesn’t always know
where he is or where he’s going, he seldom loses sight of where he’s
coming from.
And the story goes — one of the stories, anyhow — that the old
hustler’s last voyage, undertaken reluctantly indeed on direct orders
from Haroun al-Rashid, was back to Serendib, to deliver a reciprocal
gift from the caliph to the island king.

12
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

So far, so good: but (here comes our story) it wasn’t Sindbad the
Sailor who made that final voyage. Sindbad the Sailor had no quarrel
with the caliph’s project, though he’d never before set sail with any
motive nobler than restless greed. As he knew from hard experience,
however — and will presently declare to his dinner guests, at the end
of their monthlong fast — you don’t reach Serendib by plotting a
course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose
your bearings … serendipitously.
Another tempest, another shipwreck, at his age! But one doesn’t
say no to the Commander of the Faithful.
So: the chap who, late in this story, will set all-but-solo sail sidewise
for serendipity will be that other, self-styled Sindbad, that nobody
whom folks called (for convenience’ sake) the Landsman, and he must
have got more or less where he was going, or he wouldn’t have sur-
vived to be telling you Scheherazade’s story of his life. But he has never
since returned to Baghdad except in dreams. And the chap’s real name
wasn’t Sindbad the Landsman; it was … something else. Somebody
took that name because then and there, at the time we tell of, he was
a streetwise castaway from the Here and Now who happened to know
a thing or two about S. the So-Called Sailor, this wealthy Baghdaddy
who’d been teasing his guests for a lunar month with hints of his
adventures on the bounding main. Rocs, cannibal giants, sea mon-
sters! His audience didn’t necessarily believe him, you understand, but
whether his exploits were real or not, his wealth was, and likewise his
hospitality. He bought the willing suspension of your disbelief with
the promise of more where this came from, plus an upcoming banquet
of first-rate food and wine to break your fast with. No doubt your
several hungers helped his hints reach harbor. True sons of Islam, for
the whole of Ramadan you had fasted faithfully, taking only your
ritual bowl of barley soup at day’s end. Under tonight’s new moon
you would be fed a feast fit for the Prince of Believers himself.
Trouble was, you had to be a rich friend to get a dinner invitation.
In fact, you had to be so rich and friendly that you’d invested money
in your host, and that means rich, friend, since old Sindbad had so
much of his own that he scarcely needed yours. He would borrow it
more to oblige you than to smooth some minor perturbation in his
house’s cash flow, which flowed on like the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Lest you think he needed what you pressed upon him, he’d oblige you

13
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

with half the going interest rate, if you asked for interest at all; the
goodwill of Haroun’s chief import-export man and de facto emissary
to Serendib was usually interest enough for you.
But that’s you (let’s say), and you’re somebody, hacking your harira
and not asking too many questions about those big birds and one-
eyed giants and diamond coastlines. Never mind what really went on
in voyages One through Six, you figure, if the old pirate will let you
buy into number Seven: Serendib Limited. Then along this midsum-
mer evening came Somebody Else: Somebody the Nobody (yours
truly, in truth), a fifty-plus foreigner in those days with not two pen-
nies in his pocket or a name to his name. When he found the right
address, he took a load off his back and sat himself down beside it on
a bench before Sindbad’s entrance gate with a growing crowd of bona
fide beggars, all hoping for a handout when the new moon rose. He
was currently pretending to be a poor porter, was our Somebody;
with his next-to-last dirham he had rented that load for half an
hour from an even poorer porter, now one coin richer, just around
the bend.
“Another mouth,” his fellows said, looking him over. He was taller
than they, less dark of hair and skin and eye: a foreigner, though every
bit as lean and, by the look of him (if I may say so), not much less
cagey.
“Shush,” he said, sniffing the air and cupping his ear toward the
gate, the wall, the window overhead.
“Your mother, gharib,” they replied. But they shushed.
Somebody heard from inside the familiar sounds of tambourines,
pipes, and mirthful voices, also songbirds glorifying God in sundry
tunes and tongues. Through the gate he saw from a familiar distance
the familiar courtyard (you’re guessing he’s been here before), the
pages and other servants moving about their service. He smelled the
familiar fragrance of harira and the fresh aromas of bastilla, braziered
lamb with cumin, newly baked pita, dates and figs both fresh and
dried — and like the other beggars’, his eyes watered, his empty stom-
ach sang to those perfumes. Raising his face to heaven and his voice
to the open windows of what he knew (though he had never yet been
in that particular room) to be the banquet hall, he praised Allah’s mys-
terious justice, first in prose and then in verse.

14
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

“So be it,” the beggars said as one.
Somebody bade again, “Shush.”
“Yours.”
Noting that the voices in the hall above him had quieted somewhat,
he next cleared his throat and sang:
We all commence our journey as a little sperm and egg;
Yet some wind up as millionaires, while others have to beg.
Some plot the course and give commands that others must
   obey.
Some live a hundred years; some die before they’ve lived a
   day.
Some reach safe harbor; some are cast away or lost at sea.
To Allah this makes perfect sense. I wish it did to me.
“Hear, hear,” his companions muttered.
“Shush.”
“Yours.”
He paused long enough to confirm that the voices inside had gone
quite silent, then sang on:
The Author of our story understands His story’s plot;
We characters can’t fathom who’s the villain and who’s
    not.
A wretch like me might be the hero, from Allah’s point of
    view;
But if you were I, milords, you’d wish like me that I were
    you!
And hearing the murmur of amused curiosity he had hoped for, he
concluded high-heartedly:
There is no god but God, but there are Sindbads by the
     score;
Praise Him who made that Sindbad rich, and this poor
    Sindbad poor!
Ignoring his fellows’ grudging applause, he then reshouldered, in
no hurry, his heavy load (he’s trim and tan, hard and healthy, our
Somebody is, but fifty-plus is fifty-plus) and, without waiting for his
share of scraps, in no hurry made as if to go his way — which would
have been back around the corner he had just turned, from where the

15
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

true poor porter kept a watchful eye upon his leased-out burden. He
did not depart so busily, however, that he failed to hear a page coming
gateward from the feast to find out for his master what was what. See
our man pause now to let the fellow catch sight of him; see him begin
to unburden himself even before the expected summons from the
gate; see him make with thumb and forefinger a circle at the watching
true poor porter and kiss his fingertips at the beggars, who, fearing
chastisement, had pointed him out to the page.
Then he barefooted back (once upon a time) in his raggedy loin-
cloth and soiled turban — both torn from a caftan that had been fresh
fine linen just the month before, when (unknown to the host) he had
last been in Sindbad’s house — and made a little bow to the page:
“Salaam, Salim.”
Taken aback, the chap asked, “You know my name? I’ve been sent
to learn yours.”
“Your errand and mine,” Somebody sighed, “are the same.” From
the crotch of his loincloth then he fetched forth his final dirham,
which he thrust first under the page’s nose, then into his palm. “Call
me Sindbad, lad: Sindbad the Shipwrecked; Sindbad the Simoomed.”
“Sindbad the Shusher,” one beggar suggested.
Somebody winked. “Sindbad the Lubber of the Land. Lead on,
Sayyid Salim. Don’t keep my namesake waiting.”
This particular page (Somebody happened to know from direct
though distant observation) — a bead-eyed, mocha-skinned, kohl-
curled, furtive-faced scamp — was more used to deliveries in the rear
from certain of his master’s guests than dirhams in the palm from
barefoot beggars. But we sense he sensed that this Somebody was
something else: he pursed his lips as he pursed the coin, which he had
been holding by its edge; he gave his head a toss, this way, and led
into the familiar court.
There we pause, as did this second Sindbad, just for a moment, to
marvel at the changes wrought in that courtyard since its famous own-
er’s sixth and recentest return. Its centerpiece, a great empty wooden
tub, was still in place, but the pools and fountains whose plash our
Somebody had savored from his singular retreat were now waterless,
filled with sand. Where hibiscus and oleander had flowered through
the month of Sha’ban were now cactus and other desert plants. A
camel, even, browsed and shat contemplatively midcourt, in the dusty

16
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

shade of new young date palms. Above and beyond this strange arid-
ity, Somebody espied the latticed window from which, through as
sweet a short season as he’d known in his half century, he had first
beheld all these.
Nobody home up there. No doubt she was in dutiful attendance at
the feast.
On, he motioned to Salim, who led him then leftward into the
wing of old Sindbad’s spread where he knew the banquet hall to be,
and there it was: richly carpeted and hung like an enormous Bedouin
tent; radiant with light from the high windows at which he had
pitched his lamentation; furnished forth with inlaid hardwoods and
soft embroidered cushions; flanked with servants of every sex and
shade, the comeliest of whom now served table or stood by to enter-
tain the guests with music and dancing. These latter fortunates, nine
in number, were (Somebody knew) ranked by creditorship in a certain
order down both sides of the low banquet board, at the head whereof
(on a cushion and a half) sat their portly, silver-bearded and red-silk-
turbaned, merry-faced but shrewd-eyed host, Sindbad the Soi-Disant
Sailor himself, while just then rising from the foot — or, rather, not
rising but making as if to rise and then, catching sight of Salim’s
Somebody …
Stunned yet unstartled, she sat. Stricken but half smiling, too, she
stared. All eyes but his own were on Somebody the Singer, of whose
voice she was more certain than of his proper name. His were on hers,
and had his been yours (listener, reader, familiar stranger), you would
have seen one seriously beautiful woman at the end of her twenties,
robed in a scarlet djellaba. She was unveiled, thus presumably unmar-
ried, thus presumably not the old man’s young wife. Contrary to cus-
tom, she was seated with the all-male company and, though scarcely
touching the food and drink before her, bidding the others to set to.
Again contrary to general custom, if not to the custom of her father’s
house (you’ve guessed she’s Sindbad’s daughter, the only child of his
late and only local wife), she had half risen to greet the stranger whom
it had been her father’s whim to summon forth, but seeing that he was
exactly who she feared he might be yet hoped against hope he was,
she recushioned herself. Her hands gripped the low table-edge; her
upper body, shrouded in that thick, loose garment, was half turned
Somebody’s way. In lieu of veil, perhaps, at his approach she’d hooded

17
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

her head; unlike a veil, that hood now hid her emotion, not from him
(and perhaps not from Jayda, her aging overseer, standing behind old
Sindbad, or from the scamp Salim, just behind Jayda) but from her
father and his guests. From under that hood, from over her right
shoulder, from that sun-browned (contrary to custom), uncosme-
ticked, so-grave face hooded further in dark lustrous hair, she trans-
fixed our man yet again with her perfectly astonishing gray-green eyes,
which flashed so in every light that he still found it hard to believe
they didn’t shine in the dark.
But those eyes were hers, So-and-So’s only his, and he saw little
with them except that brace of marvels, Yasmin’s eyes. She did not
even mouth her darling version of his name; she merely regarded, with
whole alarm and utter gravity (and just a trace of mischief), his soul.
“By Allah,” that soul now said, looking about him with pleased
wonder, then back briefly at Yasmin. “Here is a piece of Paradise,
brothers: a slice of Serendib itself, such as I scarcely dreamed I would
see again!” Not to sail overclose to that particular wind, he then bore
off boldly to the tented table’s head, where Salim was already whis-
pering in the master’s ear. He kissed the carpet beside who sat there
and, having made as it were his narrative move, waited with bowed
head to see what this story has next in store for him.
Our setting is a Baghdad evening; we’re coming onto an Arabian
night. The head of the house, when he was ready to, said, “Rise and
sit, stranger. Sit and be washed; be washed and eat with this good
company. And when you’ve eaten and drunk your fill, repeat your
name and sing again those verses that took our ear. Yasmin.”
At her dad’s low-keyed command, that grave-faced beauty rose
from her place and — followed by all male eyes in the room except
those of Sindbad, who brightly scrutinized our interloper, and those
of that interloper, who dared not look where aimed undeviatingly the
compass-needle of his heart — taking a basin from Jayda, herself knelt
before the ragged visitant and washed his hands, all the while transfix-
ing him with those hooded eyes of hers. Not even the faithful near the
table’s head, used though they were to their host’s grand gestures, had
seen such hospitality lavished upon a nobody. As for Somebody (who,
truth to tell, could not have met his washer’s gaze again without giv-
ing himself away), he raised his eyes in God’s presumable direction
and repeated, “Surely this is Paradise, or some king’s court! I’m only

18
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

a poor shipwrecked porter, gentlemen, who knows the streets of
Baghdad better than I know my name; yet I’ve made a wrong turn
and strayed onto Adam’s Peak, or into Heaven itself!”
Then, as he was in fact not fasting but starving, he fell to with the
others as directed, seated incredibly in Sindbad’s daughter’s very place,
upon the cushion she had shaped and warmed. The young woman her-
self stood by and tended his wine cup, which by some magic she was
able to fill with her gaze fixed level (and still incredulous) upon his
face. The company, while they ate, chatted about their host’s hospital-
ity and about his momentous projected voyage, back to that fabulous
island which he alone among Baghdad’s citizens had both adventured
to and returned from, and which, since his return, had become so
legendary that even nameless beggars now invoked it.
Presently the fullness of Somebody’s stomach approached that of
his heart. The host tapped for attention upon a wide, shallow, empty
wooden tub immediately behind him, smaller than the great one in
the courtyard. Then he ordered slops sent out to the other beggars
and with narrowed eyes repeated his request: “Your name, Brother,
and your song.”
“For that song,” our man replied after duly resinging it, “I ask your
pardon; for my name I may not. Some while back I was dubbed Sind-
bad the Shipwrecked by one who found me stranded in the marshes
below Basra, where the Shatt al Arab meets the sea. Fate had set me
there as naked and nameless as on my birth-day, and not for the first
time. A local fisherman kindly gave me mullet chowder to postpone
death with, a clean rag to cover my nakedness, a name to be called by,
and simple directions to Baghdad: ‘Upstream till you’re there,’ he said,
‘where derelicts before you have found good harbor.’ Upstream I
went, and here for hire I tote others’ burdens when they’re there to
tote. When not, I shoulder my own by begging, as I beg you now to
excuse the impertinence of my lament.”
He salaamed. The guests approved. “We suspect, Brother Sind-
bad,” declared their host, “that your directions were more particular.
But in any case, praise Allah, from whose perspective it’s no coinci-
dence that my name is yours and that your fate has more than once
been mine.” He gestured around the company. “As your song says
truly, in Allah’s eyes we are Sindbads all, and whether we sail first class
or steerage, the same port finally awaits us, every one. Yasmin.”

19
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Without changing either her expression or the direction of her
gaze, his daughter topped up every wine cup in the room in a particu-
lar order, beginning with her father’s and ending with his namesake’s.
Nor did she spill a drop, though her hand was seen by some to tremble
at the end.
“Sindbads all,” her father said again, this time by way of a toast.
The company drank. “But some perhaps more than others,” he went
on. “I myself am that Sindbad called the Sailor, after whom your res-
cuer seems to have named you and to whom I don’t doubt he sent
you. The Basra boatmen know that my condition hasn’t always been
as you see it now.”
To the company at large he continued, “Six voyages, friends, each
harder and more harrowing than the one before, have paid for what I
share with you! Six several times I have thought myself sunk and
drowned, or cast away beyond hope of rescue! And yet — Allah be
praised! — though on every voyage I’ve lost my whole investment and
despaired of my life, I’ve come back each time to Baghdad more
wealthy than the time before. Nowadays the very smell of salt water
turns my stomach; the sound of surf, of seamen’s chanteys and slatting
sails, makes my mouth go dry, my blood turn cold. From past immer-
sions I’ve become so hydrophobic that I yearn for the desert. I’ve
drained my fountains; I wash only with perfumed oils; I piss into a
vessel of sand, so as not to hear the splash. I can’t bear even to water
my wine. Yet though I’m scarcely dry from my sixth submersion, I
must set out a seventh time, old man that I am! Set out once again,
and sink and soak … Allah preserve me! And preserve me He will, I
don’t doubt — marinate me in that brine He has seen fit to pickle the
earth with. As surely as steam rises and dry wood floats” — again he
tapped the tub behind him — “Sindbad will come back up the Tigris
older and richer yet, though not a bit happier or more wise.”
So moved were the dinner guests by this speech that it seemed to
Somebody they could scarcely restrain themselves from putting their
purses altogether at their host’s disposal. Boldly from the table-end
our man called, “Brother Sindbad!” The astonished guests fell silent.
“Had you no more than excused my doggerel, I’d have been your
debtor! But you have plucked this stranded nobody off the street and
wined and dined him beyond his dreams. You’ve set your own daugh-

20
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

ter, the flower of Baghdad, to wash and serve me like a houri in Para-
dise. What right have I to further favor?”
“None,” his host affirmed at once, and then amiably gestured for
him to continue.
“But as it happens,” Somebody said, “this Sindbad, too, has sailed
six several voyages, though they fetched me not to wealth and peace
and joy but to what you see before you: a derelict in even more ways
than may appear. For that reason, when I try to conjure a fit finale to
such a feast as this, I can imagine nothing better than the tale of your
six successes. What entertainment!”
The guests regarded one another, their wine cups, the backs of their
hands. Yasmin carefully regarded Somebody — as (renarrowing his
eyes and stroking his beard) did ruddy Sindbad. There was through-
out the tented hall a holding of breath. Salim alone, standing out of
his master’s view, dared roll his eyes Allahward.
“I had meant to have Kuzia Fakan and her friends amuse us,” Sind-
bad said. He smiled toward two slender, veiled women standing by
with pipes and tambours, and a plumper, handsome third — unveiled,
black-eyed, barely costumed under her half-opened robe — standing
behind them with folded arms and a skeptical expression. “But we
Sindbads agree that the only entertainment better than a story is half
a dozen stories. The ones you crave, however — which, despite their
seasickening aspect, happen to be my very own favorites as well —
these patient gentlemen have heard already, in bits and pieces.”
Discreet exhalation; sips of wine. But Somebody protested, “What
can that matter? A story first heard is a virgin bride, who so takes us
with her freshness that we care nothing for her style. A good tale
retold is a beloved wife or long-prized lover, whose art we relish be-
cause no novelty distracts us. Tell, this beggar begs you: from start to
finish, tell, and while these worthies relish your grace notes and flour-
ishes, my worthless ears will hang on the tale’s mere melody. Do tell!”
Were the diners polled, Somebody sensed, it would be he who’d
hang, not his ears. And from both ends of the table — Sindbad before
him, Yasmin behind — he felt a voltage rise at his mention of brides
and mistresses. The old man paused and pondered, glanced particu-
larly at a red-faced, red-bearded, beefy banqueter perspiring immedi-
ately to his right, and then with a hand-wave bade the three women

21
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

sit. The unveiled one (Kuzia Fakan, Somebody happened to know)
sniffed and tossed her head. Several gentlemen for several seconds
closed their eyes.
But then what the senior Sindbad said was “No: a tale told too
often is a jade whose bawdries only postpone sleep.” All eyes opened.
“Not a man here,” he declared, “but has heard me from time to time,
through the lean and holy month just now behind us, resail those
voyages: my first, to that floating island that was a monstrous fish; my
second, to the valley of serpents and diamonds, the island of rocs and
rhinoceri; my third, to the mountain of apes and cannibal giants; my
fourth, most dreadful of all, to God knows where, where I myself was
obliged to deal death or die, and I did not die; my fifth, no easier, to
where I was pissed on head to foot by the Old Man of the Sea — ai!”
As on his right hand he ticked off these terrors with his left, Sind-
bad the Sailor grew finger by finger more distressed; this fifth fetched
tears from the teller, nods from the told. “Who can shake him?” Sind-
bad wept. “I feed him wine to loosen his grip; it loosens his sphincter
instead, and once more Sindbad’s drowned! I killed him, brothers, but
he rides me yet, and night after night I am bepissed! Yasmin.”
But without waiting for her cue, already by the rocs and rhinoceri
his daughter had moved himward behind the dinner guests, who du-
tifully wept with him. As he wiped his eyes now with the red hem of
her djellaba, and each guest his own with the sleeve she then offered
turn by turn in the same order as the wine, she fixed hers — tearless,
smileless, knowing, waiting — upon our upstart second Sindbad, who
said now, “The sixth, sir, the sixth: praise be to Allah, who in His
mercy follows Five with Six, and will follow Six with Seven!”
“Hum,” said Sindbad. The company hummed. “Our virgin listener
turns out to be less than virginal.”
The company fell silent.
“The fame of Serendib,” Somebody said, “and of Sayyid Sindbad’s
recent visit there, has spread even to Serendib itself. God grant you a
dry return from your second going, sir, and a rich return from your
rereturning. Sweet Serendib!”
All eyes were on him. Asked Sindbad carefully, “Can it be you’ve
been there?”
His daughter by this time had sleeved all hands’ tears save those of
Somebody, who had been dry-eyed as herself and beside whom now

22
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

she resumed her stand. “Where your tales and travels end, sir,” he
declared, “is where my story in this world begins. Sweet Serendib!”
“You’ve been there,” Sindbad said. He frowned. “Yasmin: your
sleeve for our visitor.”
She offered it as bidden but for the first time turned her eyes away.
“More than once,” Somebody swore, and under the pretext of dab-
bing his eyes with it, he kissed that sleeve. “It’s from there I came here,
though not directly, on my own last voyage but one. And it’s to there
I would give anything to return, if I had anything to give.”
The host fingered his beard. Appraised his wine cup. “On the
strength of our common name, Brother, I had planned to give you
gold and good-bye. But the story of how you got from Serendib to
here is one to which we’re virgins all.” Again he glanced at the plump
young redbeard beside him, then back at his namesake. “Very well,
sir: that virginity of ours is yours. Tell your tale, and then we’ll have
Kuzia Fakan. But look here,” he then demanded, “what shall we call
you? Not the Shipwrecked; not the Simoomed; not the Survivor:
those are me, Allah be praised.”
Somebody smiled; Somebody bowed. “Call me Sindbad the Still-
Stranded, at your orders.”
His reply appeared to please. “Still-Stranded? So are we all! And at
my orders? Then I order you, Still-Stranded, to tell us of Serendib,
and how you came from there to here.”
Somebody said, “With pleasure. It is a tale that involves the house
in which I now find myself as well as my long-lost own, to which I
pray the telling may return me.” To the company at large then he went
on: “Know, sirs and ladies, that there are several Serendibs, not one.
There are the Serendibs of our childhood, our youth, and our mid-
manhood, from each of which I made a voyage and was lost and
found. There is the Serendib of late maturity, in very sight of whose
Adam’s Peak I drowned to the world I’d known. Yet a fifth Serendib
there is: the one I next woke to, aboard Sayyid Sindbad’s ship Zahir
(its master’s daughter aboard, her father not), which was then cap-
tured by the Qeshmi pirate Sahim al-Layl. …”
Before the company’s consternation at these names, Still-Stranded
paused. His host went turban-red; the red-faced fellow on his right
went white. Yasmin drew the red cowl of her djellaba about her face,
and old Jayda her black one likewise. Only the dancer Kuzia Fakan

23
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

appeared amused by the general alarm, while the page Salim (like our
narrator) sized up the scene.
“Serendib Six,” Somebody said, “is truly where I sit.” He patted
the silk-embroidered cushion under him and carefully did not glance
at its former occupant. “Sweet Serendib, to which I fetched (who
knows how?) and where I now find myself still stranded! But sweeter
yet, sirs, is the seventh: crossroads between the world of my first four
voyages and the world of my latter two, in which, in my flawed but
heartfelt Arabic, I speak words like these. That,” he declared directly
to Sindbad the Sailor, “is the place voyaged to by you and from by
me: the Serendib to which we would return.”
When the company calmed, disconcerted Sindbad said, “Speak for
yourself, Sayyid Still-Stranded. But in so speaking, speak to us, and
more plainly. It’s not your Arabic that gives us trouble, but your in-
direction. Kindly begin at the beginning.”
Unabashed, Somebody countered, “Again I pray you, Brother: be-
gin at yours, and let me match you voyage for voyage until our twelve
voyages become one — to Serendib!”
At that rate, Sindbad observed, there would be neither Kuzia
Fakan nor sleep. Since even an Arabian night must come to morning,
he counterproposed (weary as he was of all things nautical) that they
rehearse their separate voyages one by one, at the rate of one apiece
per evening, till it be discovered how they interweaved and ended at
their common starting place: right here, right now. Moreover, he in-
vited the assembled — in particular the now once more tomato-faced
gentleman on his right, but the others as well — to be his dinner
guests again and again till those tales were told, for they clearly bade
to bear upon business present and to come.
In a tone compact of invitation, command, and threat, Sindbad
then proposed to Somebody the Stranger that he strand himself upon
his namesake’s hospitality until their narratives reached common
harbor.
Our man bowed his head slightly and turned up his palms. “So
be it. But let Sindbad the Somebody speak before Somebody the
Nobody.”
The host nodded. “Yasmin.”
Since the mention of Zahir and the Qeshmi pirates, Sindbad’s
daughter had not uncowled her face, but only rocked slightly where

24
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

she sat, and where Jayda now comforted her. At her father’s com-
mand, however, she put back her hood, wiped her own tears with
the sleeve she had earlier offered the company, and dutifully, with
downcast eyes, refilled the wine cups in the same complicated order as
before: first she served her father, then the young redbeard on his
right, then a very old man at her father’s left hand; then she went
down-table to the diner at what had been her own right hand before
Somebody took her place, and filled his cup; after that she served
the man across from him, at Somebody’s left; then she moved up
to the man at Redbeard’s right, two seats down from Sindbad; then to
the man across from him, two down on her father’s left; then to the
man two down from him; then to the man third down on Sindbad’s
right; then to the man more or less across from him; and finally to
Somebody the Still-Stranded, at whose left hand, having filled his cup,
she demurely sat.
As she performed this busy service, Sindbad said, “I need not
repeat what all here have heard before — that I first got into the
voyaging-and-trading way because as a young man I squandered in high
living the fortune inherited from my dear father. That when I set out
from Basra on my maiden trading voyage to recoup that fortune with
my fellow merchants, the first island we paused at was no island but a
whale of such enormity and sluggishness that like a dark, luxurious
dream, in the floating ages of his sleep he had grown trees and rocks
and beaches on his back, and had thus disguised himself without in-
tention to deceive. Innocents innocently thus gulled, a party of us
went ashore and strolled as if through Eden. Anon our cookfires
burned through the dream to the dreamer, who, half wakened, dived
for deeper sleep, extinguishing our fires and most of us as well. A few
reached ship; I saved myself in a wooden laundry tub and watched
those luckier comrades panic off without me. Alone then in Allah’s
ocean, I quite gave myself up for dead but managed to tub it to an-
other island — which, half eaten though I was by the citizens of the
deep, and desperate for dry land, I would not set foot upon till I saw
campfires burning safely on its beach. Once ashore, I contrived to
become King’s Favorite; but as I would not trust myself even then to
the island’s interior (lest it prove after all to be but a larger dream,
with a longer waking time), he appointed me his port minister. Never
out of sight of the sea — which, dreadful though it is, is what it is — 

25
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

I dreamed my own dreams in a small boat moored in the harbor, my
lines always singled up for quick departure, my Tub of Last Resort
ever at my side, and spent my waking hours aboard the larger vessels
clearing customs. Either this island was real or this whale a sounder
sleeper, for when one day, like a dream redreamed, my original vessel
called at that port — and I persuaded its captain that I was Sindbad the
erstwhile Sailor, and reclaimed and sold my goods, and returned to
Basra enriched both by my profits and by a good-bye present from my
friend the king — I left his sea-girt kingdom as fixed as I’d found it.
“From this maiden voyage, my friends, I learned four things.” He
tapped his tub with his left hand, from which our man now observed
that parts of two fingers were missing. “That some shores may be less
solid than the sea. That a dream long dreamed may grow a real geog-
raphy, unsuspected by the dreamer, and that we who therethrough
wander wake such dreamers at our peril. That the castaway who
would become King’s Favorite must first not only abandon hope but
feed a portion of himself to his ultimate devourers. Finally, that he
who would regain his lost goods does well to become registrar of
cargoes. Yasmin.”
Through a chorus of approval, Sindbad’s daughter made her com-
plex rounds, recomposed enough now to suspend Somebody’s soul
once more in her sea-green gaze. The company’s attention moved with
her (all but Redbeard’s; he was recounting Sindbad’s lessons on four
fat fingers) and thus ended upon our narrator, Still-Stranded. …
Who, in his odd but not unfluent tongue, now told a version of the
tale of

26

Somebody’s First Voyage

Once upon a time I was twins; my other half didn’t quite make it into
this world.
I remember her.
Like many another solitary though not unhappy child, young Simon
William Behler invented playmates. “Bijou” especially, with her tide-
water eyes. We two had long conversations, high adventures; no
doubt they’ve colored my memory from this distance. But we were
together back there, more or less conscious through the last trimester,
and my kid sister (I’ve never thought of her otherwise) was game for
anything. In our liquid world we slid and turned like a brace of young
otters. We even told stories — I did, anyhow — about what we imag-
ined was going on: what was out there, who we were, who they were.
In these tales of adventure, love, and mystery there was no Once upon
a time. Our language had no tenses. My stories were perhaps no more
than a rendition of what took place.
In the last of them, Bijou and I make ready for what four decades
later will be called Extravehicular Activity. The pressure’s on. We know
it’s risky, this shift from one world to another; we’re edgy but eager.

27
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

A comradely last hug; then I thrust myself headfirst into the Passage.
My faithful friend and audience is right behind me. See you there,
Bijou! Two. One.

He awoke in the strange though familiar bedroom of his older brother,
Joseph “Joe Junior” Behler, in the family house in East Dorset, Maryland.
Sunday morning, July 1, 1937: Simon W. Behler’s seventh birthday.
Bijou’s, too.
“Familiar” because our parents had lived in that house since before
we were born; “strange” because the night just past was the first I had
slept in my brother’s room. Today they would bring Mother home:
my birthday present, Aunt Rachel said. (Bijou’s, too.) But she was
still too sick to sleep in her and Dad’s room, and so yesterday Dad and
Uncle Josh had moved my twin bed back into Joe Junior’s room. To-
day we would move the rest of my things, and Mother would take the
spare twin.
Neither my brother nor I was happy with this arrangement. Joe
Junior was thirteen and wanted privacy; I was used to rocking myself
to sleep and talking to Bijou. But it was for Mother’s sake, and just
for a while.
Those twin habits of mine, however, were of long standing and not
easily put by. I rocked on my left side; all my pajama tops wore
through at the right shoulder from friction against the bedsheets.
When I was mostly awake, talking quietly to my sister or telling our
stories in my head, I had a way of rocking that made nearly no noise.
But as sleep took over, sometimes I would rev up enough to set
springs and bed-frame going. On the door between her and Uncle
Josh’s room and mine (and Bijou’s), Aunt Rachel would tap “Shave
and a haircut” — tap tata tap-tap — and say, “Sy?”
“Okay,” I’d answer. Wearily. For a while then I would lie still, and
sometimes fall asleep without further movement. But well into my
teens I woke up rocking. What would I do, I used to wonder, when I
had college roommates? When I had a wife right in bed with me?
Now my brother said, “Quit rocking.” Joe Junior’s room had an
odd rank smell, not sweat not dirt not garbage. Matter-of-factly he
declared, “You got to quit that now, big baby,” and added in a sing-
song, “Happy birthday to you happy birthday to you happy birthday
dear Simon happy birthday to you. Amen.”

28
Somebody’s First Voyage

The room was hung with his flying model airplanes, rubber-band-
powered, their hand-razored balsa frames painstakingly tissued,
doped, decaled. Testors glue and banana oil were part of the smell,
but not all of it. Spad, Fokker triplane, Flying Jenny, Ryan trainer,
and my favorite: Stinson Reliant, with its ring of nacelle blisters
around the navy-blue engine cowling. An airplane pilot was what I
was going to be.

He went down to breakfast with the family.
On weekends the black and chrome breakfast table was moved mid-
kitchen from its nook to make room for the six of us, lately five. Dad
and Uncle Josh, at its ends, were deep into the Baltimore Sunday Sun,
cigarettes, coffee. Dad and Aunt Rachel smoked Camels; Uncle Josh,
Chesterfields in a black holder. The men tapped their ashes into smears
of corn syrup on their willowware plates, Aunt Rachel hers into the
sink beside which she worked. My uncle came to Sunday breakfast
pajamaed and robed: with his silvering hair and rimless bifocals,
jaunty chin and cigarette holder, he looked like his hero, President
Roosevelt, especially when he tipped back his head to laugh or focus
on the newspaper. Our father always came down fully dressed except
for his suit coat, whether by personal inclination or because as a town
councilman and volunteer fireman as well as a businessman, he was
much summoned from the house. Even on hot summer weekends
Dad wore his suits, white shirts, solid-color neckties; I had never seen
him in short sleeves, much less swim trunks or pajamas. The front
section of the Sun was reserved for him; I knew they were on their
second coffee because he was reading the “Maryland” section. He
folded it neatly twice the long way, as Aunt Rachel told us New York
City subway riders do, so as not to take up more than their share of
space. Our father was lean and tall and bald, long of nose and ears and
fingers, hard-of-hearing from a condition that made his nose run al-
ways, and farsighted. Without his reading glasses, he liked to say, he
couldn’t make out a headline at arm’s length, but street signs and li-
cense plates he could read from half a block away.
Our kitchen was the family’s pride and a showpiece of our business:
ample and modern, fluorescent-lighted, chrome-and-leatherette-
furnitured, replete with white cabinets and appliances, black imitation
tile halfway up the walls, a black-and-white checkerboard floor of

29
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

genuine rubber squares that any careless motion of our sneakers
marked, a nonticking electric wall clock with a red sweep second hand,
and, beside it, a built-in fan to carry off cooking odors and cigarette
smoke. When Joe Junior and I came in, Aunt Rachel was scouring one
of the stainless-steel countertops with Bon Ami cleanser, by which she
swore. On its red and yellow label are a newly hatched chick and the
company’s motto: Hasn’t scratched yet. My brother liked to ask her,
“Yet?” Aunt Rachel would make a show of examining the countertop
closely before answering, “Not yet!”
There was a strong family resemblance among the Behlers, which
skipped my brother but passed to me. With her ears lengthened even
further by dangling rings, her dark hair braided and terry-turbaned,
her lank form robed in plum satin, my aunt looked to me like a Gypsy
lady or a Turk. Tap tata tap-tap, went the near-empty can of cleanser;
“Happy b-day, Simon B.!” called out Aunt Rachel, and with Bon Ami
in one hand and sponge in the other, she came around the table to
kiss me seven times in the hair. Joe Junior availed himself of that op-
portunity to whale me seven good ones across the backside plus one
for luck and one to grow on. “Not too hard there, Joey,” said amused
Uncle Josh around his cigarette holder, and my father, “Happy birth-
day, son.”
“Bijou, too,” I reminded them, not insistently. My brother
groaned. My uncle returned to his newspaper. My aunt said, “You’re
the birthday boy,” in a tone meant at once to humor and gently to
reprove. My father didn’t hear.
Birthday or not, Joe Junior had First Goods on the funnies, to
catch up on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. The scorchings on the
egg-yellow field of my French toast made a false-color map of our
tidewater county, whose labyrinth of salt-marsh necks and islets,
creeks and coves and guts and tidal meanders, had harbored escaped
slaves before the Civil War, bootleggers during Prohibition, and
moonshiners even yet, Dad declared, in the hard times that were upon
our nation.
The talk at table — as my brother and I ate and Aunt Rachel
cooked, served, scrubbed, sometimes even sat, sipping coffee all the
while and lighting one Camel after another — was of the current,
sometimes violent strike at the Albany Brothers canneries, whose
workers were protesting their employer’s ban on national labor

30
Somebody’s First Voyage

unions. My family’s sentiments were mixed: my father — who had
been a carpenter’s helper for his father and then an appliance delivery-
man and repairman for Sears and Roebuck before opening his own
little shop and gradually expanding it into Behler Maintenance & Im-
provement — thought the Albanys were entided to their motor yachts
and large waterfront houses; for “Captain Philip” Albany, our only
native millionaire, he was proud to have done the most elaborate
kitchen cabinetry to be found outside the more imposing downriver
estates of minor Du Ponts and Chryslers. The striking workers were
biting the hand that fed them; better to take pay cuts in these lean
times, if necessary, than to shut down the plant to protest layoffs and
call for even higher wages. The unions were killing the goose that laid
the golden eggs. It was all the fault of outside organizers.
Uncle Josh, born and raised across the Chesapeake, in Baltimore,
had himself been laid off as a bookkeeper at Maryland Drydock and
therefore took a less benevolent view of Albany Brothers and their
product, Dorset Brand vegetables and seafood. But in his earlier life
he had been variously a merchant seaman, a groundskeeper for a fancy
golf club, and an assistant purser on an ocean liner. Aunt Rachel
had met him in that last capacity on a trip to London, England, with
some girlfriends before the Depression. Though the couple had been
obliged to give up their city apartment and move in with us till times
improved, Uncle Josh played golf and hunted wild geese and went
on fishing trips when not bookkeeping and estimating for Behler
Maintenance & Improvement and tending bar on weekends for the
Chaptico Country Club. We regarded him as something of a sport: a
good-natured dependent whose opinions were indulged like his black
cigarette holder, his bright bow ties, his maroon Nash coupe and deer-
skin driving gloves. He subscribed to National Geographic and Field
and Stream.
Aunt Rachel was the family favorite. Her service as a Red Cross
nurse in England during the world war and as a registered nurse at
Union Memorial in Baltimore afterward, her return visit not only to
England but to France as well in the Roaring Twenties, her marriage
to a city man and their residence in a city apartment building rather
than a house with porch and yard, even her and Uncle Josh’s childless-
ness — all gave her the aura of an adventuress in our eyes. She and
Mother “got on famously,” as Aunt Rachel liked to say, and it was

31

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

well that they did, for Dad’s business, his deafness, and his involve-
ment in civic affairs left him little time or taste for recreation beyond
our ritual Sunday drives. Every day he read the morning and evening
editions of the Baltimore Sun, also the Philadelphia Bulletin and the
Dorset Daily Democrat, and on Sundays the Philadelphia Inquirer and
the New York Times. He was concerned about Benito Mussolini and
Adolf Hitler, and likewise about the New Deal, for which there was
much to be said but which went too far. After dinner with the family
he was off to town-council or fire-company meetings, or responding
to the fire calls themselves at all hours, or scouting more contracts for
Behler Maintenance & Improvement, whose business had so declined
with the decade that only our repairs department kept us afloat. Or,
still dressed in white shirt and tie, on weekends he would rake leaves,
simonize our black LaSalle, mix unslaked lime to spray the caterpillars
on our Chinese Cigar trees. But Aunt Rachel made even grocery shop-
ping an adventure: she and Mother used to go off in the maroon Nash
like chuckling conspirators and return laughing with baskets of can-
teloupes they’d talked down the price of at some roadside stand, baked
goods from a church benefit, saltwater taffy for Joe Junior and me
(and Bijou) from a State Hospital raffle. Older than Dad, she freely
teased him for his stick-in-the-mudhood, and thus we learned that he
was a stick-in-the-mud. Before Mother took sick, the two women had
played double solitaire, even contract bridge with Uncle Josh and a
fourth from among Aunt Rachel’s nurse friends down the street at
Dorset General. Despite our father’s standing in the community, he
and Mother never entertained or went socially to others’ houses, only
to Democratic bull-roasts and fire-company ham-and-oyster suppers.
Uncle Josh and Aunt Rachel, on the other hand, went almost weekly
to dinner at friends’ houses (invitations that, I realized much later,
they were in no position to return), to the movies at Schine’s Bijou
Theatre with Mother and us, to Ocean City for the day. They even
went dancing at the country club on Uncle Josh’s occasional Saturday
nights off from bartending. Though he was not a regular member, he
was on all-but-equal terms with the membership, who by and large
were not socially superior to him and Aunt Rachel, only more fortu-
nate economically. Those minor Du Ponts and Chryslers belonged to
other clubs, elsewhere.

32
Somebody’s First Voyage

In her amused and scoffing tone Aunt Rachel declared that strike or no strike, the union didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance on the Eastern
Shore of Maryland, which still considered itself deep Dixie and would
have nothing to do with anything Union.
“Rachel,” our father said.
No, really: she knew East Dorset people who wouldn’t be caught
dead in Union Memorial Hospital, just because of its name. And had
we ever heard of a union organizer from Richmond or Charleston?
she asked Joe Junior and me. Of course not: they were all from Pitts-
burgh or worse, and it was time for us to get out of our pj’s and off
to Sunday school.

His family was indifferent to religion. Except that Dad, perhaps out of
civic-spiritedness, went regularly to men’s Bible class at East Dorset
Zion Meth-Prot while we boys attended Sunday school. But we
“went to church” only on special occasions, did not say mealtime grace
or bedtime prayers, and never spoke of God, Jesus, the soul, the here-
after. Probably we thought that Uncle Al, mustard-gassed in Belgium
in 1918, waited to rejoin us up there somewhere, meanwhile looking
after Bijou. But our disposition was entirely secular. Joe Junior and
his buddies spent their Sunday-school hour teasing girls, twisting the
words of the hymns, and making plans for the interval between the
10:50 benediction and our one-o’clock Sunday dinner. I myself took
more interest in the exotic but vaguely depressing world of the illus-
trated lessons — camels and palm trees, figs and dates and anointing-
oil, sandals, robes, unbarbered hair and beards — than in the strange
agonies and paradoxical imperatives of the lessons themselves, pre-
sided over by cheerful matrons of the neighborhood: Whoso loseth his
life shall find it, and the rest. Let the lower lights be burning, we sang
together at the end:
Send a gleam across the wave.
Some poor sinking, suffering seaman
You may rescue, you may save.
Joe Junior and his friends changed sinking to stinking, adding the
t just lightly enough to escape detection. Since boats and beacons,
unlike palms and camels, were the daily furniture of our tidewater
lives, I wondered as always why the hymnist called for lower rather

33
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

than higher lights. A forward range light, perhaps — but in that case, why more than one lower light? It was only a hymn, Mrs. Travers
explained.
In the ten-minute break between Sunday school and church, as
others mingled and chatted in the steamy shade of maples out on the
bright sidewalk, my brother’s gang and I made our way back along
Maryland Avenue to Maple Street, past rows of crabfat-yellow clap-
board houses, mean but tidy. I hurried ahead to say hi to Mother. But
though the rest of my bedroom furniture had been moved, she had
not. The fire-company ambulance had been called to a drowning up
by the Chaptico River bridge; its crew had not yet delivered the victim
to Dorset General, whence they would drop off Mother en route back
to the firehouse.
Good: we would get to see the flashing red Cadillac stop impor-
tantly before our porch, perhaps with siren purring. Aunt Rachel
guessed not: Mother’s homecoming had been scheduled for when
most of the neighborhood and family were at Zion because she dis-
liked being the center of attention. We boys were to change clothes
now and go off to play until dinnertime, as usual; Mother would be
waiting for us when we came back.
What was usual for my brother was not so for me and Bijou; we
usually played in our room, ours no more, or about the yard, or, at
farthest, along the seawall before Dorset General, at the end of our
street, where I skipped flat stones and oyster shells, narrated to my
invisible sister (in third-person italics, I would later come to under-
stand), and looked for washed-up bottles with messages. Joe Junior’s
gang played on the Island, in the mouth of Island Creek, over by the
other hospital. I was a compliant child, but I resisted Aunt Rachel’s
suggestion that today I go with Joe Junior, who I knew didn’t want
my company, either. My Ingersoll Mickey Mouse watch — a gift from
the family one birthday past — kept good time; moreover, this was
supposed to be my day. Why could I not seawall it alone and promise
not to come home before a quarter till one?
“’Cause you’ll snoop,” my brother declared matter-of-factly, having
arrived in time for this question.
“Will not!”
Normally then we’d have Will⁄Will-notted, Will⁄Will-notted until
either we were shushed by authority or one or the other of us tired of
the contest. Today, however, far from carrying on his taunt or object-

34
Somebody’s First Voyage

ing to my company, Joe Junior agreeably offered as part of my birth-
day present to take me riding on his Silver King, his own birthday gift
from the whole family two months past.
I perched sidesaddle on the crossbar, and we labored up Maple and
down Maryland. My brother stood on the pedals to get his one-geared
bicycle up to speed — hot work on a still tidewater forenoon in
July — but then drove the two of us without difficulty across our
gradeless neighborhood. First stop was the foot of Bridge Avenue,
where the two-mile Chaptico River highway bridge linked our poor
salt-marsh county to its drier, more prosperous northern neighbor, to
check out the drowning. Despite the stinging sea nettles that infested
the estuary after June, this was East Dorset’s bathing place: the narrow
brown beach had been widened with dredge-spoil from Dorset Creek,
and a stretch of it was shaded by the bridge. The river bottom was
firm and mostly weedless. The agile could scramble onto and dive
from the concrete piling bases; the daring — in defiance of clearly
posted prohibition — used the bridge itself, some twenty feet above
the surface at the eighth piling out, a doubler.
This Freddie Mulligan had done, one of Joe Junior’s friends told
us, and had not been seen to surface. His older sister Mary had gotten
hysterical; someone had run to the nearest house and telephoned the
fire company; the ambulance had been dispatched before Freddie ap-
peared from behind the ninth piling, to which he had swum under-
water to alarm his friends. There being no two-way radio for such
purposes in those days, the ambulance crew could not be recalled. By
when they reached the scene, scared Freddie had bolted; no one be-
lieved his protestations that he had been only resting out there, not
hiding.
“A hiding’s what he’ll get,” my brother and Andy Travers agreed,
chuckling soberly. I concurred, feeling truly older to be in on the con-
versation. “And I know where he’s hiding till he gets it,” Joe Junior
added. Andy Travers exclaimed, “Hey, yeah!” and asked were we go-
ing there now.
Tapping a forefinger on my head, my brother said, “Directly,”
which meant the opposite.
He and I went then, not on up the rivershore to Island Creek and
the Island, but up Bridge Avenue, the county’s only stretch of four-
lane highway, toward Albany Brothers, to have a look at the strike.

35
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

The word pickets, lately much spoken in our house, I associated with
the fenced camps of migrant Negroes who picked tomatoes all sum-
mer for Albany Brothers, but the ones we saw now outside the first
cannery building, standing in dungareed groups or walking up and
down with placards, were white men. I was thrilled and frightened:
the pickets had beaten workers and truckdrivers who had tried to cross
their lines (I envisioned a literal line on the ground, such as East Dor-
set schoolboys drew for certain challenges); they had in turn been
attacked by Captain Philip Albany’s guards, and some of them arrested
by the state police. Joe Junior had already broken a family rule by
riding his Silver King on the dual highway; I thought we should not
also go close to the pickets.
My brother mildly replied, “Big baby,” and pedaled us right along
the highway shoulder opposite them, unfair, their placards read.
One of the pickets called to us across the road, “Not carrying any
tomatoes on there, are you?” “No sirree!” I called back. I could see no
line on the ground.
At Washington Street we turned right, at Dorset Avenue right
again, winding among cannery buildings on both sides of those
streets. The most pickets were at the main plant entrance, but as it was
Sunday, not much was happening there. On the Dorset Avenue wall
of one particular building, however, was a machine we called the
Lifter, which in peak season we sometimes saw in action even on Sun-
days, on our afternoon family drives. The device was no more than a
vertical conveyor for carrying cases of Dorset Brand from truckbeds
to the upper story of the warehouse, but we always pressed Dad to
drive by to “check the Lifter,” to see whether it was working and, if it
was, to stop the black LaSalle for a minute so we could watch the
cartons rise and disappear inside the building. “Watch now,” I would
instruct Bijou. Once in a while the loaders’ rhythm lapsed and an
empty riser would appear among its loaded neighbors like a missing
tooth. Then we would proceed.
That we could now ourselves go check the Lifter, on Joe Junior’s
Silver King, seemed to me a prodigious, adult freedom.
“Hey, hot dog!” To pump us back up to cruising speed after turn-
ing from Washington onto Dorset, my brother was standing on the
pedals again, and so saw before I the overturned tomato truck sur-
rounded by pickets at the foot of the idle Lifter. Like a gutted elephant

3
Somebody’s First Voyage

it lay on its side in the hot sunshine, its ripe load hugely spilled and
stinking. Squashed early tomatoes flooded the macadam from shoul-
der to shoulder; baskets both shattered and intact were scattered ev-
erywhere. The truck’s windshield panes, we saw as we approached,
were smashed into twin webs of cracks, like the eyes of comic-strip
characters stunned or killed. Pickets milled among the mess, some gin-
gerly, others heedlessly.
“Pee-yew!” Joe Junior and I agreed. Two brown-and-yellow state
police cars idled on the far side, flashers flashing. Some altercation was
going on, either among the pickets or between them and the troopers;
both seemed to be struggling with a man who wielded his unfair
sign like a bat till other pickets wrested it from him and yet others
pinioned his thrashing arms and legs. Except in the movies at Schine’s
Bijou, I had never seen grown men fight. My blood surged; I hoped
the struggler would be arrested, so that I could tell my parents and
aunt and uncle (and kid sister) that I had seen a man arrested. But the
state troopers seemed interested only in clearing the avenue for traffic.
We saw a tow truck rounding the corner some blocks down.
“Neat-o!” I wanted to watch the dead truck be righted, but Joe
Junior was eager to tell his friends what we’d seen. Several times be-
tween the Lifter and the creek he even used the term we: “Don’t tell
Dad and Aunt Rachel we rode up Bridge Avenue, you hear? Tell ’em
we stayed on side streets and never got close.”
I promised and let my fancy embellish the role of kid brother. We
would exchange confidences from bed to bed; Joe Junior would advise
and stick up for me.
On Island Point, the sandspit where Island Creek meets the Chap-
tico, we parked the Silver King in reeds and, as my brother’s friends
had not arrived, threw oyster shells for a while. The cupped bottom
shells skipped more times across the still surface of the creek; the flat-
ter upper ones could be sailed straight up into the air, almost out of
sight if you had a good arm, and would slice back into the water with
no splash, just a kind of shck. A good skipper made five, seven, eleven
touchdowns before it sank, leaving a row of spreading rings progres-
sively smaller and closer together. Joe Junior could sail the nearly flat
shells, inside down, clear over to the small wooded island halfway
across the creek mouth. This he did, to learn whether his friends had
swum over there already.

37
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

They had not, or they were playing possum like Freddie Mulligan,
so he gave me the next part of my birthday present: another secret to
be kept from the family (except Bijou), like our having biked right up
Bridge Avenue. I would never be old enough to join their club, whose
name was known only to its members, because Joe Junior and his
friends would keep on being six years older until they grew tired of
the club and disbanded it. But under oath of secrecy he revealed to me
three of their initiations and demonstrated the first. Unbuttoning his
fly and fishing forth his pee-tom, he wrote his name on the sand with
pee in two-foot block capitals, J-O-E B-E-H-L-E-R, and had enough
left to underline it. I was astonished.
“That keeps girls out,” he declared, and with little knee-dips he
joggled his writing equipment back into place as he rebuttoned. “Do
yours.”
Dismayed, I protested, “Mine’s longer.”
“Like fun it is!” He was fortunately so taken with this joke that
instead of insisting on my performance, he explained that Freddie
Mulligan, for example, had been allowed to do his in smaller letters;
even so, they called him Mullig because he hadn’t managed his an.
Anyhow, joe was longer than sy, ha ha.
The second initiation could be done only on an ebbing tide, and
just now the water was slack. On the nuthouse side of the Island was
an oarless, abandoned old skiff that would still just barely float if you
bailed it constantly. Any aspiring member of the club was set adrift in
midafternoon on the outgoing tide, facedown in the bottom of that
skiff with nothing but a rusty quart tomato can, one side flattened, for
a bailer. He had to go where the gentle current took him, bailing as
necessary but neither sitting up to see where he was nor calling for
rescue until the sun set behind Turkey Point, downriver. So far, either
wind or countercurrents had set every candidate ashore not long after
the skiff passed under the Chaptico bridge (the initiate’s only land-
mark), half a mile downstream. My brother himself claimed to have
been carried to the Dorset General seawall and the foot of our own
street. But he believed that if you got yourself fetched as far out as the
channel buoys, nearly a mile from either shore, the tide would never
bring you to land; you would drift up and down the Chaptico without
food or water until some other boat rescued you. And Mullig believed

38
Somebody’s First Voyage

that beyond Turkey Point the current strengthened and would carry
you right out into the bay and down to the Atlantic Ocean like a
message in a bottle, and good-bye. They’d find your bones washed up
in Portugal.
I was impressed but skeptical. How did a person know, without
peeking, exactly when the sun went down?
“You can tell, dumbbell. Hey!” My brother was much pleased with
his unintended rhyme. “And you know why I went the farthest?
’Cause I’m a natural-born bailer! Get it?”
I skipped a shell. “How do you get the rowboat back to the Island?
I bet there isn’t even any rowboat.”
Twisting my arm up behind my back, he invited me to reconsider
that bet: “Is there or not, big baby?” But taunt and torture alike were
edgeless, a half-attended reflex; my brother was more interested in the
club’s third initiation, a swimming test.
“You get stripped and blindfolded, all right? And we walk you out
by the red day beacon till you’re up to your chin. Then you have to
swim fifty strokes out — real strokes, not baby strokes, and we count
’em off from shore. Then you have to somersault twice underwater and
spin around three times when you come up. Then you have to swim a
hundred strokes before you take your blindfold off, unless you touch
bottom first. If you look to see which way you’re going, you’re out.”
The idea was to watch the disoriented novice swim off in the
wrong direction and have to wade or swim naked all the way back.
Andy Travers, who had told us of Freddie Mulligan’s faked drowning,
had swum bare-assed into a throng of girls bathing off a small beach
halfway down toward the bridge. Mullig himself had come ashore
upriver, at the nuthouse, right in front of the Violent building, where
signs said no bathing or boating from this beach. As for Joe
Junior, he had raised his blindfold at the permitted time to find him-
self well out in midriver, and what with the tide and the sea nettles,
he had darn near not made it back to the Island. I could try it now if
I wanted to, closing my eyes in lieu of a blindfold and stopping at a
couple dozen strokes, since I was little and this wasn’t a real initiation.
I needn’t even strip naked; the thing was, it was neat not to know
which way was home.
“I can do a hundred easy,” I declared, “and then some.” This was the best ordeal I’d ever heard of, and sea nettles or no sea nettles, it

39
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

was a rare East Dorset child who was not at home in that warm green
water.
“Not three hundred, you can’t,” my brother reminded me: the dis-
tance out and back, should I go the wrong way, plus the distance to
and from my starting point. Besides, who wanted to wait for me that
long?
“Fifty, then,” I proposed, already boldly stripping to my jockey
shorts. “It’s my birthday.”
Since it was my birthday, Joe Junior replied, I ought to swim in my
birthday suit, ha ha. But fifty strokes only, from the starting place; he
had a club meeting to go to. Still feeling kid-brotherly, I decided to
take his joke as a dare. I folded my khaki pants and blue polo shirt and
left them atop my sneakers in the reeds beside his Silver King; then,
having waded out waist-deep on the shoal toward the red day beacon
without spotting serious sea nettles, I shucked off my undershorts,
squeezed them into a dripping ball, and pitched them shoreward.
“No tricks,” I demanded. Joe Junior said back, “No tricks your own
self. Keep your eyes closed, or it doesn’t count.” I was gratified to see
him step out of his shoes and pants to retrieve my shorts from the
shallows and stand watch: my idea of an older brother. It was my first
time naked in the river; though I worried about nettle stings on my
pee-tom, the free flow about my hairless crotch and cleft was interest-
ing. At the chin-deep point — only halfway to the red day beacon just
now, as the tide was in — I stood on tiptoe and called “Two! One!
Zero!”
Joe Junior, down to his own jockey shorts, stood knee-deep hold-
ing mine. He waved me on and strode ashore. I was pleased to hear
him shouting the count as I swam half a hundred easy strokes out into
the river.
The overall salinity of the Chesapeake estuarine system, Uncle Josh
had once remarked at our dinner table, is the same as that of human
tears. Its waters therefore never sting the eyes, as do those of the ocean
or a freshwater lake or a swimming pool. We children had never swum
in lake or pool, but it was true that at Ocean City we had to close our
eyes when we ducked under a wave, whereas in the Chaptico we al-
ways swam and dived with eyes open. To swim out now blind was
disconcerting, even a bit alarming — to reach my starting mark and

40
Somebody’s First Voyage

know only from my brother’s distant voice (and from what sense re-
mained of my initial bearing) which way was landward.
At fifty, as I treaded water, he called out, “Okay! Two somersaults
and three turnarounds!”
The underwater somersaults alone, while easily executed, were
enough to remove any lingering sense of direction; it took me a mo-
ment after the second one even to determine which way was up. The
three subsequent turnarounds were approximate as well as redundant;
since Joe Junior now said nothing to give away his position, I had no
way of knowing when a rotation was completed. And it was, as he
had promised, gratifyingly scary then to strike out in the dark, so to
speak — dark green, as it seemed behind my tight-closed eyelids —
for all I knew right out toward the distant draw and trestles of the
Chaptico bridge.
Nevertheless, I narrated silently to my sister, young Simon Behler
swam on, determined not to stop and open his eyes at fifty strokes but to
swim on and on until his hands or feet touched bottom, even if he had to
swim all the way across to Avon County. Which, in fact, I intended to do
as soon as I was old enough to get my parents’ permission and arrange
for someone with a boat to stand by. Nobody I’d heard of had ever
swum the Chaptico at Dorset, either nonstop or resting on the bridge
piers from time to time, but already by my seventh summer (eighth,
if you counted 1930 as my first) I was so able a swimmer and so effort-
less a floater — a regular muskrat, Aunt Rachel called me — that I felt
sure I could go on all day, swimming and resting by turns, without
touching bottom.
At forty-two or -three strokes, however, my left hand touched soft
mud. I veered right, thinking to make my way as if accidentally back
into deeper water and on. But then my right hand touched, and some-
thing brushed my leg. I jerked away reflexively, fearing sea nettles; my
foot felt bottom. I had swum into weedy shallows and had no idea
now which way was out. So as not to embarrass myself as Andy Trav-
ers had done, I opened my eyes and found myself disappointingly near
my starting place: inshore, just a bit downriver from the day beacon.
Joe Junior was nowhere in sight: around the point, maybe.
His uncanny homing instinct, I reported to Bijou, had guided young
Behler back almost to where he had started. Taking care to remain waist-
deep, I swam and waded across the shoal. Nobody to be seen along

41
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

the creek mouth or over on the Island, but now I saw other bicycles
stashed beside the Silver King, other piles of shoes and clothing beside
Joe Junior’s and mine.
Instead of coming ashore, I recrossed the shoal to where I had first
touched bottom, and fooled around for a while there in the tepid
water. Eyes open, I did the facedown dead-man’s float, regarding my
murky arms and legs, my pendant pee-tom, white on green. Then I
floated on my side, one eye above the surface, one below: different
worlds. Holding on to a waterlogged tree limb on the bottom, I imag-
ined myself seized by a giant South Seas clam, unable to surface, and
tried to see how long I could make myself stay under.
There was an indentation in the shoreline nearby and likewise in
the stand of tall spartina behind the pebbled beach, which, being lee-
ward of the northwesterly storm winds, was strewn with driftwood.
At the one-foot depth the bottom was smooth clay and mossy flat
stones, pleasant to lie prone upon, propped on my forearms, amphib-
ian. From within the indentation I could see neither bridge nor day
beacon nor — I realized with a little thrill — any other sign of human
habitation. There were no cans or bottles on the beach, no boats out
on the Chaptico, no channel buoys in sight, and the wooded farther
shore from where I sat now, cross-legged in the wavelets stirred by a
light new breeze, was unbroken by fields or houses.
A desert shore. I had tucked my wristwatch into my sneakers for
safekeeping, and I wore no ring or other ornament; when I boldly
now stood and walked ashore, I was as truly and completely naked as
the beach itself. Only by S. W. Behler’s short haircut might an observer
have guessed that he was a twentieth-century American boy. But there was no observer.
Ensconced in my cove of reeds, I sat on the smooth beach pebbles,
resting my back against a half-buried driftwood tree trunk. While rac-
ing Amelia Earhart across the Pacific, Bijou and I had developed en-
gine trouble; our Stinson Reliant had gone down in shark-infested
waters near an uncharted tropic isle. I had stripped off my flight suit,
plunged into the clear lagoon, and, calling to my kid sister to follow
me, by sheer good fortune reached shore unscathed. The sky was
cloudless, brilliant. There was not a sound besides the rustle of spar-
tina on three sides and the wavelets’ soft lapping before me. The little
breeze moved sweetly on my drying skin.

42
Somebody’s First Voyage

Where was I? Languorously I fiddled with my crotch; found my-
self; let my hand remain there. Slowly, experimentally, I retracted the
foreskin of my pee-tom, exposing the pink gland like a thumb-tip
through a driving glove.
Promptly from over my left shoulder came a rising howl: the East
Dorset fire siren, loud for its distance, followed a moment later by the
chorus of its counterparts in our town’s other wards. It achieved and
sustained a single note that went on and on, then subsided to a growl
and then to nothing: the noon whistle, against which I often checked
my Ingersoll. But today was Sunday, and by now it was past noon.
Another ambulance call, then.
I found myself again.

Surrounded by used white handkerchiefs on the screen-porch glider,
Dad was reading a section of the Sunday Times. Aunt Rachel was at
work in the kitchen; Uncle Josh was off in the maroon Nash but
would be back soon. I hurried upstairs through the odors of roast
chicken and cigarette smoke to see Mother.
She was propped on pillows in the spare twin, wearing a light bed-
jacket over her nightgown despite the heat. She looked sick, all right,
and the room smelled different. She had her glasses on — I used to
think she looked prettier with them on, like a pretty schoolteacher —
but the magazine section of the Times was lying beside her on the
bedsheet, open to the untouched crossword puzzle. On my maple
nightstand were a small white enameled basin, a box of Kleenex, and
a pencil for the puzzle. My wastebasket had been set in front of the
nightstand; quite a few used Kleenexes were in it already, and a couple
more were on the floor beside it.
“Mother’s so tired,” she said after we had carefully hugged and
kissed and she had wished me a happy birthday. “She wasn’t able to
go shopping for you this year.”
That was okay, I told her. The powder on her cheeks was thicker
than she used to wear it; you could see it caked on, as if new powder
had been put right on top of old. I sat on the edge of the spare twin,
holding her wrist as she held mine. On hers was still the name-bracelet
from the hospital.
“Is Joe Junior home?”
“He’s coming.”

43
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

He and I would have fun in the back bedroom together, she as-
sured me. Would I promise her, now that I was seven, to try not to
rock in bed?
I promised.
She really was tired. We didn’t say anything else for a while. Pres-
ently, however, I asked her whether she could tell me something about
my sister.
“Your sister!” She laughed a little, in her chest, and that made her
cough, and she had to spit into a Kleenex and close her eyes and lie
back against the small headboard. “There’s nothing to tell, honeybun.
She didn’t quite make it into this world, is all.” She considered. “We
called her BeeGee, for Baby Girl Behler, ’cause she didn’t live long
enough to get a real name. Then you took to calling her Bijou after
Schine’s uptown.”
Those things I knew. “Was she born alive and then died, or born
dead?”
Mother had squeezed my wrist while she coughed; now she patted
my forearm. “Some of both, I guess. Once in a while it happens that
a baby gets hung up being born, and that’s what happened to little
B. G. Behler.”
I had more questions, but Mother was so tired, and I heard my
brother taking the steps two at a time, calling “Mom?” Anyhow, I had
learned a considerable piece of news.
I should have told him I was going home, Joe Junior complained
as soon as he saw me; he’d had to go looking all over the Eastern
Shore of Maryland for me. How could I have told him when he was
over on the Island with his club? I could have left a note on his Silver
King, for pity’s sake. Well, it so happened I didn’t carry a pencil and
paper around with me. Then I should have written it on the sand, for
pity’s sake.
Mother whispered, “Boys.”
I went down to help Aunt Rachel set the dining-room table and
asked her what made a baby die being born. “Now there’s a nice Sunday-
dinner question!” she scoffed, in her way, but then she explained
while stirring gravy that sometimes the belly-button cord gets twisted
around a baby’s neck and strangles it while it’s being born. Dr. Fowler
and everybody had been upset, but there wasn’t a blessed thing any-
body could have done. They had been relieved then that I came out

44
Somebody’s First Voyage

okay, because with two of us swimming around in there, she guessed
things could get right tangled.
I was astonished. Hadn’t I been born first, as I’d always been told?
“No no no no no,” Aunt Rachel scoffed, and she tapped her stirring-
spoon smartly on the edge of the roasting pan: tap tata tap-tap. “Who
ever told you such a thing as that?”
“Everybody!”
Good-humoredly but positively she declared, “They never did! You
got that idea from being older than your sister ever since. But she
came first and she went first: ‘Girls first!’”
This second revelation, more momentous than its predecessor,
made me almost dizzy. I could not, in fact, recall ever having been told
in so many words that I had been born before “BeeGee” — though
surely I had never been told otherwise, either, and that omission
struck me as extraordinary, even somehow culpable. I urgently wanted
verification, but Mother was resting now, and with Dad you had to
say things too loud, and Uncle Josh wouldn’t know any different than
Aunt Rachel. I summoned the family to dinner and on the way back
from the screen porch asked my brother whether he’d known that
BeeGee was born first.
Nonchalantly he asked back, “What’s the difference between a
duck?”
The talk at table was of the strike again, of how much better off
were the Albany Brothers cannery workers than the people in war-
torn Spain and China, who would count it a blessing to eat spilled
tomatoes right off the street and would give their eyeteeth for a dinner
of stuffed roast chicken and succotash and mashed redskin potatoes
with giblet gravy. That was a Christ fact, Uncle Josh had to admit, but
even so.
“I heard another truck got turned over,” Joe Junior announced
loudly to our father. “And a picket was beaten up and arrested.”
“I doubt he was beaten up and arrested both,” Dad said. Uncle
Josh chuckled and said, “It happens.” Aunt Rachel thought they
should arrest them all and ship them off to the U.S. Army.
“Nothing can stop the Ar-my Air Corps!” Joe Junior sang out, with
a grin that meant he was in on something I wasn’t. Aunt Rachel
crooned admonishment — “Joe Jun-ior …” — pitching the second
note higher, like our door chime. My brother said “Tee hee” and made

45
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

a neat volcano of his mashed potatoes, with gravy lava. “Isn’t it some-
thing to have Mother back for your birthday!” Aunt Rachel asked me,
and I agreed it was, and Aunt Rachel said to Uncle Josh in a knowing
tone, “The poor thing’s tired, though.”
Over tapioca pudding the fire whistle blew again. My scrotum
tightened. When the sound had risen and fallen once and then rerisen,
Joe Junior told Dad, “Fire whistle,” and Dad said, “Hah,” and excused
himself to go to the fire, blowing his nose as he left the house. Almost
an hour later he telephoned to say that the fire had been at an Albany
Brothers warehouse and now there was an emergency town council
meeting and he didn’t know when he’d get back. We had cleaned up
dinner and were all on the screen porch waiting to take our Sunday
ride, which Mother had insisted we ought to go right ahead with,
never mind her. It was the first time I could remember Dad’s ever
telephoning home.
“Well!” Aunt Rachel said when she came back out on the screen
porch. In her cheery-scoffing tone the word whooshed out with lots
of breath: “Hwell! We’ll just take our little ride in the Nash, the four
of us.”
Joe Junior said, conversationally, “Yippee.”
We didn’t have to take a ride, I offered. “’Deed we do,” Aunt Ra-
chel replied, “and it’s a pity Mother and Dad can’t come along, ’cause
it’s your birthday surprise. Howja like them apples?”
“Eee-urr-room!” Joe Junior went, imitating first the sound of a
diving Spad and then its chattering machine guns: “Khuh-huh-huh-
huh-huh-huh-huh-huh!”
Uncle Josh said mildly, “That’ll do, Joe,” and folded his section of
Sunday paper.
“You have a good time, honey,” Mother bade me when I went
upstairs to say good-bye. “Mother’s sorry she can’t go with you, and
you’ll love your surprise, I know.” She was lying down now, her
glasses folded beside the basin and pencil on the maple nightstand. I
bent over and was weakly hugged and kissed. While her hands were
pressed to both sides of my face, an awful question occurred to me,
so important that I went ahead and asked it despite her being sick and
Joe Junior’s standing right behind me:
“Was it her own belly-button cord that Bijou got tangled up in, or
mine?” 

46

Somebody’s First Voyage

 “Jeez, Sy!” my brother objected. A blush scalded over me.
But Mother didn’t seem to mind. She laughed, airlessly, and shook
her head. “The things you think of!” Her hands were on my shoulders
now; she squeezed and wearily let go.

Joe Junior crowed to our aunt and uncle, “This drip!” We were turn-
ing off Maple onto Maryland in the maroon Nash, Uncle Josh driving
with his deerskin gloves even in July, his black cigarette holder be-
tween his teeth. “He asked her that, while she’s sick in bed!”
“Mother didn’t mind!” I said hotly. But I was impressed both by
the accusation of tactlessness — which, once I heard it, seemed shame-
fully justified — and by my brother’s superior discernment, which
clearly impressed him, too.
“I’m sure Mother didn’t mind,” Aunt Rachel said soothingly. “That
all happened years ago, and there wasn’t a blessed thing any soul could
do.”
Seven years ago today, I thought, stinging. And I could have gone
first.
“Nhow!” Aunt Rachel declared. “What we need to know is what
Simon William Behler intends to be when he grows up.”
Joe Junior at once replied, “A bigger baby,” but not in his really
needling tone — more as if he were still rolling his eyes at my dumb
question to Mother.
“A famous pilot,” I answered, glumly. They all knew that very well,
in general.
But Uncle Josh grinned in the rearview mirror. “A famous pilot?”
Aunt Rachel approved. “That’s the ticket.”
What had happened was that the first time Joe Junior had declared
at table his ambition to be an engineer, and I mine to be a pilot, the
grown-ups had pointed out to us that there were many sorts of each:
highway engineers, electrical engineers; harbor pilots, coastal pilots.
When my brother then specified locomotive engineer and I airplane
pilot, they had good-humoredly chided us both: such people (Dad
and Aunt Rachel, especially, maintained) were no more than glorified
truckdrivers. We should set our sights higher, make a name for our-
selves. Joe Junior subsequently decided he would be the other kind of
engineer, the kind that designed and built locomotives; that way he’d
get to drive them as often as he wanted to, to make sure they were

47

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

okay. For a while I reckoned I would do the same with airplanes. But
“aeronautical engineer” sounded too close to what my brother would
be doing, and I had in mind to be a lot more important than he would
be. So, without mentioning it till now, I had revised my ambition.
“Get a load of Charles Lindbergh,” Joe Junior mildly jeered. I
blushed but was pleased to sense that he was envious of my having
thought of celebrity. I was ready to point out to him, when necessary,
that there were no famous locomotive engineers, in the desirable sense:
who wanted to be Casey Jones? But it was not necessary yet.
There was something going on.
“My father’s father was a famous pilot,” Uncle Josh remarked
around his cigarette holder.
Joe Junior laughed. “Was not!”
“Sure he was,” our uncle insisted. Aunt Rachel smiled at him.
All we knew of the Vernon family was what we had been told. “He
was a farmer!” I insisted, considering however that in those early days
a person might somehow have been both. “Was he a crop duster?”
“Some people might call it that,” Uncle Josh allowed, twinkling.
“But actually he was a manure pilot: Pile it here; pile it there. …”
As we duly groaned, I saw that we were about to turn left off
Maryland onto Bridge Avenue, toward the river bridge itself and Avon
County, instead of right, as usual, toward the canneries and lower
Dorset. “Hey, what’s up?”
“The price of eggs,” cracked Joe Junior.
“Price of tomatoes,” Aunt Rachel predicted, “soon enough.”
“Airplanes are up,” declared Uncle Josh, cocking his cigarette
holder at a jaunty angle as we headed north over the blue Chaptico.
“What goes up must come down,” my brother said, and he made
his dive-and-crash noise: “Eee-urr-room-pulghhh!”
His family had arranged a marvelous birthday surprise.
“Where’re we going?” I demanded, beginning dizzily to suspect.
Aunt Rachel said, “You’ll see, birthday boy.”
We were across the bridge and headed for Avondale, where the
region’s only airport was. As often as I could persuade them to, my
parents took me there to watch the planes take off and land, but that
was not often: our father always said that the Eastern Shore began
at the south bank of the Chaptico, and he had no interest in prosper-
ous Avon County, with its gentleman farmers and waterfront estates. 

48

Somebody’s First Voyage

It was these that the Avon airport largely served: there were no
scheduled commercial passenger flights, but many of the “C’meres” —
people from Washington, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and even New
York who “came here” to their vacation or retirement properties —
owned private airplanes or hired air taxis to and from the city. Some-
times we would sit for half an hour among the Pipers, Cessnas, and
Grummans and see no planes move at all. Once, however, we saw a
trimotored Ford “Tin Goose”; another time, just a few weeks past, a
brand-new Douglas DC-3.
But merely being taken to see the airplanes again, so soon, was not
likely my birthday surprise. I became uneasy. “Are we going up?”
Uncle Josh steered smiling through Avondale. “You couldn’t get
me up in one of those things!”
Always-game Aunt Rachel said she would give her eyeteeth to go
up again; years ago she’d had a beau who was a barnstormer. (He was
that, Uncle Josh agreed.) But we would just see.
“You’re going, aren’t you?” I asked Joe Junior anxiously.
“What’s the matter, big baby? Cold feet?”
As we approached the familiar corrugated-metal buildings on the
far side of town — and the windsock, the beacon, the grassy run-
ways — those brightly painted airplanes parked in rows no longer
looked like large gay toys. They were formidably real and not particu-
larly friendly machines. Where we lived there were neither mountains
nor tall buildings; I had traveled no farther from home than Balti-
more, once, and there had not been time then to go up in a skyscraper.
The highest off the ground that I could remember ever having been
was the top of the Ocean City Ferris wheel.
“It’d better be a Stinson Reliant!” I said. “I guess if it’s not that
blue Stinson Reliant, I’d just as leave skip it.”
Joe Junior chorded. “Listen to the big baby!”
“I don’t have to go!” I made clear. “It’s my birthday!”
“Boo hoo hoo!”
“Peace on earth good will to men!” Aunt Rachel chided us. “I’d go
up in a raspberry Model T if somebody offered!”
Uncle Josh said he bet she would, too.
The blue Stinson Reliant I had admired on other visits “belonged
to somebody,” they guessed. Anyhow, it did not take passengers up

49

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

for hire. What kind was it, then, the one they’d rented? Incredibly, to me, they didn’t know: a regular little one, they supposed. Nor had
they rented it, quite; on our last ride over here, the family had seen a
sign for airplane rides, and Aunt Rachel had phoned ahead this morn-
ing while we were in Sunday school, to confirm. The pilot was ex-
pecting us.
“Manure pilot!” said Joe Junior. “I’ll go with you, big baby.”
I was much relieved. “But I can decide, okay? When I see what
kind of plane it is.”
We did not go from the maroon Nash right out onto the airfield,
but into a small office entered from the grass parking-lot side of a
nearby hangar, where a red-on-yellow hand-lettered sign advertised
airplae rides $5. The office was floored with worn-through green
linoleum; a chipped oak desk was strewn with grease-soiled manuals
and papers, box and crescent wrenches, ashtrays filled to overflowing;
the walls were hung with finger-smudged maps of Avon and Dorset
counties and calendars from spark-plug companies, with all-but-naked
women on them. A thin-faced man in yellow sport shirt and slacks
and red porkpie hat swiveled his beat-up desk chair to face us, mouth-
ing an unlighted cigar. An ancient black oscillating fan stirred the hu-
mid air.
It was me he looked at. “You’re the feller wants to be a pilot?”
I cleared my throat. “Yes sir.”
“It ain’t no way to get rich!” he laughed to Aunt Rachel and Uncle
Josh.
My aunt informed him, with mock asperity, that I was going to be
a famous pilot.
“Oh, well, then!” The man’s laugh loosened phlegm. He spat into
a rusty metal wastebasket beside his desk and said, “’Scuse me.”
“Wiley Post!” my brother offered. “Eee-uur-pulghh!”
“Well, I’m Howard Garton,” the man said, shaking hands with me
and then with Joe Junior, “and I say don’t let nobody make fun of
your wantin’ to be a pilot.”
My uncle said that that was the ticket.
“What kind of plane do you have?” I asked Howard Garton, and
he said why didn’t we all just go take a look. Then he winked: or did
I want to leave Big Brother behind?

50

Somebody’s First Voyage

In the same tone he had used, I said I guessed Joe Junior could come along. We were going simply to inspect the airplane, I imagined, after
which we would return to the battered office to discuss the flight plan
and I would make my decision. But Howard Garton led us through
the small, empty, dirt-floored hangar behind his office and out to a
Bellanca four-seater, red and yellow like his clothes or Aunt Rachel’s
Bon Ami can, with painted flames streaming back from the exposed
cylinder heads and the wheel pods. He opened the thin door on the
passenger side, tipped down the right front seat-back, and said to Joe
Junior, “In you go, bud. We’ll let the birthday boy ride up front. You
coming along, Ma?” he asked Aunt Rachel, and he explained to Uncle
Josh, “Can’t sit but four of us.”
“You bet your bottom dollar I’m coming along!” Aunt Rachel
scoffed, and then she added, “How ’bout three for the price of two?”
Things were happening too fast. Where were the helmets and gog-
gles? The parachutes? I thought of offering to wait on the ground
with Uncle Josh. But Howard Garton chuckled and said, “Make it
twelve-fifty,” and Aunt Rachel said to Uncle Josh, “Kiss me good-bye,
love; I’m off to the wild blue yonder,” and let Howard Garton help
her up into the rear seat beside Joe Junior. I didn’t have nerve enough
not to climb in too.
It was better when Howard Garton threw away his wet cigar,
stepped up into the pilot’s seat, and stashed his red porkpie into a
stretchy pocket in the door. His head was bald, bumpy, freckled. “All
right, sir,” he said. “What’s your first name?” I told him. “Let’s you
and me fasten our safety belts, Mr. Simon, and Mom and Brother do
the same, and we’ll see if old Bessie feels like running today.”
“Aunt Rachel’s our aunt,” Joe Junior reported. As if in a spirit of
mere inquiry, I asked, “Where do you keep the parachutes?” Howard
Garton laughed. Joe Junior said, “What good are a pair o’ chutes for
four people? Get it?” Aunt Rachel told me to go ahead and ask all the
questions I wanted to, and Howard Garton explained then that para-
chutes were used only on warplanes and maybe by stunt pilots and
test pilots; if old Bessie’s motor conked, we would just look around
for a nice place to park. He started the engine — not nearly so loud a
noise as I’d expected; like a big fan, really — and now I understood
that of course we didn’t need helmets and goggles in a closed cabin,
any more than in the maroon Nash or the black LaSalle. The Bellanca

51

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

had dual controls; I knew what every one was for, from my reading.
Howard Garton let me move the ailerons, the elevators, and the rud-
der while we were still on the ground.
“Not when we’re up in the air, though,” Joe Junior warned from
behind. Howard Garton said we’d just see. Now all my fear was
gone; though we had not yet moved, I loved Howard Garton and old
Bessie and flying. Uncle Josh stepped back and waved his gloves; we
three waved back. Howard Garton advanced the throttle — I admired
the way his bony, freckled hand rested so lightly upon the knob — and
we rolled forward.
“Off we go!” sang Aunt Rachel. “Do you like Stinson Reliants?” I
asked Howard Garton, who squinted judiciously out the side window
and replied, “Stinson Reliant. They’re a right nice airplane, I reckon.
Out of my class.” I declared Bellancas to be good airplanes, too —
though in fact I was struck by the apparent flimsiness of old Bessie’s
construction. As we bumped along toward the runway, the plane
seemed not all that different, except in scale, from one of Joe Junior’s
balsa-and-tissue flying models. Even the quietly fluttering propeller
sounded rubber-band-powered. …
Until, in takeoff position at the head of the runway, Howard Gar-
ton advanced the throttle while braking the wheels, and the Bellanca
roared and trembled and strained to go. “That’s more like it!” cried
Aunt Rachel. I watched the instrument needles climb; my skin buzzed.
I had expected radio talk with a control tower, but there was none.
Howard Garton merely looked around, released the wheel brakes, and
opened the throttle all the rest of the way. As we gathered speed, the
Bellanca’s tail lifted; now I could see the grass runway rolling swiftly
under us, the windsock almost limp above the distant hangar before
which Uncle Josh waved. In no hurry at all, at a certain point Howard
Garton drew toward him ever so slightly the little steering wheel on
his side, as I knew he must. Mine came back in tandem with it. We
were airborne.
I had not anticipated the untidy decrepitude of Howard Carton’s
office, the unglamorousness of the little man himself, the homely in-
substantiality of old Bessie’s interior appearance, but about the expe-
rience of flight itself my imaginings proved prescient, and I was as
perfectly at home in thin air as in the waters of the Chaptico. My
boyish ambition to be a pilot, however, fell lightly away from me with

52

Somebody’s First Voyage

the treetops and rooftops of Avondale. Oh, I might fly a Stinson Re-
liant for recreation when I was grown, but commercial aviation (I
realized already from this first altitude, as clearly as I had realized while
taxiing that we didn’t need helmets and goggles), even piloting a
brand-new DC-3, was … an insufficient destiny.
Things were exactly as I had known they would be: the little air-
port, already well below and behind us; tree-shaded Avondale; the
highway leading south through farmland to the Chaptico bridge. I
was glad that Joe Junior and Aunt Rachel were behind me, glad also
that they were too absorbed to speak much. In a calm, nonboyish
voice I asked Howard Garton whether we had time to fly over the
river to Dorset; above the engine’s drone and the rush of air past the
Bellanca’s thin fuselage, it was like speaking to our father.
“I reckon,” Howard Garton said. The steering wheel in front of me
turned just a little, and we banked left on the light west wind we had
taken off into. “It don’t take long to get there in this baby.”
Already I saw the blue-gray Chaptico ahead, so much wider below
our town than above it. Just under us was the smaller Avon, its tribu-
tary, flecked here and there with sails and scored with the wakes of
motorboats.
“Hey, neat!” Joe Junior said. “There’s the bridge! I bet we see our
house!”
I knew we would, and more, for there was the world exactly con-
figured, a living map. There was the rivershore, the general hospital
with its seawall; there were Maple Street, Maryland Avenue, and the
other mapled streets and avenues of East Dorset. Our house was
mostly shrouded by those maples and by our Chinese Cigar trees, but
I saw part of our shingled roof, under which Mother lay ill and tired,
and a white clapboard gable, and now the black LaSalle out front; so
Dad was there, too, probably on the screen porch with the Times, deaf
to the plane humming high overhead. There was the squat gray gran-
ite belfry of Zion Meth-Prot; there was East Dorset Elementary, and
behind it the shiny new standpipe of our ward. There was Dorset
Creek, lined with packing houses, dividing our town into East and
West; the creek bridge leading to the business district, with Behler
Maintenance & Improvement somewhere in it, on the street behind
the firehouse. Howard Garton banked left again before I got a good

53

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

view of West Dorset, where the boat basin and the waterfront park and River Boulevard and the better residential section were. But to
westward, when we leveled off, I had a long view out toward the hazy
great mouth of the Chaptico, miles wide where it joined Chesapeake
Bay at what remained of Piney Island; and to southward now
stretched the endless marshes of the lower county: a maze of reedy
necks, meandering tidal creeks, and spattered low islets, like the pat-
terns on scorched French toast. Now we banked left yet again, to head
back to the airport, and I could see the poor colored ward and the
spread of the Albany Brothers canneries, from one of which rose
smoke. I hoped vaguely that the pickets had not burned the Lifter.
There now was Island Creek with its several channel markers, the. Is-
land, Island Point with its red day beacon, exactly right. I could see
where the twin creeks eventually came together, at the municipal
cemetery, making a larger island of East Dorset itself. I could even see
the shoal that the Island Creek day beacon perfectly marked, extend-
ing to meet it underwater, and the little indentation in the shore
nearby, where Bijou and I —
To hide my sudden distress, I pressed my face to the glass. Though
this should have been her birthday gift as much as his, Simon Behler had
not even thought of his sister, much less narrated to her, since the family
reached Avon Airport in the maroon Nash.
The voice was hollow now, wrong. Dismayed, I regarded upshore,
beyond the Island, the grounds and buildings of the Eastern Shore
State Hospital, and beyond them, where the slightly higher ground of
the upper county commenced its quiltwork of woodlots and tomato
fields, the new county cemetery. That was not yet where our dead lay,
but it would be: the Behler plot in Dorset Municipal, where BeeGee
Behler was, was full; so was that whole old graveyard, which had
served our town since its incorporation two hundred and fifty years
ago. Dad and Aunt Rachel had bought space for the future in the bare,
newly laid-out county spread, formerly one of Captain Philip Albany’s
tomato fields.
“Hwell!” my aunt exclaimed just then, behind me. “There’s home!”
“Right pretty to look at, i’n’t it,” Howard Garton said.
Announced Joe Junior, “I see the seawall!”

54

Somebody’s First Voyage

En route home in the maroon Nash, I was teased for my odd behavior,
mainly by my brother. But Aunt Rachel, too, told Uncle Josh that she didn’t know just hwhat had come over our Simon. When Howard
Garton had invited me to take the wheel for a minute and hold old
Bessie steady as she goes, I had politely declined, saying I was content
to let him do the flying so I could just look. “It is right pretty,” How-
ard Garton had admitted. Back at the hangar, standing beside the Bel-
lanca’s yellow wing strut, I had felt subdued, taller and more serious
forever. I shook Howard Garton’s freckled hand and thanked him for
a good flight.
“You don’t seem too het up,” Uncle Josh observed kindly in the
car. “Stomach woozy?”
“No, I feel great. It was great.” Even to me my voice sounded
peculiar. Just to hear it again I said, “I sure thank you-all.” I was re-
lieved that they pretty much left me alone then. My small dismay at
forgetting Bijou had quickly passed; the exhilaration of flight re-
mained, but I felt too serious about it and other things to join in Aunt
Rachel’s and Joe Junior’s Did-you-sees as we recrossed the Chaptico
bridge. I worried, too, that they would ask whether I still wanted to
be a famous pilot, and then would think it was out of fear that I had
changed my mind, when in truth …
On the screen porch, Dad took off his glasses, smiled, and asked,
“How’d it go?” “Great!” I called back. Aunt Rachel declared that the
whole Eastern Shore of Maryland looked from up there just like the
fire company’s Christmas garden. Except no snow, Joe Junior cor-
rected her, and he went off on his Silver King — hollering, “Contact!
Switch off! Eee-urr-room!” — to tell his friends where he’d been.
Still feeling tall and grave, I ascended the stairs to thank Mother for
the airplane ride. It was the neatest birthday present I’d ever had, I
said truthfully. In that room my new voice and manner seemed less
affected. She held my hand as I sat on the edge of the spare twin and
told her what I’d seen from up there. That was nice, she said. She
believed Mother might be feeling just a little bit better.
Then I asked her whether Dad and I could ride over to the town
cemetery before supper: I wanted to put some flowers on my sister’s
grave.
Surprised, Mother said, “What a thoughtful idea. But I know
Dad’s tired, honey. And we don’t have any flowers.”

55

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

I stood my ground. “Just to visit, then.”
“Well. Ask your father, or maybe your aunt Rachel. No — she’ll have her hands full with supper. And your uncle Josh has been driving
already.”
I could see the problem tiring her out. All the same, gratified that
Joe Junior wasn’t there to tease me or maybe even ask to ride along, I
put the question loudly to our father.
“Cemetery?” he repeated.
Uncle Josh was on the screen porch, too, looking through the
travel section of the Times. He raised his voice for Dad to hear: “Boy
wants to say happy birthday to his sister! I’ll ride him over, directly.”
Aunt Rachel called from the living room, “The boy’s father can
drive him, Joshua.” She stepped out onto the porch, wiping her long
hands on her apron. “I think that’s a good thought!” she said to me,
loud enough for Dad, too. “I wish we had flowers for the whole
kaboodle!”
Dad blew his nose and put on his seersucker suit coat, though the
temperature and the humidity were both in the mideighties, and we
went off in the black LaSalle. Even with the windows down, it was an
oven inside that car until we had driven across East Dorset to the creek
bridge, for Dad never parked in the shade of the silver maples, where
starlings would drop all over the paint. In the black LaSalle it was even
harder to talk to him; since he couldn’t hear the big engine idling, he
often raced it and engaged the clutch too suddenly. But when we
crossed the trestled swing-bridge over Dorset Creek (which was rank
even on Sundays from the mountains of crab shells rotting in the sun
beside the packing houses) and lurched onto Cemetery Avenue, I saw
cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace wild along the rusting fence and
asked whether we could pick some for Bijou’s grave.
Dad guessed not.
“They’re just weeds!”
He smiled and shook his head. “They don’t belong to us, son.”
That was that.
We turned off the creek-side street of peeling clapboard houses and
into the old cemetery, wound through its crushed-oyster-shell lanes of
tombs, and stopped beside an ancient cedar. Dad took a cigarette from
the pack with its desert scene like our illustrated lessons, tamped its
end against the horn button, and pressed his thumb against the ciga-
rette lighter on the dash. A clear glass bead in its knob would glow

56

Somebody’s First Voyage

red when it was ready. “We’re over by those holly bushes,” he told me,
pointing with the unlit Camel. “You take your time.”
The air was still and steamy; already cicadas rasped in the trees.
Our plot was marked by a polished gray stone the size of a single-bed
headboard, lettered behler. Before it the individual grave-mounds
bore low footstones. wilhelm benjamin, 1850-1933, and rosa
herron, 1855-1934: my grandparents, who had come over from
Germany and whom I scarcely remembered, joanna parson Si-
mons, Mother’s mother, not really a Behler, 1863-1935, after whom
I’d sort of been named; her, too, I could but half recall, though she
had lived with us in her last years, ill and indifferent, flora, Dad
and Aunt Rachel’s elder sister, 1885—1929, who had never married or
left home and had died of cancer the year the market crashed, cpl.
albert wilhelm — older than Dad, younger than Aunt Rachel,
1891-1918, mustard-gassed in Belgium. And baby girl behler, the
only one of us with her last name on her stone, as she had never had
a first: daughter of joseph benjamin and pauline simons.     born and died july i, 1930.
The mound above her footstone — had I ever really seen it be-
fore? — was tiny. Here is where she had been, winter and summer,
while I was growing up and doing every kind of thing. I considered
saying some sort of prayer for her soul, but it occurred to me not to
believe in any such thing. The people in the coffins under those
mounds were just skeletons now — though Grandma Simons maybe
not quite, as she had died only two years ago — and their souls
weren’t anything. Chemicals came together to make a holly tree or a
sea nettle or a person; then after a while they dissolved like Piney
Island in the mouth of the Chaptico. Fifty years ago, Dad had once
told us at the dinner table, Piney Island had had farms and woods and
a village of three hundred people, with a general store and a Methodist
church; now everything was washed away but a small stand of loblol-
lies and the skeleton of a pier. By the time I grew up and had a wife
and children, there would be nothing left of Piney Island but a shoal
under the water, marked with a light.
Same with Bijou: when the time came that I forgot even how I
used to narrate my life to her, that would be that. Same with Mother
and Dad and Aunt Rachel and Uncle Josh, eventually, and me and Joe

57
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Junior and whatever children we would have. The tide would still
come in and go out; that had nothing to do with us.
Not far from our footstones was a single clump of dandelions in
bright blossom. I checked to see whether Dad was looking; couldn’t
tell through the reflections on the windshield; went ahead anyhow
and plucked the whole clump. The five or six blossoming ones I laid
atop my sister’s mound. Anybody watching from behind would think
I was kneeling to pray. One dandelion had gone to fuzz; to make up
for having picked the clump, I puffed its seeds over the whole plot.

As we crossed back into East Dorset in the black LaSalle, Dad sur-
prised me by remarking, without turning his head, “I want you to be
somebody, son.” I supposed it was a birthday wish; or perhaps my
wanting to visit the cemetery had impressed him. On the other hand,
maybe he meant I wasn’t measuring up. To ask, at a shout, was too
awkward. Without turning my head, either, I nodded shortly.
As we passed Andy Travers’s father’s ice cream store and Zion
Meth-Prot, my father went on, still looking forward down Maryland
Avenue: “Make a name for yourself.”

It was odd, that night, to look up through the dimly reflected street
light at Joe Junior’s hanging models, even the blue Stinson Reliant,
and feel myself measurably older. Now I didn’t know what I would
be. Odd also to realize — as I could easily do now by imagining my-
self up there just then, looking down on us all from Howard Garton’s
red and yellow Bellanca — that the whole town of Dorset, asleep and
awake, was going on. The entire world was going on while I lay there,
and Joe Junior lay over in his bed, asleep already or pretending to be,
and BeeGee Behler, who had gone first and was gone now, lay out
under her little mound. Tigers in the jungle, Chinese people in China,
whales in the oceans of the globe.
Under my head my Ingersoll wristwatch ticked. Bijou’s dandelions
were already dead and curled. Down by the Island Point day beacon
the tide slid silently, in or out. I counted the hours back to when I had
swum: it was moving in.
So that my brother, if he was awake, would think me asleep, I
breathed slowly and evenly. Presently from his side of the room came
a muffled slap slap, his more urgent respiration, and the smell. Some

58

Somebody’s First Voyage

time after that I heard the breathing of his unfeigned sleep. East Dor-
set was by then so silent that I could hear the dinging of the Dorset
Creek bridge bell, many blocks up Maryland Avenue from Maple
Street. Even at this hour on a Sunday, they were opening the draw to
let some vessel out upon its business. Then that sound, too, ceased.
Ever so slightly, ever so lightly, I rocked, and it was not long before
I reached that state between two worlds where distances go strange
and the familiar is no more. I was in black space, suspended, or as it
were with one eye open above some surface, one below. Though his
family little suspected it (my narrator resumed in a new voice, to a
different audience), our unnamed hero verged upon an alternative and
very different life, in a very different realm, to the threshold whereof
his lost twin had led him, but into which not even she could follow.

59

Seven Interludes

                  

1.

Although their version of his tale had been more or less in their lan-
guage and on their terms, the company sat silent when Somebody
finished it, studying their fingernails and the backs of their hands, per-
haps glancing at one another. Yasmin alone looked unswervingly at
our narrator, he at her.
Said Sindbad presently, “Hum: mechanical birds and bracelets that
measure time. Yet who would have believed a sleeping whale over-
grown with trees and beaches if he had not himself mistaken one for
an island and been carried under? And that business of your brother’s
drifting in a leaky vessel that must ceaselessly be bailed: that speaks to
my condition! An admirable bit of realism in a sea of fantasy.” He
rapped the wooden tub behind him, either for attention or for luck,
and shifted on his cushion-and-a-half. “Tomorrow evening, friends,
my second voyage, no nearer-fetched than these, and this second Sind-
bad’s second Serendib.” He clapped his hands. “Kuzia Fakan!”
Yasmin excused herself. The eyes of the assembled were divided
between watching her leave the hall (in close whispered conference

60
Seven Interludes

with her duenna, Jayda) and watching the three performers make
ready at last — especially that black-eyed dancer-in-chief. With such
art then did they play and dance — in particular Kuzia Fakan, who
directed her charms almost belligerently at the half-attentive host —
that at music’s end there was surely not a dry crotch in the hall,
not even Still-Stranded’s, though his thoughts were emphatically
elsewhere.
Only in Baghdad, upon an Arabian night, would the host not next,
once the company was dismissed, have interrogated his visitor till
morning and beyond, if need be, until he had the real Serendib
story, chapter and verse, in private. But an Arabian night was in what
Somebody was stranded still — had been, as it seemed to him, for a
thousand-plus — a night in which Sailor Sindbad did indeed now say
to him, “You and I will talk tomorrow,” but then directed the rerobed
dancer herself (to the company’s envious surprise) to show the guest
to a guest-apartment: a room off the harem, tented like the banquet
hall in silk brocade. There bright-skinned, dark-eyed Kuzia Fakan, still
perspiring from her dance and plainly set down by her assignment,
nevertheless laid out fresh linens and sponged and scented Some-
body’s body and her own, mechanically fondling each by turn and
frankly examining him for evidence of disease.
“Your attention does me honor, Kuzia Fakan.”
Her eyes flicked. “Be honored, then. At least your honor stands to
my attention.”
Somebody perpended this observation. “In hands so skillful, whose
would not?”
“Ask your famous namesake,” the woman said impatiently. “For
their own lack of appetite, some blame the cook.”
“Aha.” During his earlier sojourn in the house, still-standing Some-
body had from his secret distance more than once observed this
woman (whom he knew to be Sindbad’s current favorite, procured for
him by Jayda) but had not appreciated, among other things, her
quickness. “Then am I your punishment? The mistress of the house is
given for the night to a nameless nobody?”
“Who spoke of the night?” She perched half pouting on the bed’s
edge and gestured at its tentlike canopy. “Like the Bedouin I came
from, I carry with me the only house I’m mistress of.” Opening her

61
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

muscled, clean-shaven thighs, with two impudent fingers she spread
herself. “Yours to enter and begone from, Sayyid Whoever-You-Are,
not to camp overnight in.”
“That is a wâhât,” Somebody acknowledged, “fit for the king of all
the Bedouin.” But he gently pressed her knees together. “Consider
your penance done, Kuzia Fakan, and a good night to you.” He
handed her her robe and began donning the linens she had laid out
for him. She looked from one to the other.
“What’s this?”
“It appears to me,” Somebody said, “that the owner of that royal
oasis is not its mistress but only its caretaker.” He indicated the door.
“Caretaker, then!” cried Kuzia Fakan. “I take care of it, and it has
taken care of me, from the day my mother first sold me until the day
before yesterday!” Standing with legs apart, she opened her robe to
let lamplight illumine the place in question, altogether depilatoried,
per custom, like her legs. “Has it suddenly gone sour as a camel’s, that
I can’t entice either an old man or a nameless beggar with it?”
“Entice?” Smiling Somebody raised his eyebrows. “I don’t doubt
that you could entice the Commander of the Faithful himself, if en-
ticement were truly your objective. Good night, now.”
Wailed Kuzia Fakan, “What are you doing?” She had reluctantly
closed her robe; now she flung it wide again and went to her knees on
the carpet. “Let all Baghdad know I begged the beggar!”
She found herself raised up and gentled doorward. “Don’t beggar
your professional pride,” Somebody said. “Count on me to tell your
master tomorrow that never in half a century have I been so enticed.”
With one quick hand she boldly tested that proposition. “Liar.”
Somebody shrugged. “Half a century, Kuzia Fakan, is half a
century.”
In a different tone she asked, “Are you an agent of Haroun al-
Rashid?” Surprised indeed, Somebody reminded her that he was not
even the caliph’s subject, much less his secret agent — only a hapless
castaway from Serendib.
“Liar,” she said again, but almost respectfully. At the door at last,
her dark eyes reappraised him. “Do I truly disgust you? Or are you
one of those who prefer boys to women?”
“You saw me stand to your touch,” our man reminded her, “even
when you’d made it plain what you thought of your assignment. But

62
Seven Interludes

I’ve been thrust from one world into another like a genie through the
neck of an hourglass, and I’m dizzy and spent. I’ve gorged myself with
food and drink, I’ve told a long story understood by no one, and I’ve
sat through a dance more sexual than sex itself. It’s no wonder I’m too
far gone for anything but sleep. Good night, I beg you.”
“You’re a spy. A queer. An assassin. And I’ve seen you before.”
“None of those.”
“You’re an ifrit from a Jew’s lamp, a genie from a sea chest. Your
speech is ours but not ours. I have seen you before, in this place,
before Ramadan. You’re an agent of Prince Jabal or Sahim al-Layl,
come for revenge.” 
“I am an agent of Sindbad the Still-Stranded,” Somebody declared.
“Find me that sea chest, Kuzia Fakan, and if I’m a genie, I’ll close its
lid over me and float myself home tomorrow, back to where your
master says he came from.”
“It’s not my fault his silly amulet doesn’t work!” the dancer sud-
denly lamented. “Yet he blames me for its failure and for his. The only
love charm I believe in is desire, not rhinoceros horn and silver
heartbeats.”
“Of this,” Somebody said, “you and I must speak further, but not
now. I’m told you’re Sindbad’s favorite —”
“Once upon a time,” Kuzia Fakan interrupted crossly. “He has no
favorite now, amulet or no amulet. Unless I find a new patron or some
magic trinket of my own, I’ll end up like Jayda.” She took Somebody’s
arm. “Look here, Sayyid: I’ve seen more of the world than its bed-
room ceilings. Whatever you are, I know you’re not what you’re pre-
tending to be. Do you think Sayyid Sindbad invites beggars in every
night? Do you think I do? He’s afraid of you, but he’s not sure why
yet; that’s the real reason I’m here. Help me out with him till I can
plan my next move, and by Allah I’ll show you what enticement is.
Like my mother and grandmother before me, I am a professional, and
proud to be.”
“Who can doubt it,” Somebody asked, “once having glimpsed that
wâhât like a mirage among the dunes?”
“Another mocking man,” Kuzia Fakan said bitterly, and she turned
to go. “Nobody will help me.”
“If nobody will help you,” Somebody said seriously, “I’m your
man. I mean that truly, Kuzia Fakan.”

63
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Muttering something in dialect, she sniffed and left, not bothering
to close the door behind her. Somebody left it ajar, turned low but
did not extinguish the lamp she’d lit, and lay on the bed to consider
where he was and what he had learned, or been half told. Presently
the household quieted, and the city around it. A single small bell
dinged distantly, then ceased. Our man himself — nobody, nameless,
spent, still stranded — slipped, against all resolution, into sleep.

2.

Out of which a name stirred him — one of his, hers for him —
whispered from the closing door, the red-hooded djellaba in his arms
already as he rose to her:
“Simon!”
Her dear version, whispered like “Seaman” by the mouth under the
eyes framed by the hair framed by the hood, which now fell back;
breathed into his ears, against cheeks and forehead, lips and neck,
chest, shoulders: “Simon Simon Simon Simon! Simon! Simon!” Still
she repeated it, laughing, incanting, till by and by they lay sweating
their joy into her djellaba, spread like a second carpet beside the bed:
like their carpet, on which, in which …
Out there in Baghdad somewhere, a dog howled sirenlike and was
answered by another. Prone atop her lover, brow to brow, Yasmin
tented their faces with her fragrant hair, rolled his head from side to
side by rolling hers, rode her last small waves with the help of his
hands on her hips, and even then murmured, incredulous, “Simon!”
until they slept.

3.

When presently we woke — refreshed, restored — it was as if some
drug or incense cloud had cleared, or exotic curtain opened to plain
air, though it was still night in the house and city of Sindbad the
Sailor. We lovers moved from carpet to bed, where as we washed and
kissed each other clean and toweled ourselves dry with Yasmin’s djel-
laba, the young woman spoke quietly of her dismay and disbelieving
joy: at hearing his voice, of all voices, outside the banquet-hall win-
dow; at his wild imposture, his reckless return to her despite every-

64
Seven Interludes

thing, including her wishes. But who knew her wishes? Certainly not
herself: see her weep with delight at being with him again; hear her
laugh with fear that our mad connection (which, at news of Sindbad’s
sudden sixth return, she had cut off for both our sakes, against her
heart’s whole thrust) will come to light, at the cost of what remains of
her reputation and quite likely at the cost of Simon’s life, given her
father’s peculiar feelings for her and the ready availability of hired as-
sassins. But Allah spare us, there he was: her lovely, her precious, her
demented, her doomed!
And there (“Simon” told the silky small of her back, backs of her
knees, undersides of her breasts, brave underneath of her chin, her
earlobes, nape) was she, whose returning of him one month past —
gently narcotized and rolled in her own magical Bokhara, on which
we had made such flights! — to the marshy shore where he had first
remet her had brought him closer to ending his life-story than he’d
come since the day he realized he’d changed worlds. There was she, of
his love for whom he was more certain than of his name and where-
abouts: his prop against despair, touchstone of reality amid its oppo-
site, long-suffering fellow victim and companion in his only joy. There
was his Yasmin, for whose sake her Simon was now quite prepared
to die.
But his Ramadan-month in the marshes near Basra with Mustafa
the Navigator had given him a better idea. He made to tell her it; she
stopped him with a kiss. She didn’t care what it was; anyhow, what-
ever it was, she had a better yet. Light out, eyes closed, we made love
again, more or less (Simon’s not young). We breathed long and
deeply — now in unison, now not — and told stories through our
skin: long stories and short, simple and complex, realistic, fantastic,
happy, sad — but every one ending, not in the peace that passes un-
derstanding, but in the most understandable peace on earth.

4.

We slept.
Prayer, the minareted muezzin called again, is better than sleep!
We woke.
“Love,” Yasmin sighed, “is better than prayer,” and she kissed her
friend here and there in the predawn dark. He held her head between

65

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

his hands; like the muezzin’s echo, a rooster crowed. We reviewed in
two sentences our plan, still tentative, improvisatory, in which Simon
had no more than a little confidence and Yasmin less. Who except
Scheherazade ever changed her fate by telling stories? But we had not
much left to lose: our lives, maybe, though probably not; each other
again, maybe, though we were now determined not. Most else we had
lost already, separately and together.
In the gray first light, Yasmin slipped into her djellaba, out of the
guest quarters (old Jayda, waiting slumbrously on a pallet not far from
the door, gave the interloper a single, expressionless glance), and back
to her own. Her fragrances lingered in the air, on the bedclothes, on
her lover’s skin, which therefore for some while he would not wash.
Had Simon (she had asked him, hours back) noticed the plump
and crimson-faced, red-bearded fellow at her father’s right hand? He
of the wide-open eyes, the tight-closed mouth and hands? Simon had,
though not particularly; his own eyes had been too full of her. Then
he might trouble himself tonight, she said, to notice that fellow more
particularly: Ibn al-Hamra, a wealthy merchant of the city (it went
without saying) and … her prospective new fiancé, with whom Sind-
bad was currently negotiating her marriage price.
She had felt her friend go rigid in her arms. Then he exhaled, re-
laxed his limbs somewhat. What had he expected? Yasmin wanted to
know. Why did he suppose she and Jayda had drugged him and rugged
him off last month from her chambers (against her heart’s whole
thrust)? Had we not agreed long since, in our darkest hours together,
that life must be not only got through but somehow made the best
of? Perhaps Simon would make her father a better proposal than Ibn
al-Hamra’s?
He had muttered “Sorry” and kissed her darkened breasts. She
pressed his face between them. So: her price was being negotiated
once again.
It was, and that negotiation was delicate indeed, for reasons Simon
knew. After Zahir’s hijacking by the Qeshmi pirates, Yasmin’s value
on the bride market had been as sorely compromised as her captor had
intended. Who would now believe her virginal, when her own ex-
betrothed would not? Yet who could blame the young Sohari prince
Jabal, to whom she had been en route with her bridal party, for con-

66
Seven Interludes

eluding that his goods had been irreparably damaged in transit? Jabal
was only following his vizier’s prudent advice, and that is the business
of viziers: prudently to advise.
On the other hand, what everybody assumed had never quite been
proved. At the time of that first affiancement, Yasmin’s maidenhood
had been attested by her lifelong nurse-duenna. Such was Sindbad’s
wealth after five successful voyages, and so desirable his daughter, that
her father had been able to rebuff, politely, Jabal’s vizier’s discreet sug-
gestion that the fiancée be confirmed “intact” by some woman of the
prince’s retinue as well. Young Jabal, in love at first sight of Yasmin
during a state visit to Baghdad, had not insisted, but there, no doubt,
was sown the seed of misgiving that flowered when news of her hi-
jacking reached him.
With her and her attendants aboard Zahir had been half her dowry,
which the pirates had seized together with the ship’s passengers. The
other half was to have followed with Sindbad himself, in another ves-
sel, in time for the wedding. That second half the pirate captain, Sa-
him al-Layl, had demanded as ransom for the lives of his hostages, and
as much again if Yasmin’s virtue was to be preserved along with her
life. In vain Sindbad had pleaded with Prince Jabal, for his bride’s
sake, to underwrite that third portion, which it would impoverish her
father to pay. Jabal’s vizier had pointed out that even if Sindbad paid
it all, the prince would be marrying a now dowryless woman of un-
verified purity. His advice to Jabal therefore had been to go forward
with the wedding only if Sindbad met either of two conditions: he
must both ransom his daughter himself and restore her dowry, or,
since the young prince so desired her, ransom and deliver her to Sohar
(Jabal’s capital, in Oman, which happened also to be Sindbad’s birth-
place) with no further dowry than her maidenhead — to be examined
and pronounced intact, however, by the prince’s own inspectors.
Sindbad had groaned and cursed, had torn turban and caftan, but
in the end had borrowed heavily to pay the additional ransom for
Yasmin’s “honor” as well as her life, and she and her party had been
restored to him. He would not, however — could not, he insisted —
meet either of the prince’s alternatives. To restore even half the dowry
was now quite beyond his means; indeed, he must set out promptly
on another fortune-hunting voyage (his sixth and latest) simply to pay

67
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

off his creditors. As for the other option, he declared it an affront to
both his honor and his daughter’s. Indignantly, Yasmin had agreed;
likewise Jayda, who had been taken and ransomed with the rest of the
bridal party. The engagement was off.
But the truth, of course, was that Sindbad no less than Prince Ja-
bal — and most certainly Jabal’s vizier — had assumed all along that
the “virtue” ransomed by that final ransom, after weeks of piratical
captivity, would not likely be Yasmin’s virginity. Of that her father had
not even bothered to stipulate proof before payment. At best, all tac-
itly assumed, she had been spared the even further outrages she would
surely have suffered at her captors’ hands if Sindbad had ransomed
only her life; this way, he had bought as well his own self-respect and
some measure of technical honor. This last had enabled him then to
denounce Prince Jabal (anyhow, the prince’s vizier) as an unfeeling
scoundrel, though in his place Sindbad would have acted no differ-
ently, nor for that matter would Yasmin.
It enabled him, too — and here we rearrive at last night, for be-
tween Yasmin and Simon (who had been hostaged with her from the
bride-ship Zahir and pressed into service as the pirates’ navigator), all
the foregoing went without saying — to exercise some limited lever-
age in his current negotiations with the merchant Ibn al-Hamra. Both
parties “knew” that the ferocious young pirate Sahim al-Layl had done
to Prince Jabal’s betrothed what pirates do to their eligible victims.
Indeed, the fact that Yasmin had not returned pregnant from her or-
deal (as had several of her bridesmaids and servants), far from arguing
that she might after all have been spared, had put her fertility in ques-
tion. The kindest interpretation of it was that she had perhaps been
forced less frequently than the others. But honor forbade any of this
to be acknowledged openly, even between father and daughter. It was
acknowledged instead (as Yasmin had explained last night to Simon,
between our lovemakings) by Sindbad’s offering Ibn al-Hamra the
same handsome dowry he had offered Prince Jabal, though her new
suitor was not of royal blood: in the code of their dickering, “though
no less beautiful, Yasmin was less young” than she had been at her
first affiancement. It was acknowledged also by Ibn al-Hamra’s sug-
gestion that — precisely because he was no prince, only a successful
commoner like Sindbad himself — an even handsomer dowry would

68
Seven Interludes

permit him to surround Yasmin with more of the comforts appropri-
ate to “a woman of her maturity and experience.”
All this Yasmin herself attended with pained amusement, among
other emotions. As of the evening past, she had reported to Simon
last night, her father had given her suitor to understand that an in-
crease in her dowry might be interpreted by the cynical as reflecting
unseemly doubts on Ibn al-Hamra’s part concerning the “pure desir-
ability” of his bride-to-be; and Ibn, professing horror at the mere pos-
sibility of such misinterpretation, had proposed alternatively that a
share of the profits of Sindbad’s upcoming seventh voyage — fifteen
percent, say? — be discreetly added to the package.
Five, her father had replied at once, plainly signaling to any true
gentleman his willingness to settle for ten. But Ibn al-Hamra had had
the effrontery to suggest next that where the comforts of children and
grandchildren “cannot be assumed” for one’s old age, material pros-
perity must be their hollow substitute. Fifteen percent.
“Gould I give myself to such a man?” Yasmin had exclaimed, first
to her father, later to her lover. “It’s clear what he thinks of me! Ten
percent tops, or Jayda herself will regard me as nothing but a scrap of
used goods, to be haggled over in the souk!”
And if your suitor agrees to ten? Simon wondered. But by then we
were making love again (as ardently as a spent semicentenarian can,
the third time in a night), and after that we briefly slept until wakened
by the muezzin’s early prayer call. We reviewed Simon’s desperate and
so-tentative new plan. “Do it,” Yasmin said. “At least it might per-
suade that red-bearded cow-pat that a virgin’s wâhât is worth his com-
ing down to seven and a half for.”

5.

S. the Still-Stranded therefore made bold to say to Sindbad the Sailor,
when the page Salim fetched guest to host at the latter’s midmorning
summons, “Sir, your pardon: I must risk your displeasure by speaking
plainly.”
“Take that risk,” his now orange-turbaned host advised him. In the
shade of a date palm in his sandy court, Sindbad was taking his ease,
oddly, in the larger version of that empty wooden tub before which

69
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

he had sat at dinner. “Myself,” he went on, “I sit here every morning
to remind myself to risk no more.” He thumped the tub’s high wall.
“Dry land! But who knows when it may sink, or the water rise? Ser-
endib is what I want to hear about: the real Serendib, not last night’s
Never-Never Land. But speak your piece.”
Somebody bowed and declared, “The pirate Sahim al-Layl himself
was no more impudent than this merchant Ibn al-Hamra! How can
the pearl of Baghdad be bestowed upon a niggling nobody?”
The old man’s watchful countenance darkened. “Kuzia Fakan has
been filling your ear. But that Bedou magpie was with you so briefly
that I’m surprised even she found time for such gossip.”
“Fifty years,” Still-Stranded said in his own defense, “is not twenty-
five.”
“And seventy is not fifty,” Sindbad replied. “But to get out of my
tub still costs Kuzia more sweat than that.”
Smiling to himself, Somebody bowed again. “Twice in one eve-
ning, sir, you set an unexpected banquet before a starving beggar. The
first unmanned me for the second.” In any case, he assured his bene-
factor, the splendid Kuzia Fakan had not been his informant. A sur-
vival expert such as himself learned to read every crack in the plaster,
so to speak, and to listen with all the pores of his skin. He had known
of the negotiations with Ibn al-Hamra before last night, he acknowl-
edged — even before he had presented himself yesterday at Sindbad’s
gate. Indeed, it was his indignation at the great disservice being done
the lady Yasmin — a disservice, he could only conclude, that she her-
self was too proud to protest — that had led him so audaciously to
presume upon Sindbad’s hospitality, and that led him now to presume
upon it further by pointing out that just as seventy years are not fifty,
nor fifty twenty-five, so fifteen percent of a projected profit is not ten,
to say nothing of five, not to mention zero: the share Ibn al-Hamra
deserved of the upcoming voyage to Serendib.
“Make yourself clear, Brother,” Sindbad said. “Not only about the
business of Ibn al-Hamra, which is not your affair, but about that
unmentionable pirate captain as well, whose name is never to be ut-
tered in this house. Also, if you please, about your own comings and
goings from Serendib.”

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Seven Interludes

Somebody thereupon did just that, more or less: retailed to his near-namesake an abbreviated version of the story he proposed to tell
the company in full a few evenings hence, when his recounted voyages
and Sindbad’s reached their crossing point. By his reckoning, it would
be the story of his fifth voyage.
Leaning back again in his cameled court like a figure on a cigarette
package, his solitary listener at this forenoon rehearsal heard him out
with narrowed eyes, fingered beard, and no comment. At story’s end
he shifted on his special cushion, spat sideways over the tub’s edge,
and did not even question the tale, only its teller, of whom he asked
simply, “You expect grown men to swallow that?”
Unruffled, Somebody said, “Grown men may swallow what a child
would choke on: whales the size of islands, with landscapes on their
backs! Rocs and rhinoceri! Shores strewn with diamonds!”
Sindbad smiled. “Because their appetite was whetted with greed,
friend, and the marvels washed down with wine.”
“As they will be tonight,” said Somebody, “and tomorrow and the
evening after. But in my stories there are no genies or one-eyed giants
to be swallowed whole. Nature’s laws are not transgressed.”
“Only the laws of human nature,” Sindbad replied, “which bid
hungry men eat when food is in their hands, as Yasmin was in the
hands of We-Know-Whom. Besides, I brought real diamonds home,
whereas the jewel you speak of —”
“Is tucked safely in its casket yet,” declared Still-Stranded, “unless
that daintiest of vaults has been forced since you ransomed it. Sayyid
Midnight (so I’ll call him, since I’m forbidden to say al-Layl) was so
enthralled by the flower of Baghdad that he would not touch her with-
out her consent, and would cut off the nose of any crewman who so
much as sniffed in her direction. As for Prince Jabal of Sohar, he let
himself be viziered right out of the garden, believing that his jasmine
had been plucked. As did others.”
Sindbad squinted at him some while longer, clearly endeavoring to
see through him and just as clearly failing in that endeavor. Half under
his breath then he exclaimed, “Plucked and petaled! Stemmed! Sucked
dry! Seeded, chewed, and spat!” Spitting once more over the tub’s
side, he said to Somebody, “Whoever you are, Brother, try that story,
if and when you dare. If you are not hooted from the hall, we’ll speak
further of Serendib.”

71
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

6.

Transported by his night and much pleased by his morning, that af-
ternoon our man spent scribbling: a former trade from a former life,
so far behind him now in time and space that his roughened hands
could scarcely draw the letters. To be sure, in the world where they
used to flow so readily that he seldom thought of them as letters, only
as the ongoing line of story, they had flowed not from a goose-quill
that must be redipped line by line and repointed page by page, but
from an ever-sharp, never-dry fountain pen, as effortlessly as from the
fountain of his youth. Even so, the old muscular cursive spoke to
both memory and imagination, which together made a journey that
the penman himself could not: from Here clear back to There. He
set down an abbreviated version of what he had come to think
of — speaking of it first to Yasmin in her bedchamber through the
month of Sha’ban and again to his baffled auditors at last night’s
feast — as his “first voyage,” in “America” in “1937,” when his name
had been Simon William Behler, more or less; when he had told sto-
ries to his lost twin, acted them out with her, narrated their life and
high adventures.
He mused then upon his “second,” in that same realm seven years
later: perhaps forty years past, as Somebody’s body measured time;
perhaps a thousand hence, if where he was was real. But whether two
score or a thousand and one, it was more than years that divided “East
Dorset” — and Crazy Daisy Moore and her Bon Ami and Joe Junior’s
Island — from the East of Baghdad and of Sindbad the Sailor.

7.

“Every morning,” Sindbad said that evening to the assembled, “every
one of us begins a new voyage, or resumes the voyage of yesterday.
Men speak of Sindbad’s six voyages: twenty-five thousand and six
would be closer to the mark. In the holy month of Ramadan alone,
since my latest return to Basra, I have sailed thrice-ten more without
leaving my dear dry courtyard, as have you all without venturing be-
yond Baghdad. And on this morning’s voyage alone, speaking with
my brother the Still-Stranded” — he gestured down the low board’s
left side, at the midpoint of which sat Somebody — “I learned more

72
Seven Interludes

about the blessed isle of Serendib than my own landfall there ever
taught me. My faith in Voyage Seven (if not my thirst for voyaging)
is now redoubled, as yours will be when you have heard him. But let’s
address our appetites in the usual order. Yasmin.”
Robed in a fresh djellaba, this one a brilliant saffron like her father’s
turban, and fresh-faced herself from a long day’s rest after her night of
love, his daughter rose from the board’s far end and smilingly served
wine, Jayda following to replenish the decanter as it was emptied. She
took particular care that her father’s cup, Ibn al-Hamra’s, and that of
the old fellow across from him, in that order, were brimful; then she
went back and forth and up and down among the company in the
same elaborate order as on the previous night, filling their wine cups
nearly to the top — “Still-Stranded’s” last of all.
“To the two great harbors,” Sindbad proposed. “Dry land and
sleep, from which we venture in order to return.”
The company drank. Food was then served, first to those at the
main table, then to those at a small side table where sat veiled and
frowning Kuzia Fakan with her piper and tambourinist as well as
Jayda and the page Salim — not quite servants but not ranking mem-
bers of the household, either, at least not currently. By unspoken
agreement, the dinner talk was not of foreign lands and voyages but
of matters less glamorous, though related: cinnamon and pepper fu-
tures, the market price of sandalwood and aloes, the relative merits of
teak and aini wood as ship’s timber. Her father’s daughter, Yasmin
more than held her own in these conversations; though appearing to
defer to male opinion like any properly brought-up Muslim woman,
she was so clearly knowledgeable about the commodities market that
all at her end of the board sought her advice, as all at Sindbad’s end
sought his. 
“If I happened not to be a mere woman who knows nothing of the
world,” she would venture when asked, “and if I happened to have at
Basra a fresh shipment of first-quality poon logs from Beypore, as has
our friend Sayyid Talib ibn Sahl, I would resist the temptation to sell
them just now, even though the price of ship spars has peaked and
begun declining. I would warehouse those logs at whatever cost till
this time next year, when the caliph’s new shipyard is scheduled to
begin production. The demand for poon logs should then double, and
their price as well. Rice futures, on the other hand, I would avoid this

73
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

year like the pox, for every sign points to a good monsoon and a
bumper crop, which will depress rice prices till the next drought and
famine rescue the market. But what do I know?”
Boldly replied Still-Stranded, his heart full, from the third seat
down on her right and the third equally from her father’s left: “You
know the price of things as well as their value, whether or not those
coincide.”
“And where they do not,” Ibn al-Hamra called approvingly from
Sindbad’s right hand, “may you know as well how to come to terms
with the differential.”
Yasmin levelly regarded first the one, then the other, then her food.
At dinner’s end, Sindbad the Sailor signaled for attention by tap-
ping, not his Tub of Last Resort this time, though it was in ready
place behind him, but his turban, with both hands. Then, as promised,
rather than recounting his second voyage in detail, he merely recapitu-
lated it, drawing the company’s attention to aspects perhaps not em-
phasized in his previous tellings:
“Dry land and sleep,” he repeated. “Also turbans: the three great
things. But sleep, as my second voyage shows, is a slippery savior.”
He sipped and sighed. “It was mere profligacy, you remember, that
first drove me to sea and beached me upon that sleeping whale. Dis-
turbing its dreams led to the fulfillment of my own, once I had paid
the dark dues of despair and fed a bit of Sindbad to the creatures of
the sea. I had been rich, then poor; I came home richer than the father
whose dear death had first enriched me. With my riches I bought this
house and slaves of every sex and shade to serve me, and though I
lived more extravagantly than before, my fortune like a healthy muscle
increased of itself by that exercise, as the fortunes of the fortunate
sometimes do. What I desired, I acquired. As in a very dream of
luxury, I lived high, slept late, and never waked alone. Yasmin.
“From this dream of a life,” he went on when fresh wine had been
poured, “it was not want that waked me, but a double itch: to see
more of that monstrous world beyond gracious Baghdad, the City of
Peace, and once more to trade sharply with my fellows, a sport as
delightsome to the adept as love or narrative. I bestirred myself to
Basra, half hoping that the sight of ships and serious water would
scurry me back to the high ground of my slave women and other
sweetmeats. Alas! I saw for sale in the harbor a fine new trading vessel

74
Seven Interludes

named Zahir, so pleasing to my eye, so finely joined and rigged and
fitted, so fully found, so yare, so Bristol fashion — oh, my friends!
Bear in mind my term as port minister in Voyage One: my eye for
marine architecture had grown as cunning as my eye for cunts and
cargoes, and here was a young Jayda or very Kuzia Fakan of boats.
I fell in love with her on the spot and therefore promptly climbed
aboard, as had become my custom. When the most intimate inspec-
tion confirmed my first impression, I bought her straightway (as had
also become my custom), loaded her with merchandise and fellow
merchants, hired me a canny young captain, and bade him make sail.
“Brothers! First voyages are dangerous because we have everything
to learn, second voyages because we believe we have learned every-
thing. This time I curbed my natural impulse to befriend my ship-
mates, having learned that many of them must perish, and not
wanting unnecessary cause for grief. Soon enough we raised the in-
evitable tropic isle, a very Eden et cetera, and remembering the hard
lessons of Voyage One, I remained in my cabin while the captain and
my fellow merchants rushed ashore, strolled about, and built cooking
fires. Not until I had satisfied myself that this beast was either a true
island or a truly imperturbable sleeper did I slip ashore myself. Even
then I stayed aloof from the others, who had strayed too far inland for
my taste; I picnicked alone in a grove of what looked like sea grapes
on the beach. So sweet was that grove, so splendid the day, so deli-
cious the feel of a bona fide island under me again, and so excellent
the wine I had brought ashore to toast my solitary landfall that I sank
not into the sea but into sleep, whereupon it pleased Allah to teach
me the innocence of my experience. Because I had so warily held back,
my captain and fellows didn’t know that I had finally followed. Having
abandoned myself to sleep, I woke to discover myself abandoned, my
beloved Zahir already hull-down on the horizon.
“Hello again then to Despair: shipmate from Voyage One, stow-
away on Voyage Two, and now my fellow castaway and sole compan-
ion. How I saluted him you may imagine, for neither need nor greed
had brought us together this time, only idle restlessness and idle rest.
“We strolled about, he and I, waiting for Zahir to notice my ab-
sence and return for me, and found ourselves to be the island’s only
human inhabitants, a finding that closened our bond. There was no
sign even of other animals: only Sindbad, Despair, and vegetation.

75
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Fruit and fresh water abounded, enough to keep both of us alive in-
definitely and unconstipated. But my companion kept asking: without
wines and convivial friends and slave girls with silver chains on slender
ankles, why should a man live? Unable to answer, I let him unwind
my turban and look about for a convenient tree limb from which to
hang me with it.
“That is how we came upon the great white dome you all have
heard of, which I mistook for the alabaster temple of some barbarous
faith, as it lacked both doors and windows, not to mention minarets.
As I walked around it, its owner arrived to blacken the sky and teach
me that temples of that sort are always rocs’ eggs — a lesson I would
remember on Voyage Five but neglect to teach my shipmates. Despair
was for the moment frightened away; I put off hanging and hid myself
instead.
“The great hen settled down to incubation and, like me in my sea-
grape grove, soon drowned in sleep. Praise be to Allah, said I to my-
self, who never sleeps and who gave men turbans with which to solve
their problems one way or another. Instead of hanging myself by the
neck from a cinnamon tree, I bound myself fast to the roc’s right leg,
big as a tree itself, in my innocence believing what my experience had
taught me — that no other place to which the bird might take me
could be worse than where I was.
“Presently she awoke and flew, paying no more heed to me than to
the other parasites that plagued us both. Terrified though I was, I
soon beheld, with the same astonishment as my namesake here, what
he told us of last night in his first voyage: the living world spread out
below me like the chart of Allah mu-Allim, the Celestial Navigator.
This, however, was no fretwork of marshes and meanders like the
scorch-marks of fresh-baked pita, but a merciless expanse of blue water
as boundless as the Seven Seas it was — as boundless, even, as the blue
dome above it, on which it seemed to me my carrier must soon bump
her head, so high did she carry me. Had I understood what I was
overviewing, I might have seen the whole geography of my life below
me, past and future, the seas of my several voyages and all their land-
falls: the City of Peace, from which I had so foolishly reembarked;
Whale Island and its solid neighbor, where dwelled my friend the
king; Roc’s-Egg Island and all the islands yet to come, including

76
Seven Interludes

cursed Qeshm and blessed Serendib. But such names are ours, not
Allah’s; he puts none on his great chart.
“What happened next you know — how the roc descended into a
cliffbound valley and her passenger, airsick but grateful, unturbaned
himself from her, only to discover that the valley floor was strewn
equally with large diamonds and much larger serpents, and that there
was no more exit from it than there had been entrance to the Temple
of the Egg.
“Nor any less. Though life’s tuition is always ruinous, inexorably
we learn. Too late now to retie myself to my roc; she had flown off
with one of those sides of mutton thrown down by diamond hunters
from the clifftop to be studded with gems on impact and carried aloft
again by the birds. Even as I lamented (turban in hand) that my
dreadful new landing place had not even a decent tree from which I
might hang myself before the serpents ate me alive, I heard myself ask
One of those what? and then remarked both the rest of the diamond-
gathering operation and two better uses for my turban than suicide.
“Down the cliff came another side of mutton. Had it struck me, I’d
have been squashed as flat as millet cake and my troubles ended. It
struck the valley floor instead, and diamonds stuck in the fat of it like
lardoons. Another great bird, this one a giant eagle, snatched it off to
her clifftop aerie, whence the hunters retrieved it by flapping their
turbans till she flew. They then picked out the diamonds from the suet
and tossed the mutton down again. Before it hit the ground, I had
my plan.
“Like most serpents of my acquaintance, these in Diamond Valley
were active by night but torpid in the heat of the day. While they
slept — as soundly as an incubating roc or myself among the sea
grape — I loaded with the largest diamonds every pouch and pocket
of my person, even the six usable orifices of my body (also my navel,
which in those days held forty carats snugly), and when the sheep I
counted on came whapping down, I lumbered to it with my trusty
turban.
“Alas, this particular side of mutton had been so many times re-
cycled in the heat of the day that now it dripped and stank like carrion.
Another fell not far from it, just as rank, and another and another. I
scanned the clifftop, hoping for a fresher vehicle. But the afternoon

77
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

had waned; there was not a roc or an eagle in sight; it seemed that the
gatherers had got their day’s worth of diamonds and were discarding
their spoiled bait and heading home. Nevertheless, breathing gingerly,
I trussed myself under the rotten meat in hope of retrieval, and there
spent the most disgusting hour of my story thus far. No rocs ap-
peared — rocs don’t eat carrion — but so many flies swarmed down
that with any organization at all, they alone could have carried us off.
“The serpents began to stir. I praised Allah the Tireless Schoolmas-
ter, who deigns to teach us lessons even when we’re past applying
them — and just then, in the familiar twilight of my hopes, I was
birded off. Not, alas, by a roc or even a giant eagle, but by a mighty
vulture, who moved in when those noble raptors had left the field.
“He took me to his nest, a place more revolting than the food he
fetched there and the family he fetched it to, and what happened next
I would not speak of in this room were your own dinners not securely
down. A horrid mate he had and two huge chicks, by comparison to
whose ugliness their mother was Kuzia Fakan herself, and their nest
this banquet hall. Their manner of feeding was for the adults to rend
and swallow their foul food and then vomit it into their offspring’s
gullets. This they set about, and in the process retaught me Lesson
Three of Voyage One: as I had fed two toes and part of my ring finger
to the fish before I floated to that voyage’s second island, now I lost
to the buzzards the first joint of my left pinkie and portions of my
right buttock before I could untie myself and flap those horrid scav-
engers off. Their babes remained, not old enough to leave the nest
but big enough to have been the end of me had they known how to
bite as well as swallow. Their parents, moreover, fancied them in
danger from me rather than vice versa; they swooped and reswooped
to flush me from that nest. To preserve myself — your indulgence,
friends — I was obliged at every swoop to duck into the swamp of
regurgitation.
“Later I learned from the diamond hunters that normally they
worked as a team. Six flapping turbans of assorted colors are required
to frighten a feeding roc; four will serve for a giant eagle, and one for
a monster buzzard. But only the poorest hunters, those who cannot
afford fresh sides of mutton with firm white fat, bother with the buz-
zards, so nauseating is the labor of retrieval. They wait until the baits
of the successful have spoiled and been discarded, and their prosper-

78
Seven Interludes

ous owners gone home like the rocs and eagles; then, like the vultures
themselves, they pick over the remains.
“On the day I speak of, there was but one such human carrion-
crow about, and having but a single turban, dirty and colorless, he
dared not approach the pair of adult buzzards until he saw my turban
flapping at them from the nest. Then he ran up angrily, thinking me
one of his kind who had beat him to his haul — and it’s well he did,
for by this time I was so soaked in buzzard puke and overpowered by
nausea that I myself was regurgitating between swoops. These
spasms — though they cost me the diamonds I had been holding in
my mouth and (for reasons I need not explain) those in my bitten arse
as well — saved my life. The chicks believed I was feeding them, as
indeed, unwillingly, I was. The circling parents paused in their attack
to assess this novelty, and my grudging rescuer finally arrived. The
wrath with which he flapped his turban at me sent the buzzards scur-
rying long enough for me to climb out of their nest at last.
“I explained how I had got there. The fellow called me a liar. Had
I not needed his direction to the nearest bathhouse and seaport, I
would gladly have left him to fetch his filthy diamonds single-handed
from that carrion stew, for I had plenty left of my own. Instead, I
convinced him of the truth of my story with the gift of my navel-
stone, bigger than any fetched up by even the freshest sheep suet.
Furthermore, as I was already basted in upchuck from crown to sole,
I volunteered to go back into the nest and pick out his meager take of
gemstones from among the bluebottle flies while he flapped off the
parent buzzards. But the fellow was too meanspirited to trust me, and
so instead I did my final turban-work of Voyage Two: frightening off
my erstwhile besmirchers while he mucked out his low-carat catch.
“The rest of that voyage need not concern us here. Three days of
scrubbing made me presentable at last to the better class of diamond
gatherers; my gifts to them of selected items from my hoard made my
story plausible. My buzzard bites were a suppuration long in healing;
I still bear the scars and must sit on a cushion-and-a-half. For weeks
afterward I was obliged to spend hot afternoons in cool baths, for the
least perspiration brought out a lingering whiff of recent history. En
route home at last, I paused for a final fumigation at the Camphor
Isles and there observed, but was not threatened by, further monsters:
rhinoceri who lifted elephants on their horns like wagons of ripe fruit

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

and then themselves were lifted, prey and predator together, by rocs
that made my earlier ones look like sparrows.”
Sindbad adjusted his well-wound turban and beamed about the
table. “Perhaps you doubt me? Then look for proof in the bottom of
your goblets! Yasmin.”
She made the rounds, Jayda this time preceding her, and as each
wine cup was filled by the older woman in the now familiar complex
order, the younger dropped into it a gem. Even the servants found
themselves included in the toast, and were convinced. To ruddy Ibn
al-Hamra, Yasmin gave the largest stone — but mischievously dropped
it in from such a height that his red wine splashed him like buzzard
pabulum.
“From Voyage Two, as from Voyage One,” Sindbad concluded, “I
learned four lessons.” Ibn al-Hamra left off stanching his caftan to
count on his fingers, as before. “First, that with respect to salvation,
as aforedeclared, sleep is a soporific. Particularly when you suspect
yourself to be in Paradise, do not doze off! Second, that God gave
men heads not only for wearing turbans on, and turbans not only for
wearing on our heads. Third, that where diamonds abound, so surely
shall serpents. Fourth, and finally, that what goes down may come
up — though for narrative digestion there are all-but-foolproof aids.
Perpend this last, my friends, for tomorrow’s voyage will put these
first two in the shade. Your health!”
The toast was drunk, and many were the cross-eyed drinkers of it,
careful not to swallow their persuaders with their persuasion. Some
glanced in the direction of Kuzia Fakan, hoping for an intermission.
But Sindbad the Sailor, as good as his word, simply extended one
hand, palm up, toward Sindbad the Still-Stranded, offering his name-
sake both the audience and the narrative floor.

That fellow turned between pensive thumb and forefinger the dia-
mond from his cup.
“To flavor your wine with, comrades, or my story,” he said, “I have
nothing like this. It must be swallowed neat or spat back like buzzard’s
brew.”
He rose, went down to the table’s far end, and smilingly dropped
the stone into the empty cup of the cup-bearer in her saffron-orange

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Seven Interludes

djellaba. Frowns of surprise at his presumption went around the
company.
“Empty-handed I came into this hall,” Somebody declared, return-
ing to his place, “and all but empty-handed I’ll leave it when our tales
are told, though my head and gut alike will be as stuffed with marvels
as were our host’s with diamonds till those vultures fouled him.”
He smiled: at still-startled Yasmin, at the dinner guests (even Ibn
al-Hamra), at old Sindbad.
“As you said truly, Sayyid, every morning begins a new voyage or
resumes an old. But each night does, too: awake and asleep we sail by
turns two voyages, now parallel, now worlds apart, yet at times so
close that the voyager may be transported unawares from one ship to
the other. One Sindbad naps among the sea grape and wakes to find
himself headed heavenward; another dozes off in Serendib and wakes
still stranded.”
The company praised Allah, who, though He never sleeps,
dreamed both their world and any others. Their present narrator then
told them a version of

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Somebody’s Second Voyage

When Simon William Behler was thirteen and fourteen, his special
friend was Daisy Moore, who lived on River Boulevard in West Dor-
set. It might even be said that “Crazy Daisy” was the young man’s
moral coach and sexual instructor.
“Oh blyeh!” my friend Daisy would have replied to that: her throw-
up sound. It was the noise she had made last night in Schine’s Bijou,
for example. The island chieftain’s daughter, a saronged and hibis-
cused Dorothy Lamour, had expressed to Sterling Hayden her puzzle-
ment at the catcalls and wolf whistles of the U.S. Navy exploration
team that had come upon her swimming innocently in the lagoon:
“Among my people, the naked body is a thing of dignity. It is a flower
to be quietly admired, not one of your pinups to be whistled at.”
“Blyeh! Blyeh!” had gagged Crazy Daisy.
“How come blyeh?” I asked her afterward, as I walked her home
from uptown to River Boulevard. “I’ve heard you say things like that.”
My lean and serious friend liked from time to time in these dia-
logues to clutch my arm with one hand, clap her brow with the other,
and stop us where we stood, as if calling God and the community of

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Somebody’s Second Voyage

Dorset to witness her dismay at my retardation. This she did now
under the streetlight on the corner of High and Holly, not far from
the offices of Behler Maintenance & Improvement. “That’s the point,
’Simmon!” (Her nickname for me that season, from Simon but also
from the country term for persimmon: this same season she had re-
ported to me that in the transport of ejaculation I scrooched my face
as if I had “sucked a sour ’simmon.”) “I believe it, but Lamour’s talking
movie-talk. ‘Among my people …’ Blyeh!”
Daisy Moore’s speech was rich in italics, exclamation points, sound
effects, and moral distinctions. Her father — a slight, gentle, almost
apologetic man with silver hair and a black mustache, whose daugh-
ters affectionately called him Sam — was, by his own description, a
“vice president by marriage” of Albany Brothers, Inc., the packers of
Dorset Brand tomatoes, shellfish, and, lately, C rations for the U.S.
Army. Her mother — the vague, wild-haired, good-natured daughter
of one of those Albanys — was in and out of the Eastern Shore State
Hospital. Daisy was the second of their numerous children, several
daughters followed by several sons. The oldest girl, Brinsley, had gone
off to college and never came home on school vacations. Especially
during Mrs. Moore’s sojourns in the asylum, Daisy “watched out for
Sam,” as she put it: she helped the housekeeper look after him and her
younger siblings and the house, a pillared pile on Dorset’s oldest resi-
dential street, and discreetly saw to it (she once mentioned to me) that
neither she nor Julia, her younger sister, found herself alone with him
in his library at day’s end, when her brothers had been put to bed and
her father enjoyed a brandy or two before turning in.
I asked. She shrugged. “He gets too friendly.”
Upon this subject and certain others about which I was comparably
curious, Daisy sometimes volunteered information, but I was not per-
mitted to press inquiry. Though we were classmates, she was a year
and a half older than I (I had skipped a grade) and uncountable laps
ahead of me: in everything, it seemed to me; “In two things, ’Sim-
mon,” she would correct me, “and only one of those matters. ‘Among
my people …’ Blyeh!”
This was the last night of June, a Friday, warm and damp and
fragrant on River Boulevard, which ran its few wide blocks under
splendid cottonwoods and mock oranges from the uptown business
district down to River Park and the Municipal Basin. Though there

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

was no need for it, I was wearing over my polo shirt a poplin wind-
breaker, currently the fashion in our school; Daisy’s sleeveless blouse
and airy skirt were better suited to the humid evening. We sat awhile
in the glider on the Moores’ porch, dark and vast. Julia and some of
the brothers played noisy hide-and-seek in the boxwood and hydran-
gea; from where we sat, Daisy refereed their game. Fired by the ex-
ample of Sterling Hayden, I put an arm around her bare shoulders
and bussed her ear, moving her long brown hair aside with my lips to
expose the little pearl pierced earring in her lobe, and tautly awaited
her response.
In these matters I found my friend altogether unpredictable. Nearly
sixteen, she had dated high-school seniors — had even run around
briefly with my brother Joe’s gang — and helped raise her brothers.
Male anatomy and its functions had no mysteries for her, as had fe-
male still for me. Her sister Brinsley, who had been to Daisy in the
moral sphere as Daisy was to me, was known to all Dorset to have
been “fast”: a regular hellion, Aunt Rachel had told me, half admir-
ingly. Even before she went away to college for good, Brinsley Moore
had had to be packed off to a girls’ boarding school near Baltimore
for her senior year. (“Had to be,” scoffed Daisy. “Blyeh! Don’t believe
everything you read in the papers, Persimmon.”) The Moores in gen-
eral were out of my social class: Sam’s brandy nightcaps and university
degree; Brinsley’s cream-colored roadster, laid up “for the duration”
in their carriage house; Mrs. Moore’s easy talk, when she was home,
of art museums, operas, and the novels she pressed upon me from the
family’s library — these were to me themselves the stuff of novels, and
of Hollywood movies, with which I had larger acquaintance from
faithful attendance at Schine’s Bijou.
But Daisy’s unpredictability seemed to me, even then, quite her
own. Through the first third of Lagoon I had let my right hand idly
dangle ever nearer the front of her blouse, my arm along her seat-back
and over her shoulder, until in a moment of reaction to Dorothy La-
mour’s close encounter with the tiger beside the sacred waterfall, fin-
gertips and breast made a seemingly accidental contact that I lightly
then maintained. Without moving her eyes from the screen, Daisy
snapped me off her with a smart flick of the fingernail, as one might
send flying an errant Japanese beetle. Through the contretemps with
the rowdy sailors and Sterling Hayden’s subsequent demonstrations

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Somebody’s Second Voyage

of his superior sensitivity as well as his manliness, I moved my opera-
tions to her left leg, beginning boldly not at the knee but a hand’s
width above it, and not atop the hem of her dirndl but straightfor-
wardly underneath, on the smooth, slightly sweaty inside of her lower
thigh.
“Jesus, ’Simmon!” she had hissed. “Lay off pestering me!”
Now, on the contrary, she grabbed my wrist and stuck my hand
right into the front of her blouse, onto her little bare left breast. At a
time when most girls her age were eager to wear brassieres and even
padded them out with Kleenex, Daisy Moore would not. “For these?”
she had said in May, the second time we’d swum together over to the
Island. There she had permitted her very excited friend to examine
and within certain limits to explore her in our special bower, formerly
Joe Junior’s gang’s clubhouse: the first naked girl’s body I had seen
firsthand.
“Neat, huh?” she’d said. “But no headlights.”
Moreover, to my astonishment she had presently on her own initia-
tive “done” me (the occasion of my nicknaming), collected my prompt
ejaculate in her palm, inspected and sniffed it as if disdainfully, but
then with a grin lapped it up and said, “Mnyum!”
Then and now, I was electrified. But what had been amiss, I wanted
to know, with my touching her in Schine’s Bijou?
Daisy clapped her brow. “I was watching the stupid movie! No hid-
ing up here, Charles Moore!” she warned a ten-year-old brother, and
then she quietly observed (I was working her nipple carefully now
with two fingertips, neither hard enough to hurt nor lightly enough
to tickle), “Hey, Persimmon: you’ve got it right.”
But even as that nub rose welcomely under my touch, her father
ambled out onto the porch, brandy snifter in one hand, cigarette in
the other. Not so abruptly as to attract his attention, we disengaged,
and I saw Daisy shift her left ankle behind her right to hide my I.D.
bracelet. That summer it was the custom for a Dorset High girl who
was “going steady” to wear on her left ankle her boyfriend’s silver
identification bracelet, the heavier the better. Daisy Moore and I could
hardly be said to be going steady, though neither of us was “involved”
with anyone else; moreover, Daisy’s father disapproved of this particu-
lar custom, as well as of going steady in general among high-schoolers,
and Daisy seconded his contention that she was nobody’s property.

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

For just that reason, however, after our second visit to the Island she
had not refused the bracelet that my family had given me a year ago,
on my thirteenth birthday: thinking that when I became the famous
explorer that I intended to be, I might elect to use William as my first
and Simon as my middle name, I had asked them to leave the bracelet
unengraved until I decided, and a year later its nameplate was still
blank. Daisy liked that: she declared it showed she was Nobody’s
property. Sometimes she wore it on her arm with other bracelets;
most often she kept it in her jewelry box. Now and then she would
insist that I wear it for a while. Then, unpredictably, as she had done
this evening, she would demand it back and, once we had left her
house, wear it in plain view on her left ankle.
“Time to come in now, Daise,” Sam Moore said gently. “Is that
Simon Behler? Hello there, Sy.”
“Hi, Mister Moore.” I admired the way he held his brandy glass,
its squat bowl cupped in his palm, its stem between his third and
fourth fingers.
“Game’s over!” Daisy announced to the dark yard. “Ten! Nine!
Eight! Seven!” Her count brought siblings from the shadows, all ex-
cept six-year-old Beaufort, a famous tease.
“I’ll find him,” Daisy said. “Happy birthday tomorrow, ’Simmon.”
Shy, befreckled Julia Moore, stringy like her sister and already as
tall, had emerged from a hydrangea just behind our glider, smiling
through her dental braces and framing us in an imaginary camera.
Daisy caught her elbow and briskly led her off, calling, “Beaufort
Moore, we know where you are, and if you make us come get you we’re going
to tickle you till you wet your pants!”
Their father inhaled his filter-tipped cigarette and watched the girls
leave the porch. I was pretty sure he had noticed the ankle bracelet.
Then, as if to the brandy sliding around in his snifter, he remarked,
“So: your birthday, is it.”

En route home from West to East Dorset across the creek bridge,
young Behler paused for some moments on the draw-span to admire
his hometown and to savor his really quite considerable sophistication.
Counting tonight, I had half a dozen times reached Second Base,
at least briefly — and with a girl older than myself — and on two oc-
casions had precociously achieved Third. It was Daisy herself, not my

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Somebody’s Second Voyage

male friends, who had explained those bases to me, together with the
distinction between measuring physical intimacy in such terms, which
she regarded as inevitable and even useful, and boasting of it to our
classmates, which she judged to be contemptible. I was certain from
their talk that none of my East Dorset comrades had experienced with
any girl what I had (twice) with Daisy on the Island. What was more,
thanks to her carrot-and-stick coaching, I had managed not to boast
to them of my extraordinary sessions with her, at least not directly and
explicitly — though I had learned to deploy a smiling silence to good
effect. If I lapsed, she had warned me, she would learn of it soon
enough, however much I might swear my buddies to secrecy, for such
gossip was never containable; her sister Brinsley had taught her that
truth. Needless to say, between her and me, that would be that. But if
(she had said one late-April night on that same front-porch glider) I
actually kept my mouth shut and moreover didn’t pester her like some
absolute drip … we would see what we would see. So saying, she had
moved my hand from its tentative perch on her left knee up under her
skirt and snugly and exactly to her crotch, which it breathtakingly
fitted — atop her underpants, yes, but so exciting was the warmth and
moistness of that contour that I spontaneously fired off into my jockey
shorts.
I had been twice also to New York City with Aunt Rachel and
Uncle Joshua, their joint birthday gifts to Joe Junior and me in 1939
and again in 1940: to the World’s Fair, the Statue of Liberty, and the
top of the Empire State Building. We had stayed in a Manhattan hotel
and had once had breakfast served to the four of us in our room. At
Daisy’s mother’s urging I had read Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, and
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain, and was currently at-
tempting both that latter author’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and
a volume of tales from The Arabian Nights, unexpurgated; I was also
a great fan of the adventurous Richard Halliburton, who had person-
ally autographed Sam Moore’s copies of his travel books. Very likely I
was the only East Dorset kid — perhaps one of the few East Dorseters
of any age — ever to have been inside the Moores’ big house on River
Boulevard; none of my family had been, though my father was now
mayor of the town and on cordial terms with Sam Moore, himself a
councilman. But I had even eaten dinner there, three times, when Mrs.
Moore was in residence. Once she had served roast leg of lamb, which

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

I had never eaten before because my father didn’t care for lamb. I had
liked it all right. Mr. and Mrs. Moore sipped wine with their dinner,
and Daisy and I were permitted a third of a glass each, Julia and the
brothers a sip or two, to begin to learn the different flavors. Neither
my father nor Uncle Josh knew that round-shouldered bottles were
Bordeaux and slope-shouldered ones Burgundy, though Aunt Rachel
remembered having been told that by a Frenchman during her visit to
France.
Behler was not destined, my narrator intoned, to play out his part
on the small, familiar stage of Dorset, as had his father and grandfa-
ther before him. Vaguely but unmistakably, some larger, more adven-
turesome future beckoned.
That intuition inspired in me, there on the creek bridge, a detached
affection for my little city and the tidemarsh county of which it was
the seat, where I had lived for what seemed to me a very long time
already. I felt … seasoned by experience. Up at Dorset Creek’s dark
confluence with Island Creek, under the quarter moon, was the old
municipal cemetery; I recalled with wry amusement the day seven years
ago when I had last visited it, at my own insistence. I remembered my
early fascination with the Lifter at the Albany Brothers cannery —
nothing more than a vertical conveyor belt! — and my trepidation at
Joe Junior’s close bicycle approach to Colonel Philip Albany’s striking
workers. Now my brother was a Seabee in the Pacific theater of opera-
tions, and over the Albany Brothers cannery flew the blue and white
E for Excellence for producing rations for our troops, and my father
was no longer town councilman but mayor, and Uncle Josh — the
general manager of Behler Maintenance & Improvement — was chief
of civil defense for the town. I myself was an expert airplane spotter,
the only boy in my scout troop to get a perfect score on all three parts
of the aircraft identification test: Allied, German, and Japanese. In
consequence, though I was a year younger than my fellow freshmen,
I had served last year on the Incendiary Bomb Squad at Dorset High
and hoped this year to be its chief. While the others, students and
teachers alike, sat in the hallways during air-raid drills with their fore-
heads on their knees and their arms clasped around their legs to pro-
tect themselves from flying glass, the Bomb Squad and its faculty
advisers stood watch on the asphalt-and-gravel roof beside shovels and

88
Somebody’s Second Voyage

galvanized washtubs filled with sand, with which we were prepared to
smother incendiary bombs dropped on Dorset by Heinkel bombers.
(“Pfth!” had scoffed Daisy Moore two weeks ago on the Island,
retracting my foreskin while we discussed the recent Allied invasion
of Normandy. I had spoken gravely of the likelihood of Nazi counter-
measures, including some sort of raid on America itself; I was proud
that both the Albany Brothers cannery and the Dorset Shipyard, two
blocks from our house, had been officially designated as possible mili-
tary targets. “How’re they going to get bombers clear across the At-
lantic Ocean?” The only way America could ever be “attacked,” she
declared, no doubt quoting her knowledgeable father, was either by
commandos put ashore by submarine, who at most might manage to
smuggle a bomb into the Capitol or the Washington Monument, or
else by V-1 buzz bombs somehow launched from those submarines.
In either case, I and my bucket of sand would be of little avail. Didn’t
I realize that all this civil-defense business was just to make the home-
folks feel involved in the “war effort”?
I did not, until that moment; the idea was as astonishing to me as
was Daisy’s candid inspection of my exposed and erect glans penis for
traces of smegma — terms I learned from her then and there, as I
learned of the charade of civil defense — before she said, “Looks
okay,” and … kissed it!)

Without compunction — indeed, with cool exhilaration — Simon
William Behler then committed the first consciously immoral act of
his life.
Just off the East Dorset end of the creek bridge was Paul’s, a neigh-
borhood soda fountain and candy store whose Coke sodas, we loyally
maintained, were the best in town. Although it was still a good hour
before closing time, the place was empty of customers. Freddy Mulli-
gan, rejected for military service because of flat feet, had begun clean-
ing up behind the counter. Everything about me just then gave me
satisfaction: I could remember being brought to Paul’s for ice cream
when I was so little that Mother had to lift me high onto one of the
green revolving stools, and the counter clerks seemed huge grown-
ups; now, a grown-up myself in many ways, I could drop in at the end
of an evening and with my own money casually buy a Coke soda from

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

my old boyhood acquaintance Freddy Mulligan. This reflection gave
me unexpectedly to appreciate what must be my father’s perspective:
born and raised in East Dorset in its rougher days as a poor water-
men’s neighborhood, the hardworking son of hardworking immi-
grants, he had lived his adult life in a house three blocks from the
house he was born in, and though like many of his generation he had
been obliged to quit school at sixteen and take up his father’s trade,
he had risen to be a prosperous businessman and the first mayor of
our town ever to have been elected from East Dorset. How proud his
stolid parents would have been had they lived to see his success! I too
was proud of it, yet I understood that beyond our marshland county
his name was scarcely known, and that beyond tidewater Maryland it
was not known at all.
“Whatcha hear from Joe?” Freddy Mulligan asked me. He had
made my Coke soda, rung up my quarter, and gone back to wiping
the ice cream cabinets with a rag. A red and yellow can of Bon Ami
cleanser, in use, stood near my elbow on the green marble counter.
“Nothing since San Diego,” I reported, pleased with the recent
huskiness of my voice. “He won’t be allowed to say where he is even
when he gets there.”
“Bulldozing hisself some Japs on one of them islands,” Freddy
Mulligan reckoned. “Wish I was right there with him.”
Mullig had grown fat and sported a thin mustache. The years be-
tween us, once so formidable a span, were insignificant now. I recog-
nized that by comparison even with my brother he would never
amount to much, and this understanding inspired in me a generous
self-confidence.
“You been out messing with Crazy Daisy?” he wanted to know
next. His back turned toward me, he was polishing the cash register.
Firmly but amiably I said, “None of your beeswax, Mullig.”
He chuckled and waddled off behind the candy showcase. Loyally
I called after him, “There’s nothing Crazy about Daisy Moore. She’s
all right.”
From where he stooped, out of sight, Mullig chuckled again. “You
ought to know.”
I had finished my Coke soda and was contemplating the familiar
trademark on the half-empty can of cleanser. “I do know,” I acknowl-
edged, and in one easy motion I tucked that can under my wind-

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Somebody’s Second Voyage

breaker and swung off the much-taped revolving stool. “See you,
Mullig.”
Grunting to his feet, Freddy Mulligan called back, “See you now,
Behler.”
Under street-lit maples down wide and empty Maryland Avenue I
strolled home, as coolly giddy as on that hot May afternoon on Island
Point when I had challenged Daisy to swim with me over to the Is-
land, though we had no swimsuits with us, and she’d said Sure, and
I’d stripped to my underpants, hoping she would do likewise, and she
had not stopped there. With my left forearm I clutched my stolen
prize to my heart until I turned onto darker Maple Street, where I
dared carry it openly.
Poor dumb Mullig!
On our screened front porch, Uncle Josh was smoking and sipping
beer in the dark; I had seen the glow of his Chesterfield from the
sidewalk. Nowadays he could have afforded his own house, but he and
Aunt Rachel had grown used to living with us, and after Mother’s
death it had seemed to go without saying that they would stay on and
manage. “Late,” he noted mildly as I crossed the porch. I reported
having stopped at Paul’s for a Coke soda.
Dad was in his living-room chair, simultaneously reading his
double-folded Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and listening to Edward
R. Murrow on the radio, used white pocket handkerchiefs tucked all
around his seat cushion. He could not hear people come onto the
porch, but he looked up smiling when he saw movement in the room.
“How was your movie, son?”
Holding the Bon Ami can lightly out of sight behind me, I called
“Fine!” and went on back to the kitchen. Aunt Rachel was fixing her-
self a fresh-lemon Coke, her regular and frequent summer drink, to
take with her out to the porch, where she and Uncle Josh liked to sit
together in the dark through the eleven-o’clock radio news.
“Brought you some Bon Ami,” I declared, and I put my red and
yellow prize (the colors, it now occurred to me, of the only airplane I
had ever flown in, Howard Garton’s old Bellanca at the Avon airport)
on the stainless steel countertop next to the sink. “Freddy Mulligan
gave it to me for helping out at Paul’s.”
“Hwell!” Aunt Rachel feigned mutual indignation. “That’s some
pay!” She pretended to inspect the countertop. “Hasn’t scratched yet!”

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

I saw at once a possible mistake in my having provided her with an
anecdote that might call undue attention to my trophy. Just then the
radio news came on — loudly, for Dad’s benefit. I bade all good night
and went up to bed.
After Mother’s death, in 1938, my old bedroom had passed to Aunt
Rachel as a sewing room. My brother and I, ever less agreeably, had
shared the back bedroom for yet another two years, until his high-
school graduation and immediate enlistment in the Seabees. Thereaf-
ter, as he came home only on brief, infrequent leaves, the room was
virtually mine, though for sentimental reasons my brother’s half was
left undisturbed for the duration. Though nearsightedness had dis-
qualified Joe Junior from flight training, the airplane models he had
built right up to enlistment day still hung, dusty now, from their ceil-
ing threads: the gull-winged Stuka dive bomber and Vought-Sikorsky
carrier plane, the pursuit planes P38, P39, P40, P47, and P50. My side
of the room was equally military: my spotter’s sheets of winged sil-
houettes, my wall maps of the ETO and PTO with their flagged pins,
which, as a rule, I relocated nightly after the news. I would catch up
tomorrow with our Normandy invasion forces, our bogged-down
campaign in Italy, and the Red Army’s advance across eastern Europe.
My Pacific pins had scarcely been moved for more than a year, since
Guadalcanal. Some were actually rusting in our humid air. But Dad
and Uncle Josh agreed that something big was brewing out there.
Wearing only my pajama bottoms in the damp heat, I turned out
the bedside light, armed myself with a handful of Kleenex, and began
my ritual. Rocking lightly on my left side under the sheet, I embel-
lished the remarkable-enough facts of my adventures on the Island
with Daisy Moore. Never mind that my friend had actually twice done
for me what I was doing now for myself, and the second time had
instructed me how to do the same for her, which I had not suspected
possible; I felt obliged to destroy my hometown by fire (a surprise
attack with secret new rockets fired from U-boats off Ocean City) as
Dorothy Lamour’s village had been destroyed by the angry volcano
god. Daisy and I escaped only by swimming to the Island. Looking
back grimly from its shore as Sterling Hayden had done from his re-
treating ship, I embraced my tearful lover to console her and myself
for our loss, then led her into our bower of honeysuckle and Virginia
creeper, where at last —

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Somebody’s Second Voyage

The ceiling light clicked on. “Where’d you get the Bon Ami, son?”
Luckily my bedsheet had worked its way down only to my waist.
“Swiped it from Paul’s.” My treacherous voice broke in midconfes-
sion. I could not recall my father’s ever having been in my bedroom
before; it did not occur to me to lie to him.
“What?”
“I swiped it from Paul’s!”
“Get on your wheel,” he said quietly, “and take it back ’fore he
closes.” He set the can on my dresser-top and withdrew.
Asweat with humiliation, I pulled my khaki pants on over my pa-
jama bottoms, slipped into my polo shirt and penny loafers, and went
downstairs with the Bon Ami. Perhaps to spare my feelings, Uncle
Josh and Aunt Rachel had moved back into the kitchen. Dad, in his
living-room chair, didn’t look up from his Evening Bulletin but said,
“Tell Paul Travers you’re sorry.”
Joe Junior’s battered old Silver King had passed to me; though the
Maintenance side of the family business was prospering from the same
wartime shortages that curtailed the Improvement side, there were no
new bicycles to be had for the duration. I wheeled it off the porch,
letting the screen door slam behind me to signal that I was obeying
orders, but under protest. The night was still warm and breezeless, the
street empty. As I pedaled past Zion Meth-Prot toward Dorset Creek,
I conjured Andy Hardy-like scenes of earnest apology to Mr. Travers,
who usually stopped by his store at closing time to check the receipts
and make sure all was secure for the night. Feigning sternness but
secretly amused, he would commend my strength of character and
offer me a summer job; the anecdote would be retold in East Dorset
when Simon William or William Simon Behler had risen to national
fame, or maybe even international fame, like Richard Halliburton. On
the other hand, if Mullig was still there by himself, I would take the
simpler course of pretending to have forgotten something I needed
and surreptitiously restoring the Bon Ami can while he fetched what-
ever that was.
Paul’s neon sign and display windows were dark. If the store was
closed, I could leave the can in the entranceway with a straightfor-
ward, dignified note — or perhaps without a note (I had no pencil or
paper), but I would say I had left one. If Dad happened to check with
Mr. Travers — he wouldn’t go out of his way to check, but as mayor

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

he chatted with dozens of Dorseters every day, and he had grown up
with Paul Travers — I would suppose that my note had blown away.
Just Mullig would be best. I would tell him I was sleepless with
concern for my brother — premonitions, call it what you will — and
needed another Coke soda and a little conversation before turning in.
But I had neglected to bring any money. Just some talk, then, though
it wouldn’t surprise me if old Mullig set up a Coke soda on the house.
I would tease him, amiably, with Joe Junior’s story about how he had
got that nickname.
They were both there, closing up: Mullig lumped on one of the
green counter stools, waiting to be dismissed, and Mr. Travers count-
ing out the cash register. All thought of confession fled, and Maryland
Avenue was so deserted that even if I tried to sneak the Bon Ami into
the doorway, one of the pair would surely notice me. My face burning,
I pedaled on, out onto the creek bridge. I paused where I had paused
before, on the grating of the draw-span, and (making sure the bridge
tender couldn’t see) dropped the wretched can into Dorset Creek.
What retribution I then inflicted upon my humiliators. En route
home I indulged myself in a resentment that would have been unbe-
coming even had I done what I had been dispatched to do. The porch
was empty. Uncle Josh and my betrayer had gone to bed; Dad waited
up, still reading newspapers, but though I was no doubt prepared now
to lie if questioned, I made it plain in the way I stalked past him and
up the stairs that I was not to be interrogated, and I closed my bed-
room door just loudly enough to advertise my anger without provok-
ing his. Too furious to resume masturbation, as I rocked myself
toward sleep I summoned the Luftwaffe to redestroy my town, and
though I managed to save most of my family with a daring at which
they could only shake their humbled heads, once clear of the rubble I
turned my back on them forever and went off Islandward, to where
Daisy Moore (whom I had rescued first) waited for me in our honey-
suckle bower.

He went down to breakfast with his family.
Though our old LaSalle had on its windshield both the black A
and the green C gasoline-rationing stickers, its ponderous tires, re-
capped once already, were wearing smooth again, and so on weekdays
my father walked uptown to Behler Maintenance & Improvement.

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Somebody’s Second Voyage

Saturday mornings, however, he drove to his municipal office and
about his mayoral rounds, for which our A card had been granted. I
lingered in bed until I heard him leave the house, blowing his nose
and clearing his throat, racing the engine and riding the clutch as he
shifted gears. Then, still shouldering the chip of my insulted pride but
worried afresh that on his way uptown he might stop by Paul’s to
chuckle at my prankish theft and chastening restitution, I came
downstairs.
Uncle Josh, in his seersucker summer robe, was clearing the break-
fast dishes. Around his cigarette holder he announced, “Here’s the
birthday boy.”
Aunt Rachel — terry-rurbaned, long-earringed, light-housecoated
— turned from her sinkful of suds. “Happy b-day, Simon B.”
Without replying, I went to the refrigerator to get milk for cereal,
though the skillet and French-toast makings were assembled on the
stove. In plain view, too, on the breakfast table, was a small gift-
wrapped package, the shape and size of a wristwatch box or an Ever-
sharp pen-and-pencil set. I ignored it as well and conspicuously fixed
myself a bowl of Rice Krispies.
“Uh-oh,” said Uncle Josh. “Snap, Crackle, and Pop.” He patted my
shoulder and left the kitchen. Aunt Rachel sat down across from me,
propped both elbows on the breakfast table, rested her chin on her
interlaced fingers, and crooned to the tune of our door chimes: “Si-
mon’s pout-ing. …”
“It’s not funny!” I let her know.
“No, it isn’t,” she mildly agreed, and she got up to put things
away. “You’re old enough to understand that Dad’s got your best in-
terests in mind. He wants you to be a somebody, not another Freddy
Mulligan.”
“Mullig’s okay,” I let her know.
“Sure he is! And twenty years from now he’ll still be jerking sodas
for Paul Travers. Is that what you want to be doing in nineteen sixty-
four?”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I let her know, but Aunt Rachel, con-
fident that arguments to my ambition were unanswerable, let the mat-
ter rest. Her Saturday-morning chore was to scrub the week’s scuff
marks off the white rubber tiles of our checkerboard kitchen floor,
which she had made Dad promise to replace with cheaper, more

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practical asphalt tile as soon as the war was over and things were avail-
able again. Mine, much less laborious, was to mow the lawn and spray
the Chinese Cigar trees, and I would be well advised, Aunt Rachel
suggested, to get the job done in the cool of the morning, as the fore-
cast called for another stinkeroo like yesterday. But that, she agreed,
was nobody’s beeswax but my own.
Our yard was a small flat rectangle, easily mowed with our ancient,
clattering push-mower except for the nuisance of our catalpa trees,
which were to the grounds what those white rubber floor tiles were
to Aunt Rachel’s kitchen. For climbing, they were splendid; I could
even enter and leave my bedroom via what I called the Escape Route,
a thick lateral catalpa limb that overhung the back porch roof, onto
which my rear window opened. But in May they littered the grass
with their dead white blossoms; in June and July, unless sprayed
weekly with slaked lime from our pressure sprayer, they were so in-
fested with caterpillars that the yard was unusable; in August and Sep-
tember their foot-long green seed pods — the “Chinese cigars” that
East Dorset children dried and attempted to smoke — turned brown,
split, and carpeted the lawn with both their winged white seeds and
their long, brittle husks, impossible to mow over and clumsy to rake
up; and in October the leaves themselves, as big as water-lily pads,
came down. This morning was still and steamy, the sky gray-white,
the grass wet with dew. Walking about stirred up mosquitoes, but I
peeled off my shirt and set to work, feeling especially virtuous under
the circumstances, and the physical exertion purged me of my mood.
Fourteen! My body pleased me, mostly: wiry, smooth, and sun-
browned, still too thin in the chest and upper arms but already broad-
shouldered and narrow-hipped and, unlike my brother’s stocky build,
pushing toward six feet, maybe beyond. The family predicted that I
would be its tallest member. My jaw was as hairless as a girl’s, subject
more to pimples than to whiskers, but I had practiced shaving it with
Uncle Josh’s expensive prewar Gillette. I wished my voice were deeper,
my muscles larger, my pubic hair thicker, my penis more imposing in
its flaccid state. Otherwise, however, it was okay, and I assumed that
all those improvements would come to pass before long. Pleasuring in
the exercise, I mowed the grass, raked the clippings, emptied and re-
placed the canisters of the Japanese-beetle traps supplied free to all
local householders by the Department of Agriculture and faithfully

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maintained by the neighborhood as a patriotic duty. Alone among the
people I knew, my friend Daisy scoffed at these traps; her mother had
told her that their scented baits attracted more Japanese beetles than
they killed, and that the whole program was no more than patriotic
busywork inspired by the insect’s name. But Mrs. Moore was, in her
own phrase, “part-time crazy,” and the Moore family inclined to such
heresies. Daisy said, for example, that her father believed the War
Bond drives to be another patriotic fraud: the government, Sam had
told her, would see to it that the $25 we got back in ten years would
buy less than the $18.75 we paid out now. At this shocking idea, when
I reported it, Aunt Rachel clucked her tongue and Dad frowned. But
Uncle Josh said it wouldn’t surprise him: 1954 was a long way off.
Next I mixed the white lime spray, pumped up and shouldered the
heavy pressure tank, and sprayed the catalpas, pretending that the cat-
erpillars were Japs and the sprayer a flamethrower. I was one against
multitudes, but even in the steady southwesterly from a Bermuda high
stalled off the coast, my accuracy was devastating. The trees were lib-
erated. “I’ve got a brother out there somewhere,” I modestly declared
to President Roosevelt. “I was only doing what any of my buddies
would have done.”
By late morning the sky was sunny, the temperature climbing
through the eighties. My family were all about their business; the
house was empty, its doors and windows open to the humid breeze. I
washed up and fixed myself a tall glass of strawberry Kool-Aid. On
the breakfast table, beside my unopened birthday gift, was a note from
Aunt Rachel: Back by 2. Windows? Burglary was no problem in East
Dorset, but mildew was, and it was the summertime responsibility of
whoever left the house last (in practice, always either my aunt or my-
self) to balance the usual possibility of afternoon thundershowers
against the need for maximum ventilation and to adjust windows ac-
cordingly, especially on the north and west sides. She and I regarded
ourselves as experts in this area and enjoyed conferring on its fine
points, such as whether a forty-percent chance of thundershowers
warranted closing the south and east upstairs windows as well, since
rain could be backwinded through them in a real squall. Hence the
question mark.
At the sight of it I understood that I had forgiven her, if not yet
Dad, for last night — she had doubtless only reported to him what I

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myself had told her, and for some reason Dad had doubted my
story — and that I liked Joe Junior’s being away in the service, so that
I could both miss him and be the only young person in the house.
Our relations had been neither very close nor often truly adversary; I
liked my brother better in his absence and wouldn’t mind if he never
came home again except to visit. However, if that birthday gift was
what its size and solitariness suggested, I would be touched and
thankful indeed. My faithful Ingersoll Mickey Mouse watch still kept
good time, but I was too old to wear it; Uncle Josh’s old Longines-
Wittnauer, which he had loaned me, looked and ran like an antique;
and no new watches were available for the duration. But Joe Junior
had mentioned in a letter from California that he could get real Swiss
watches cheap in the Navy Post Exchange. … I shook the package
carefully and was gratified; its rattle was not that of an Eversharp pen-
and-pencil set.
Concerning my birthday gift from Daisy I had certain hopes, and
though I knew I must leave the initiative to her, I was determined to
provide her with ample opportunity to take it. As a virtual only child,
with few summertime responsibilities beyond such chores as I had just
completed, I was freer to spend time at her house than she was at
mine. In Aunt Rachel’s view this was as it should be, but I wished it
were otherwise, for our house was often empty for a predictable inter-
val, as it was just now, whereas the Moores’ was always swarmed. On
the back of Aunt Rachel’s note I wrote, Scouts till 12, Moores after.
Windows OK. Uncertain of whether or where Moores should be apos-
trophized, I added a small, ambiguous mark directly over the s.
The last part of the morning I spent in the furnace room of Zion
Meth-Prot with the Silver Fox Patrol of Troop 159 of the Boy Scouts
of America, baling the wastepaper we had collected in a neighborhood
drive the week before. Ordinarily, in the absence of adult supervision,
my patrolmates and I made a leisurely job of untying the string-bound
piles of old newspapers and magazines and culling choice items such
as Esquire and Judge before stacking the rest high in the baler for
compressing and wiring into regulation bales for the war effort. The
Silver Foxes had yet to turn up anything to match the three-foot stack
of illustrated Spicy Detectives once found and sequestered by the Otter
Patrol, but this morning Freddy Mulligan’s kid brother, Danny, a
newly recruited Tenderfoot, had discovered a single issue of a bona

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fide nudist periodical, which I found the Silver Foxes examining to-
gether — the first such that any of us had seen.
“Simon the Behler,” Charlie Norman greeted me. He was the min-
ister’s son, our patrol leader and only Star Scout, working toward
Eagle. “Come get a load of these headlights.”
Nothing to jerk off by, we agreed: the men, women, and young
children in the black-and-white photographs were just standing
around naked in parks and on beaches; there were no teenagers, and
almost none of the women pictured had a good body. On the other
hand, these were actual photographs, not line drawings like those in
Spicy Detective, and the people were white Americans, not the naked
Papuans and Pygmies of Uncle Josh’s National Geographic. Raucously
but carefully we inspected the misshapen breasts, bellies, and buttocks,
the sometimes startlingly shaggy crotches and pendulous cocks. The
magazine declared editorially that if the delegates to the League of
Nations had convened regularly in the nude, “with nothing to hide,”
there would never have been a Second World War.
“Yeah,” Roger Henry commented. “They’d’ve been too busy fuck-
ing to fight.” Danny Mulligan attempted to repeat a dirty joke that
his brother had told him involving Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt,
but all he could remember was that they were naked in the White
House and that the last line was “Cobwebs, Franklin.” “Man,” Charlie
Norman said, “this one’s got plenty to hide.” He pointed to an obese
lady standing with others before some sort of cabin. “Who could fuck
that?”
Several Silver Foxes volunteered.
After only an hour’s baling I left, pleading a fictitious birthday
lunch. Roger Henry singsonged, “We know where you’re go-ing.”
Charlie Norman bet I was going to “dine at the Y.” “Eat Moore at the
Y,” Roger Henry improvised, a note of respectful envy in his taunt,
and Danny Mulligan said, “That would be crazy. Get it?”
“Shut your lunch hole, Tenderfoot,” I warned him. But I was not
displeased at the general assumption. When Roger Henry (First Class
Scout, like myself) called after me, “Have a nice lunch, Behler!” I
simply called back, “Thanks, Rodge.”
Pedaling past Paul’s and over the creek bridge to the Moores’ in the
hot light of day reinspired my grudge against my father, a resentment
that I must have imagined would somehow work in my favor with

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Daisy, for I was eager to share with her the story of last night’s hu-
miliation. She was, however, busy with the family’s lunch, which, at
least in Mrs. Moore’s absence, was an assembly-line production. Their
kitchen — designed a hundred years ago for the Negro slave help,
Sam Moore had once explained to me, not for the lady of the house —
was much smaller, darker, and less modernized than ours. Virginia,
the colored housekeeper, brought out to the main dining-room table
institutional-size jars of peanut butter and two kinds of jelly, long
loaves of sliced whole-wheat bread (never used in our house), half-
gallons of milk, a bag of apples, stacks of plates and napkins, and a
sleeve of paper cups. Warning the brothers to keep their hands off till
she gave the word, Daisy dealt out a row of lunch plates like playing
cards — one extra when she saw me come in — and Julia, behind her,
four slices of bread per plate. Young Beaufort then, at her orders, went
around spreading peanut butter on half the slices (“He always spreads
it too thin,” an older brother complained; “This time he won’t,” de-
clared Daisy, whose authority in these matters was absolute), Charles
the grape jelly on one slice per plate, and Morgan the peach preserves
on another: no variations permitted at time of manufacture, though
swaps might be negotiated after. Winston, the oldest boy, then assem-
bled the sandwiches and cut them “Moorewise,” as their father had
once defined the family style: halfway between diagonally and athwart-
ships. Julia poured milk, Daisy doled out apples and paper napkins,
and all hands, our hands full, filed into the backyard to sit in a circle
on the grass under a huge old mock orange that shaded the former
slaves’ quarters. There we said grace (never bothered with in my
family), bartered this for that, and ate.
My friend did not look her best this noon. Her face, as thin as the
rest of her, appeared at once gaunt and puffy, reddish around her
brown eyes. Her voice sounded worn; her hair was turbaned up like
Aunt Rachel’s; she was dressed in soiled pink pedal pushers and a
baggy Antioch College sweatshirt sent her from Oberlin by Brinsley,
to whose ex-boyfriend it had once belonged. There was no sign of my
I.D. bracelet. And her manner was, for Daisy, subdued. She neglected
to wish me a happy birthday even after shy Julia did; indeed, except
for automatically dealing out that extra lunch plate, she scarcely ac-
knowledged my presence, but busied herself with confirming the boys’
afternoon plans and ruling peremptorily on the exchange values of

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apple halves and jelly flavors when free-market principles hit a snag.
Sometimes she got this way; it occurred to me that she might be hav-
ing her period, the mechanics of which she herself had once explained
to me.
Julia, always closer to Daisy than to her brothers, was more than
usually solicitous. She neglected her own lunch to brush and braid
her sister’s hair into a long pigtail as the rest of us ate, and conversed
with her in their private language, a version of “opp-talk” spoken at
such a machine-gun clip that not even the brothers could follow it,
much less I.
“Yoppou fopporgoppot toppo woppish ’Soppimmoppon hopp-
appoppy boppirthdoppay.”
“Noppo oppl doppidn’t. Loppatopper, moppayboppe, oppif oppl
foppeel loppike oppit.”
“Oppokoppay.”
When it had been established that Winston would walk Beaufort
uptown to his piano lesson and redeliver him to Virginia the house-
keeper before meeting his friends at Schine’s Saturday matinee, and
that Julia would see to it that Morgan and Charles and she got down
to the Yacht Club in time for their dinghy-sailing class, and that every-
body would be home without fail by four o’clock sharp to get them-
selves and the house ready for Sam’s arrival at five with their mother,
who might be coming home this time to stay, we trooped back
through the kitchen to dispose of our trash. Daisy reviewed the after-
noon schedule with Virginia (who sat plumply at the little kitchen
worktable in her white uniform, eating sliced tomatoes and sipping
iced tea) and added that she and I were going for a bike ride, probably.
“Y’all be careful,” Virginia instructed us, unconcerned.

Behler’s objective was Island Creek, Island Point, and, if possible, the
Island itself.
After telling Daisy the story of my unjust disciplining, I would
wish aloud that she and I could run off somewhere together, just the
two of us, away from civilization entirely. With my Scout survival
training, I was reasonably confident that we could manage like Tarzan
and Jane. Thus would I lead her into our game, which several times
already had taken unexpected happy turns. If no one was in sight, we
would hide some or all of our clothes in the reeds near the red day

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beacon and swim over to the Island and around to a certain little spot
of beach on its northeast corner, from which nothing human was vis-
ible, not even the Chaptico bridge — only woods and the wide, empty
upper reaches of the river, which served as our South Pacific. The
honey locusts became coconut palms, the trumpet vines lianas. Once,
under my direction, we had been Adam and Eve in the Garden; an-
other time castaways on a desert isle without a common language; yet
another time Robinson Crusoe and his Girl Friday. By a tacit division
of labor I was, as a rule, in charge of the story, Daisy in charge of its
limits, especially when (as had become our narrative-dramatic tradi-
tion) its plot fetched us into our bower, where my friend’s unpredict-
ability was most likely to assert itself in either direction. There fantasy
had twice been outstripped by extraordinary reality; on the other
hand, and rather more likely, Daisy might tire of the conceit and its
obvious direction. She would then quash it with her throw-up noise
and challenge me to a footrace in the shallows or a swim to the State
Hospital shore and back.
Today I had in mind to try Princess Wakini and Lieutenant Bailey
from Lagoon and see where that might lead us. But Daisy’s mood was
still cranky. She appropriated her oldest brother’s bike and did not
object when I turned off River Boulevard toward East Dorset, but we
pedaled in silence, and instead of riding beside or ahead of me, she
trailed behind. At the uptown foot of the Dorset Creek bridge she
turned aside and coasted down past the colored bakery and the oyster-
dredge builder’s smithy to the Albany Brothers seafood plant. By the
time I noticed, turned back, and caught up with her, she had dis-
mounted at the creek bulkhead, propped Winston’s dark-red Schwinn
against a mountain of oyster shells, and was skipping flat ones out into
the channel of Dorset Creek.
Gray-and-white herring gulls stood about on the pilings or hovered
low on the southerly over the creek, hoping for scraps from the hard-
crab pickers. Instead of probing Daisy’s mood, I skirted it, idly testing
my hypothesis that hovering gulls cannot be hit by oyster shells. With
calm and minimal evasive action, they confirmed it. To my own sur-
prise, I heard myself say vehemently, “I hate this place!”
Daisy, still morosely watching the gulls, said, “No you don’t,” and
I realized at once that the truth of my feelings was nearer the opposite

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of what I had declared. Anyhow, I had her attention. I reported how
I had swiped dumb Mullig’s can of Bon Ami to get even with him for
his teasing me about her, and how instead of throwing it away I had
given it to Aunt Rachel to use in our kitchen; how my dumb aunt had
gone straight to my father with the story even though I’d told her I’d
been helping Mullig at Paul’s; how Dad, the Great Dictator, had
waked me from a sound sleep and ordered me out of the house, back
down to Paul’s, even though I had told him the honest truth imme-
diately, which I certainly needn’t have done; and how that unfair pun-
ishment had made me so angry that I’d flung the damned Bon Ami
right into the creek.
Through the latter part of my complaint, Daisy listened with eyes
closed. Toward its end she held her left hand to her brow but did not,
this time, stay me with her right. When I was done she regarded me
without expression for some moments. To express my continuing re-
sentment (and to avoid that stare) I zipped another oyster shell
through the squadron of gulls, and, uneasily, another.
At last she said, “You chickened out!”
“What do you mean?” But I knew already what she meant. Even as
I was telling my story, I had seen myself for the first time from outside
it, and was abashed at the sight.
“Persim-mon. …” Furious now, Daisy grabbed both my elbows
to make me look straight at her. My face fired up. “You’d’ve done the
same thing!” I said, though I strongly suspected that she would not
have and suddenly much wished that I myself had not. I shrugged her
hands off me, but was appalled at the revelation that I was not the
hero of my story. On the contrary.
Instead of denying my objection, however, Daisy dismissed it.
What she would or wouldn’t have done in my place didn’t matter, she
declared, because she didn’t matter, any more than Freddy Mulligan
mattered, or anybody else we knew, except me and her sister Julia.
Herself she regarded as a lost cause, like her mother; she was therefore
permitted anything. But I had to be honest and brave et cetera, be-
cause (like Julia, if Daisy had anything to say about it) I was headed
somewhere that none of the rest would ever get to.
Why in the world did I not pick up on that “lost cause” business,
a complete surprise and the closest Daisy had ever come to inviting

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intimate questions? But my vanity was so dazzled by what she had just
said about me (I wasn’t so sure about Julia) that I could think only to
mumble some protest against her double standard of behavior. Exas-
perated, Daisy moved off toward her brother’s bike.
“I’ll find the damn can and return it right now!” I said after her.
She cut her eyes back at me, over-shoulder. “Let’s look for it!” I called.
“You can stand right there and watch while I give it back to Mister
Travers!”
I saw that she was interested. More forceful by the moment, I took
her arm and led her up onto the bridge. The tide looked to be near
flood now, I pointed out; therefore it would also have been running
in at Paul’s closing time last night. So as not to be seen from the
bridge-tender’s station, I had dropped the can over the upstream rail-
ing of the draw; it would have been carried on up the channel toward
the old cemetery at the two creeks’ fork and might well be lying along-
shore somewhere up past the packing houses and the work-boat fleet.
“Baloney,” Daisy scoffed. “It’s halfway to Portugal by now.” But
the project appealed to her imagination. We locked our bikes together
with Winston’s combination lock and chain and prowled the creek-
shore, looking between the moored oystering skipjacks and bugeye
ketches laid up for the summer season, the tong-boats fitted now with
outboard rollers for trotlining crabs, the haul seiners piled with nets.
Then, shoes off, we prowled the slick mud flats farther up, where the
remains of abandoned work boats made a marine graveyard before the
human one.
Soon enough my bravado waned; there was so much floating and
stranded litter that I began to fear we really might find a discarded
Bon Ami can. I considered proposing a detour into the cemetery; I
hadn’t poked around in there for ages. On second thought, I proposed
the more promising alternative of continuing around the fork and
then down Island Creek all the way to the Chaptico. There had, after
all, been a low tide between the two highs; if we reached the other
creek mouth having found nothing, there we’d be at Island Point. We
could swim over to the Island and check its perimeter as well, just to
make sure. …
“Never mind your Island,” Daisy said. “This matters; that doesn’t.”

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As she led us back down Dorset Creek instead and across the bridge toward Paul’s, I began to worry that she would demand con-
fession with or without restitution. I even thought of taking that
moral initiative before she came up with it — and I realized I hadn’t
nerve enough.
At the East Dorset end of the bridge she said, “’Simmon, you wait
here for me and don’t dare go away, or you and I are finished. I’ll be
back in two shakes.”
“Where’re you going?”
But she sprinted off — not, I was gratified to see, toward Paul’s,
but back across the creek bridge to our bikes, and from there pedaled
away in the direction of River Boulevard. The afternoon blazed. The
breeze had waned to a damp breath, not enough to dry sweat but just
enough to carry the stink of sun-rotting crab waste across from the
packing houses. Clearly in for it, I waited like a condemned man in
the shade of the bridge abutment, experimenting to see whether, by
force of a willed neutral attitude toward nature’s basic processes, I
could make myself inhale that rank stench deeply without gagging or
even catching my breath. I discovered that I could, after some practice.
By the time Daisy returned, I had learned almost to enjoy doing so.
From the bridge railing overhead she tossed down to me a can of
scouring powder.
“This is Bab-O,” I pointed out.
“Never mind. Come on.”
I headed with her toward Paul’s as toward a scaffold. “Where’d you
get it?”
“Swiped it from Virginia’s closet.”
“Swiped it!”
Her over-shoulder look this time was mischievous: the first good
humor I’d seen in her all day. “I’m allowed to. You’re not.”
Almost like Aunt Rachel, I said, “Well! This is some birthday
present!”
“Stop worrying about your birthday present.”
It was no use proposing to Daisy Moore that we leave the can
inconspicuously in Paul’s entranceway. My last hope was that despite
what I had said before, she might wait for me outside, and I might be
able to set the can casually on the counter while speaking to Mr. Trav-
ers of something else, in such a way that the scene would look from

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outside like confession and restitution. To that desperate end I strode
ahead of her, as if angrily, saying, “Let’s get this over with.”
When my hand was literally on the store’s door handle, Daisy called
from twenty feet behind me, “Persimmon?”
“What.”
Her brow furrowed. “You don’t have to.”
My heart lifted, but I kept my voice truculent. “How come.”
“You’re willing to,” she explained. “That’s enough.”
But I saw my part clearly now, and the heady savor of moral-
dramatic initiative made me fearless. Without replying, I strode through
the door and up to the soda fountain, where Mr. Travers was chatting
with the Zion Meth-Prot organist and choir director, Mrs. Pool. He
looked over when I plunked the Bab-O can onto the marble, just
about where Mullig’s Bon Ami had stood. “Hi there, buddy. Get you
something?”
“Two Coke sodas!” Daisy called from behind me. “Chocolate ice
cream in mine. Treat’s on me,” she said brightly, taking the stool be-
side me, and she explained to Mrs. Pool and Mr. Travers that today
was my birthday.
“How old are you, Simon?” Mrs. Pool asked me.
“No sodas,” I ordered. Paul Travers paused, his hand on the shelf
of inverted soda glasses behind the fountain. Mrs. Pool regarded us
over her Coke. Mr. Travers raised his eyebrows and wiped his hands
on a rag. To keep my voice in its lower register, I spoke quietly. “I
swiped this can off your counter last night, Mister Travers, while
Freddy Mulligan was cleaning up. It was a dumb thing to do, and I
apologize.”
Mr. Travers stepped over, picked up the cleanser, and tipped his
head back to examine its label through his bifocals. “Didn’t come from
here, bud.”
Actually, I explained, what I had taken was Bon Ami, but I hadn’t
been able to find any Bon Ami in our house this morning, so I had
brought the Bab-O instead, for him to use until I got to the A & P to
get a new can of Bon Ami.
Mr. Travers shook his head and set the Bab-O back on the counter
in front of Daisy. “Would the pair of you kindly scoot out of here now
and take this back where it come from?” He looked over his eyeglasses
at Mrs. Pool. “Kids.”

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*   *   *
Daisy Moore herself then led the way out to Island Creek, across to
the Island, around to their special beach, and, finally, into their bower,
and there presented “’Simmon” Behler with his birthday gift.
Though my earlier experiments both alone and with Daisy had
shown me how inexpungibly, even in total darkness or underwater,
we carry ourselves inside our heads — our time and place, who and
what we are — my recent reading in Mrs. Moore’s Arabian Nights had
made me chafe not only at being ineluctably I and here and now but
likewise at the iron constraints of nature itself, which made it quite
certain that no fish would really ever talk and no genie appear from a
bottle, nor would Daisy and I be magically transported from Dorset
County to Samarkand or Serendib. My closest approaches thus far to
anything resembling the boundary of those constraints had not been
those two surprising interludes on the Island with my friend, when —
even as I’d groaned and scrooched my face as if sucking a sour ’sim-
mon — I had not for a second left self-awareness behind but had been
on the contrary preternaturally aware of myself and her, the honey
locust trees round about us, a twin-engine Army transport plane pass-
ing overhead (the military version of the DC-3), and two bright-blue
dragonflies mating on a tendril of trumpet vine near Daisy’s perspiring
forehead, their long, thin abdomens arched and connected to form a
Valentine heart. No: the eerie moments of a true near-ecstasy, whose
scary disorientation I had learned to protract and relish, had been
those rather less rare ones when (especially since I’d had the back bed-
room to myself) I was able in a certain combination of drowsiness
and less-than-total darkness to rock myself just beyond all usual and
normal sensory cues into a charged suspension, vertiginous, electri-
cally humming, in which the ceiling, the walls, the frames of the doors
and windows, and the very bed beneath me were at once their familiar
selves and unspeakably alien, their distance and configuration fluid,
and I myself was no longer or not merely I but as it were the very lens
of the cosmos: a sentient star of light-years more compass than any-
thing named Simon William Behler — to whom, however, I clung in
those thrillsome intervals like a man overboard to a rope, to haul my-
self back before I was carried past retrieving.
Something like that, I supposed, Home Plate must be: an ultimate
transfigurement. There was a degree of transport in even masturbatory

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orgasm; there had been rather more (though more self-consciousness,
too, as aforedescribed) when Daisy “did” me, and she had acknowl-
edged a like sensation the time I did her, even in the absence of any
literal, observable squirt. She was squirting plenty inside, she had re-
ported, and her joints felt unglued and her muscles melting, and the in-
side of her head was squirting, too — floating and squirting at the same
time. What I had hoped might happen today, if I could orchestrate the
situation and if Daisy’s mood coincided with mine, was that in our
bower, out of sight of all things human except each other, she would
remove even the little pearl pierced earrings she wore always, and that
after “Wakini” and “Lieutenant Bailey,” our eyes closed, had embraced
and kissed each other into a half-trance (as had once or twice happened),
we might “do” each other simultaneously, eyes still closed, and then
together … I didn’t quite know what. Levitate? Evaporate? Melt?
Cross over?
Her earlier truculence had therefore much discouraged me, but af-
ter our stop at Paul’s my hopes were higher than ever. Daisy seemed
almost excitedly pleased with me now; from her pants pocket she
fetched out my I.D. bracelet, and fastened it around her left ankle. She
rode ahead down Maryland and across Bridge Avenue, standing up
on the Schwinn’s pedals to pump it along faster, laughing, raising the
Bab-O can like a standard, and calling back to me over her shoulder.
Still in charge, I followed more deliberately on the Silver King, oblig-
ing her to pause from time to time and urge me with merry impa-
tience, “Come on!”
At Island Point I was disappointed to see four or five youngsters
from the Second Ward playing on the shore and in the shallows a
hundred yards up-creek and several crab boats working trotlines out
in the river, not far from shore. The kids I could cast as Polynesian
natives, maybe headhunters to hide from in our jungle cave, but the
crabbers and their distinctive Chesapeake work boats, chuffing back
and forth on one-lung inboard engines, would be hard to work into
Lagoon. And the proximity of both ruled out skinny-dipping to the
Island.
“Come on!” Daisy said. She stashed her bike in the reeds, shucked
off her penny loafers, and peeled out of her Antioch sweatshirt, under
which she wore one of her brothers’ plain white T-shirts. By the time
I laid the Silver King atop the Schwinn, she was already undoing the

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waistband of her pedal pushers. I embraced her from behind, my fore-
arms just under her little breasts, and murmured experimentally into
her hair, “Wakini. …”
“Blyeh!” She hugged my arms closer to her for half a second before
shrugging them away. “No make-believe, ’Simmon. Come on.”
Stepping back into the tall spartina where our bicycles lay, she
slipped the pedal pushers off, rolled them around her sweatshirt,
and tucked the bundle into a handlebar basket. Her underpants were
robin’s-egg blue. As I unlaced my canvas sneakers, she half squatted
beside me to lock the bikes together and retrieve something from one
of her pockets. I bussed her skinny hip just below the panty-line.
“That tickles,” she protested — but she pressed my face against her,
not away. Then, giggling, she sprinkled my head with Bab-O,
dropped the can, and dashed from the cover of the reeds into the river,
the ankle bracelet flashing. “Last one in’s a rotten egg!”
I followed in my jockey shorts, checking as I went to make sure
that the Polynesian natives (who usually did their swimming up near
the crabhouse, where their mothers worked) were keeping their dis-
tance and paying us no mind. In chest-deep water off our beach —
where the crabbers were, alas, in plain view still, but busy at their
work — I overtook and embraced her again. Chuckling, she permitted
me to kiss her thin, wide lips, but when I closed my eyes and slipped
in my tongue, she drew her head back and said, “Eyes open today,
Persimmon!”
And that was the order of an afternoon that both fell short of and
far exceeded my anticipations. No Lagoon or other scenarios: Daisy
was uncompromisingly Daisy, I I, nowhere but on the Island of Island
Creek on the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland on the hot afternoon
of July 1, 1944, crabbers working the Chaptico nearby and somebody’s
large dog barking intermittently up-creek, probably at the Negro kids.
Daisy’s soaked white T-shirt clung close; her pink skin and dark nip-
ples showed through. Keeping my eyes dutifully more or less open
while she rinsed the cleansing powder out of my hair with river water,
I put a hand on her breast. She clapped her forehead, rolled (but did
not close) her eyes, grinned and groaned, pressed my hand against
her, then led me by it into the trees, watching out as always for briers
and poison ivy. At our bower she let go, jumped a step or two ahead
into its moss-and-fern-lined center, and (still dripping wet, as was I)

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with a toss of her braid turned to face me, smiling but serious, her
legs slightly apart and arms wide open.
“Happy birthday, ’Simmon.”
It was a level declaration. Even our kiss then had to be open-eyed:
Daisy and me. When I slid my hand from the small of her back up
under her T-shirt and then down into her underpants, and dared even
to press my fingertips for the first time into the cleft of her backside,
and Daisy made a murmur into my mouth and pushed herself against
the front of my jockey shorts, I shut my eyes with a shudder of excite-
ment. Still kissing me, Daisy straightway opened them with thumb
and forefinger before darting her tongue into my mouth in hard little
thrusts.
Encouraged by that response (which reminded me of her reaction
to my initiative with Mr. Travers), after lifting off her T-shirt with her
help, instead of merely kissing her breasts I boldly nursed one nipple,
a thing I had never done before. Daisy said Mm hm and with her
closed left hand pressed my head there, then presently moved me to
her other nipple. Her free right hand, moreover, she cupped under my
jockeyed scrotum and gently kneaded it.
When we had stepped out of our underpants I moved back from
her, all nerve and willpower now, in order to move likewise from the
verge of ejaculation, and asked her — commanded her, really — to
take her earrings off.
“My earrings?” But without entirely opening her left hand, she
obligingly removed them, reattached their backings, and put them
atop her blue underpants for safekeeping. I relished her movements,
and even more so my authority. As she stooped to secure the earrings
I said in a husky whisper, “Let’s undo your braid,” and set about re-
moving the tan rubber band from its end.
“’Sim-mon,” she protested, but I saw that the idea interested her.
She obediently turned her back to me and held still while I undid the
plait, even pressed her lean little rump against the wet tip of my erec-
tion. I astonished myself by being able to draw back from her and say,
“Not just yet, Daise.”
She shook her hair loose and, pleased, tilted her head to one side
and combed her right-hand fingers through it. “You’re weird,
’Simmon!”

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But when I knelt now to remove the final item, her ankle bracelet,
she gasped and jerked that leg away.
“No!”
What she meant, I flattered myself to suppose, was that she wanted,
just now, to be my property. But in that case she must do as I wished,
mustn’t she? Squatting before her, I said, “Take that off, too, Daise.”
But my command came out as a request, to which I added, as if sport-
ively, “Let’s get completely stripped, okay?”
Once more in charge, Daisy said, “We’re stripped enough.” She sat
herself Turk-fashion on her spread-out T-shirt in a clean mossy patch
a few feet away, her unbound hair falling across her shoulders, and
fingered the ankle bracelet distractedly. Her brown eyes, I was sur-
prised to see, were wet and reddening. Without looking up she said,
“Come here to me, Persimmon.”
I readily obeyed: stood on my knees before her and kissed the top
of her head. She opened the hand she had kept closed; in her palm
was a small flat packet with a picture on it of a handsome Arab chief-
tain. Sheik, it said, and other things.
She smiled wanly and knuckled teardrops out of her eye-corners.
“You know how they work?”
I said “Sure,” for though I’d never handled one myself, I had seen
discarded ones like beached sea nettles along the rivershore and even
near our bower. Moreover, certain members of the Silver Fox Patrol
had once sneaked some — Trojans, they were, not Sheiks — from
their older brothers for a water-balloon fight in the basement of Zion
Meth-Prot, and had spoken by the way of their intended function.
“Be honest, ’Simmon!”
I understood then that Daisy was telling me that she did know, if I
didn’t. “I just slip it on, right? We don’t have to do this, Daise.”
She put her packet-holding hand to her forehead and raised her
eyes briefly skyward, but then lightly bussed my shoulder and said,
“First you take one out of the box.”
The packet said in smaller letters: 3 prophylactic sheaths. For preven-
tion of disease only. There were two white Sheiks inside, tightly rolled
but not otherwise sealed. I pinched one out — it looked like a model
of those inflatable life rafts that downed flyers sometimes drifted in
for days and weeks — and Daisy tossed the packet over to where her

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earrings and our underpants were. A glance showed me in which di-
rection the thing was meant to unroll, but I did not in fact know
whether one unrolled it first and then slipped it on like a sock, or what.
“Now you hand it to me,” Daisy said, and taking it from my fin-
gers, she drew my face to hers and snugged my hand onto the little
mound of her crotch before proceeding with the demonstration. Her
eyes were less teary now; her previous emotion, I supposed, had had
to do with the momentousness of the occasion, which would leave her
physically altered, as it would not me. This I understood from conver-
sation on the subject not with Daisy (who characteristically discussed
things after the fact, rather than before) but among the Silver Foxes,
whose fund of sexual lore was rich in the area of defloration and its
complications: infrangible cherries on the one hand, unstanchable
hemorrhages on the other, panic lockups that required a doctor to
disconnect the couple (how would we get to one?), sharp initial pain
on the woman’s part, transformed into insatiable craving once the bar-
rier was breached.
Daisy and I were spared all that. When my excitement filled the
first Sheik before my friend had finished unrolling it onto me, she
gently complained, “’Simmon,” removed and tossed it away among
the creepers, and in a little while was able to apply the second. I prom-
ised huskily, as she drew me onto her, “I’ll be gentle.” Daisy said noth-
ing but kept her eyes on mine as she first introduced and then with a
surprising motion slid me fully into her, or herself fully onto me, and
held me in place there for a considerable while before permitting or
resuming further motion. Up-creek, that dog barked on; those trot-
liners chuffed away out on the Chaptico. In our bower, midges whined.
A plane droned overhead: another twin-engine job, by the sound of
it, flying high enough to see all of Dorset County spread out like a
map. At one point a faint shout or howl floated to us from the
grounds of the State Hospital, of a sort that I had heard once or twice
before on the Island when the breeze was southeasterly. Daisy’s eyes
closed at the sound, and all her muscles tensed, but there was no
lockup. As I approached my second ejaculation, the fire sirens of Dor-
set suddenly chorused from ward to ward. Daisy broke her own rule
again by closing her eyes and turning her head aside on her spread-
out hair. She made a low sound, whether of passion or of amused
exasperation at the sirens I couldn’t tell, but I took the opportunity to

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steal a glance down between us at the spectacle of my firm piston in
its prophylactic sheath — aglisten, but not with blood — sliding in
and out of Daisy Moore.
Then it was I who made a sound, trying not to scrooch my face as
my knees and elbows deliquesced. Daisy clasped her thin limbs around
me and received my weight; I felt the ankle bracelet press into my
buttock.
Presently into her left ear I said, “I love you.” With a deliberate
motion Daisy turned to give me her sizing-up look, then eased herself
out from under me. “Wrong again, ’Simmon. You just say things.”
I was too full of pride and other emotions to object. If we had
crossed no Boundary, we had unequivocally passed a celebrated mile-
stone. Just turned fourteen, I had accomplished with Daisy Moore
what the love songs really meant when they said kiss; what the camera
turned away from after Dorothy Lamour’s and Sterling Hayden’s
faces came together in the grotto behind the sacred waterfall; what the
Silver Foxes’ banter was tirelessly preoccupied with: the mysterious
business at the heart of adult desire. If what I felt for my friend was
less than love, it surely included affection, admiration, and gratitude.
Pleased as I was with myself and with the postcoital look of my geni-
tals — the organ itself flaccid now as I stripped off and discarded the
condom, but unquestionably longer and thicker than it used to be,
perhaps permanently so, and my scrotum gratifyingly looser, more
dangly — I was more pleased still with the look of Daisy as she picked
herself up off the ground. Her shoulder blades and buttocks were
blotched and impressed from our double weight; flecks of moss and
leaf-scrap stuck to her skin and in her hair, as also to my reddened
knees and elbows. Whether or not I loved her, I loved watching her
movements as she shook out her T-shirt and brushed herself clean:
standing, turning, bending.
Fucked.
The coarse word filled me with tenderness. I helped brush the litter
off her while she replaced her earrings. Daisy liked that; she let me
embrace her afterward front to front for a long kiss, during which my
curiosity buzzed. Was it because of the Sheik that I had felt nothing
pop or tear inside her at my first penetration? Where was the fabled
blood? Did she feel different inside now? Did she love me? Neither of
us had gone out of our minds with passionate excitement, as I had

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thought we might at Home Plate; indeed, in our two earlier sessions
on the Island, which had gone less far, there had been more ardent,
dizzying play. Perhaps such transports would come later: the possibili-
ties for exploration and experiment seemed limitless, and though just
minutes ago I had felt utterly expended, the press of Daisy’s breasts
against my chest and of her bushy little mound against my thigh was
already restirring me. I began moving my kisses down from her face.
“No more,” she announced. “We’re out of rubbers, and I gotta get
home. Let’s take a swim.”
Later, as we dressed in the reeds, I managed to ask, “Are you
okay?”
Daisy was refastening her hair. She turned to me while fixing the
rubber band in place with both hands. “Aren’t you?”
“I mean did it hurt you.”
She went back to the little rearview bicycle mirror she was using to
see herself in. “I’d’a said ouch if it’d hurt, ’Simmon.”
I considered this while lacing my sneakers. “Did it feel good,
then?”
Daisy raised her eyes to heaven. “Jesus peezus! That’s what it’s
about!”
Uncoupling our bikes, I remarked that I had seen female cats and
dogs in heat who didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves, and that I
was just checking to make sure, since what we’d done had certainly
felt good to me, but I guessed I wasn’t interested unless she liked it, too.
“We’re not cats and dogs,” Daisy pointed out. “Anyhow, never
mind about me.” She unlatched the ankle bracelet, slipped it into her
pocket, and swung up onto her brother’s Schwinn. Following behind,
I watched to see whether she sat on it perhaps more gingerly than
before. She did not. Shortly before Daisy and I had become friends,
Charlie Norman had told another Silver Fox that Andy Travers had
told him that back when she had hung around with some of my broth-
er’s gang, Travers and a couple of the other guys had once bet Crazy
Daisy that she couldn’t write her name in the sand the way they used
to, and she’d said she bet she could, too, if they swore not to watch,
and they’d sworn, but she’d caught them peeking and had quit after
the second letter. Charlie Norman didn’t particularly believe that
story, and neither did I, though Daisy’s tomboyish spunk had helped

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earn her her nickname. Andy Travers was a notorious liar, especially
concerning girls. But when I remembered the story now, a new ques-
tion forcefully suggested itself, and I resolved to put it directly to
Daisy as soon as possible, whether she felt like talking about the sub-
ject or not. To that end, I didn’t say good-bye at Maple Street but
rode on with her toward the Dorset Creek bridge and River Boule-
vard, though she made me promise not to hang around her house: she
had stuff to do before Sam brought her mother home.
The draw happened to be open for one of the small freighters that
plied between Albany Brothers and the Baltimore shipping terminals.
As we waited with our bicycles at the lift gates with their lights and
bells, I asked Daisy to tell me honestly whether this had been her first
time, as it had been mine.
“’Sim-mon,” she protested. “Leave me alone.”
“I need to know,” I insisted — though I already knew, now, and
my heart stung. “I’m in love with you. I have a right to know.”
“No you don’t,” Daisy replied. Her tone was glum but positive, as
if the moral question were familiar. “If you loved me it wouldn’t mat-
ter, and since you don’t it’s none of your business. You just think
you’re in love, ’Simmon. It’s fun to think that.”
Everything Daisy Moore said seemed true to me as soon as she said
it. But I had begun to learn from her how to respond. “I do think that.
And you’re right: it doesn’t matter if this wasn’t your first time. But I
wish it had been.”
She cut me a glance of serious appreciation and went back to pre-
tending to watch the swing bridge close. “So do I.”
Andy Travers, I said to myself: Paul Travers’s son, who had failed a
grade and then quit school to join the Merchant Marine after Joe Ju-
nior joined the Navy. Though not bright and known to be a ready
liar, Andy Travers was an athlete, handsome and popular; my brother,
I now bitterly recalled, had once teased him about being a cradle-
robber who dated freshman girls, even junior-high girls, in his senior
year. Andy Travers! The idea of him and Daisy doing things together
on the beach, maybe even in our bower, made me dizzy, almost nau-
seated. I felt ridiculous, too, for having imagined myself her first lover.
Those childish games of mine, which she had gone along with, hu-
moring me like one of her kid brothers!

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She must have seen something of my distress. As the lift gates rose
she put a hand on my perspiring arm and said, surprisingly, “Hey,
Persimmon? You’re the first one I ever liked it with, okay?”
I jerked my arm away from her and — not quite registering what
she had said — pedaled angrily ahead. What stung most, perhaps, was
that except for the moment in Paul’s with the Bab-O and the moments
in our bower with Daisy’s earrings and braid, I had been the novice,
in my friend’s complete and experienced, maybe even amused, charge,
whereas with that cradle-robber Andy Travers she had been the ten-
derfoot, submitting to his wishes, doing at his direction things that
she had never done before. I hated and envied him for that, so much
so that I had crossed the creek bridge before I realized that to punish
Daisy for deceiving me — for betraying me in advance, so to speak —
I ought to have biked off the other way, homeward. Now it would
look dumb to wheel around at Staub the Jeweler’s on High and Holly,
one block from River Boulevard, and head back, especially since Daisy
was making no effort to overtake me but was pedaling at her own pace
a block or so behind.
Awkwardly, therefore, I reached her house before she did. Various
brothers were already on the porch, playing Monopoly under Julia’s
supervision. She gangled down the steps as soon as she saw me, her
white legs too long for the rest of her, particularly in her summer
shorts. Half breathless, as always, she asked, “Where’s Daisy, Simon?,”
but then grinned past me and clicked an imaginary camera at her ap-
proaching sister.
Already, at thirteen, Julia Moore had larger breasts than Daisy.
Among the Silver Foxes it was theorized that such precocious devel-
opment was the result of girls’ massaging their tits nightly with a
Turkish towel and⁄or letting guys suck on them, but so shy was Julia
that I wouldn’t have believed that the theory applied to her even if her
sister hadn’t told me (with her throw-up sound) that it was baloney.
Remembering now the circumstances in which Daisy had enlightened
me on that point and others, I burned with chagrin and supposed
unkindly that skittish Julia, following the example of her older sisters,
would soon enough let some Andy Travers reach that Second Base, if
she had not done so already, and quickly move on to Third and Home.

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“Your uncle called a half hour ago,” Julia told me. Her eyes, I no-ticed for the first time, were not brown, like Daisy’s, but a greenish
color. “You’re supposed to go right home. Hi, Daise.”
“Jule.” While they embraced as usual upon remeeting, Daisy, still
straddling the Schwinn, gave me one level look over her sister’s shoul-
der. Then she propped the bike on its kickstand and turned her atten-
tion to counting brothers.
“Beaufort’s hiding from Ma,” Julia explained to her. “Hoppe’s
oppin Broppinsloppey’s coppar.”

Recrossing to East Dorset in this late afternoon of his innocence,
“’Simmon” Behler indulged himself in a multiple indignation.
No doubt it was the Bon Ami affair I was being summoned home
to account for, though for some reason it had been Uncle Josh who
had telephoned the Moores’. Either Dad had talked with Paul Travers
before I’d confessed and been excused (unlikely, considering Mr. Trav-
ers’s surprise) or — it would be just like Dad! — notwithstanding that
courageous gesture, I had still to atone for not having made it last
night as directed. Given what had happened on the Island this after-
noon, the whole business seemed petty: ancient history. If Dad hadn’t
spoken with Paul Travers since this morning, I would say, “Maybe you
ought to speak with Mister Travers again.” If he had, and expected me
all the same to be contrite about last night, I would just say, “Seems
to me the books are closed on that particular business, Dad.”
I liked that expression, which I had in fact picked up from my
father himself: it suggested mature judgment and resolution. Between
Daisy and me, too, I guessed, the books were closed, or almost so.
She had amused herself with me because the older fellows she used to
run around with were off to war, all except Mullig the pig. Let her
piss his name on Island Point, along with Andy Travers’s! Mullig’s
insinuations of last night came back to me, along with the Silver
Foxes’ teasing earlier today. They must all know that as well as taking
him up on his bet, Daisy had let Andy Travers fuck her — he certainly
wouldn’t have kept it secret. Maybe she had let them all fuck her!
Picturing that as I turned onto Maple Street, I recalled belatedly
what Daisy had told me at the creek-bridge lift gates, and my nerves
thrilled: maybe she hadn’t let any of them do any such thing but had
spunkily taken them up on their challenge to pee her name in the sand

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 (I could imagine Crazy Daisy doing that) and had then been not only
spied upon but ganged up on and … forced.
Raped.
That supposition — more an illumination than a hypothesis —
along with that cruel, exciting word, clarified everything: Daisy’s in-
clination thereafter to a younger, more innocent and more manage-
able boyfriend, with whom she could set and maintain whatever limits
she pleased; her obvious “experience,” together with her disinclina-
tion to talk about it; her description of herself as one who didn’t
matter, a “lost cause”; her brief, involuntary tears at the prospect of
“going all the way” again, even though this time — for the first time —
willingly. Even her mercurial attitude toward my blank I.D. bracelet
made sense now: after what had happened to her, she felt herself a
nobody, unworthy to wear my bracelet, which nevertheless she trea-
sured and would not remove for our lovemaking even at my insistence.
Now my heart flooded with belated tenderness for my friend,
whom I had so insensitively wounded. Far from being closed, our
books were only beginning to be really opened. By the time I reached
home I was indignant for a different reason — at having to bother
with such a trifle as half a can of swiped Bon Ami before I could
somehow get through to Daisy and make a private apology that was
enormously more important than the public one made already to
Andy Travers’s father.

Behler found his family stunned with grief.
Both cars were parked out front, but there was nobody on the
screened porch. I allowed its door to slam shut behind me like a warn-
ing shot. Nobody in the living room, either, but as I considered
whether to seek out my summoners in the rear of the house or go on
upstairs and let them find me, Uncle Josh came in from the dining
room, coughing softly and rubbing his forehead with his fingertips.
“Terrible, Sy.” His tone was shocked, not censuring. With sudden
horror I wondered whether someone might just possibly have caught
sight of Daisy and me in our bower or even just swimming half naked
to the Island and reported what he or she had seen. “Telegram came.”
He put an arm around my shoulders and, still coughing into his hand,
ushered me kitchenward. The dreadful words did in fact shock, like a
small current of electricity: “They say young Joe’s missing.”

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On the dining-room sideboard was the birthday cake for which
Aunt Rachel had pinched our sugar rations since Flag Day. Beside it,
like a gaily wrapped reproach, lay the longish little gift-box I had dis-
dained to open at breakfast, along with an envelope that I knew con-
tained a U.S. Savings Bond from my aunt (inflation or no, she bought
them loyally and regularly) and a second package of a size with the first:
it was my aunt and uncle’s custom to give separate gifts. Though I
knew the thought was reprehensible — I could imagine Daisy Moore’s
reaction to it! — I couldn’t help a moment’s rueful wish that the War
Department telegram had arrived a day later.
Western Union yellow, it lay importantly open on the breakfast
table as in a scene from a war movie, its ripped envelope beside it
along with three coffee cups, two ashtrays, a book of matches, and
open packs of Camels and Chesterfields. For some reason (it would
be, I realized irrelevantly, because Aunt Rachel had scrubbed the
rubber-tile floor that morning) the table had been moved back into its
too-small nook; it was odd to see my father tucked in there beside the
wall phone, smoking and staring through the window into the side
yard. He must have noticed movement at the edge of his vision; he
looked around at me, his long face blank, and turned back to the
window.
“Sy Sy Sy!” Aunt Rachel crooned from across the kitchen, where
she was wiping her eyes with a dish towel and making more coffee.
Already weeping again, she hurried to hug me. “Your poor brother!”
Uncle Josh said thickly behind me, “Doggone war.”
I was as tall as my aunt already and would soon be taller. As she
hugged me she cried into my shoulder, “Some birthday present!,” and
the thought set her to sobbing. I patted her bony back and, as soon
as I could disengage myself, boldly picked up and read the telegram
for myself. Less terse than the classic ones in the movies at Schine’s
Bijou, it regretted to inform us not simply that Seaman 1st Class Jo-
seph Behler, Jr., was missing in action in the Pacific theater of opera-
tions but, more specifically, that the transport plane carrying him and
other members of his construction battalion and their equipment from
Pearl Harbor to an (unnamed) advanced base had failed to reach its
destination and was presumed down with all hands.
“He could be somewheres out there in a rubber raft,” Uncle Josh
supposed. Aunt Rachel said, “Oh dear God!”

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The phone rang. My uncle coughed and said, “I’ll get it.” Most
calls in our house were for Dad; he could hear telephone speech rather
better than face-to-face, but someone else usually took the call first.
This one was town-council business; Uncle Josh said firmly, “He can’t
come to the phone now, Fred. I’ll tell him you called,” and then spoke
up to Dad: “Fred Parsons! Not important!”
Dad nodded; ticked the ash off the cigarette burning in his long
fingers; drew out one of his white handkerchiefs and wiped his nose
but didn’t blow it.
“We should get the word out!” Aunt Rachel called to him. “Doctor
Norman can announce it in church tomorrow, and they can put it in
Monday’s paper!”
Dad nodded. To Uncle Josh, Aunt Rachel reckoned, “That means
people’ll stop by after services.” She consulted the electric wall clock.
“I better get myself to Howard Henry’s ’fore he closes.”
I volunteered to run the grocery errand on my bike, if she would
give me a list and money. “Bless his heart!” Aunt Rachel cried, and
she hugged me again, and again went off into tears, as if to do the
weeping for all of us. “Where’s my Joesikins?”

Young Behler himself remained as dry-eyed as his father.
Pressure built behind my eyes, however, when I wheeled out the
Silver King to fetch an extra pound of chicory-laced “victory coffee”
and two boxes of assorted Nabisco cookies from Howard Henry’s lit-
de grocery down by the creek. There weren’t sugar coupons enough
for another cake; since mine was undecorated except for its candles, I
volunteered it for tomorrow’s obligation, and after a bit more weep-
ing, Aunt Rachel agreed, blessing my heart as we smoothed chocolate
icing over the fourteen holes. Full of my new maturity, I requested
further that no happy birthday be sung at dinner, despite our agree-
ment that my brother would have wanted things to go on as usual.
That verb form constricted my throat and brought the pressure
behind my eyes again, as it had not at its last frequent usage in our
house, after Mother’s protracted dying in Dorset General. But I was
too busy being grave and brave to shed tears even when, following a
ham-steak and sweet-potato dinner for which none of us had any ap-
petite but which we all managed to put away, at the family’s behest I
solemnly opened my gifts: Aunt Rachel’s war bond, a black and gold

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Eversharp mechanical pencil from Uncle Josh (I had wanted a pen, if
anything in that line, but no matter: an explorer could use a mechani-
cal pencil, too, to make notes and such), and, from Dad and Joe Ju-
nior, a fine Omega wristwatch with a thin flat stainless-steel case and
an expansion band to match, wiry black hands including a sweep sec-
ond hand, and stark black tick-marks instead of numerals on its
brushed-steel dial. It was neither waterproof nor self-winding — I had
hoped it would be both — and the band would need to have several
links removed by Staub the Jeweler on Monday, but I liked it so much
that I wound it, set it, and put it on immediately, pushing it up my
forearm until it stayed.
Though only Aunt Rachel wept, we were all sniffling. When I
called out my thanks to him, Dad nodded and said, “Your brother got
that in his PX out there in San Diego.” He blew his nose. “Looks like
you’re it now, son.”
Through the heavy evening, after Aunt Rachel had telephoned our
minister and Uncle Josh the editor of the Dorset Daily Democrat and a
representative of the town council to pass along our news, we all sat
on the darkened porch — the two men in wicker chairs, my aunt and
I in the glider — reminiscing about Joe Junior and assuring ourselves
that he might already have been rescued. Lightning bugs pulsed in the
damp night air and car lights twinkled distantly on the Chaptico
bridge, occulted by its concrete railing posts. In the silver maples
along our sidewalk, cicadas rasped — “Calling for more hot weather,”
Mother used to say — and in the grass the higher-pitched crickets
sang continuously. Three glowing cigarette tips moved among our
voices and the agreeable, unaromatic smoke. From time to time a car
rustled to or from the hospital, and once the fire-company ambulance
purred by. Out on the river, I calculated, the tide would be moving in
again now, off the bay, from the interconnected oceans.
The theme of my family’s reminiscences, despite our professed op-
timism, was how tragically young my brother was to have been “cut
off.” But even more so than on the creek bridge last night it now
seemed to me that I myself had lived a long time already, a very long
time; and Joe Junior had lived six years longer yet and had been to
even more places. It was true, as Uncle Josh was recalling, that al-
though Betsy Birdsall had pretty clearly been sweet on my brother, he
had never gone steady with her or anyone else; nor had he, on the

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other hand, “played the field.” His only letters home, as far as we
knew, had been to us.
“He was in no hurry with the girls. Let ’em come to him!”
But my impression was that they had not, particularly. For the first
time in some while I remembered the familiar slap-slap and sour smell
of Joe Junior’s masturbations (my own semen, unless I stuck my nose
virtually into it, was odorless to me), and it occurred to me that there
was another side to his preferring the rough-and-ready camaraderie of
Andy Travers and Freddy Mulligan to the more fastidious company of
Betsy Birdsall: my brother had been shy with girls. Indeed, unless his
Navy buddies had taken him to whorehouses in Bainbridge or Nor-
folk or San Diego (the Silver Foxes had heard about such places), it
was possible that I had done things already that he had not — and
now never would.
In the light of this possibility, his side of the back bedroom —
when Dad, consoling himself with habit, went in from the porch to
hear the eleven-o’clock news, and Aunt Rachel kissed me good night
and wished me a happier birthday next year, and I went upstairs —
had a particularly boyish aspect. In our evening’s recollections both
sad and merry, my brother had already taken on a half heroic stature:
his bluff, often coarse insensitivity had become a reluctance to wear
on his sleeve the emotions that he in fact felt deeply. At the memory
of his sarcastic “razzing,” often relentless and seldom witty, we tsked
and said, “He really knew how to tease, didn’t he?” He seemed to us
to have been more than normally able, dependable, truthful, untrou-
blesome, stouthearted, loved and respected by his friends, admired
in the neighborhood. But as I made ready for bed among his not-
awfully-well-finished model airplanes, his rudimentary high-school
crafts-shop projects, the Boy Scout merit-badge sash (with a mere half
dozen badges on it) pinned over his headboard, his blue and gold
Dorset High pennant, I saw his other aspect: not especially bright or
accomplished or handsome or popular (though not the opposite of
those things, either); no athlete, a nondancer; he had been simply a
stolid, unexceptional boy, shy with girls — and perhaps even a bit jeal-
ous of his more supple younger brother.
At this view of him my eyes watered with sympathy, if not yet real
grief, for the first time since I had come home from River Boulevard.

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Lying in the humid dark beneath my serious war-zone maps and
airplane-spotter’s charts, I imagined Joe Junior out on that trackless
ocean in a life raft, maybe alone, maybe at night. No: it was daytime
out there now. Maybe in a storm, then, or in a menacing calm with
great sharks circling, ever less patiently nudging the soft tubes of his
half-deflated raft.
I began to rock myself toward the Boundary.
“’Simmon?”
The War Department telegram had supplanted, briefly, all my
thoughts of Daisy Moore, but when Uncle Josh had instructed that
town councilman to spread the word among Dad’s colleagues, it had
not displeased me to fancy, added to my friend’s other feelings for me,
her shocked pity for my bereavement. In the face of this adult tragedy
there was of course no longer any urgency in my wish to apologize to
her for my earlier inconsideration. Even so, I liked the idea of making
that apology, perhaps sometime tomorrow; to do so in such circum-
stances would demonstrate all the more effectively my unselfish regard
for her. I rocked.
“’Simmon!”
It really was Daisy, calling in a loud whisper from the unlighted
alley behind our house. And now a small handful of gravel rattled off
the window screen between Joe Junior’s bed and mine and down the
cedar shingles of the back-porch roof. Surprised, I hustled up and
raised the screen. In the partial moonlight I could just make out a
person and maybe a bicycle down there, beyond our privet hedge.
“Daise?”
She blinked a penlight briefly at my window. “Can you come out a
minute? I heard what happened.”
“Hold on.” I checked my new Omega — and found it nonlumines-
cent as well as nonwaterproof. But the big exhaust window fan in
Aunt Rachel’s sewing room had been turned on to ventilate the up-
stairs, a sign that everyone was abed. Much impressed by Daisy’s con-
cern — she couldn’t have been permitted to bike across town alone at
this hour — I hurried into my clothes and slipped quietly out by my
Escape Route: over the windowsill onto the back-porch shingles, into
the overhanging catalpa, down to the ground.
“Hey, ’Simmon, that’s neat.” Daisy had leaned Winston’s bike into the hedge. Now she wiped her gravel-throwing hand on the waist of

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her skirt — the same one she’d worn the night before to Schine’s Bi-
jou — and held it out to me. “Hi.”
I made to reply and was not displeased that for one reason or an-
other my voice failed me. I embraced her instead, sniffing and swal-
lowing. Daisy kissed my cheek and, briefly, my mouth before breaking
off our embrace to smack at her bare calf with the penlight.
“I’ve got bug stuff,” she whispered. “Let’s go where we can talk.”
From a pocket in her skirt she fetched and then applied one of the
new chemical insect repellents that were just appearing on the civilian
market. I had never used any — our family relied on punk sticks, ciga-
rette smoke, citronella candles, and screens — and for some reason
declined when she offered it to me. She had with her also a not-quite-
empty pack of her father’s Parliament cigarettes, which she occasion-
ally filched. It was exciting to set off down the dark alley with her,
hand in hand, sharing a cigarette and knowing that my friend — my
girlfriend — was waiting sympathetically for me to give voice to my
grief when and as I wished. I imagined myself too full of that grown-
up emotion to speak of it immediately; perhaps I was. Presently I
asked instead, “Is your mother okay?”
“She’s home,” Daisy said.
I thought that a terrific reply and squeezed her hand. My new
watch slid down my arm; I pushed it back up with my cigarette hand
and asked her how long she could stay out. In the near-total darkness
we were passing through, I felt more than saw her shrug.
“Sam’s got his hands full now, but he could notice I’m gone. Is
there somewhere we can sit?”
“Sure.” I was thinking of the hospital seawall, just a block away,
which I had prowled once before at night, alone, to try out my Escape
Route. But a more adventuresome idea occurred to me. We were ap-
proaching a streetlight; I halted us the way Daisy sometimes did, but
instead of clapping my brow and raising my eyes to heaven, I took
both of her hands and said, “Come up to my room.”
“’Sim-mon.” She frowned and smiled together. “This isn’t the time
for that!” But she kissed me again and let me press her against me. As
I did that, she said, “One of these days I’ll swipe some more of Sam’s
Sheiks. I’m sorry about your brother, Persimmon.”
We strolled riverward through lightning bugs, crickets, occasional mosquitoes. I reminded Daisy that Joe Junior was not dead for sure,

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only missing. They might have had to ditch the plane; he could be out
there on a raft somewhere. My friend did not reply; I realized that I
didn’t believe what I had just said and probably shouldn’t wish it: for
every such crash survivor who was eventually rescued, there must be
dozens for whom the “life raft” meant a lingering, horrible death in-
stead of a quick one. It occurred to me therefore to speak next of my
feeling a kind of responsibility for the family’s loss. I had enjoyed not
having my brother around, had even hoped he wouldn’t come home
after the war to stay, only to visit. It was almost as if I had wished him
dead — and now, almost certainly, he was.
Daisy stopped us. “’Sim-mon!” It was her Don’t pester me tone.
“That’s such baloney!”
I understood that it was, even before Daisy went on to explain that
she herself loved not having her sister Brinsley around always, and yet
at the same time she missed her like crazy. Why did I say stuff I didn’t
mean?
Instead of replying that I did so because I didn’t yet know what I
meant and therefore said things in hope of finding out, I walked on
silently for half a block, pretending to be cross with her. Maybe I was
cross with her. Pretty clearly, nothing else very interesting was going
to happen this night.
At the crumbling concrete seawall, against which the black Chap-
tico chuckled, Daisy stopped us again and sighed. “Walk me back,
Persimmon.”
I supposed she meant back to River Boulevard. I didn’t really want
to haul clear over there at this hour — ten before midnight, my street-
lit Omega said — but on the way back along our alley I remembered
the things I had wanted to ask about her and Andy Travers, and also
that I had intended to apologize for my afternoon surliness. And here
I was being surly again to the friend — my best friend, really, as well
as my girlfriend — who despite my childish behavior had come clear
across town in the middle of the night to console me. What was more,
when we rearrived at our hedge she said, “Good night, ’Simmon. I
really am sorry about your brother,” and went to retrieve her bicycle.
My eyes watered. “Daisy!” I caught her arm, and this time my
throat truly clutched up. I was barely able to squeak out through my
tears, “I’m such a jerk!”
Daisy hugged me while straddling Winston’s bike. “Sam says
people our age don’t know who they are yet.”

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 “You do!”
She liked that. Though she said “Hah!” she added, “I guess it’s
mainly boys Sam means.”
Having checked to make sure that our house was still dark, I in-
sisted now on walking her home, though Daisy pointed out that she
could get there sooner on the bike. We shared another Parliament,
passing it back and forth as we walked the Schwinn up empty Mary-
land Avenue, and our conversation now was easier. Without yet ques-
tioning her further, I apologized for having behaved badly at the creek
bridge that afternoon — “Yeah,” she affirmed, “that was dumb” —
and let her know how much I admired her personality (I didn’t yet
have the word character, much less integrity) as well as her good looks
and the rest.
“I’m a knockout, all right,” Daisy scoffed. “Blyeh!” But I could tell
she was pleased. As we passed Paul’s, long since closed and dark, I
went on to praise her openness, her nerve, her lack of phoniness, her
maturity: a term and concept I was getting to like.
“Don’t overdo it, ’Simmon.” But I felt myself to be on solid
ground. What I meant, for example, I declared, was things like her
concern for her brothers and sisters, as well as for her father and her
unfortunate mother.
“Ma’s still plenty scattered,” Daisy acknowledged.
At the creek bridge we laughed about the Bon Ami⁄Bab-O busi-
ness. “Hey,” I asked her, “did you put that can back in Virginia’s
closet?” and Daisy said, “Hell no: we left it on Island Point.” I was
reminded of our creekshore search, which I had initiated. On an im-
pulse as sure as that one, I said, “Let’s poke through the cemetery. I
want to say happy birthday to my sister.”
“’Sim-mon! You’re weird!”
Once before, swinging on Daisy’s porch, I had mentioned my still-
born twin. My present hunch was sound: despite the hour and the
possibility that her absence would be discovered, Daisy turned off
Maryland Avenue unhesitatingly with me, and onto the scruffy oyster-
shell road that ran behind the crab-and-oyster-processing plants to the
fork of Dorset and Island creeks. Julia was covering for her, she said.
I wondered how — and, for that matter, how discipline was adminis-tered in that easygoing household where none ever seemed to be
called for.

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A stringy cat prowled by. Farther on, as I took a turn at wheeling
the bicycle, Daisy clutched my arm at the sight and sound of a water
rat scuttling along the bulkhead. But it was as if we were our town’s
only living human inhabitants. I propped Winston’s bike against a low
chain-link fence and climbed over into the graveyard, where I was
jumped immediately by mosquitoes in the untrimmed grass. Daisy
handed me her sandals, the penlight, and then, from her skirt pocket,
the insect repellent and a short, slender wrapped package, the wrong
size for Sheiks. She tucked the hem of her skirt up into its waistband,
thrust her toes into the fence mesh, and swung herself over.
I tried some repellent on my face, arms, and ankles; as Daisy reap-
plied it to her legs, I reached over and smoothed some between her
thighs.
“’Sim-mon. …” But she did not bat my hand away. “Where’s your
kid sister?”
“Twin sister,” I reminded her. Even with the penlight it took me a
while to find the family plot; I hadn’t visited it for years, and we had
entered from the creek side instead of through the Cemetery Avenue
gate. There were no lights in the graveyard itself, but street lamps here
and there along the fence cast some small light inside, and the quarter
moon had risen. A slight warm breeze stirred; there was no dew.
Holding hands, we walked the weedy crushed-shell aisles among
tombstones and shrubbery until I found the old cedar I was looking
for and, nearby, the clump of hollies, grown now to small trees them-
selves. There was the old Behler headstone; there were the footstones
of the family (up to Mother, the first of us out in the new county
cemetery); and there was Baby Girl Behler, Born and Died July 1,
1930, whose nickname I used to conflate with the exotic name on
Schine’s marquee: the Spare Twin, who had gone first.
Her little mound and the next few near it were carpeted with dan-
delions. After wishing her aloud a happy fourteenth birthday, I sat
awhile on BeeGee’s stone and told Daisy how I used to narrate to
“Bijou” both my actual ongoing life and our imaginary adventures
together.
“You still do, sort of.”
We smoked the last of her cigarettes. Daisy showed me how to hold it backward, the lighted end cupped inside my hand so no one would

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see it. Brinsley had taught her that, and even how to smoke it with the
lit end in her mouth. Daisy was sitting on my uncle cpl. albert
wilhelm, 1891-1918, mustard-gassed in Belgium. So, I remarked:
now we had lost family in wars on opposite sides of the planet.
“Stupid stupid stupid,” Daisy sighed, sympathetically, and I real-
ized that it was at least incomprehensible, their fighting and dying in
wars half a world away, for reasons that Sam Moore claimed had as
much to do with “the flag following the dollar” as with what govern-
ments told people they were fighting for. Life itself, I went so far as
to suspect, was … not stupid, no, but scarcely comprehensible: Joe
Junior’s life and Uncle Albert’s, for sure, but the others’ lives, too —
Mother’s and Dad’s, Uncle Josh’s and Aunt Rachel’s, Daisy’s, even
mine. Yet the universe went on, and not in quietly measured ticks like
my new Omega, but in an unpunctuated streaming like the red sweep
second hand of the electric wall clock in our kitchen: relentless,
irreversible.
“Life’s weird, Daise!” It came out a sort of blurt, half choked, and
suddenly there were tears behind my eyes again.
My friend bent over me where I sat now on the dry grass, put her
hands on either side of my head, and kissed my hair. “It sure is that.”
I pressed my face into her skirt to stanch my eyes. Hoarsely into
that fabric and almost to my own surprise I said, “What’d Andy Trav-
ers do, rape you?”
Daisy’s thigh muscles tightened, and the grip of her hands in my
hair. “Andy Travers!” She pushed away from me but held on to my
head. “Persimmon, you’re loo-oo-ney!” Laughing now, she pushed
me backward onto BeeGee’s mound and piled atop me as if wrestling,
then rolled off onto her back. “Andy Travers! Blyeh!”
Just as suddenly she turned serious, raised herself on one elbow,
and declared, “That is it now, ’Simmon Behler, and I mean it.” To
enforce her decree she kissed my mouth so hard that my teeth hurt my
lips, and this time I closed my eyes tightly, opened her mouth some
with mine as I embraced her, and rolled with her into the dandelioned
trough between BeeGee’s mound and Uncle Albert’s. I prolonged the
kiss beyond any previous in our connection, cutting off our breaths
until my senses spun as if we were submerged or suspended, at the
Boundary.

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When finally Daisy pulled her mouth away, we lay huffing like
winded divers. Then she put her lips to my ear — to whisper some-
thing, I supposed, but instead she took the whole ear into her mouth
and moved her tongue-tip around inside. Almost frantically I tugged
at her blouse; she quickly unbuttoned it, and as I pawed and nuzzled
her she chuckled into my hair and asked, “What’ll your baby sister
think?”
Indeed, Daisy’s head and shoulders rested now on BeeGee’s
mound, her hair fanned out as on a floral pillowcase. I rose to my
knees to survey her: her blouse untucked and wide open, the front
hem of her skirt pushed halfway up her thighs. She tucked her hands
comfortably behind her head and smiled up at me: my birthday pres-
ent. I tackled her underpants.
She started up — “’Simmon, no!” — but I persisted. With a little
whine of protest she lay back again, lifted herself just a bit to let me
slide the panties down, and then accommodatingly bent one knee at a
time to help me get them over her feet. When I undid my belt and fly,
however, she quickly moved my hand from there to between her legs
and whispered, “Just your hand, honey.”
That endearment, unprecedented, did it, together with the fact that
Daisy’s crotch was decidedly wetter than I had ever felt it before: so
hotly liquid under and around my fingers that I wondered for a mo-
ment whether girls maybe sometimes peed from excitement. I would
not be stopped. Urgently — when with no deftness at all I struggled
my khakis and jockey shorts down over my tennis shoes — Daisy sat
up and pleaded, “Let me do you!” I permitted her to handle me for a
few moments but then firmly pressed her back against the little
mound, kissed her forehead, and moved onto her.
She closed her legs and eyes and rolled her head. “We don’t have
anything!”
“I know,” I said, though I was far from truly understanding. I
pinned her forearms lightly over her head with mine and humped
against her, covering her face and neck with kisses until at last she
stopped shaking her head. She exhaled a long breath, opened her eyes,
and relaxed her whole body at once. Regarding me levelly, she lifted
her knees high, spread them wide.
This second sexual penetration of my life was very different from
the first. I found Daisy’s slippery entrance for myself and drove in so

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forcefully that though my friend’s expression did not change nor her
level gaze falter, she grunted involuntarily at each thrust. Of these
there were no more than the number of my years, for Daisy’s unme-
diated sheath was so intensely more alive that despite my resolve to
withdraw at the critical moment, I could not. With a shiver, I shot
her full.
“Oh Jesus,” she sighed. But then with sure, slow movements under
me she drew my climax vertiginously out, right to that Boundary that
I had fancied Home Plate might even carry us beyond.
Whereupon the next wonder ensued. As my sweaty face pressed
into Daisy’s collarbone and my breath came gradually less hard, I no-
ticed that my birthday watch had slid loose to my wrist, and my spirit
flooded suddenly as if from nowhere with the truth of my brother’s
fate. Whatever his actual state of affairs, I saw my earlier life-raft fan-
tasies for what they were and all my day’s reactions to that fell telegram
as sentimental experiments, postures, attitudinizings, for which Joe
Junior had been only the occasion.
I believe that I had never before sobbed; sobbing was something
that characters in novels did, especially women characters. But as my
false grief was displaced by true, I found myself spontaneously racked
with sobs. Between them, to let Daisy know I wasn’t weeping at what
we’d done, I managed to croak out my brother’s name and, having
found my voice, added something no more specific than “Everything’s
so real!”
Her heels still pressed into the back of my thighs, Daisy held my
forehead against hers and praised and encouraged me. “Let it come,
Persimmon.” And as if, irrespective of my emotion’s source and na-
ture, its authenticity aroused her, she began moving under me again,
at first slowly and then not, exhaling hard at her own thrusts as she
had grunted before at mine. When I realized what was happening, I
tried to assist her with movements of my own; in the end Daisy rolled
us over and ground herself atop me quite as I had earlier atop her,
until with sounds that astonished me her passion peaked.
Side by side then against BeeGee’s mound we lay collecting our
breath, cooling down in our perspiration, until mosquitoes stirred us.
In her normal voice Daisy fretted, “I’m gonna get killed.” But we
dressed in no hurry, punctuating our movements with light kisses on

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each other’s mosquito bites. “That was dumb dumb dumb of us, Per-
simmon,” my friend declared at one point, “but it was terrific. The
best.” I quite believed her, and so much more mature a lover did I feel
myself to have become than the boy she had initiated just that after-
noon, I took it as a compliment that her range of comparison was
larger than mine, and kissed the nape of her neck instead of pestering
her on that subject. Walking her back through the deserted streets to
River Boulevard, I asked merely whether she thought we had made
her pregnant. To speak that word — for the first time in my life, prob-
ably — made me feel both grown-up and frightened.
“Not likely,” Daisy said. “I’m late already, but I’m never on time
like Julia. What’s done is done.”
I myself rather doubted that at barely fourteen I could actually
knock a girl up; it would be two more years before I could even get
a legal work permit and a driver’s license. In any case, I had meant
to … pull out, I told her, but hadn’t been able to when the time came.
“Sam says that’s one of Mother Nature’s little tricks,” Daisy said.
The reality of these things, which till now I had only heard of and
joked about with the Silver Foxes, awed me. What would she do, I
asked her, if worst came to worst? Daisy shrugged, as if not very in-
terested, then flashed me a sad sidelong smile. “We’ll name it after
your brother.”
We turned onto River Boulevard. At the sight of a dim front-
bedroom light in her house, Daisy said, “Uh-oh,” but then she decided
it was probably just her mother having a bad night. If Sam had no-
ticed her absence, he’d have had lights on in his study. All the same,
she thought she’d better go on alone from there. What time was it? I
consulted my upper left forearm. Feeling very mature, instead of
“Quarter till two” I said simply “Late,” and insisted on waiting across
the street from her house until she signaled me that all was well,
maybe by blinking her penlight from her bedroom window. Which
one was hers and Julia’s?
But Daisy said no, she’d be all right in any case. And if she wasn’t,
so what?
My heart surged with uncertain pity.
“Hey,” she said then, brightening. “I forgot the rest of your birth-
day present.” She bade me hold Winston’s bike while she fished out of

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

her skirt pocket that slender little package. “Good night, Bill Behler.”
She bussed my cheek. “Open it when you get home, okay?”

Despite the hour, Behler brooded to the foot of River Boulevard, to
the municipal wharf and waterfront park, to regard the night and sort
out his soul.
Beyond question, Daisy Moore was my girlfriend now. We were
lovers, maybe in serious trouble. I wanted to be with her a lot — every
day, perhaps — not only to explore the length and breadth of the ex-
otic country she had led me into, but to become closer to her than
even Julia was and to know all her secrets. I ought to be anxious, I
knew, that our lovemaking would be found out, and that whether or
not I had knocked Daisy up, her indignant parents might call me to
account before my father and themselves for a malfeasance beside
which my petty thievery from Paul’s was laughable. And this in the
rawest hour of my family’s grief, when I ought to have been stricken
by Joe Junior’s almost certain death! I could never in a million years
explain even to Aunt Rachel, never mind deaf Dad, that I had been
stricken, that it was with Daisy in the graveyard that I had learned true
loss, along with other grown-up things.
But though I felt some concern, even some guilt, what I felt mainly
was reverential excitement. A car rippled past on the bricks of the
boulevard; several others were parked, with lights out, in the gravel
lot down by the wharf, a favorite spot for Dorset lovers with cars and
spare gasoline. Only a few months ago I would have said that the
couples in those cars were smooching, or necking, not altogether sure
what that activity involved once it went beyond kissing and the guy’s
feeling up the girl. Now I understood quite well what they were do-
ing, and further, with chastened awe, that even some twenty-year-olds
would go less far this night than Daisy had taken me twice on my
fourteenth birthday. Some people went to their graves without ever
experiencing what I had experienced. Perhaps Uncle Al had, mustard-
gassed in Belgium; perhaps Joe Junior. Just last night I would have
felt like a child among these smoochers and neckers. Now I felt be-
nevolently more mature than they: more seasoned, further along.
Flecks of foam on the dark water moving westward past the bulk-
head told me that the tide on the Chaptico had turned again and was

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Somebody’s Second Voyage

now running out. Up-shore beyond the shipyard were the lights of
Dorset General, never dark; to the left of them, one car blinked its
way across the river bridge on some small-hours errand worth burning
scarce fuel for. Below the bridge, the channel buoys winked their vari-
ous rhythms, each regular but in shifting syncopation with the others.
I decided once and for all that there was no God, or if there turned
out to be one, that I had no interest in him. Though no one but myself
was watching, I shrugged my shoulders. A car started up and left the
parking lot, lights out until it reached the street. A small meteor slid
down the far sky across the river, over Avon County. Overhead, the
stars were breathtakingly clear; my Astronomy merit badge not far
behind me, I identified a dozen constellations and half a dozen indi-
vidual stars, most of the former named in Greek, the latter in Arabic.
The Milky Way was particularly brilliant, its black dust clouds sharply
defined. The physical universe, I acknowledged, was vast, intricate,
and full of marvels and mysteries in both directions, from atoms to
galaxies. But not miracles.
I decided to drop out of the Boy Scouts of America. My mosquito
bites from the cemetery itched like crazy. To test my self-control, I
stoically held off scratching them.
I decided to open Daisy’s present under the first streetlight I came
to. In the box were my I.D. bracelet and an Eversharp fountain pen
to match Uncle Josh’s mechanical pencil. My girlfriend had been in
secret touch with my family! I looked to see whether she’d had the
bracelet engraved, maybe with my name on one side and hers on the
other. But though just a while ago she had called me by a surprising
new name, the silver plate was still blank on both sides.
Uncertain as to what its return (in the form of a gift, together with
the pen) signified, I put the bracelet on my right wrist and headed
back up River Boulevard toward home. The Moores’ house, I was
relieved to see, was entirely dark now. I wondered whether Daisy was
asleep already or lying awake in her bed, maybe whispering to green-
eyed Julia about what we had done. It was exciting to imagine her
telling her rapt sister everything, and equally exciting, and at least as
easy, to imagine her telling Julia nothing much at all. Would I ever
fathom my deep friend Daisy Moore?

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I decided that Simon William Behler would not be a famous  “explorer.” Fancying that I would be was no more than a habit I had
gotten into after reading Richard Halliburton; I hadn’t really meant
it for quite a while.
On the creek bridge I decided that Simon William Behler would
maybe not even be my name. I didn’t know who I was, who I would
be. However (idly scratching after all), I decided to become not only
“somebody” but somehow … immortal.

134

Six Interludes

1.

Though their version of his tale had been briefer than the one here
given, when Somebody finished it the listeners were afidget. This one
stroked his lips between thumb and forefinger; that one conferred
with his neighbor in turbaned undertone, shrugging eyebrows, turn-
ing up palms. Some frowned into their cups as if prospecting for fur-
ther gems; others shifted upon their cushions and looked to their host
for cue. The elder merchant at Sindbad’s left hand had nodded off in
midvoyage. At its end the silence woke him; he beamed benevolently
at the company and declared adversity to be a schoolmaster charged
by Allah with man’s improvement, and tales of voyaging to be that
master’s lesson-book. Yasmin smiled at her saffron lap. Sindbad the
Sailor scratched his saffron-wound head and leaned back against the
empty tub behind him.
“If I may, sir,” suddenly said Ibn al-Hamra, and with a turn of
Sindbad’s hand he was given leave to speak.
“Though God has seen fit to favor my enterprises,” he declared
carminely to the company, “I do not forget that I am a mere merchant

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

of humble origin, not a man of learning and culture. Yet in narratives
of voyaging, as in other matters, I know what I like, and whereas our
host’s compelling and exemplary tale of his second expedition quite
fills that bill, I must say that our visitor’s, in my estimation, falls
short.”
He wet his red lips, already glistening with his eloquence. “The
high ground of traditional realism, brothers, is where I stand! Give
me familiar, substantial stuff: rocs and rhinoceri, ifrits and genies and
flying carpets, such as we all drank in with our mothers’ milk and shall
drink — Inshallah! — till our final swallow. Let no outlander imagine
that such crazed fabrications as machines that mark the hour or roll
themselves down the road will ever take the place of our homely Is-
lamic realism, the very capital of narrative — from which, if I may say
so, all interest is generated.”
Several nodded assent, none more vigorously than the speaker him-
self, who then asked, “And may not the same be said for a story’s
action? Speak to us from our everyday experience: shipwreck and sole-
survivorhood, the retrieval of diamonds by means of mutton-sides and
giant eagles, the artful deployment of turbans for aerial transport, buz-
zard dispersal, shore-to-ship signaling, and suicide (Allah forfend) as
necessary. Above all, sing the loss of fortunes and their fortuitous re-
doubling: the very stuff of story! Do not attempt to distract us from
these ground-verities with such profitless sideshows as human copu-
lation, which is no more agreeable to hear about in detail than are
our visitor’s other narrative concerns: urination, masturbation, and —
your pardon, Sayyid Sindbad — regurgitation.”
“Blyeh!” suddenly went Yasmin, in a creditable imitation of “Daisy
Moore.”
“As to that,” her father put in, “whatever my brother Still-Strand-
ed’s less plausible and tasteful flights, he has got that noise right. Just
hearing his young concubine make that sound was enough to put me
back in my nest of foul and giant vultures, which I had hoped never
to revisit: a commendable touch of realism among so much unbridled
fancy.”
“Granted,” Ibn al-Hamra said at once, his florid cheeks perspiring.
“Or should we say, rather, it would have been commendable if, like your
hapless own excursion into filth, it had been a detour fraught with
moral instruction. For what we successful merchants of Baghdad most

136

Six Interludes

prize in any tale, after realism, is edification. A story without a moral
is like a meal without mint tea. Consider, gentlemen: our host’s first
two voyages yielded four pious lessons each, a projectable return of
two dozen moral gems from his peregrinations to date. But from his
self-styled namesake, what have we gained? His so-called voyages have
fetched us nowhere, at greater length and slower pace than life itself.
In the time it takes him to mark one boyish birthday, we listeners age
seven years. We shall expire of inanition and old age before he ever
reaches his Serendib, not to mention our Baghdad and the gracious
house of Sindbad the Sailor.
“Moreover, he will not deign to knit the ravels of his plot. The
pressing question of that young tart’s maidenhead, for example, is no-
wise resolved.” He looked candidly at Yasmin before continuing. “I
propose, sirs, that we accept it as a given that this stranger finds him-
self among us in the City of Peace rather than in his barbarous native
land, and that we brook no further lies about how he got from there
to here. He has battened on our hospitality. We have generously heard
him out. Let him go his way now, back to his self-abuse and other
impious diversions, such as desecrating his own family’s grave-plot like
a vulture fouling its nest. As for ourselves, let us get on with a voyage
more profitable than any story: to Serendib!”
In one plump pink hand he raised his empty wine cup. But though
many nodded approval of his speech, no cups joined his except that of
Kuzia Fakan, off in a corner, and she quickly lowered hers when she
saw that she was alone. By way of acknowledging that neither the
criticism nor the proposal was unworthy of consideration, Sindbad
the Sailor cocked his head. Then — after a long glance at Kuzia
Fakan — he looked to still-stranded Somebody for reply, as did blush-
ing Yasmin and all the others except her prospective fiancé. Still
flushed by his own rhetoric, Ibn al-Hamra sipped vigorously at his
empty wine cup and recomposed himself on his cushion like an agi-
tated rooster after crowing.
“Every teller,” ours presently declared, “tells at his audience’s plea-
sure. I would be most pleased if my story pleased all who heard it.
Failing that, I shall be satisfied if it satisfies my host and any other
whose heart is open to it and its teller. Failing that, I’ll tell on all the
same while I have one listener for whom I care. But hear me, friends:
when I wake from this dream of Baghdad to find myself once more

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beached and bleached, with none but the tireless tide to talk to, nev-
ertheless I will hearse and rehearse the six voyages that left me
stranded here, for it is only by retracement of his course that the lost
navigator can hope to find his bearings.
“Of which six voyages, gentlemen and ladies, the third jumps not
another seven years but four times seven, to the voyager’s forty-second
birthday: a leap in time that should gratify my impatient critic. And it
fetched me not to an island virgin but to a virgin island, where I not
only reapproached the Boundary you’ve heard me speak of — be-
tween that world of my stories and this of their telling — but for the
first time (if only for some moments) crossed it.”
“By Allah,” said Sindbad the Sailor, “we will not let our brother go
till we’ve heard that story.” As if to the company at large then he
added, “Let any who has heard his fill not join tomorrow’s feast, when
we twin Sindbads will tell of our third voyages. My own, at least, is as
rich in moral lessons as in island monsters, but it has not a virgin in
it. Yasmin.”
Her face the hue more of last night’s djellaba than of tonight’s,
his daughter went the wine-rounds, but this time saved for last Ibn
al-Hamra’s expectant cup. Then with a small salaam she took his
cup-holding right hand in her left, as if to make a joint toast. He
blinked, crimsoned, smiled. Having thus steadied his cup, however,
Yasmin carefully poured the red wine half in, half out of it, onto the
belly of his white caftan, which looked now like a bridal bedsheet or
a shambles apron.
“Kuzia Fakan,” Sindbad called at once, not urgently. Yasmin made
another salaam to Ibn al-Hamra and yet another to her father, be-
fore whom she set down the now empty decanter. Then, with Jayda
following after, she left the consternated company as Kuzia Fakan,
veiled and caftaned, came forward with her two associates. Scarcely
looking up at her, Sindbad gestured toward the offending stain. Kuzia
Fakan snapped her fingers three times at the musicians; they set to
with pipe and tambourine, and she danced the host’s amends to Ibn
al-Hamra. Stepping right onto the low table, after introductory pir-
ouettes among the empty plates and bowls she removed her black
head-scarf, flourished it at each member of the company in turn as she
shook loose her dark hair, then spread the scarf like a silk napkin over

138

Six Interludes

Ibn’s wine-stain. Next, to an insinuating melody, she pulled her silk-
sleeved arms in through the wide sleeves of her caftan and moved her
hands invisibly about, all the while swaying and turning before the
guests as kitchen servants cleared the table for her dance. At length,
her arms resleeved, she reached down the caftan’s open neck and
slowly drew forth, as if from between her breasts, a short, bead-
spangled vest or jumper, which she had managed adroitly to unfasten
and remove. This too she brandished around the approving table, es-
pecially at the two Sindbads, before draping it over Ibn’s lap.
Now the rhythm accelerated. Kuzia Fakan thrust her hands this
time through side-slits in her caftan and once again busied herself in-
visibly, in the neighborhood of her waist, accompanying her business
with thrusts and swivels of her generous hips. From one of the side-
slits she then drew out a silken sash, from the other a large, brightly
patterned wraparound worn like a skirt or decorative apron over her
long embroidered trousers. One garment in each hand, she swirled
and capered, snapping the sash (to the company’s amusement) directly
at Still-Stranded’s face as she passed by him, and then laid these, too,
in the lap of the beaming Ibn al-Hamra.
The music slowed. Back into their caftan-sleeves went Kuzia’s
silken arms and moved here and there out of sight about her upper
body. Never pausing in her dance, she raised the neck of her caftan
briefly high enough to hide her head. When she slipped it down again,
her forearms reemerged bare: one hand held the sheer long-sleeved
blouse she had wriggled out of, the other a cupped and sequined hal-
ter that she wore beneath it. Depositing both on Ibn’s pile, she drew
back her shoulders, thrust forth her chest at each diner in turn, and
shook her unharnessed breasts: deferentially at Sindbad the Sailor,
contemptuously at Somebody the Still-Stranded, and most vigorously
at Ibn al-Hamra, to make it clear that under her overgarment she was
now topless.
“God is great!” exclaimed the elder merchant on Sindbad’s left. No
one disagreed. Now the rhythm ceased; the tambourinist sustained a
beatless sizzle, over which the piper wailed a sinuous, minor-keyed
cadenza while Kuzia Fakan, her hands busy in the caftan’s side-slits,
loosed her embroidered trousers at the waist and then, her hands
clasped above her head, lowered them by slow gyrations of her hips

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

until she could step out of them and with one bare foot pitch them
over to Ibn al-Hamra. The piper continued her improvisation — half
impudent challenge, half wild lament — and Kuzia worked invisibly
but suggestively upon her pelvis as she danced frontally before each
diner in turn. The exception was Still-Stranded, at whom for the com-
pany’s entertainment she thrust her busy backside.
“In all His aspects,” declared undismayed Somebody, “Allah be
praised.”
She ended her dance not before Ibn al-Hamra but before old Sind-
bad, vibrating her hips to the piper’s trill until with a crash of tambou-
rine her ultimate underthing, little more than a small network of
beads, dropped to her ankles. With prehensile toes she deftly footed it
to her hand; then she snatched off her veil and, with one of those final
intimate garments in each hand, raised her arms and danced trium-
phantly, at once stripped and entirely covered, in the table’s center. At
the music’s close, bowing low, she presented veil and bead-string to
her lord. But Sindbad took her wrist instead and transferred the pre-
sentation to Ibn al-Hamra, to whom he said, “Be kind enough to carry
this Bedou’s costume to her quarters, and she will expunge that stain
on our hospitality.” He then bade the applauding company good
night until Voyage Three and — as Kuzia Fakan haughtily ushered
florid Ibn from the banquet hall — brought a final knowing smile to
his guests’ faces by assigning as Somebody’s bedroom guide not one
of the other attractive woman attendants (the piper or the tambou-
rinist, say) but the page Salim. That saucy fellow promptly queened it
around the table in mimicry of Kuzia Fakan: he twitched his hips,
pirouetted on his toes, fumbled under the sash of his trousers as if to
undo his drawers, minced backward from the hall, and beckoned se-
ductively for our narrator to follow.
Nodding calm good-night to host and guests, Somebody did in
fact exit with his mocking usher. Once out of the room, however, he
said, “Enough, Salim. I know my way.”
“What way is that, Sayyid? Kuzia Fakan tells us that none of her
ways is yours, and yet you make sheep-eyes at Yasmin.”
“Good night, Salim.”
But the young man stuck to him as to a tourist in the souk. “You
prefer to ride the camel?”

140

Six Interludes

 “No camel, Salim.”
“Fountain of youth? Shower of gold?”
“Sleep well, Salim.”
The page followed him around the dry courtyard and up the stairs
to the guest quarters, trotting before him, skipping backward, catch-
ing at his sleeve. “We all think your stories are mad.”
“You are free to.”
“Yet they make it plain that you understand why God hung men’s
tails in front. Do you use yours only for shooing flies?”
“Also for flogging the impudent. Shoo, Salim.”
“You are a fool to set yourself against Ibn al-Hamra! One day he’ll
be the richest man in Baghdad.”
“Allah’s will be done.”
“He’s a camel-driver, too, that one. Kuzia will be too sore to dance
tomorrow.”
“You speak from experience.”
“You don’t believe me? I could tell you about Ibn al-Hamra.”
“I am not asking.”
“When he weds your Miss High-and-Mighty, he’ll skewer her like
a lamb on the spit. She’ll think she’s back with the Qeshmi pirates.”
“Enough of that.”
“Aha! I think you are a spy for her former boyfriend, Prince Jabal.”
“Thoughts are free.”
Surprisingly then, the page said, “Listen, Sayyid: you may depend
on me. Use me as you will.”
“You would be disloyal to your master?”
“Allah forbid! But he has as little use for me these days as for Jayda
and Kuzia Fakan.”
“For whom has he use, then?” They had reached Somebody’s door.
“Never mind. Leave me now, Salim.”
“You are a spy,” the page said. “If not for Prince Jabal’s vizier, then
for Caliph Haroun al-Rashid himself. I know all the secrets of this
house, Sayyid. What things I could tell you!”
“Good night, fellow.”
But Salim pushed past into the room and turned to face him. “Eu-
nuch and pig-eating Christian!”
His curses were clearly experimental. When Somebody seized him duly by the back of his shirt, as if by the scruff of his neck, he laughed

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

and said, “Have mercy!” And he was merrier yet when Still-Stranded
forced him chest-forward over the lid of a large trunk near the bed.
Far from resisting, he quickly slipped his trouser-sash and, unlike
dancing Kuzia, in one swift motion presented his bare buttocks.
“Woe!” he wailed. “I am a naughty camel who needs the whip!”
What he felt instead, however — and not where he expected, but
edgewise against his scrotum — was a fish-knife given Somebody by
Mustafa the Master Navigator, its blade so many times resharpened
that it was reduced to a keen-edged sliver. Merry no longer, Salim
cried “Allah spare me!” and wondrously compressed what he had been
spreading. “It was Kuzia said you’re a foreskinned faggot!”
“You will now be a circumcised eunuch.”
“No offense, Sayyid! For God’s sake, mount the camel instead of
gelding him!”
“Stop shivering, Salim, or you’ll geld yourself. What does Sindbad
think to learn by sending you to me?”
“Aiee! Careful there! He wonders what the whole house wonders:
who you are, where you came from, what you’re after. He worries
that Haroun will learn the truth about his last voyage and his next.
Lessim, master! Ease off!”
“What is that truth?”
But wide-eyed Salim declared that he could not say, even on pain
of castration, for he knew no more than that Sindbad’s public account
of his voyage to Serendib was either not true or not the whole truth,
and that behind the official project of Voyage Seven was some other,
secret plan. These things he knew, as did Jayda and Kuzia Fakan, from
long tenure in the household and even longer practice at keeping his
ears and eyes, for example, open. But though Ibn al-Hamra (to name
only one) would pay well to know more of these matters, the facts
were known only to Sayyid Sindbad — and perhaps to his daughter.
“Speak of her quickly, or you are eggless.”
“Aooo!” Already the page was grinning again, though nervously.
“She is a miracle of fortitude and chastity! A jewel! A treasure!”
“One. Two.”
“Owow! What do you want to hear?”
“The truth about Miss High-and-Mighty.”

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Six Interludes

 “Yes! Such airs, when everybody knows she was zabbed from stem-
head to sternpost by the pirate Sahim al-Layl! Wuff! Lessim!”
“You don’t believe Captain Sahim kept his side of the ransom
bargain?”
“Fuff! But long before the pirates porked her, she had opened her
legs for her daddy’s pet, right under her daddy’s nose. Stop!”
“No. You mean a certain young sailor called Umar al-Yom, who
grew up in this house?”
“Why ask, if you already know? Umar took what she offered and
got what he deserved.”
“So you say. And this is the virgin for whom Ibn al-Hamra
dickers?”
“Fah! He knows what he’s trading for. As late as last month, while
her father was out recouping the ransom, Jayda and I sneaked one of
Yasmin’s boyfriends right into the harem, rolled up in a rug! There
they went at it day and night as if the household knew nothing, and
when Sindbad reached Basra we rugged the young buck back out
again.”
“Was that this fellow Umar al-Yom?” asked Somebody, who hap-
pened to know that Salim had not been an accomplice in the episode.
“No, man: Sindbad got rid of Umar years ago, on Voyage Five!
This was Captain Sahim al-Layl himself! He’d given her such a taste
for Qeshmi sausage that she had to have more.”
“I see. And has Sindbad got wind of this?”
Salim turned up his palms. “Who knows what that old man knows?
When I offered to tell him just what he had bought with his ransom
money, he put his dagger where yours is now, and the whole story
slipped my mind.”
Said relieved Somebody, “It seems clear to me that Mistress Yasmin
is anybody’s for the taking, and that you and Jayda are her pimps.”
“Ah, well, now. …”
“I want a piece of her.”
“Sayyid!”
“As you value these peahen’s eggs of yours, Salim, take me to her
now.”
Such a thing was unthinkable, the page protested. No man but
Sayyid Sindbad himself — or a rare guest honored by him with the privilege, such as Ibn al-Hamra just now — could enter the women’s

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

quarters without bringing the house down about his shoulders. Even
Ibn would be taken not to the heart of the harem but to an interme-
diate space on the order of Somebody’s guest apartment, where Kuzia
Fakan would do her hospitable work. …
“Yet you say you smuggled the pirate Sahim al-Layl directly to Yas-
min’s bed. Do the same for me.”
“I lied,” the young man confessed. The pirate captain likewise, he
said, had been taken to a private room of Yasmin’s just outside the
harem itself, overlooking the courtyard. And it had not been he and
Jayda who had toted him there, but Jayda and Kuzia Fakan’s tam-
bourinist, Fatmah Awad, who had subsequently mentioned to Kuzia
the unusual weight of Mistress Yasmin’s new rug, whereupon Kuzia,
when Yasmin declared the room off-limits to anyone except herself
and Jayda, had speculated to Salim and to others (but not to Sindbad,
from whose favor she feared herself to be already slipping) as to what
and who might have been inside that rug.
“Up with your pants and lead me to that room,” Somebody de-
manded, “and you will learn who was there before. But if you take me
to the wrong place,” he added, “you may say good-bye to that camel’s
nipple God gave you to wet your drawers with.” To our man’s consid-
erable relief, the retrousered page admitted now that he could not say
for certain even which room it was that Yasmin’s lover, presumably
her late ravisher, had allegedly been smuggled into during her father’s
sixth voyage. There were so many rooms in Sayyid Sindbad’s house!
He could, however, point out which room it was that Kuzia Fakan
said Fatmah Awad said she and Jayda had set the rolled rug nearest
the door of.
Pleased as Somebody would have been to revisit that sanctum of
happy memory, the excursion was doubly unnecessary: he had learned
what he had hoped to learn, and when nevertheless he ordered Salim
to lead away, and set out with him along the obscure balcony that led
from the courtyard past his door and others to he knew not where, he
saw a shrouded figure coming toward them, carrying a small lamp.
“Jayda,” the page whispered. “We’re fucked.” Somebody thrilled to
see then behind the first figure a second, making her way to him as
she had the night before. At sight of the approachers, she stopped before they could make out even the color of her djellaba, much less
her face. Salim, too, stopped still, but Jayda came on.

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Six Interludes

 “Mother of Yasmin!” Somebody saluted her (using the respectful
title Umm), and he tucked away his fish-knife. “Sindbad the Still-
Stranded greets you and your young lady and wishes a word with you
both in this page’s presence.”
The duenna drew her veil closer to her face and raised the oil lamp
to inspect the caller. At Salim she frowned her eyebrows; the page
pouted and shrugged his face. Yasmin gathered her djellaba-hood over
her nose and mouth. Turning to her, Jayda nodded toward a curtained
door, the nearest to hand, and followed her inside.
“You have her, Sayyid!” Salim whispered triumphantly. “Ten dir-
hams to Jayda and a little something for your guide, and I wish you a
white night!”
He held out his open palm. Somebody seized his wrist and pulled
him into the room, which was handsomely carpeted but otherwise
unfurnished. The two women, lamp-lit, stood by. Yasmin pushed back
her saffron hood and smiled questioningly.
“This fellow,” Somebody declared, “awaits his payment for deliv-
ering me to Sindbad’s daughter for the night.”
“Salim!” Yasmin redrew her hood. Jayda scowled over her veil.
“Sayyid insisted,” the page said.
Affirmed Somebody, “I did. I asked to see that famous room he
told me of, where Mistress Yasmin hid her lover Sahim al-Layl for the
month of Sha’ban while her father sailed out for reimbursement and
revenge. Is this it, Salim?”
“Ask her.” The page cocked his head Yasmin ward.
“Sahim al-Layl!” cried appalled Yasmin. “What a thing to say,
Salim!”
“That rug wasn’t empty,” Salim grumbled. “Fatmah Awad says she
strained her back carrying it upstairs and then turned her ankle carry-
ing it back down again, just before Ramadan.”
Yasmin closed her eyes. “Sahim al-Layl!”
“Now,” Somebody went on, “our friend here suggests that ten dir-
hams will persuade Madame Jayda to leave her responsibilities in my
hands for the night.”
For the first time in this interlude, Yasmin’s guardian broke her silence: “Ten dirhams!” she scolded the page. “See if I don’t wring
your unwashed neck!”

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Though still held fast by the wrist, Salim shrank from her. “I swear
by Allah I said fifteen!”
“Sahim al-Layl!” Yasmin moaned again, her hand to her forehead.
“Fifteen dirhams!” Jayda said contemptuously. “For the whole
night!”
“Say what you will,” the page insisted, “somebody was in that rug.
The whole house knows it, except Sayyid Sindbad.”
Yasmin hid her face in Jayda’s shoulder and murmured in the lan-
guage they used between themselves. Jayda glanced at Somebody over
her veil.
“Enough of this,” he said, and he instructed Salim, “Tell the whole
house, beginning with Fatmah Awad and Kuzia Fakan and the camel-
driver Ibn al-Hamra, that somebody was in that rug, both going and
coming. But that somebody was neither Captain Sahim al-Layl nor
any lover of Mistress Yasmin. On the contrary: it was an agent of the
Prince of Believers himself, commissioned to protect the honor of
Sindbad’s daughter.”
The two women regarded each other.
“That agent,” Somebody asserted, “was with her on the bride-ship
Zahir when its captain surrendered to the Qeshmi pirates. He was
with her on the pirate ship Shaitan to help Sahim al-Layl protect her
from his crew while her ransom was being negotiated. He was with
her in this house during Sindbad’s sixth voyage, to make certain that
no foxes raided the hen-coop in the farmer’s absence. He is with her
now.”
Redrawing his fish-knife and reseizing the great-eyed page by the
back of his shirt, Somebody went on: “To the most serene Caliph
Haroun al-Rashid, it is of no concern whether Mistress Yasmin be-
stows her maidenhead upon Prince Jabal of Sohar or Sahim al-Layl or
Umar al-Yom or Omar Khayyam. She may give it to the Man in the
Moon for all the caliph cares. But out of respect for her and for his
loyal subject Sindbad, who has brought back six several fortunes to
the realm, he commissioned me to capon any cock who offers to take
before Mistress Yasmin offers to give. I have left a trail of such upstart
zabbs, separated from their owners, from Baghdad to Qeshm to Basra
and back. You will now carry yours to Ibn al-Hamra in a little sandal-

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Six Interludes

wood casket designed for that purpose, to let him know that what he
bargains for is more than he bargains for.”
Whatever the rough edges of this improvisation, there were none
on the blade of the fileting knife of the master navigator Mustafa,
which flashed in Jayda’s lamplight like an outsized scalpel.
“I can’t bear to watch yet another of these operations,” said quick
Yasmin. “I’ll just step outside. Where do we keep those little sandal-
wood caskets, Jayda?”
“Where else,” smoothly replied her overseer, “but under my bed?”
“Go with her,” Somebody bade Jayda, “in case she meets the camel-
driver coming from his stable. This fellow’s backside will serve as his
little casket, for he has fucked himself.”
“Ai yi!” Salim wailed. “Don’t let him do it, Mother!”
“Pfwah,” Jayda scoffed. “For all the son you’ve been to me, I should
take Sayyid’s knife to you myself. But Allah help us,” she declared to
surprised Somebody, “a mother is a mother, and though this scamp is
neither cock nor hen, he’s all I have in that line. Let him keep what he
was born with, please, in the place where Allah saw fit to put it. Maybe
one day he’ll learn to use it as God intended.”
Released, the page moved a safe distance off but did not run. To
Jayda, Somebody said, “Your pardon, Mother. Who knew that Umm
Yasmin was really Umm Salim?” He consulted Yasmin’s face but could
not see it clearly in the shadows near the doorway, where she had
paused.
“She carries on like Yasmin’s mother, though she isn’t,” Salim com-
plained, his fright forgotten. “Her own flesh and blood she has no
use for.”
“Because from the hour it was weaned it had no use for me,” Jayda
replied at once. “If I had given you a thrashing every time you de-
served one for being a wretched son, perhaps you would have learned
that you are my son. But I always pitied him and made excuses,” she
explained to Somebody, “and came between him and his just punish-
ment, as I’ve done again tonight. For that he has become my punish-
ment. Go along,” she ordered Salim, “before I change my mind and
borrow Sayyid’s fish-knife. This house will be no worse for having one
less zabb in it.”
The page turned his behind to them in the doorway, farted swiftly
and roundly one two three, in turn at Yasmin, at his mother, and at

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Somebody the Still-Stranded, and hurried out. Yasmin hooded her
amusement. Lamp in hand, Jayda stepped after him, grumbling that
his father would be told.
“My father!” we heard Salim scoff; he farted again and snickered
off. The room was altogether dark.

2.

Toward where he’d last seen Yasmin standing, our man said quietly,
“You never mentioned that Jayda is Salim’s mother.”
“Magboot,” she replied, just as quietly but from elsewhere in the
heavy darkness. “That’s right.”
He moved over the carpeting toward her voice. “No doubt there
are other things as well that you haven’t mentioned.”
“No doubt,” she granted, speaking almost in a whisper from yet a
different place. “If you and I had done nothing but talk through the
month of Sha’ban, we could never have told each other our whole
stories, let alone Jayda’s.”
As she spoke, he moved. “We did talk, Yasmin, didn’t we?”
Her reply, when it came, came from back where she had stood at
first, and she seemed to be moving as she spoke: “We did.” Down by
the carpet, over toward the doorway, there was a rustling, almost a
jingling. “But we did not talk all the time.”
“Who is Salim’s father, then?”
Suddenly close behind him, she said, “Ask Jayda.” But when he
turned and reached out, she was gone.
“Why are you moving about? Where are you?”
“Over here in the graveyard, waiting for Beel Bailer to find me.”
“Bus, Yasmin. It’s so dark in here I can’t even find myself.”
“Leave that to your Day-zee, once you’ve found her.”

So we moved and paused, listening for each other’s breath, soft foot-
falls, the rustle of clothing. “I have found your dear slippers,” the man
said presently, and the woman: “Let yours lie atop them.”
A bit later, after stumbling to his knees over it: “Your djellaba.”
“It longs for your caftan to cover it. Make a little mound of them,
like BeeGee’s grave.” In a whisper then: “Good night, Beel Bailer.”
“Don’t call me that. Where are you now?”

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“Oppovopper hoppere. Oppacropposs yoppour Boppoundoppary.”
Marveling, he stalked her, half kneeling on the carpet to keep his
balance as he swept the darkness with his arms and speaking no more
to signal his position. There was that muffled jingle: some jewelry that
sounded as she stepped. Over there, after a near catch, her faster
breath: his hand had grazed a bare hip. In a corner, sure enough, he
felt a small pile of silken, perfumed underthings; he added to it his
own, of linen, and heard either the woman or her jewelry chuckle from
the room’s dark center. Moving thereward, he heard her not move off.
On the scented mound he’d made he found her and hers, and was by
her found.
“Simon.”
Through our blind and ardent business then, that jingling was now
up behind his head, now at the small of his back; he understood in
general what it was even before Jayda returned with the lamp. Lips to
his ear, Yasmin identified the approaching footsteps. “Simon” paused,
would disconnect us. But she spurred him back with those ankle
bracelets to his joyful work — “Yallah, Beel! Yallah!” — until her urg-
ings rose to a muezzin-call of satisfaction: “Tamoun, tamoun! Oh, ju-
mail, Simon! Shabash!”
When we had quieted, we heard the door open slightly and saw
(“Simon” did, at least, and moved to cover us with some free part of
his caftan but was clasped fast) the lit lamp handed just inside and set
on the floor, then a water-basin and a towel, and finally a chamberpot,
and the door closed. The man raised himself off top, the better to
kneel beside and resavor what he had just light enough now to survey:
Yasmin’s body, dusky, recumbent, perfect; naked but for silver brace-
lets on both slim ankles; arms overhead, as Daisy Moore’s had been in
1944, and relaxed upon our mounded clothes; breasts ampler than
skinny Daisy’s, lifted by her upraised arms; knees bent slightly and
thighs still parted, like the lips between, from our coupling.
“Jumail indeed,” he said, and he placed one hand just under her
navel. “Beautiful.”
She turned her smile his way before opening her eyes. “Jayda?”
In our month of Sha’ban, he had gotten almost used to this. Veiled
and caftaned, the older woman stepped on hearing this call into the
room, brought over the basin and towel, and stood impassively by
while first Yasmin sponged and toweled her lover and then he her.

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From time to time the duenna would take the sponge for rinsing in
the scented water or refold the towel dry side out; when it was Yas-
min’s turn to be washed, Jayda sternly brushed her hair as Simon
sponged her skin. All through these ablutions, as was her habit, Yas-
min talked: sometimes to him, sometimes about him, to Jayda, either
in standard Arabic or in their private language. Sex not infrequently
wound Sindbad’s daughter up, after first pleasurably unwinding her.
Had there ever been, she would demand of Jayda, a softer, silkier
little Beel-Beel than the one she was now toweling, which just minutes
past had stood like a minaret pointing her to Paradise? Really, she
believed she loved it as much when it was Sayyid Tom-Thumb as when
it rose and swelled like an uncorked genie — which, to be sure, it did
less often and less awesomely for her, given Simon’s age, than it must
have done long ago and far away for her lucky sister Day-zee. And she
was Daisy’s sister, no question about it: at once her older sister (inas-
much as Daisy on her mound had been sixteen, and Yasmin on ours
was nearly thirty) and her younger (inasmuch as Beel-Beel, then four-
teen, was now fifty-plus). How she would have enjoyed to touch him
back then and see him spring up again and again like a jack-in-the-
box! Day-zee, yes: Yasmin understood her, and that business of the
ankle bracelet, better than “Bill Behler” had. All the same, she did not
quite see how Simon’s first and second “Voyages” — which had in-
volved no vessel except Daisy Moore’s little oasis (wâhât Day-zee) and
had brought Simon William Behler no closer to Baghdad than he’d
been before — bore upon what we were calling “our plan.” It seemed
to her that he had accomplished more to our purpose in five minutes
with the inspired fabrication that he had sent Salim to spread about
the house than he had in two whole evenings with tales of his stillborn
sister and of Yasmin’s new sisters Day-zee and Jul-ya, so beloved of
their father. … “Ai, Jayda! Not so hard!”
“Critics everywhere,” Simon sighed, and he dabbed dry the damp
undersides of her breasts. “What had your father’s first two voyages to
do with Serendib? They fetched him to his third, which fetched him
to his fourth. Without six voyages there can be no seventh, and I could
not be fifty if I had never been fourteen.”
That was, Yasmin replied, not quite an answer. Rather, it was an
answer for critics of the redbeard sort, with wine-splotched bellies,

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Six Interludes

but not for the listener who makes love to her teller and would know
his tales as she knows his body. Would he please scratch her, lightly,
back here? “Not you, Jayda: him. What was that business of Beel Bail-
er’s scratching, for example, at the story’s end? I am not a camel-driver
in search of moral lessons, but I like to know what’s going on.”
“Yes. Well.” While Jayda finished brushing her charge’s hair, Simon
lightly scratched her bare shoulder blades and explained both the
French words bon ami and the hatchling trademark and slogan of the
American cleansing powder so named.
“Enough,” Yasmin said: “Noppow oppl oppundopperstoppand.”
Her green eyes flashed approval and sought it as well. She caught one
scratching hand and kissed it: “Enough of that, too. My teacher’s re-
ward,” she declared, “is to watch his student turn wine into water, if
it would please him to do so.”
Extending one hand to him, she rose from our mounded clothing
and led him doorward to the chamberpot, upon which she managed
to perch herself like an allegory of grace. More than once, in the wax-
ing of our honeymonth, she had pestered him to let her oversee those
functions more private than sex, as if, after the sore indignities we had
earlier suffered together aboard the pirate ship Shaitan, it was a solace
to do such things by choice, as an act of love; and he had learned that
at least in some humors it aroused her for him to reciprocate that
curiosity. He hunkered before her; she toyed with his hair while dain-
tily tinkling into the pot. Did Simon suppose she could write her
name on the beach, as her sister Day-zee had spunkily attempted to
do until those crude boys interrupted her? “A virgin wâhât,” she ac-
knowledged, stroking herself now with his hand, “is not the best writ-
ing instrument in Islam.”
“That may be,” her friend concurred. “But I believe that Sindbad’s
daughter could write the whole Kitab Alf Laylah Wah Laylah on the
Chaptico rivershore if she set her mind to it — that Book of a Thou-
sand Nights and a Night that I’ve told you of.”
She glanced to see whether she was being teased and must surely
have seen, even in our poor light, that she was but being admired.
Nevertheless (perhaps at the echo, in Alf Laylah, of al-Layl) her ani-
mation vanished, as sometimes it did. All business now, she rose from
the pot, turned her splendrous back to him, and patted herself dry

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with a cloth supplied at once by Jayda, whom then she asked for the
gemstone that Simon had presented to her from his wine cup at din-
ner. She wished to return it to him.
“It was a gift,” her lover protested.
Still hind-to, she said, “So shall this be.” From somewhere in the
folds of her clothing Jayda fished forth a small wooden box, of a size
with those we had invented to frighten the page Salim. As best Simon
could see from behind her, Yasmin took from it the stone and, press-
ing it into her belly, said “Oppalsoppo moppy voppeil.” Looking sur-
prised but not puzzled, Jayda unhesitatingly provided it, and Yasmin
donned it. Then — wearing only that veil, the ankle bracelets, and the
naveled jewel — she turned to face her lover like Daisy Moore in that
island bower and said seriously, “Happy birthday, dear Simon. Come
and have now what is yours.”
“Shabash!” Jayda cheered: the first time Simon had witnessed that
woman merry. She even added, chuckling, “Woppell doppone, daugh-
ter!” All the same, she announced then, she was going to put out the
lamp now and lie down in the doorway to sleep. She did not doubt
that we two could prospect for diamonds in the dark.

3.

Prospect we did, but in virtual vain: to this second occasion, “Beel-
Beel” would not rise. Our wordless work cannot have made sleep easy
for the third among us, though this was by no means her first such
dark audition. As in the business of the chamberpot, Yasmin was in-
different to Jayda’s attendance on our intimacies. She would even re-
port to her from time to time in course of them: “Allah help me,
Jayda! I am impaled!” or, in instances like this: “What am I lacking,
little mother? Nothing you’ve taught me makes Sayyid Tom-Thumb
stand!”
To such outcries the older woman made no response. Tonight,
amid our busy sounds of alternative recourse, Simon thought he heard
her snore. He would not retrieve the stone from Yasmin’s navel; prone
atop him, pinning his arms and legs with hers, she did her best to
transfer it directly into his without manual mediation, until we both
were stifling laughter. Her other ministrations reroused Simon’s ap-
petite but perversely shrank Sayyid Et Cetera. “I’ll tell him a bedtime

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Six Interludes

story,” Yasmin decided, wordlessly but not soundlessly. “You tell her
one, too, and never mind if Jayda overhears it.”
These twin narrations, sentenceless, achieved in time their denoue-
ment. Breath and pulse recalmed, the tellers dozed damp-faced each
upon the listener’s thigh. Then, after who knows how long a lull,
clearly across the darkness Jayda’s voice spoke into our sleep:
“To the handsome and the privileged,” she declared, as though ad-
dressing the night itself, “who can scarcely imagine being otherwise,
it appears that their elders choose old age, for reasons as mysterious as
their choosing to be ill or ugly. Servants faithful or impudent, louse-
ridden beggars, wine-bellied fools, even munificent but crotchety pa-
triarchs — to the handsome and the privileged it appears that all those
around them have chosen, or have been assigned by Allah, the role of
minor characters in the story of which they, the handsome and the
privileged, are heroes. Sayyid Simon’s father chose to be deaf-eared, or
anyhow accepted that condition; his Aunt Rachel chose to be the child-
less, good-hearted housekeeper; his mother and baby sister and older
brother all chose fortuitously to die, and young Day-zee to lie down on
her back and open her legs to that one and this one — all in further-
ance of the hero’s first and second voyages. ‘Now I make love,’ young
Mistress Yasmin announces to me; ‘now I make water. Now I suffer
indignities at the hands of him who calls himself Sahim al-Layl; now
I rejoice in the handsome arms of the outlander Sayyid Simon.’ And
all the while Jayda, a minor character, stands faithfully by.”
Surprised indeed, we waited to hear more.
“Who is this creature Jayda,” Jayda went on, “who silently hands
out towels and empties chamberpots? It now appears that she has a
son. Can it be that that same son had a father? Impossible, think the
handsome and the privileged, for that would imply that somewhere
under her black and ageless garments this Jayda has a wâhât of her
own, or at any rate had one once upon a time, and that some man
somewhere once actually coveted that oasis enough to pitch his tent
there! Surely then it must have been some hole-in-corner affair, of no
interest to the handsome and the privileged, whose very navels glint
with diamonds; whose couplings are the stuff of poetry; whose idlest
pissing must be music to Allah’s ears. Some itinerant tinker or passing
camel-driver must have caught old Jayda one night between the
kitchen garden and the buttery, and first had and then gone his way.

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

When her time came on her, no doubt she dropped his spawn behind
a wild oleander on the riverbank and went back to laundering her
master’s turbans. And while she did not go so far as to deny the little
wretch her teat, it is not to be expected that she much cared whether
he suckled or starved, for it was her incomparable privilege to be a
minor character in the life story of one who truly mattered: she was
nursemaid and governess to the pearl of Baghdad.
“Well well well: it so happens that who Allah’s great story is really
all about is none other than this same Jayda, the Cairene. Cairene
Jayda is its hero, and all the others, from milady Yasmin to Haroun al-
Rashid himself, are but accessory characters of more or less impor-
tance. The history of the world from Adam and Eve to the birth of
Jayda the Cairene is no more than that story’s prologue. Its first chap-
ter is her happy girlhood in Cairo, as the daughter of a loving and
pious goldsmith who married late in life and had but one child, her-
self, the apple of his eye, her mother alas having died not long after
bearing her. For all his grief, so grateful was her father to Allah for
blessing him with Jayda the Cairene that when she reached fourteen
years of age he sold his shop and with his precious and already sur-
passingly beautiful daughter set out to make the hajj, the holy pilgrim-
age to Mecca. In the company of some like-minded fellow goldsmiths
we traveled overland from the sacred Nile, which I have never laid eyes
upon since, to the city of Suez, where we joined a shipload of pilgrims
bound down the Red Sea for the holy city.
“And there ends Chapter One of the Story of Jayda the Jewel of
Cairo, for like certain other vessels we have heard of, this one got no
farther down the coast than Râs Banâs, near the Tropic of Cancer,
before it was waylaid by two boatloads of fishermen-pirates from the
nearby islands of Zabargad, who regularly netted such traffic along
with their mullets and pilchards. These gentlemen promptly threw
to the sharks any crewman who made the least show of resistance,
robbed the pilgrims of all their goods, took with them a number of
the younger women passengers for their future amusement, and bid
the others a safe and glorious hajj.
“First among their prizes, need I say, was young Jayda the Cairene,
whom the chief of the fishermen-pirates reserved for himself the mo-
ment she was fetched forth with the other young women hiding be-
lowdecks. When my father saw me led away by that fierce and filthy

154
Six Interludes

fellow, my hair and clothing already disheveled, as if in token of what
was to come, he set up a grand howl against Allah for His indifference
to pious pilgrims. His caterwaul so offended my abductors, who were
themselves devout, that instead of raping their young captives on the
deck of their fishing boats then and there, before the eyes of parents
and husbands, as was their custom, they paused a moment to slit my
father’s throat for his blasphemies and dispense him to the sharks.
“Then, when the grapnels had been released and the pirates raised
sail for home port, they zabbed their captives all together on the open
decks of their vessels, among the herring and the sardines and the
booty taken from the pilgrims, who, for grief at the sight and sound
of what was happening to their wives and daughters, tore their own
hair and clothing as the pirates tore ours. Thus was every maid among
us rudely deflowered except Jayda the Cairene, not (God knows!) be-
cause my lord and master spared me, but because, unknown to him,
the half dozen of his crew who had found me hiding with my girl-
friends in the hold had been no less struck than he by my beauty and
had taken turns upon me and me alone, three at a time — one here,
one here, one here, a thing I had never in my innocence imagined
possible — before they brought the lot of us on deck.
“And so it went now with the others, turn and turn about between
the starboard and the larboard watches, one group tending sheets and
tiller while the other took its pleasure, all the way from Râs Banâs to
Geziret Zabargad, until every fisherman-pirate had had his way with
each of the captives except the captain’s favorite, Jayda the Cairene. I
was likewise spared, after the first round, the unpleasantness of being
humped on deck in company with the rest; like a certain young and
privileged lady in this room, I was sequestered for the captain’s plea-
sure in his cabin. But this evil fishing-smack was no sleek and ample
Shaitan, nor was its skipper a once-handsome devil like Sayyid Cap-
tain We-Know-Whom. What woman will deny that rape is rape in
whatever circumstances? And yet here were no soft berths and clean
linens and perfumed baths and gentle orders to do this and that. The
place was cramped and dark and stank of fish; the man was bestial,
besotted, foul of tongue and fouler yet of breath and hair and skin, as
crusted with the slime and scales of fish as if he had become a creature
of the deep himself. Master Sindbad the Sailor tells us that after his
sojourn with those giant vultures it took him weeks of bathing to

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

purge himself of their smell. But this second chapter in the story of
Jayda the Cairene took place more than thirty years ago, and I cannot
to this hour distinguish the natural fragrance of my poor wâhât from
the fishy infusions of its first befouler.
“Chapter Two ends in Geziret Zabargad, those islands in a sea
made redder with the blood of cut throats and the ruptured hymens
of the faithful. A number of my sisters, when they could bear no more,
put an end to their shame by leaping over the side. Of the rest, some
joined their predecessors as the fishermen’s slaveys, cleaning their
catch and bearing their spawn for the rest of their lives. Others were
sold off to be sailors’ whores in small ports up and down the coast.
But the two or three beauties among us, including Jayda the Cairene,
though by then we had been violated uncountable times in every ori-
fice and attitude, were refitted as virgins to be sold in the white-slave
market in Jiddah, the port nearest the holy city that my father had set
out for with his maiden daughter.
“Chapter Three of Milord Allah’s great novel tells how its heroine,
Jayda the Virgin Cairene, reached Mecca after all and was redeflow-
ered not a stone’s throw from the holy Kaaba by her new owner, a
rich and pious old Yemenite with a face like a basking crocodile’s and
a taste for girls the age of his eldest son’s daughter. How he effected
penetration of Jayda the Cairene I shall pass over, remarking only that
the spectacle of her hymenal blood so excited him that Chapter Three
is the briefest in her story.
“His eldest son, who now took possession of her along with the
rest of his late father’s goods, was a reptile of another color. It had
cost the old man dearly to buy me in Jiddah; his son resented this
expenditure of money that otherwise would have passed to him. The
hajj completed, he determined to exact his lost patrimony out of my
arse on the overland trek back to Yemen. This he did with compound
interest: a sore and busy chapter, at the end of which, his daughter
being jealous, I was resold to a Somalian trader in such wares.
“Chapter Five takes Jayda the Cairene ever eastward underneath a
series of owners, through the Gulf of Aden and across the Arabian Sea
to the Malabar Coast of Al Hind itself. By the time I reached that
fabled shore, three years had passed since my setting out from Cairo
with my father. I had been mounted upward of a thousand times, by
more men than I could remember, and every time a rape, inasmuch as

156
Six Interludes

even when I initiated the thing myself (as for one reason or another I
often did), I did so under the general duress of a condition into which
I had been forced. I had by then three times been gotten with child
by who knew whom and thrice been ungotten, to free me for further
sport. I knew backward and forward the naughty pleasures of men
both forward and backward, of all ages, from a dozen countries. I
could fuck either human sex in four principal languages and two dia-
lects, and at certain private exhibitions had been mounted as well by
a very large guard dog, a small but ardent donkey, and a particularly
lascivious chimpanzee, from whom I contracted a social disease. Yet
so skillful were my Indian owners in Calicut that for my seventeenth
birthday they cured my monkey-pox, outfitted me with a new maid-
enhead guaranteed to fool any but another dealer, and sold me to a
certain wealthy merchant trader en route home to Baghdad after his
harrowing but immensely profitable third voyage, of which we shall
once more hear the tale tomorrow night.
“My expectation was that Jayda the Cairene’s new sayyid would
have a go at his virgin concubine at once, as he had been long at sea
and twice stranded among monsters of the nonhuman sort. Inasmuch
as he was in those days handsome as well as rich and did not appear
to be a monster himself, I put on my most maidenly demeanor and
awaited my third defloration. But throughout our long passage up the
Bahr Larwi and the Bahr Faris to Basra, though he smiled and spoke
kindly to me, he showed no interest whatever in plumbing my refresh-
ened wâhât. Nor was this his only peculiarity: he would not sleep
belowdecks in the comfortable quarters in which he had installed me
(almost as elegant as the pirate Sahim al-Layl’s quarters on Shaitan,
and a palace compared to certain other cuddies and cabins I had
known) but preferred instead to bed down in an empty wooden tub
on deck, lest this vessel sink under him as others had. And even sleep-
ing in that tub he would not remove his turban, which he claimed was
more precious to him than gold.
“In consequence of his not forcing me, and because of all my own-
ers he was the handsomest, richest, and gentlest, despite these oddities
of his behavior I began to desire him — my first experience of that
emotion, which made me feel like a maiden indeed — so much so that
one afternoon when he visited me belowdecks to tell me once again
the story of his three voyages, I made plain my readiness to visit him

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

that night in his capacious tub, if such was his pleasure, and there
present him with the maidenhead he had bought and paid for.
“‘Allah forfend!’ he said, with a merry laugh that I can hear yet. ‘I
know the merchants of Malabar from three several voyages’ worth of
experience with them. When they offer an Egyptian virgin pilgrim for
sale in Beypore or Calicut, I take it for granted that she has been
pilgrimed stem to stern from the Giza Pyramids to the Isle of Seren-
dib, by donkeys, monkeys, monks, and men. She has borne four bas-
tards, three of them human, been cured of two poxes, and learned to
hump all the higher sexes and species in their native tongue while
calculating currency exchanges and baking pigeon pie. That is why I
bought you.’
“His recitation made me weep, perhaps for the first time since I
had been brought by the fishermen-pirates to Geziret Zabargad. I
wept both for pity at that catalogue of my degradation and for fear of
what must be in store for me at the hands of a man who had paid my
virgin-price in full knowledge of what he was buying. All the same, he
had not spoken his unkind words in an unkind voice, and he stanched
my tears with one of the spare turbans he carried like handkerchiefs in
every pocket. I therefore presently took heart, told him my story from
first to last, and set the record straight on the few points where he had
overstated it. Unveiling my wâhât for his inspection, I assured him in
particular that I was altogether free of the one pox I had ever caught
(from that lying and lubricious ape in Djibouti), and I confessed that
I could never get the pastry right on my pastillas, even when being
violated by no more than one man at a time.
“Never mind, said Sayyid Sindbad the Sailor; he would buy himself
a proper pastry chef in Baghdad when he set up his new household
there. It was his intention, he then declared, to take a proper wife and
to sire children upon her by way of curing a certain pox of his own:
his itch for merchant-voyaging, which three times out of three had
wrecked or stranded him and had come within an isba of costing him
his life more times than I had ever pretended rapture to earn my keep.
Because he himself had been handled so roughly by fate and had be-
come of necessity so wily in the world’s ways, he meant to marry as
innocent and trusting a bride as he could find in the City of Peace and
to savor her innocence and trust as he would savor the other comforts
of his house after the hardships of voyaging. However, as he himself

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trusted no one besides himself, he wanted a particular sort of spy in
his harem: a young maidservant of good family, apparently as chaste
as his bride but actually as canny as himself, to serve and befriend her
and become her confidante while secretly reporting to him her every
word and movement.
“Even as I wondered, without asking, why he would trust a for-
eigner and stranger like myself with that equivocal mission, he pro-
ceeded after all to a visual and manual examination of my private parts,
as deft and thorough as any physician but more gentle, all the while
praising their beauty and mine, marveling that we had come through
such ordeals with so little apparent damage. He promised that in his
house no man would touch without my consent what he was touching
just then for verification purposes only; that despite my youth he
would make me chief among his womenservants if I gave him ample
evidence of my trustworthiness and general ability; and that when
enough time had passed to prove both my loyalty and my freedom
from disease (for not even he, who had survived captivity on Ape
Island in Voyage Three, knew all the ins and outs of monkey-pox), he
would be pleased to accept what I had graciously offered to deliver to
his tub. There was a piquancy, in his opinion, to the breaching of the
revirginated — especially those of the Malabar Coast — that was lost
on the credulous but prized by the connoisseur. Did I not agree?
“With my entire heart I did, as I would have agreed just then to
anything that man proposed — and there begins Chapter Six of Al-
lah’s great tale of Jayda the Cairene, for the purpose of telling which
He created this world. To the young and the privileged it may appear
to be no more than an interlude in their own story, an anecdote over-
heard in the dark between any two of their epic couplings. In fact,
however, it happens to be the central episode in the main line of the
plot, and the longest as well, for it began nearly thirty years ago and
is not finished yet: I mean the chapter of Jayda the Cairene’s love for
Sayyid Sindbad the Sailor.
“But now its heroine is weary of her own narrative and will sleep.”
Throughout this extended interlude, Yasmin’s hand squeezed Si-
mon’s, and his hers, each of us bidding the other to hold still and listen
and at the same time signaling that we were indeed all attention, as-
tonishment (at least Simon was, knowing nothing of Jayda’s past ex-
cept that she had been bought as a young woman to serve Sindbad’s

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

first wife and that she had raised his daughter after Yasmin’s mother
died), and the particular sympathy that the rather less victimized may
feel for the rather more. At its end we moved wordlessly from our
original position into each other’s arms. After a silent embrace, Yasmin
said quietly into the room, “I am not so very young anymore, my dear
Jayda. But privileged I remain, and high among those privileges has
been your guardianship my life long.”
If her nursemaid heard her, she gave no sign.
“As for me,” Simon added softly, resting our clasped hands be-
tween his thighs, “I am no longer young at all, but privileged I am
and have been, extraordinarily. And high among those privileges,
Umm Salim, has been to hear Allah’s tale of Jayda the Cairene, up to
its sixth chapter, from the main character herself. May the Author
grant that we hear more another night.”
Whether or not she heard, Jayda presently answered us with the
heavy breath of sleep. Soon enough we slept, too: the intermittent
sleep of lovers reminded of desire by every stir of each other’s bodies,
though not necessarily stirred to desire by each reminder. Toward
night’s end we dreamed separate versions of that second coupling we
had not managed while awake: “Beel-Beel” (in need now of the cham-
berpot) stood firm; once again (in her dream) Yasmin cried joyfully,
“Jayda! I am impaled!,” and her lover (in Simon’s dream) thought he
heard presently his lover’s climax-call, “Jumail!”
But it was the muezzin himself, sleep’s enemy, summoning us all
to wake.

4.

Though he could scarcely credit his own reality, let alone God’s, still-
stranded Somebody made his way back along night-cool corridors to
his own room as if he were one more of the faithful en route to morn-
ing prayer. Hunkered dimly on his threshold was Salim, adrowse; at
the touch of a hand on his shoulder, the page woke instantly, regis-
tered who had roused him, and — once on his feet — trusted aloud
that Mistress Yasmin’s maidenhead remained safe from harm.
Our man fished forth his fileting knife. More wary than fearful,
Salim salaamed.

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Six Interludes

“Sayyid Sindbad is at his prayers,” he reported from just out of range. “He invites you to breakfast with him in the courtyard when
you’ve finished your own devotions.” He flashed the pretty eyes in his
ferret face. “I’ll tell him you’ve done so.”
“You’ll tell him I have yet to begin to pray,” Somebody said, truth-
fully. “But I’ll meet him soon.”
He then washed the love-smells off himself, emptied his bladder,
cleaned his teeth and trimmed his beard, donned a fresh caftan from
the guest wardrobe in his room, and went to the central courtyard.
There under date palms sat his host, as on the morning before, but
bright-gold-turbaned now and at his ease in the great dry tub, from
over the edge of which, with Salim’s assistance, he fed leafy branches
to the camel standing by.
“Come aboard, Brother Sindbad!” he called, and he tapped the
tub’s rim. “May Allah have blessed you with a night as undisturbed
as mine.”
Salim grinned and handed his master another oleander branch.
“My night’s ship safely reached the port of morning,” Somebody
replied. “May the same be true for all your household fleet, however
they navigated through the dark.” He climbed as bidden over the tub’s
side and seated himself opposite Sindbad the Sailor. Between them
were plates of bread and dried dates, bowls of yoghurt, and a pot of
tea, which Salim now poured with a flourish. For some minutes fur-
ther, as the two Sindbads sipped and ate, their conversation took its
shape as did the tub, from the space inside. Speaking of navigation,
declared the elder Sindbad, he had named his camel Mustafa after his
erstwhile navigator; for just as this could find his way across the track-
less desert from oasis to oasis, so that one, in his prime, could steer
the good ship Zahir unerringly from landfall to landfall across the
trackless sea. Or almost unerringly.
“To that same Mustafa mu-Allim,” Somebody now acknowledged,
“I happen to owe my life several times over. Most recently, it was he
who found me stranded not long ago near Basra and chowdered me
back to health, and at my insistence directed me here.”
“I guessed as much,” said Sindbad. “And before that?”
“Another story, Sayyid, for another time.”
“In a lifetime of navigation,” Sindbad mused, “our faithful Mustafa
made but one grave error in his reckoning — and that, he would have
us believe, was not truly his.”

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

 “It was not,” Somebody affirmed. “I will swear to it.”
“You? I suppose you were there?”
“My fifth voyage, Brother: three evenings hence. I was there, who
now am here.”
“And why, exactly, are you here?”
“Yesterday’s reason is still today’s.”
Sindbad spat a date-pit overside. “Yesterday, sir, is the day neither
of us was born, and today we’re yet another day older.” He tipped his
gold turban pageward. “You have told Salim a story even more pre-
posterous than the ones you tell at dinner.”
“And Salim,” Somebody said smoothly, “has dutifully passed it on.
May the accuracy of his reportage match its promptness.”
Said Sindbad, “I know how to read this fellow. The tale you told
him is not true.”
Somebody pursed his mouth and nodded, as if at his tea. “If it is
not, then you had better accept your prospective son-in-law’s proposal
before he raises his percentage of Voyage Seven from fifteen to
twenty.”
“Twenty percent! Leave us, Salim.”
The page grinned, bowed, and turned away with a twitch of his
backside. Sindbad sniffed and said to Somebody, “Now, then, Brother:
who might you be?”
With his host’s indulgence, our man responded, he had addressed
that very question for two evenings running and would again tonight
and yet again tomorrow, as he had done for some five decades, with
indifferent success. “I am one,” he concluded, “who has learned who
he is not, and who nightly discovers who others are not.”
“Enough of that,” said Sindbad. “Unless you’ve begun to believe
your own fabrications, you know as well as I that one thing you’re not
is an agent of Haroun al-Rashid, commissioned to protect my daugh-
ter’s virginity. In the first place, the caliph takes no interest in such
matters. In the second, there is nothing to protect, nor was there even
before Mustafa made the single error of his career and led my daugh-
ter afoul of Him-Whom-We-Do-Not-Mention.”
“To me personally,” Somebody replied, “that is of small concern: if
it is not Mistress Yasmin’s maidenhead that I protect with this navi-
gational instrument” — he showed Sindbad Mustafa’s fileting knife —
“then it is her honor, and that has not been sullied since Zahir’s cap-

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Six Interludes

tain (not its navigator) betrayed your trust. If the Commander of the
Faithful has been misled on this point, however, it may be that he has
been misled on others as well. Your most recent voyage —”
“It quite accomplished its objectives,” Sindbad said shortly,
“whereas your project in my house, so far as I can see, has made no
headway whatever. Nobody understands your stories.”
Somebody the Still-Stranded smiled. “Unless my own navigation
is in error, that project will take a more evident step forward this eve-
ning. But it, too, in my judgment, has quite accomplished its objec-
tives so far. Ibn al-Hamra no more believes Salim’s report than you
do, but he is not certain that it’s false or that something like it may
not be true. Very likely he suspects that you and I are in league, as in
a sense we are. Very likely he smells a trick, but he’s not sure what
trick.”
“No more am I,” admitted Sindbad. “Suppose he breaks off the
marriage negotiations?”
“Then he will receive his due share of Serendib Limited, which is
nothing, and likewise of your daughter.”
“My daughter.” Sindbad spat another date-pit, but as it were re-
flectively, not disdainfully, and looked Somebody straight in the face.
“In the month of Sha’ban, while I was homeward bound from Seren-
dib with my latest fortune, where were you?”
“Still stranded,” Somebody said, “but no longer in the hut of Mus-
tafa mu-Allim. I was here, Sayyid.” He pointed up to one of the elabo-
rately grilled upper-level windows overlooking the court. “Right up
there, to be exact, making sure that what you had ransomed at such
cost maintained its value in your absence. Ask Yasmin.”
Grumbled Sindbad the Sailor, “I have long since done so,” and
there ended both the interview and this interlude.

5.

Pleasurably exhausted by his night and not at all displeased by his early
morning, through that forenoon Somebody slept, gratefully alone in
his room: a respite from search and subterfuge, delight and despair
alike. Though he dreamed hard dreams and true — brother found,
son lost, love spent and soured — he awoke refreshed from where he
had become the successful travel journalist known as “Baylor” to

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

wherewhoever he currently was: still-stranded “Simon” in the house
and world of Sindbad, called the Sailor.
For his own bemusement then he fetched forth what passed in
these parts for pen and paper and synopsized what he had told last
evening as his Second Voyage, with Daisy Moore, to the then edge of
his understanding. Were you to slip into his room right now, dear
dead Daisy, as he scribbles this line (he wrote), would he know you
any better? Or has your lean, mishandled person become no more
than memories imaged, images rendered, a body of words?
Moving only his neversharp quill, he then leapt three decades: over
two wars and how many killed millions more? Over “Korea,” over
“Vietnam,” from the domestic fuel rationing of “World War II” to the
verge of the Arab oil embargo consequent upon the “Yom Kippur
War” of “1973”; from (westward the course of time’s empire!) a Swiss-
made wristwatch, through an American, to a Japanese. …
To none. Here where he was stranded out of time, his misgivings
were suspended at the point above by a sudden fanfare of tambourine.
Half-veiled, lithe, wiry as a brown-limbed Daisy Moore, Kuzia Fakan’s
percussive colleague snapped and sizzled through his doorway, spun
to a barefoot halt, and made a slow salaam, all the while darting dark
eyes about room and occupant with the bright curiosity of one who
had lately heard from the page Salim.
“Fatmah Awad,” Somebody acknowledged.
Holding her position, she replied, “Sayyid Simon.”
“Where did you hear that name?”
“On the tearful tongue of Mistress Yasmin,” the tambourinist de-
clared, “when I helped Jayda rug you out of here one month ago.”
She stood at ease now and looked him over. “Who could have imag-
ined a woman weeping so over the death of her eunuch bodyguard?
For so she described the burden in that Bokhara. But Kuzia tells us
she has seen for a fact that you’re neither a dead man nor a eunuch —
only a lover of boys, she decided, and now Salim tells us you’re not
that, either.”
“In this house,” Somebody said, “if I decline to eat a goat’s eyeball,
I’m called a vegetarian. What’s your errand, Fatmah Awad?”
“Her errand,” another woman called impatiently from the corridor,
“is to bring you Kuzia Fakan’s apologies for having insulted you in

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Six Interludes

one or two ways and to request a few minutes’ talk. But when tam-
bourinists take solos, they lose the beat.”
Somebody invited the dancer in and offered her a cushion near his
own. Dressed in the same caftan under which she had performed the
night before, Kuzia Fakan ouched herself down.
“This one,” Fatmah Awad announced to her, “just compared your
wâhât to a goat’s eyeball.”
Somebody sighed, but weary Kuzia waved away both sigh and
slander. “If it was a goat’s eyeball yesterday, it is the gouged-out socket
today. Ai, what a Tatar! Stand watch, would you, Fatmah darling?”
“I’ve done nothing else lately,” the tambourinist complained, but
she obligingly moved doorward.
“Then I owe you the same,” Kuzia Fakan called after her. She was
answered with a clap of the tambourine on its owner’s backside as
Fatmah Awad stepped into the corridor.
“My compliments on your dance,” Somebody said then, and he set
aside his writing materials. “Even from where I sat, it was enticing.”
With a level glance the dancer sized up this compliment, then nod-
ded at the ink-scribed leaves. “Be sure to put that praise into your
report.”
“You may count on it. Has your new friend’s wine-stain been
removed?”
Kuzia rolled her eyes. “Allah knows it has been redeemed. Ibo was
so annoyed by your lady’s little prank that he swore to raise his per-
centage of her father’s next voyage to seventeen and a half or break
their engagement. I spent the night humping him down to thirteen-
five, and at this morning’s prayer call he weighed her insult against my
reparations and held the line at fifteen.”
“Well done,” Somebody said, and he promised to report her ac-
complishment both to Sindbad’s daughter and to her father.
“You may be sure that I’ve done that already,” said Kuzia Fakan,
“but it won’t hurt to have it done again. Report it to your master as
well, if that will do me any good. But tell your friend Yasmin that if
she spills more wine on that camel-driver before tomorrow night,
she’ll have to balance the ledger herself.”
Somebody smiled and shook his head. “You chum the waters of
our conversation with more baits than one poor fish can rise to.” He

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

ticked off examples on his thumb and two fingers: “Sayyid Sindbad’s
daughter is not ‘my Yasmin’; she is her own and none other’s. If you
are close enough to her these days to have told her of your night’s
work on her behalf, you will also have warned her in the matter of the
wine. But I doubt that any of these is what you came here to discuss
with me now.”
Complained Kuzia Fakan, “You are one of those men who want to
make music before our instruments are in tune.” All the same, she then
replied to each of those items in turn: in her opinion, Sindbad’s
daughter was first and finally Sindbad’s daughter, more than she had
ever been young Umar al-Yom’s boyish conquest or Prince Jabal’s fi-
ancée or Sahim al-Layl’s prize, not to mention her own person. For
just that reason (to speak to Somebody’s second point), there had
been no love lost between Yasmin and Kuzia Fakan since the dancer
was recruited by the aging Jayda, at Sindbad’s direction, to replace her
as his paramour-in-chief. Though Yasmin at the time was affianced to
the most enviable catch in Islam, that handsome young Sohari prince,
she had been nonetheless jealous of Kuzia Fakan’s regnancy with her
father — not an unusual state of affairs in view of Yasmin’s privileged
position as a wealthy widower’s only child. And the proof of her jeal-
ousy was that it had wondrously abated since Sindbad’s return from
Voyage Six — that is to say, since Kuzia herself had fallen from the
old man’s favor. And in the two days past, since the dancer’s sexual
assignment first to present company (whoever he was) and then to
Yasmin’s fiancé-in-the-works, Sindbad’s daughter had been positively
friendly for the first time — just when she might have been expected
to be jealous! Surely that showed which way the wind blew.
Aware that his expression was being monitored, Somebody simply
nodded.
“Mind you,” the dancer went on, “I hold none of this against her.
Your Yasmin has her agenda, and I have mine, and though by day she’s
a rich man’s spoiled daughter and I’m only a poor Bedou dancing girl,
Allah has so arranged the world that once the sun goes down we hold
the same cards under our djellabas. In the dark, it is her wâhât against
mine, and since her little pleasure cruise with that Qeshmi pirate, their
market values are not so different as they used to be. What’s more,
while each of us plays her cards as cannily as she can, Yasmin has never

166
Six Interludes

yet cheated me, to my knowledge, nor I her. And you are right: this
is not what I came here to talk about.”
Ignoring all that new bait on the water, our man sat by for his
visitor to say more, and soon enough she did.
“Who was it who camped in Yasmin’s rooms in the month of
Sha’ban, while her father was out settling scores in Serendib with
Prince Jabal and Sahim al-Layl? It was you.”
Only half teasingly, Somebody asked, “And who is that?”
“So we all wonder. The one thing that none of us believes is what
you told Salim last night at knifepoint, and so I allow that that — like
Sayyid Sindbad’s rocs and rhinoceri — may just possibly be the truth.”
“Kuzia Fakan,” said appreciative Somebody, “even at your dance’s
end, there is more to you than meets the eye.”
She shrugged off the compliment. “Salim himself now claims that
you’re an agent of the King of Serendib, charged with seeing to it that
Sindbad makes the return voyage that the king expects and that the
Commander of the Faithful has commanded.”
Impressed by the ingenuity of that speculation, Somebody raised
his eyebrows, pursed his lips, and nodded. “But why would such an
agent set up camp in Yasmin’s bedroom? Of what interest is Sindbad’s
daughter’s honor to the Caliph of Serendib?” He watched Kuzia Fakan
register the word honor.
“We haven’t worked that out,” the dancer admitted. “But when I
look at Yasmin’s face and yours in the morning, and when I see you
steal glances at each other in the evening, certain possibilities occur
to me.”
“And those,” Somebody ventured, a bit disquieted, “are what
you’ve come to speak to me about?”
The dancer shook her head. What went on in Yasmin’s rooms in
the month of Sha’ban, she said, and again last night and the night
before, was no more her concern than what had happened to Yasmin
and the others aboard Shaitan, and she would declare as much to Ibn
al-Hamra when it occurred to him to ask (no later than tomorrow,
she predicted, for that camel-driver was no fool). What was her busi-
ness, the first order of it, was the failing potency of Sindbad the Sailor,
at least in connection with herself, and what that betided for her po-
sition in the house. Of this she had spoken to Somebody two nights

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

ago. What perplexed her now was that she knew that old villain to be
as keen-eyed as herself and no less skeptical, yet he had not, so far,
contracted for the assassination of a man demonstrably potent (as she
had attested), though of undetermined sexual tastes, who in the midst
of the delicate engagement negotiations with “Ibo” spent night after
night within access, at least, of the wâhât in question. Kuzia knew,
moreover, that Sindbad’s first business of the day, recently, had been
conducted tête-à-tête in the Tub of Truth with that same privileged
interloper, as if to hear a report on the night past.
“And he calls you his younger brother!” she concluded. “And he
lets you call yourself by his own name! Let Ibo and Salim and Fatmah
Awad think what they please; I think you’re an agent of Sindbad
himself!”
“Really, now, Kuzia Fakan. …”
“I believe it!” the dancer insisted. “He doesn’t trust Jayda these
days, because she’s still jealous of me for taking her place, even though
she chose me for the job. So he sets you to make sure she doesn’t get
even with him for dumping her by smuggling some boyfriend of Yas-
min’s into the harem while he’s cutting a deal with Ibo.”
Somebody sighed. “Where in the world —”
“From Sindbad himself,” Kuzia Fakan interrupted him trium-
phantly, “in that famous tub of his, not an hour ago. He and I used
to be too busy in there to talk, but nowadays the best he can do is
natter on. What he doesn’t yet realize is that in giving that particular
job to you he has set the fox to guard the henhouse.”
“Aha,” said weary Somebody. “With that yet we arrive at the end
of this striptease.” He then gently scolded the dancer for an insinua-
tion more expectable from the page Salim than from her: that there
was something he so wished to conceal that her silence about it would
be valuable to him. Let her tell Sindbad whatever she knew, suspected,
or imagined about his relation to Yasmin, he invited her; let her think
him an agent of Haroun, Sindbad, Sahim al-Layl, Prince Jabal, the
King of Serendib, or Muhammed the Prophet. The truth was less
complicated and doubtless less interesting: he was no one’s agent ex-
cept his own, whoever that might be — “Simon” the castaway, ma-
rooned, still stranded. His first and final goal was simply to return to
where he came from: that much-vexed realm that he was miscalling,

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Six Interludes

for convenience’ sake, Serendib. But he had no more notion of how
that return was to be effected than had Kuzia Fakan of how to rein-
vigorate old Sindbad’s desire for her. Meanwhile, derelict in her place
and time, he was Yasmin’s friend and ally because she and he had
survived an ordeal together. There was much he did not know about
Sindbad’s daughter, he acknowledged, and about her household; but
he was the only one besides Yasmin herself who knew exactly what
had and had not happened in the captain’s cabin of Shaitan, for the
reason that he had been there with Yasmin and Sayyid Midnight even
at certain times when Jayda had not. In those parlous hours, because
of his peculiarly privileged though also dire position, he had been able
to be of some comfort to her; she had been likewise to him, then and
since, when the shoe of circumstance was on the other foot. If now
she chose to marry Ibn al-Hamra, that was altogether her affair — but
the man would not get a bolt of virgin cashmere for the price of a
worn-out prayer rug.
“If my efforts in this line make me Yasmin’s agent or Sindbad’s as
well as my own,” he concluded, “so be it. There’s nothing secret about
such agency. I only wish the best for my former fellow hostage — and
I wish no ill to my host or to you either, Kuzia Fakan.”
“How is one to deal with you?” the dancer complained. “You can
be neither seduced nor blackmailed, and just when I’m thinking that
our instruments are in tune enough to play, you tell me that the dance
is over! What Yasmin sees in such an outlander is beyond me.”
Somebody smiled. “Like you and Sindbad in his Tub of Truth, we
talk.”
“I’ll bet you do. But not for the same reason, and not in Arabic
words.”
“What I suggest, my friend,” said Somebody, shrugging, “is that
you tell me in straightforward Arabic, with neither bribes nor threats,
how you think I might help you. If I can, I will.”
Straightforward Arabic! the dancer complained again. How could
she trust what she had neither extorted nor paid for in her customary
way, nor even haggled over? But she had no choice; she was at “Si-
mon’s” mercy —
“Stop that. Neither of us is at the other’s mercy.”
“What a way to do business!”

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

“We are not doing business.”
“Fatmah Awad!” Kuzia cried doorward. “This man drives me
mad!”
But then the dancer did after all state her business, in the satisfied
tone of one party pretending for the other’s benefit to have been got-
ten the better of. Ibn al-Hamra, she reported, clearly recognized in
Sindbad’s new “brother” a threat to his marriage negotiations, if not
yet an outright rival for Yasmin’s favors. He naturally suspected the
wily Sindbad of having arranged the stranger’s interruption of the
feast and all that had happened since; not knowing that the old man
shared his apprehensions, he was as eager as Sindbad to learn just
what was afoot. Inasmuch as both Yasmin herself and Jayda were im-
penetrable on this matter, and nobody trusted Salim either to size
things up accurately or to report them truthfully, both her master-in-
chief and her master-designate of last night were promising her sub-
stantial rewards if she could by any means whatever learn who the
interloper really was and what he was up to.
“For that information,” Somebody assured her, “I would add a
third reward to those two, if I had anything to add.” As he did not,
he could only repeat what he had told her already, which nobody
believed — that Yasmin had not been assaulted by her pirate captor,
as was generally assumed, and that he himself was matching Sindbad’s
stories voyage for voyage in hope of learning how they had fetched
him here from “Serendib,” in further hope (against hope) of learning
how to fetch himself back. There was the truth.
“But not the whole truth,” ventured Kuzia Fakan.
“Who besides Allah knows the whole truth? Meanwhile, it seems
to me that your position is enviable. Look how much you have already
to report! And if the whole truth comes in installments, so should
your rewards.”
“I’ll see to that,” the dancer said. From the corridor came a low
rustling of tambourine. Kuzia picked herself up, not urgently, and
Somebody stood with her. “But if you’ve told me all you have to tell,”
she wondered aloud, “what is the next installment?” Over her veil, her
eyes flickered up and down his height. “Surely there’s something I can
offer you in exchange for more.”
Somebody touched her arm. “Your friendship?”

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Six Interludes

 “Fatmah, did you hear? No man ever asked me for that before; it
must not be worth much.”
“Perhaps mine isn’t, either,” Somebody said. “But it’s all I have
until there’s something more.”
The tambourine rattled again, more briskly.
“Coming,” said Kuzia Fakan. As she left, Somebody remarked ca-
sually after her, “I’m not yet as old as Sayyid Sindbad, but neither am
I as young as your new friend Ibo. Perhaps you and I can talk next
time about secret amulets instead of secret agencies.”
The dancer looked back at him over-shoulder, her eyes bright.
“Who’s doing business now? Maybe it’s Yasmin I should have a little
straightforward Arabic chat with.”
As they stepped into the corridor, Fatmah Awad reported, “It’s
only Salim, as usual.” She pointed with her tambourine. “He slipped
behind that corner when he saw me here.” Over her veil, she, too,
reappraised still-stranded Somebody.
“Till tomorrow?” Kuzia Fakan asked him. She held out her hand.
Somebody pressed it in his own and bowed.
The two women had no sooner turned down the corridor, whis-
pering and laughing together, than Salim appeared at its other end.
“Psst! Sayyid Simon!” he called in a loud whisper; then, glancing the-
atrically behind him as he approached, he assured our man that for
the past hour he had maintained a careful lookout on his behalf. There
was no reason why either Sayyid Sindbad or Mistress Yasmin should
get word of this little dalliance with Kuzia Fakan.
“Nor any why they should not,” Somebody sighed. “Stand watch
one moment longer, while I fetch my fish-knife, and I’ll explain.”

6.

“Swallow, swallow!” gold-turbaned Sindbad bade his guests and
household that evening, when all were seated in the new places as-
signed them. “What joy it is to eat! Particularly in contrast to being
eaten.” He raised his wine cup. “Praise be to all-wise Allah, who has
provided men with the means to bite, the ability to chew, and, above
all, the capacity to swallow! Yasmin.”

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

All present joined him readily in this toast (the purport of which was not yet entirely clear) as soon as his daughter had filled their cups.
Yasmin too was dressed in golden yellow, her brilliant djellaba embroi-
dered in reds and oranges as if to echo her costumes of the previous
two nights. It could be no coincidence, Somebody decided, that his
lover wore each night the daily color of her father’s turban. This eve-
ning her face was radiant, her manner almost merry as she and Jayda
went around with the wine. Our man complimented himself that her
demeanor might be in some measure the happy reflection of two
nights of love, followed he hoped by more and better sleep than he
himself had managed, but it seemed to him, too, that there was a new
rapport between father and daughter. They bantered easily and wit-
tily: teased Ibn al-Hamra for the ample bib he sported tonight to pro-
tect his clean caftan; agreed with each other across the length of the
low table that old Hasib Ali (the eldest, wealthiest, and most respected
of the company, who had previously sat at Sindbad’s left hand but
who was absent tonight) must have dozed off this time before dinner,
as he so often did after. Still-stranded Somebody recalled Sindbad’s
forenoon remark that he had already questioned his daughter about
her relations with him; he wondered what Yasmin might have replied,
to such benign effect.
Jayda, on the other hand, seemed less than pleased by this and
other conspicuous differences between tonight’s banquet and its im-
mediate predecessors — including the change in everyone’s position
at table except the host’s and his daughter’s. By now our man reckoned
he had figured out the house protocol in this matter. The ten guests
were not ranked in an order of descending favor from the head of the
table to its foot, as he had once supposed: the most favored at the
host’s right hand, the secondmost at his left, the thirdmost at his sec-
ond right, etc., down to the least favored at his fifth left (Yasmin’s first
right). The actual order, both of seating and of service, was at once
more intricate and more respectful of Sindbad’s daughter: first and
second place were as Somebody had assumed — those positions hav-
ing been taken, until tonight, by the prospective son-in-law Ibn al-
Hamra and the elder Hasib Ali, respectively — but third-favored was
the seat at Yasmin’s right hand, and fourth-favored that at her left.
Thereafter, he presumed, the order alternated in like fashion from

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Six Interludes

Sindbad’s end of the table to hers, and from “right” to “left” in turn from each one’s point of view, so that the tenth and least of the com-
pany (himself as of last night, since he was not an investor in the
upcoming voyage) occupied the place halfway down the table on
Sindbad’s left, or halfway up on Yasmin’s right.
It followed that Ibn al-Hamra had slipped a notch in their host’s
esteem. In the place of honor, his former position, now sat another
merchant speculator, who the night before had sat at Yasmin’s right:
presumably the largest investor in Voyage Seven after the absent
Hasib Ali and perhaps al-Hamra himself. In that enviable latter seat
tonight sat yet another, who had previously occupied Seat Four, at
Yasmin’s left hand: a dark-eyed, dark-bearded man about Ibo’s age,
but less plump than beefy, whose face Somebody had come to know,
though not yet his name. Indeed, something about the cast of his
features and a way he had of dropping his jaw and widening his eyes
in mock astonishment at every conversational sally, whether his own
or another’s, put our man in mind of his brother, “Joe Junior,” who
in middle age had developed the same affectation.
The other regular guests had all been reseated accordingly, each
moved a notch up. Somebody himself therefore was tonight in the
ninth place (third down on Sindbad’s right and third up on Yasmin’s
left), while across from him in the tenth place, to fill out the company,
was none other than Kuzia Fakan, doubtless in reward for her services
on her master’s behalf through the night past. Her delight in being
there was evident even through her veil. But though Yasmin (who
through the month of Sha’ban had spoken disparagingly of the dancer
as “Daddy’s Bedou bedwarmer”) smiled and made a good-humored
mock ceremony out of pouring Kuzia’s wine, Jayda stood stiffly be-
hind her and frowned over her black veil at these innovations.
“Swallow,” Sindbad repeated, this time directing that invitation or
command to the three women in particular. Kuzia Fakan lifted her
veil, grinned, and downed her cup. Yasmin took a cordial sip of hers.
Jayda touched her cup to her veiled mouth, set it aside, and signaled
Salim to begin serving the food.
“There is no question,” Sindbad said, “that some things are more
readily swallowed than others. When we are the diners, it behooves us
to enlarge and improve our capacity in that line. But when we are the
dined-upon, it is another story: the story of my third voyage. I urge

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

you to practice on these easier dishes before I try you with that harder
one, after which my brother Sindbad the Still-Stranded may try us
with one harder yet.”
That said, he and the company fell to as usual, eating, drinking,
and talking of business and pleasure. Kuzia Fakan alone was left out
of this conversation, whether because the merchants to her right and
left (in places Six and Seven, respectively) were more eager to talk
business with the higher-ranking guests on their other hand or be-
cause they associated the dancer more with the business of pleasure
than with the pleasures of business. But she paid no attention to their
inattention and busily pleased herself with the food and wine, now
and then winking or waving her fingers across the room at Fatmah
Awad and company at the smaller table.
When at last the dessert course was served, Sindbad thumped for
attention on the tub behind him and declared, “Those of you who
look for moral nutriment in tales of voyaging may chew on this appe-
tizer till I serve up my story’s dessert: In the dialectic of experience,
what our first voyage teaches us, our second may well unteach, so that
our third may then reteach it in amended form.” He paused and re-
garded Ibn al-Hamra, as if waiting for him to record this long maxim.
But that stainless fellow sat with his fingers laced in his lap and con-
templated his bib. Only Kuzia Fakan nodded her head in grave accord.
“As after Voyage One,” her master presently went on, “so after
Voyage Two the time came when such delights as ours tonight once
again lost their appeal (as they seem to have done for our old friend
Hasib Ali), and nothing would do but I risk my life a third time for
no better reason than the second. I posted the usual eunuchs to over-
see my harem, bade good-bye to my usual dinner companions and to
this landlubber’s paradise of a Baghdad, and went down as usual to
Basra to find ship and shipmates with which to seek a fortune that I
did not need and the misfortune certain to attend it. You would think
I had learned nothing from my hard history.
“But note: I took with me this time, as my principal stock-in-trade,
a great quantity of turbans of every sort and size, thinking thereby
always to have a supply on hand for survival purposes when the inevi-
table came to pass. And this time I looked not for a ship to fall in love
with, as I had loved my lost Zahir, but rather for one of indifferent

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Six Interludes

lines and merely adequate seaworthiness, so that I would not lose
something of which I was especially fond, or be lost by it. On the
other hand (following Moral Lesson One of this voyage, aforestated,
or Lesson Nine of the lot), this time I neither closely befriended my
fellow merchant-sailors, as I had done the first time out, nor held my-
self aloof from them, as I had done on Voyage Two. Knowing I was
bound to lose them one way or another, I enjoyed their companion-
ship while I could, troubling neither them nor myself with the inevi-
tability of their fate.
“We set sail, and my shoreside restlessness dropped astern with my
home port. As before, the first leg of our voyage took us along main-
land coasts, whose ports of call were now old friends of mine, and
where, in my experience, disaster never struck. In these ports I did my
business chiefly for pleasure, having learned that whatever I gained at
this stage would most likely be lost in the next. And no matter how
fearsome the squalls that from time to time threatened to drive us
upon the Arabian or Persian shore, I slept soundly through them
while my fellow merchants tore their beards and shat their wuzaras,
for I knew that real trouble comes not from the mainland but from
islands in general and island paradises in particular.
“When therefore one fine day we saw our captain rend his garments
in despair, I reckoned we were nearing our first island. I stuffed my
pockets with spare turbans, climbed into my tub (whose true purpose
I had concealed from my shipmates by laundering turbans in it each
evening), and looked about for the tree-covered whale or soporific
grove that would begin the next chapter of Voyage Three of Sindbad
the Sailor.
“Sure enough, there was a palm-lined beach to leeward, which the
captain identified through shuddering teeth as the shore of Ape Is-
land, and toward which a contrary breeze was setting us faster than
our miserable vessel could make good to windward. No mariner had
ever made landfall there and returned to tell the tale, he told us,
though the fate of those lost mariners was unknown.
“You might expect that in these circumstances I would have longed
for my excellent Zahir, which was particularly able at clawing off a lee
shore. But for the reason given, I praised Allah for our ship’s leeway,
and though my heart beat fast, it was with suspense more than with

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

terror, and also with measured pity for the comrades I must now begin
to lose, who, though they lacked my experience of maroonment and
the like, otherwise truly spoke my language.
“The same cannot be said for the troop of hairy apes that now
suddenly appeared as if from the sea around us and clambered aboard,
gesticulating and jabbering at one another and us in a tongue foreign
to all hands, though as seasoned merchant-traders we knew between
us the languages of every Muslim nation and not a few of the infidels,
as well. This of the apes was a grinding of consonants and a popping
of vowels, as if words were being eaten rather than spoken; and all the
while the speakers pointed at our spars and shrouds and stays, and at
their island, and the open sea, and us. Yet when we shrugged our
shoulders and turned up our palms in terrified incomprehension, the
apes made plain their annoyance as they could not make plain their
discourse. Most especially were they angered when, being true believ-
ers, we refused to join them in what looked to us like some travesty of
worship, as they kneeled northwestward on our deck and called
OppAlloppah! OppAkboppar! I can hear their feral curses still as they
then swarmed aloft: Goppo! Oppawoppay! But instead of tearing us
limb from limb or pitching us overside, they chewed up and spat out
half our standing rigging, retangled the rest, set us ashore when the
breeze at last beached us, and then sailed off with our goods and what
was left of our ship, hurling imprecations shoreward: Oppinfoppid-
oppel! Mopponkoppeys!
“Our captain reasoned that in their subhuman ignorance these apes
had once witnessed an act of human piracy off their shore and, as apes
will, had subsequently aped it at every opportunity without under-
standing what it was they were aping, in the same way that they
seemed to themselves to be making meaningful utterances. All the
same, I noted that with their shortened rig they had contrived to beat
briskly offshore to windward, as we had not. Fearing that they would
soon return to abuse us further, we retreated into the woods of their
island and there found what my companions took to be an empty
white building, as it showed to the naive eye four walls, a floor and
ceiling, and a rectangular hole in one side not dissimilar to a large
doorway. At the captain’s bidding, all hid themselves inside, except
me, who elected instead to tie myself into the top of a coconut palm
with several turbans from my supply. My independence in this matter

176
Six Interludes

baffled my companions and much annoyed the captain and first mate
(who had never much cared for my turbans and my tub), but as they
could scarcely threaten to put me ashore for disobeying an order, I
chose to follow my own counsel.
“Voyage Two, remember, had taught me that on islands uninhab-
ited by humans, what we mistake for a domed temple, say, is probably
a roc’s egg. The squarish shape of this structure by no means ruled out
the possibility of its belonging to some other species of giant bird.
Moreover, through its so-called doorway I had caught a glimpse of
what looked to be a strew of large bones, some of them fresh, on its
so-called floor, which suggested to me another explanation for the
behavior of those apes: they were regularly preyed upon by such ter-
rible birds as those in the Valley of Serpents and Diamonds; they had
boarded our ship to save themselves and had endeavored to warn us
of our peril and persuade us to sail them to safety, not understanding
in their animal ignorance that our ship was no good on the wind;
finally, unable to communicate their messages in genuine language,
they had set us ashore to appease their predators and then blundered
off as best they could.
“Alas, the worst part of this hypothesis (which I kept to myself)
was soon confirmed: whether or not the white structure was a giant
angular eggshell, it was currently inhabited not by a roc chick but by
a fearsome one-eyed ogre, who no doubt had taken possession of it as
the hermit crab does an empty mollusk shell. This awful fellow lum-
bered home at sunset and, fortunately not catching sight of me in my
tree, seized at once upon the windfall banquet in his house. Having
tested each of his terrified prisoners in turn for plumpness, he chose
our luckless captain for his evening meal, spitted him through from
mouth to anus, and roasted and ate him like a chicken. The sight,
sound, and smell of this atrocity was the more horrifying for its being
perpetrated without a word from the terrible giant, whose vocabulary
seemed limited to lip-smacks as he ate our captain, a great burp of
satisfaction when he was done, a monstrous fart as he then stretched
himself out on his filthy floor, and earthshaking snorts and snores
when presently he closed his single eye and slept.
“The laments among my companions, on the other hand, were as
eloquent as anything in that vein of which the language of Allah’s
prophet is capable. In the morning, when the ogre awoke and went

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

his way, they streamed out of his hovel, still wailing and pounding
their turbans in despair. I rather expected them to salute my wisdom
in having treed myself; at the same time, I feared that they would all
now follow my example, whereupon the giant must surely discover us,
and I would be but one more bird in his self-snared flock. Therefore I
lied and told them that my night had been as fearful as theirs, declar-
ing that the horrid apes had returned and prowled the treetops in
search of victims, grinding their consonants and popping their vowels,
and only by chance had missed the palm I’d taken refuge in. Our ship’s
first mate, now in command, then ordered us to search the island for
better shelter, and all did so except me, who instead began scouting
materials for a raft. My continued insubordination so vexed the mate
that when evening came without his having found a single cave or
other hideaway on the island, and he ordered the company back into
the giant’s den for the second night, he refused to let me share that
fearsome shelter with them.
“His reasoning was that in the ogre’s house, one of their number
was sure to die but the others would survive, whereas outside we were
outnumbered by the apes and might all be killed. I pretended terror
at my fate but was secretly delighted to turban myself again among
the coconuts. The giant returned, and the second-plumpest of our
original company, a jolly merchant from Abadan, suffered the word-
less fate of the captain. The next morning, after the giant left home
and the survivors came forth, I repeated my story of the apes, and
while the majority were too undone by their own night’s terrors to
question mine, I discerned a note of skepticism in the mate: he re-
scinded his decree against my joining them in the giant’s den, adding
that if I nevertheless preferred the terrors outside, perhaps he would
risk them with me.
“In this I discerned also a problem not far ahead, for the mate was
now the plumpest of the survivors, all of whom began to size one
another up. It did not much surprise me therefore when the larger
among them began to speak of mass suicide as preferable to the foul
fate of being cooked and eaten one at a time before one another’s eyes.
So desperate were they all that even many of the midsize merchants
were in middling sympathy with this proposal. I myself argued vehe-
mently against it, ostensibly on the grounds that self-slaughter was

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Six Interludes

forbidden by Allah but actually because my chances of being discov-
ered by the cannibal ogre would be much increased if he had to look
outside his den for his dinner. The leaner of the survivors — crewmen,
mostly — took my pious objection seriously, but all became uneasy,
realizing that if the mate alone should kill himself, for example, the
next-plumpest would be in line to be tonight’s entree and would no
doubt kill himself in turn. In short, one suicide at the top would trig-
ger another and another until the leanest was the plumpest. Inasmuch
as the mate had nothing to lose (in this life, at least), it particularly
behooved the next-plumpest after him to come up with a better idea.
“That fellow, as it happened, was myself, and though I had nothing
immediately to fear as long as the company believed my fiction about
apes in the trees, the man next plumpest after me began to voice the
same skepticism as the mate. If our leader killed himself, this one an-
nounced, he intended to take his chances with me in the trees rather
than submit to being spitted and roasted.
“Clearly the fat was in the fire — my fat, unless I came up with
something quickly. I therefore declared to all hands that so certain was
I of the apes’ discovering and killing me tonight that I intended to
take my chances in the giant’s den instead, even though in the mate’s
absence I would be the next-plumpest. For in my two treetopped
nights, I lied, I had overheard enough ape-talk to get the hang of their
so-called language and had heard them express their disgust at the
giant’s habit of breaking his victims’ necks and roasting their flesh
before eating it, instead of nibbling them alive one limb at a time in
the apes’ own civilized fashion.
“This story took care of the movement to the trees but not my
predicament. ‘By Allah!’ I then exclaimed. ‘What sort of men are we,
to talk of destroying ourselves instead of our destroyer? Let us wait
till he falls asleep tonight and then throw ourselves upon him and do
him what hurt we can, whether cutting his throat or at least blinding
his eye to keep him from finding us so easily.’
“This proposal they received warmly — all except the mate, who
pointed out with grim satisfaction that the ogre had never yet been
seen to sleep before filling his belly with a Muslim, and that since he
himself intended either to hang himself with his turban before sun-
down or to hide in the trees like certain other folk from those night-

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

apes that nobody except me had seen, the giant’s soporific meal would
be myself — unless, as would not surprise him, I proved as indigest-
ible as I was insubordinate.
“Obviously I needed to take prompt measures against this fellow,
before his jibes turned the company against me. As soon as he went
grousing off, I gathered a caucus of the plumper merchants and said
to them, ‘See here, comrades: the life of each of us is immediately in
the hands of those plumper than himself, but eventually we’ll all be
eaten unless you follow my advice. Kill or disable our devourer we
must, if we can, but that alone will not save us. Where did such a beast
come from, if not from parents like himself? And if they are no longer
living to avenge him, no doubt he has brothers somewhere about, or
a cannibal mate, for Allah does not make his creatures in single copies.
Before we attack our attacker and bring down the wrath of his kin
upon us, we must build a raft on which to escape this island; and in
this matter, though I am not a shipwright or sailor by trade, I have
some experience.’
“I told them then from first to last the story of my escapes from the
sundry islands of my two previous voyages, together with those voy-
ages’ eight moral lessons, and added that while they and the crewmen
had been searching in vain at the mate’s orders for hiding places, I had
been scouting sufficient drift-timber along the shore to build a raft big
enough for all of us, or almost all. But experience had taught me that
its construction would require at least twenty-four hours under my
supervision and perhaps several days under that of a less knowledge-
able foreman. If they could think of some way to appease the ogre’s
appetite for one night more, I told them — with other food than my-
self — then we had a chance to save our necks. But our sacrificial vic-
tim (if that was what it must come to) ought not to be one of those
presently gathered, I suggested, for the reason that, as the closest in
line to be eaten, it was we who had the liveliest interest in getting the
raft expeditiously built and launched. Neither of course could the sac-
rifice be one of our leaner shipmates, whom the ogre would simply
reject in favor of a plumper. I bade them think the matter over be-
tween then and sundown, and meanwhile fall to under my direction
to gather and bind our raft’s main timbers. Tomorrow, if I remained
alive, I would show them how to rig the mast and a makeshift sail.

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Six Interludes

 “Just as I had hoped, they no sooner set about collecting the tim-
bers I had spotted earlier and now directed them to, lashing them
together at my instruction into the shape of a great tub, than our
erstwhile first mate came down to the beach in a splendid rage, de-
manding to know what mutinies and cabals I was concocting behind
his back and swearing that while he lived and had the power of speech,
no one would give orders but himself. He then ordered his crew to
clap me in irons, to be fed to the ogre, and to undo that ridiculous
construction we had begun. Tomorrow, he declared, when I was
gone, he would show the company how to build a proper raft in only
three or four days.
“Sure enough, with no prompting from me or resistance from the
sailors, the three or four next-plumpest merchants after myself
straightway fell upon the mate and bound his arms and legs with their
turbans. I complimented them on their judgment and provided extra
turbans to insure the fellow’s bondage as well as to gag his mouth, lest
his arguments turn their minds against me or his cries move their
hearts to misdirected pity. All the rest of that day we labored on our
tub, merchants and crew together, and at sunset went trembling back
to the ogre’s den, fetching with us the unhappy mate. It was, needless
to say, a terrifying hour for the teller of this tale when its monocular
villain arrived to make his dreadful menu-perusal. Who could be sure
how discerning his judgment was? He inspected us in his customary
awful silence, passing over the skinny chaps now without bothering
even to squeeze and pinch their flesh, and quickly narrowed his selec-
tion to the three or four plumpest. Of particular interest to him were
myself, whom he’d not seen before, and the mate, so oddly turbaned;
he picked up each of us in turn several times, squinting at us closely
and squeezing various parts of our anatomy, and flung us down again,
then finally weighed us against each other, one in each hand. My anxi-
ety was heightened when the mate for very fear now beshat himself,
thereby lessening his mass by half a kilo. In my own terror I readily
followed suit, but what finally tipped the scales was that unlike the
mate and the other survivors, I had not till this night been inside this
grisly lair. The sight and smell of his recent victims’ rotting bones,
together with the filth of the ogre himself and the stink of the mate’s
terror and my own, revolted me as nothing in my past experience ever

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

had except that nest of giant vultures in Voyage Two. That memory,
atop the present foulness, was enough to add regurgitation to my
defecation, and the two combined so unballasted me that the ogre
dropped me in disgust, broke the mate’s neck underfoot, spitted him
through, and laid into his evening meal in his customary fashion.
“Thus did we survivors, in the manner you’ve heard me tell before,
survive the second of the triple perils of Voyage Three: we blinded the
ogre per plan with a red-hot iron when he was safely snoring and then
escaped to the beach, where I kept my company too busy rigging and
launching our tub to ask me where were those dreadful apes I had
earlier reported. We stepped a tall mast and improvised a square sail
of two dozen turbans knotted together at their corners: one from each
of the twelve of us still alive, plus the nine remaining of my private
supply, plus one each from the departed heads of the ogre’s victims,
which he had used to wipe his mouth after dining. Clumsy and leaky
as our vessel was, it floated, but even as we paddled off, I saw clearly
that we were too many to survive in it at sea, even if we had had food
and water.
“Naturally enough, after my success with the ogre and the tub, my
companions appointed me their captain and declared themselves ready
to obey any order I gave them. But I knew that however much I had
disguised the idea as theirs, they had seen me make a calculated sacri-
fice of the first mate; I could scarcely expect half their number (pref-
erably the plumpest) to drown themselves now at my command for
the sake of the rest. When, therefore (as I had predicted but scarcely
expected), the blinded ogre reappeared on shore, guided by a one-
eyed female no comelier than himself, and the pair of them com-
menced bombarding us with boulders the size of yonder camel, I took
the desperate measure of ordering our turban-sail hoisted, though I
reckoned that the wind might carry us shoreward faster than our pad-
dles could paddle us off.
“This came to pass, while I kept my sailors paddling too briskly to
watch where we were going. The boulders splashed about us, throw-
ing up great waves as we drew near the beach. The ogre-woman, in
particular, had a wicked right arm as well as full use of her eye; while
her mate hurled his missiles blindly in all directions, hers came ever
closer to their mark, until at last one fell so nearly upon us that by
springing up in alarm to the gunwale of the tub at just the right mo-

182
Six Interludes

ment, I contrived to make it seem as though the boulder-wave had
capsized us.
“Thus did the ogres have their revenge, for all but two of my tub-
mates drowned, one way or another, before we got our vessel righted
and bailed. I then struck the sail, and we three survivors made good
our escape to windward, out of missile range.
“Once clear of the island, we collapsed over our paddles, entirely
spent, and would have drifted back to our enemies had I not recalled
how the apes, in their ignorant attempt to imitate human sailors, had
accidentally hit upon a more efficient windward-sailing rig than our
late captain’s. Though I could only guess at its details, I gave orders
to my companions to imitate that rig as best we could with our turban-
sail, and thus we completed our flight to freedom.
“Which is to say, we were free now to die of hunger and thirst, or
to drown in the first storm that came our way (so underballasted was
our tub with only three men in it), rather than being cooked and
eaten. And for that we praised Allah, at the same time hoping He
would fetch us quickly to a kinder shore. This He did after a mere two
days and nights, which under ordinary marine-distress circumstances
would have been scarcely enough to parch our throats and turn our
thoughts to cannibalism. But inasmuch as we had all been starving
ourselves for the three days prior in hopes of becoming less appetizing
to the ogre than our fellows, by the time we piled up on the next island
down the line we were reasonably emaciated and beginning to salivate
at sight of one another’s flesh.
“As was my wont, despite the cravings of my belly I hung back a
bit near the wreck of our craft while my two tubmates rushed ashore
to gorge themselves on fruit and fresh water, with which the place
happily abounded. Only when I saw that the beach was free of dia-
monds (and so presumably of serpents and giant vultures as well), and
that there were no egg- or building-shaped structures in sight, and
that those vowel-popping, consonant-chewing apes had not made the
same landfall as we, only then did I join the others in eating and drink-
ing what they had ingested without evident harm, and in praising
Allah for our deliverance. So as not to presume unseemly upon His
mercy, however, when evening came we climbed a tall tree, tied our-
selves fast to its upper limbs with our turbans, and took turns standing
watch — if standing is the right word for three Muslim merchants

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trussed in a treetop. Not until the first light of dawn showed safely on
the eastern horizon — which happened to occur during my watch —
did I allow myself blissfully to join the common sleep.
“But know, my friends, that Allah is a tireless schoolmaster who is
no sooner satisfied that we have learned His last lesson than He sets
us His next. I had scarcely begun to dream of dear dry Baghdad when
the three of us were wakened by a horrid crunching and snapping,
which at first I thought to be ape-talk but which proved to be the
breaking bones of the lowermost of us as he was swallowed alive in
two gulps by a serpent so much more monstrous than those in Dia-
mond Valley that he needed not even to climb our tree to seize his
meal. He simply lifted his head and upper body from the ground
like a cobra rising to the charmer’s pipe, and down went Mahmud
the Damascene, tree limb, turbans, and all, crying ‘There is no god
but God!’ as he consummated his martyrdom. Whereafter the beast
retired.
“‘As Allah lives,’ my one remaining comrade and I agreed, ‘it is a
foolish man who believes the worst to be behind him while the story
of his life has even one more page ahead.’ As it was certain death to
greet another dawn in that tree (our experience having confirmed that
monsters seldom occur singly, and horrors never, but that even a
gaunt and famished Muslim will satisfy your average monster for
about a day), we risked meeting the serpent’s family in order to search
the island for better sanctuary, as well as for such friendly folk as that
king who had made me his favorite on Island Two, Voyage One.
White structures we would of course have eschewed even had we
found any; caves there were aplenty, but none small enough to block
that great snake’s entry, and many large enough to house him or his
kin. By afternoon’s end the best we had found was another tree, twice
as tall as the first, though not half as tall as we might have wished. My
companion — a spice dealer named Amahl — was all for building a
ring of bonfires around its base, despite my reminding him that noth-
ing was more likely to awaken the sleeping whale that our island
might yet turn out to be. Like that of most men with limited experi-
ence of desert islands, Amahl’s view of them was insular; he could
scarcely credit gross unlikelihoods other than those he himself had
survived. Only by agreeing to bind myself to a lower limb than his
could I talk him out of his foolish fire.

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Six Interludes

 “Even so, he insisted on staying awake through the night, not be-
cause he could have done any more awake than asleep to fend off the
serpent (since our respective limbs were already the two highest in the
tree) but because he frankly suspected that if he fell asleep and I heard
the serpent approach, I might untie and cast him down or attempt to
steal just above him to the tree’s limbless tip, where no man could
turban himself securely but one might hold on just long enough for
the other to be made a meal of. In vain I reproached him for his want
of trust in the man to whom he owed his life several times over; Amahl
declared that it was exactly that debt that made him fearful, lest I
decide to collect it.
“Nothing for it then but that I suffer not only the fear of being
swallowed alive (for I had, in truth, agreed to take the lower perch
with the intention of sneaking above him once he slept) but the pray-
ers and songs that my companion chanted hour after hour, off-key,
till his voice grew hoarse, to keep himself awake. ‘See here,’ I called
up to him when I could abide no more. ‘For all we know, your songs
may charm a brace of serpents our way, and we’ll both be done for. In
God’s name give your voice a rest.’ Amahl replied that he would be
silent only if I spoke, so that he could keep an ear on my position.
Accordingly, I launched into a tale he had heard twice already, once
on Ape Island and again in our tub: the tale of my adventures in
voyages One and Two, together with their several morals. Just as I had
hoped, before I had gotten myself fairly cleansed of buzzard puke on
Island Two, Voyage Two, I heard Amahl snoring; at the same time I
heard a mighty sibilance in the darkness below, which could be noth-
ing other than the swallower of Mahmud the Damascene.
“Pausing in my story only to indent a new paragraph, so to speak,
I quickly unbound my turbans and slithered up past Amahl’s limb.
But either he had only pretended to snore, or else my narrative’s shift
of position waked him. ‘False savior!’ he cried, and he undid his tur-
bans as the great hissing drew nearer and tried at once to loosen my
hold on the slender treetop and to clamber past me. ‘It is no false
savior who has saved you two or three times already,’ I told him, ‘but
I can save no one from inside the belly of a snake.’ So saying, I clam-
bered past him, and then he past me, each of us stomping the other
down and being by the other stomped in turn as our doom hissed
nearer, until the treetop began to bend under our weight.

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

 “Now it happened that this spice dealer had been the next-plumpest
after myself back on Ape Island, and though we both had lost weight
while tubbing it from there to here, Amahl had in our brief time
ashore engorged himself with fruit and water, whereas I had eaten
and drunk only enough to restore my health, lest the food prove un-
safe or there be another cannibal ogre on this island. He therefore
had the better of me, heftwise, by a considerable margin, with the
result that whereas I was the better slitherer and clamberer, Amahl
was the better stomper. Once we were well clear of the last limb and
shinnying together up the bendy tip, there was no getting by him;
indeed, I was obliged to retreat lest he kick me loose. As the great
snake’s tongue came forking usward now from below, I commended
my spirit to Allah, closed my eyes, and clung fast where I was while
ungrateful Amahl grunted himself higher and higher.
“A moment later I felt the treetop bend like a bow and opened my
eyes just in time to see the dealer dealt with: in his eagerness to put
both me and the snake below him, Amahl had climbed to the very tip
of the tip, which then suddenly bent almost double under his weight.
Thus was he served like a spiced olive on a pick to the serpent just
below me, who gobbled him turban-first before he could even praise
Allah. I saw his legs thrash briefly as if they were the serpent’s second
tongue; then he was gone, and his swallower as well, leaving me the
only Muslim snake-bait on the island.
“At dawn I came down to the shore with which all islands are sur-
rounded and conferred with Sayyid Despair, my old traveling com-
panion from voyages One and Two. As usual, he counseled suicide, as
the only death less revolting than the one I was bound to suffer before
I could build myself a new tub. But experience had taught me to haz-
ard a vile death in some attempt to save myself, however desperate,
rather than to guarantee an easier one at the end of a turban. Of these
I had still a fair supply, having retrieved the ones I’d loaned Mahmud
and Amahl for tree-binding purposes. I dismissed my dark counselor
and cast about to find a new use for them.
“Turning over in my mind the unforgettable images of my ship-
mates’ being eaten, some by the ogre of Island One and others by the
serpent of Island Two, I was struck by this difference in their way of
going: whereas Allah had given the one-eyed ogre two hands with

186
Six Interludes

which to skewer his victims from mouth to anus and then rend them
limb from roasted limb for eating, He had obliged the limbless snake
to swallow men whole or not at all. So considerable was his capacity
that I had no hope of fattening myself beyond it, certainly not before
nightfall. Therefore I looked about for other ways to render myself
unswallowable, and after rejecting such expedients as smearing myself
with filth (for who knew that serpent’s tastes? Furthermore, I had as
leave die as ever stink again as I had in the buzzards’ nest and the ogre’s
left hand), I happened to remember, apropos of Allah’s inscrutable
wisdom, those apes’ imposture of true worship. That memory led me
to reflect upon the false religions of other unturbaned infidels: the
Jew, with his six-pointed star instead of a proper crescent; the Chris-
tian, whose Savior is seldom depicted but as a suckling at the breast
or a dead man fastened to a cross. …
“‘Allah pardon me!’ I here cried out, for this latter memory, to-
gether with Despair’s phrase bound to suffer, showed me the way to
self-salvation. Christian, Jew, and Muslim agree that the Lord is One,
though His images differ, and so I combed the beach for drift-timbers
fit for a crucifixion. When evening came I left off tub building and,
using turbans in place of nails, bound myself there on the shore to one
timber twice my length, crossed by another twice the span of my arms.
Then — for extra insurance, as well as to avoid aping the infidel too
closely — I crossed this crosspiece with another in the plane perpen-
dicular to it, to make myself unswallowable in three dimensions rather
than two.
“As you may gather from my being here to retell the tale, Allah
smiled upon this stratagem, though a more fearful night I hope never
to pass. Again and again the serpent gaped and struck in vain, licking
me from head to foot with his cloven tongue, bathing me in his spittle,
and so enveloping me in his foul breath that I might have succumbed
to asphyxiation had the terrible tickling of his tongue not made me
laugh so hard into the teeth of my fear that I could scarcely inhale.
But swallow me he could not.
“And that was the end of my third series of ordeals, if not of the
vexations of Voyage Three. The next morning, when the serpent had
retired in hungry chagrin, Allah rewarded my ingenuity by sending
past the island a handsome old merchant ship, which I flagged down

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

with the same turbans that had repeatedly been my salvation — this
time waving a varicolored streamer of them from one of my cross-
timbers.
“My friends: there is no adventurer who is not altered by his ad-
ventures, and therefore the Sindbad who sails home is never the Sind-
bad who sailed forth, though they share a name. I was rescued,
clothed, and fed by the kindly captain of that smart-sailing ship, which
happened to be homeward bound to Basra after a long and arduous
but successful trading cruise. Such pity did he feel for me after hearing
the tale of Voyage Three alone that at his next port of call he offered
to let me sell the goods of his vessel’s former owner, who had been
accidentally lost on a desert island some years before and was presum-
ably now dead. I could keep a commission for myself; he would take
another for successfully completing his late master’s voyage and would
pay over the balance, along with the ship itself, to that luckless fellow’s
family in Baghdad. I gratefully agreed, complimenting the captain on
his good character. He then ordered the ship’s clerk to bring up from
the hold the bales and bundles of Sindbad the Sailor and asked me
under what name he should enter me as trading agent.
“At the sight of my long-lost goods from Voyage Two, the scales
fell from my eyes — some of the scales, at least — and I recognized
this weathered but still handsome sailing vessel as none other than my
Zahir, the same that I had fallen fatefully in love with years ago when
she was fresh from the Basra yards and that had unknowingly sailed
off without me when I drowned in sleep in that pleasant grove on
Island One, Voyage Two. Weeping for joy, I told that story and its
four morals to her present skipper, declaring myself to be Sindbad the
Sailor.
“‘Don’t expect an old sea dog like me to swallow that whopper,’
the captain scoffed, and he scolded me for repaying his goodwill with
such a farfetched and greedy fabrication. He himself, he said, had been
master of Zahir since her launching, and ipso facto when she had put
in at that delightful island. The ship’s owner, who had presumably
been left behind (though they’d found no trace of him when they
discovered his absence and made their way back to search for him),
had in no way resembled me.
“‘Nor do you,’ I replied indignantly, ‘in the least resemble Kasim
of Basra, whom I hired to captain our company on that voyage. Kasim

188
Six Interludes

was a fellow as fresh and ready as the ship we set forth in — his first
command and her maiden voyage — whereas you are as barnacled and
weatherworn as the hull now under us. Don’t ask me to swallow this
rank imposture.’
“Thus did we rebuke and discredit each other, until one of the elder
merchants among the passengers, overhearing our dispute, declared
himself prepared to resolve it. Had I not acknowledged, he asked me,
that the ship on whose quarterdeck we quarreled was the same Zahir
in which I had loaded my bales and sailed forth under young Captain
Kasim of Basra? Or did I think this a different vessel of the same name?
‘So great a coincidence as that,’ I answered, ‘would be too much to
swallow. It is not only her name I now recognize, but every line of her
hull, every detail of her rig, every move she makes under me, all of
which so pleased me when she was brand-new and please me yet. I
would know this ship no matter what her name, even if she were twice
as weatherbeaten as she is.’ ‘Yet you did not, at first,’ the merchant
reminded me. ‘Therefore recognize your captain as well, for he is no
other than your servant Kasim of Basra, as seasoned by the leagues
gone under his keel as are your Zahir and its owner. I have sailed with
him for a full year now and have seen seafaring age him as it has aged
me. And you, my good Kasim,’ he then advised the captain, ‘must
swallow that this battered derelict is indeed your master Sindbad the
Sailor, whom I met not many years ago on the Island of the Valley of
Serpents and Diamonds, where like myself he was for a time in the
mutton-and-gemstone trade and where he told me the moraled story
of his maroonment. I will vouch that both of you are who you say you
are, as am I and as is this ship.’
“Well, the truth is that I didn’t recognize either this peacemaker or
his name (which I have since forgotten). But as it was clearly in the
best interests of each of us at least to pretend to swallow the other’s
story, both the captain and I swallowed his as well and embraced each
other like long-lost partners. We willingly suspended our disbelief and
did our business, at such tremendous profit that by the time Zahir
reached Basra I found it no more difficult to believe that Kasim was
Kasim than that I was Sindbad. For by then the misfortunes of Voyage
Three seemed to me already as distant and dreamlike as those of voy-
ages Two and One. And though en route home I witnessed many
another prodigious implausibility, such as fish who resembled cattle

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

and birds born from seashells, I swallowed their reality with ease, so
adept had I grown at that art.
“Just so, I hope, comrades, may you all, having trained yourselves
with these first three voyages of mine and the two we’ve heard thus far
of my brother, Sindbad the Still-Stranded. For it lies to us now to
unhinge the jaws of our credulity and swallow his third voyage — after
which, this time tomorrow, we shall address my fateful fourth, more
horrendously entertaining than these first three combined, and a turn-
ing point in the story of its teller. Yasmin.”
Surprised and smiling, Sindbad’s daughter looked up from her
gold-robed lap, which both she and Somebody had been contemplat-
ing since her father’s first mention of the ship Zahir. “So long a voy-
age,” she asked, rising to pour the wine, “and no further moral lessons
at its end for my prospective fiancé?” She smiled sweetly but briefly at
far-off Ibn al-Hamra, then turned that smile full and radiant upon our
man at her left midtable.
“Oh, those,” said Sindbad, and he rattled them off casually upon
his own left hand: “Where there are diamonds, Q.E.D., look for ser-
pents, too; but where no diamonds are, watch out for serpents any-
how. Never be the plumpest chicken in the coop; in the company of
cannibals, keep yourself lean and mean and in every way unpalatable.
Consider that while discourse that makes no sense to us is not ipso
facto nonsense, if we try to ape it we may make monkeys of ourselves.
And bear in mind that it’s better to speak the unswallowable and swal-
low the unspeakable than to be swallowed up by either. Is that not so,
Brother Sindbad?”
“Brother Sindbad,” responded Somebody the Still-Stranded, “it is
the very truth. Though God’s great serpent waits to swallow every one
of us at the end of our story, we do well to render ourselves unswal-
lowable through its middle. Your health, sir.”
“And yours,” the host replied, raising his wine cup first our-
manward and then in a flourish that included the whole company:
“and yours and yours, my friends and partners.”
“Yours,” grumbled Ibn al-Hamra, and he tossed off his drink so
curtly that he splashed his own bib.
“Hasib Ali’s,” murmured one of the other guests, sipping pensively.

190
Six Interludes

“Mine,” proposed happy Kuzia Fakan. She drank off her wine in a single guzzle, burped contentedly, patted her lips with her veil, and
held out her cup to Yasmin for refilling.
“Hers,” sniffed old Jayda.
“Hers indeed,” their joint master agreed, “and there’s an end to
proposing this toast, or we’ll never get it swallowed.” So saying, he
and the others who had not yet done so drank. Yasmin went the
rounds again, returned to her place, and looked brightly to still-
stranded Somebody, at whom now her father nodded.
“Here is how I, too, was once swallowed,” that fellow said, “by
Mother Ocean, who then saw fit to burp me up again, as she has more
than once done since. But what befell me when I came ashore, though
it involved neither apes nor ogres nor giant snakes, I myself can still
scarcely swallow.”
He then recounted a version of

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Somebody’s Third Voyage

Through the first, or “British,” half of Baylor’s forty-second-birthday gift to
himself — a two-week “bareboat” sailing cruise in the Virgin Islands —
things had gone well enough, Baylor wrote in his travel log, considering.
He checked his left wrist, his reflexes forgetting again that as of
yesterday afternoon he had no working watch. At the sight of the
bracelet there of untanned Baylor-skin, he closed his eyes for some
moments. The passenger ferry’s idling diesels soothed the throbbing
in his head, but (as had happened more than once last night in the
forward double berth of our rented sailboat) he soon felt the approach
of vertigo, a premonition as of drowning in darkness or coming un-
moored in outer space, and opened his eyes wide. An electric clock on
the steel forward wall of the passenger lounge read 7:53: seven minutes
till Native Son’s scheduled departure from West End, Tortola, in the
British Virgins, for Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgins.
Baylor’s daughter, Juliette, was queued up at the aft-end food conces-
sion with her uncle Joe and aunt Betsy and a commuting crowd of
native sons and daughters, buying coffee and doubtless glad of the

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Somebody’s Third Voyage

respite from her strainful parents. Jane, his wife, was off by herself —
prowling the little high-speed ferry from stem to stern, Baylor bet,
and seething.
The harbor at West End was as unprepossessing as its name: So-
per’s Hole. Somewhere among the moored yachts across from the
ferry dock, our forty-foot chartered sloop, So Far, lay to twin bow
anchors uncertainly set, their nylon lines crossed (like Baylor’s fingers,
the writer noted now in his log, and the couple’s purposes) from the
vessel’s having swung overnight with wind and tide. Most unseaman-
like, not to straighten things out before leaving So Far untended
through the day; but matters were so volatile between him and Jane
just now, and Baylor was in such an odd, disoriented funk since last
evening’s accident, that we had simply let the damned boat lie.
Chances were that unless another squall like last Tuesday night’s blew
through, So Far would stay put till our return this evening. If she
should happen to drag down on her too-near neighbors (mostly other
charter yachts at permanent moorings, unchartered in this slack sea-
son), to hell with it: maybe the day’s respite from responsibility would
give Baylor the wherewithal to address the situation at afternoon’s end.
With a promptness more Brit than Carib, at 0800 almost sharp the
native captain of Native Son sounded the ship’s whistle. Deckhands
and dockhands called to one another in mellifluous West Indian and
cast off lines; the diesels shuddered, and the motor vessel moved out.
Normally Baylor would have followed the undocking with interest, to
admire (and report to his readers) the crew’s dexterity or lack thereof,
maybe to pick up a few pointers in case the family went on with this
birthday cruise. At least he ought to have made sure from the after-
deck that the wash from the ferry’s propellers didn’t bash So Far’s
dinghy unduly against the next dock down, where Baylor wasn’t sure
we had any business mooring it; a ten- or twelve-year-old whose
T-shirt read i born here: tortola, b.v.i. had collected a dollar
from us for the privilege of our leaving the tender under his warden-
ship for the day (“Loving tender-care,” Juliette had wisecracked) and
then had promptly disappeared. But what could Baylor do if in fact
the dinghy banged and scraped the pilings now, or even swamped,
outboard engine and all? Tell the captain to redock and hold the ferry
till he set things right?

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Baylor doubted that things could ever be set right.
A Styrofoam coffee cup in each hand, here approached his jewel:
lean and angular but never ungraceful, fair-skinned and -featured,
short-haired and short-shorted Juliette, with her father’s sharp jaw
and Low-German stoicism, her mother’s ultramarine eyes and Pilgrim
severity of expression.
“One sugar no cream, yes?” She handed him her left cup and settled
on the bench beside him, crossing her fine tanned legs.
“You got it,” Baylor said. “But I’m not sure I want it. Thanks
anyhow.”
“Today’s our present to you,” his daughter reminded him. “Relax
and let it happen.” She raised her plastic cup in toast. “Salaam, okay?”
“Shalom.”
She patted his left shoulder. “Happy birthday anyhow.”
In the spring of her sophomore year at Boston U., Baylor’s daugh-
ter, an uncertain liberal-arts major, had taken up with (been taken in
by, Jane grumbled) an expatriate Omani doing graduate work in
oceanography. Against her mother’s wishes (in 1972, Jane was still a
holdout against the permissiveness of the American sixties), Juliette
was living with the fellow this summer at the Woods Hole Institute.
Only her new enthusiasm for marine biology — and a private pitch
from her father that her company might oil the troubled waters of her
parents’ middlescence — had induced her to leave her Musalam for a
fortnight and join the birthday cruise. Wiry, gentle-mannered, abste-
mious, imperturbable Musalam — Musalam the Impenetrable, so he
seemed to Baylor, who was never comfortable in the younger man’s
presence. Musalam the penetrator of his daughter.
Once clear of the harbor, Native Son throttled up for the run south
and west to Charlotte Amalie. Already Tortola and Great Thatch Is-
land were astern; likewise Jost Van Dyke, which we might sail to to-
morrow if we didn’t call it quits. Sunward through the ferry’s portside
windows Baylor saw the shadow-sloped west coast of St. John, the
main cruising ground of the scheduled “American” week of our
charter; ahead to starboard was the brightly dappled, camouflage-
colored east coast of St. Thomas, which we would probably not
bother sailing to now that we were shuttling to its capital city. The
morning was brilliant and balmy, with fair-weather cumuli riding west

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Somebody’s Third Voyage

on the trade winds: a better sailing day than yesterday, for sure, maybe
the best so far.
So what? Baylor asked himself, he wrote.
Joe and Betsy Behler took up station at a window on the St. John
side: the writer’s bluff and florid older brother and that brother’s stol-
idly cheerful wife, who was as usual listening while her husband held
forth. “Joe Junior” — turned out for the excursion in polyester slacks,
elbow-sleeved sport shirt, and green and yellow John Deere cap —
was in this instance pointing to this and that on the ship, no doubt
explaining their functions knowledgeably from his World War II–time
stint in the U.S. Navy.
“Let’s look at the world with Aunt Bets and Uncle Joe,” Juliette
suggested, already rising.
“Be with you shortly,” her father said, and tapping his logbook, he
added ironically, “Baylor needs to talk to himself for a while.”

It was the family’s little standing joke — sometimes, lately, Jane’s
taunt — that Simon William Behler had exactly half succeeded in fol-
lowing his father’s early exhortations to “make a name for himself.”
From East Dorset High he had proceeded on scholarship just after the
war to the state university across the Chesapeake, the first of his family
to attempt higher education. “Now that’s the ticket!” his aunt Rachel
had cheered; his uncle Josh would surely have joined her applause, but
lung cancer had fetched him by then out to join Simon’s mother in
the new family grave-plot. His father had nodded approval and blown
his nose loudly into a linen handkerchief.
Encouraged by his work on the campus daily newspaper (The Dia-
mondback), the young man followed his baccalaureate with a year of
graduate-school journalism at Northwestern but used the excuse of
his bride’s prompt pregnancy to drop out of the program, which
didn’t much appeal to him after all, and into entry-level reportage for
the city desk of the old Washington Star, which soon enough appealed
to him even less. When the twins were old enough to be left with day-
sitters, Jane went back to three-quarter-time office work to supple-
ment their income — she had been a typist and proofreader for The
Diamondback when Simon met her — and her husband moved from
reporting for the daily Star to feature-writing for its Sunday maga-

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zine. The trade-off was a reduction in his already meager salary for
increased latitude in his subject matter — no more city-council and
schoolboard meetings! — and more time for free-lancing of a non-
journalistic sort. Using the nom de plume “William Baylor” to differ-
entiate this latter writer from S. W. Behler of the Star (“William”
struck him as more appealing than “Simon,” and the English spelling
of his surname “looks more the way it sounds,” he got into the habit
of saying), he established in the latter 1950s a minor reputation for
science-fiction fantasies with a topical-satirical twist: Joe McCarthy-
style red-baiting, say, among Cold Warriors on Ice Planet Zembla, or,
inversely, a gentle extraterrestrial accidentally stranded on Eniwetok
just before the first hydrogen-bomb test. In the early 1960s he had
rather more success with a pair of popular-historical narratives, pub-
lished in hardcover by a mainstream press rather than by the science-
fiction paperback houses: The Magnificent, about the sixteenth-century
Ottoman empire of Suleiman I, financed the down payment on a
modest house in the “planned community” of Columbia, Maryland;
Zanzibar!, a novel about the medieval Arab sea trade from East Africa
to China, went far toward paying Juliette’s and her brother’s private-
high-school tuitions when the time came.
Through those innocent Eisenhower-Kennedy years, the happy
first dozen of our marriage, how hard he and Jane had worked! We
were laboring, both of us, not only to repay Simon’s graduate-school
tuition loans and to finance a house and car and to educate our chil-
dren and to establish “William Baylor” as a professional author, but at
the same time — almost without realizing it, so innocent were we our-
selves — to change social classes: from small-town, semirural lower
middle to urban professional middle middle. Yet we had energy to
spare for everything: holding down several jobs (Simon taught an eve-
ning course in journalism at College Park in addition to writing fea-
tures for the Star and the moderately successful books of “William
Baylor”; Jane did telephone canvassing at home in the evenings after
six hours of office work at the Bureau of Standards), repainting the
house ourselves, gardening and lawn mowing, playing with the twins
and chauffeuring them to after-school lessons in this and that, attend-
ing parent-teacher and neighborhood-association meetings, entertain-
ing and being entertained by our circle of young professional friends,

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and making vigorous love at odd times and in odd places when our
busy schedules happened to give occasion.
Yet it was not until the American sixties really hit their stride that
“Baylor” found his most successful writing (and written) self.
Inspired by their author’s boyhood reading in The Arabian Nights,
The Magnificent and Zanzibar! had been worked up purely from li-
brary research; “William Baylor” had never traveled outside the
United States or, except for family camping vacations, very much
within them. On the strength of Zanzibar!’s paperback sale, however,
he was emboldened to plan for 1965 — when he and Jane would turn
thirty-five and the twins thirteen — a year’s leave from the Star and
our life in Columbia to visit Europe, the Near East, and North Africa.
More specifically, he proposed to winter with the family somewhere
mild-weathered and economical on the Mediterranean — an inexpen-
sive villa in southern Portugal or Spain, maybe, or off-season Minorca,
where Jane would housekeep and tutor Juliette and Andrew while he
got cracking on a book he had begun about Iberia in the Moorish
period — then tour western Europe through the summer on the
cheap, perhaps in a camper bus; and finally (if The Court of Lions was
sufficiently advanced) make a solo swing in the fall from Suleiman the
Magnificent’s capital city, Istanbul, down the Eastern Mediterranean
coast and west across North Africa to Morocco, flying home to Mary-
land from Tangier or Casablanca by, say, Thanksgiving.
Young Andrew and Juliette protested: they would miss their
middle-school graduation! What would they do, cooped up with their
parents in some foreign shack for the entire winter, no friends no
phone no television, not even any movies they could understand? On
this their parents were unanimous: the experience would be important
for them, and they would understand those movies, because the whole
family was going to crash on Berlitz School Spanish starting now.
But Jane was unenthusiastic, too. The summertime camping part
sounded appealing enough; God knew we were overdue for a real
vacation, though such a long one would put her job at risk. But she
had no head for languages and could not look forward to housekeep-
ing through the winter in a foreign country while riding herd on a
pair of bored thirteen-year-olds and supervising their correspondence-
school lessons in eighth-grade math, science, history, English, and the

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rest — particularly if doing so meant giving up a job she liked, just
when she was about ready to move into it full-time. As for that third
part of the plan: in fourteen years of marriage we had spent scarcely a
night apart, and now he was proposing a three-month separation —
“Let’s call it by its real name!” she cried — during which she was to
reopen the house, get the kids established in high school, find a new
job, and manage everything while he roamed footloose and fancy-free,
like the middle-aged hippie he was maybe turning into, through every
fleshpot and pot-pot from Istanbul to Casablanca?
Argument in this vein had lately been becoming a habit with us.
But Jane undeniably had a point: since President Kennedy’s assassi-
nation and Simon’s move to the Star’s Sunday magazine, her husband
had come to wear his hair and sideburns longer and had all but given
up neckties. Nevertheless (he would remind her in extremis), he re-
mained the principal breadwinner in the house by a factor of several;
he had been the model petit bourgeois paterfamilias for a dozen-plus
years and was not about to turn into Jack Kerouac, much less Allen
Ginsberg. The times they were a-changing, but he was not proposing
to kick over the traces; all he wanted (and by golly he intended to have
it) was a sort of working sabbatical: a temporary change of scene —
and, okay, “life-style” — in order to pursue a significant career move.
“The day you see me wearing a gold necklace and reciting mantras,”
he declared, “you’ll know we’re in trouble.” But for the good of the
order he shortened that solo part of the Wanderjahr from ten weeks
to two, abbreviated its itinerary to Morocco alone — just enough of
Islam to get a sense of where the Spanish Moors came from, for God’s
sake — and moved it to the front end of the trip. He would check out
Moorsville right after Christmas, cross the Straits of Gibraltar to An-
dalusia as Islam itself had done, rent a little place for the family on the
Costa del Sol, meet them there in mid-January, and return with them
around Labor Day, in time for the new school semester.
These things all came to pass, but from them William Baylor’s The
Court of Lions never materialized. On his first full day in Tangier (stop-
ping at the old Grand Hotel Villa de France, where Matisse lived while
painting his odalisques, in the city where Rimsky-Korsakov composed
Scheherazade) he fell in with a crew of younger American hangers-on
around the expatriate writer Paul Bowles — bona fide beatniks and
hippies, most of them — and in surprisingly short order found him-

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self both stoned and laid. Hashish, it was, in the first instance, pro-
vided (after a trial run of marijuana failed) by a winsome though
solemn Sarah Lawrence dropout in the second: granny-glassed and
Mother-Hubbarded Teri-from-Teaneck needed a place to crash for
two-three days and had a thing for straight older guys — a father
thing, you know? Once the dope had overcome Baylor’s initial,
conscience-stricken impotence and enabled him well beyond his
norm, she fucked his brains out.
No doubt jet lag, the novelty of traveling abroad and alone, and
the exotic otherness of Islam (market-women in veils and djellabas,
men in caftans over their business suits, currency in dirhams, a pre-
dawn muezzin crying something that sounded like Wombat! Wombat!
from a loudspeakered minaret near the Villa de France just as he and
Teri soixante-neufed to the point of orgasmic vertigo in the pitch and
dopey, languorous but heavy-breathing dark) all conspired to over-
whelm so easily his Stateside values, loyalties, inhibitions. Even when
his head and hotel room had more or less cleared, the experience left
Baylor much moved, even shaken — though not a little exhilarated as
well, and less remorseful than fascinated. He made no attempt to fol-
low up on this initiation into “fleshpots and pot-pots.” Relieved to see
no evidence of venereal infection, he stayed clear of the Paul Bowles
groupies, and of his fellow American tourists generally, and attended
to his Moorish homework like the able journalist and book-researcher
he was. He telephoned home: Jane was querulous, then testy, finally
just lonesome and looking forward to our reunion, as was he. He
reported, truthfully, that after a disoriented start his note-taking was
going well, and more equivocally, that he much missed her and the kids.
Miss them he did, positively. On the other hand, he wouldn’t at all
have minded a whole month alone in Morocco and Moorish Spain, to
sort out he didn’t quite know what, before settling down again with
the family. Instead of side-tripping the coast east and south from Tan-
gier, as he had planned, he probed inland, into deeper and somewhat
less touristed Islam, to the holy cities of Fez and Meknès, and even as
far as camel-girt, throat-parching, terra-cotta-colored Marrakesh. And
he found that he could not get Teri-from-Teaneck out of his thoughts.
Not the girl herself: what did he know or care about the girl herself,
beyond her dry olive eyes and freckled little breasts and disconcerting
habit, when approaching climax, of —

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Knock it off, he wrote in his notebook while touring Meknès; but
he could not. It was not the girl herself, but the elasticity of time and
space — hash-induced, no doubt — that stayed with him from …
Might as well say “from that magical night,” he wrote in his notebook
in Fez, though love was nowise an ingredient of the magic. Laved almost
head to foot in their joint perspiration, sexual fluids, even saliva (Teri
was a cat-lover and prodigious licker of her bedmate’s skin); en-
wrapped by arms, legs, bedsheets, and the girl’s long tangerine hair;
particularly at that moment when the muezzin’s call had rung over
their muffled, mouth-full moans, he had felt a black, cosmic suspen-
sion that recalled to him certain others long forgotten: rocking in his
childhood bed in East Dorset; holding on to both his breath and a
waterlogged snag in the Chaptico River bottom till he nearly lost con-
sciousness; French-kissing Daisy Moore ditto one night at age four-
teen on “BeeGee’s” grave in the Dorset Municipal Cemetery.
In Baylor’s imagination, he wrote in his notebook in Marrakesh —
for the first time referring to himself by his surnom de plume, as if
to distance the Columbia husband from the stoned philanderer of
Tangier — that one-night stand with a New Jersey dropout in the Villa de
France became inextricably conflated with the souks and medinas of Mo-
rocco. The taste of mint tea or couscous, the smells of cumin and ole-
ander (even of the notorious Marrakesh tanyards), the sight of camels
and caftans and hammered copper, the feel of soft tooled leather, the
sounds of goat-bleat, pipe and tambour, of spoken Arabic itself —
most particularly the five-times-daily prayer call from the minarets of
Islam — were charged for keeps with the illicit voltages of hashish and
adultery.

No need to remind him, he wrote in his notebook now — speeding
toward Charlotte Amalie aboard Native Son and himself reminded, by
yesterday’s mishap, of his Moroccan experience seven years ago — how
unfair all this was to his wife and children. He had duly found and leased
a tiny villa for them all in Estepona, still more a fishing village than a
resort in those days, on the coast of what “his” Moors had called Al-
Andaluz. Together we had coped with an inclement winter, warmer
than Maryland’s but less comfortable for want of heat and other amen-
ities. Jane and the twins had been real troupers, seldom complaining,
better at Spanish than he by the time we left, from having practiced it

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in their daily make-work while he tried vainly to breathe life into The
Court of Lions. We had all then enjoyed our long camping reconnais-
sance of the rest of Spain (including the original Patio de los Leones
in the Alhambra) and most of the rest of western Europe, and had
returned home enriched by the adventure and feeling closer as a
family, in nearly all respects, than we had felt before. Setting aside the
Moorish project when we left Andalusia, Baylor contented himself
through our grand tour with keeping a journal, or travel log, in his
“Moroccan” style — Baylor in the Court of Lions; Baylor in the Piazza
San Marco, the Colosseum, Dachau, Schloss Neuschwanstein, the British
Museum, Stonehenge, Tivoli, Elsinore — registering the details not so
much of those celebrated places as of his persona’s reaction to them: a
mainstream, midlife WASP American en famille at certain waypoints
and touchstones of Western Civ; a not-quite-innocent abroad.
Teri-from-Teaneck, alas, who had not infected him, infected this
journal. In the summer months especially, Europe was overrun with
the likes of her and her blue-jeaned, cowboy-booted, backpacking
male counterparts thumbing down the highways, sleeping in the parks
and campgrounds. Many of the young women were lumpy, pasty-
faced, slack-assed, altogether unappealing, but the sight of one trim
and comely on the Ponte Vecchio or in the Luxembourg Gardens or
the Rijksmuseum — like the sight of a Near Eastern restaurant in Mu-
nich, an Ingres harem scene in the Louvre, an edition of The Thousand
Nights and a Night in a London bookstall — would put Baylor sting-
ingly in mind, he wrote, of TFT’s muskmarine vulva (his wife’s was
invariably daisy-fresh, even after intercourse) and copper-fleeced armpits
(Jane shaved); of Baylor’s repeated and, in one instance, unprecedentedly
sustained erections; above all, of that swooning sense of being not “out-of-
body” but supernally in it, beyond the particulars of time and place. In vain
he strove with Jane to reproduce that sensation, without of course
mentioning what exactly he was after. Our sex life, in consequence,
was more than usually vigorous through our European sojourn, de-
spite our limited privacy; Andrew and Juliette, feeling worldly and
amused, would take long after-dinner hikes about the campground or
the neighborhood of the family’s pension-du-soir “in case you guys
want to be alone for a while,” and would loudly signal their return.
But vin ordinaire is not hashish, a Danish family campground is not
the Grand Hotel Villa de France, and one’s faithful spouse of a decade

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and a half, however still handsome and well put together, is not likely
to be (Baylor wrote) a space-and-time-transcending fuck.
At first light one morning near the end of our trip, stirred by a
vivid but already fleeting dream in which “TFT” was displaced for his
pleasure to the Jmaa el Fna in Marrakesh — that bustling, sensuous,
somewhat intimidating “Place of the Dead” bazaar — Baylor half
woke to find his bedmate fondling him in her own, evidently amorous
half-sleep. In that intermediate zone we came together, so ardently
that at the moment of ejaculation Baylor felt his ontological moorings
slacken, almost give way. Just then an English rooster crowed; an En-
glish morning dawned, gray, rain-pattering; from belowstairs in our
bed-and-breakfast outside Weymouth came the cozy smells of fried
tomato, pork sausage, English tea. Smiling Jane laid a finger to his
lips, to shush his groan.
Baylor’s Grand Tour, the first of the “Baylor” series and the author’s
debut into “the new journalism,” was also his first to attain the New
York Times best-seller list: for a respectable five weeks it bobbled be-
tween number 8 and number 6 before subsiding. It was cordially re-
viewed in the places that count and did well in paperback, too.
Though the book made no direct mention of its pseudonymous
author-antihero’s Tangerine sexual adventure, it dealt candidly and
amusingly with his hashish initiation and with certain restlessnesses
attendant on his being (Baylor quoted Dante) nel mezzo del cammin di
nostra vita. He had spoken of these things, more or less, with his wife,
though not quite in these terms, while recasting his journals into book
form. Gratified by his success — Jane, unfortunately, had not found a
new job as interesting as the one she had quit for the sake of our
trip — she was not a little embarrassed as well, a touch hurt-feelinged
and resentful, less because her husband was capable of “middlescent”
stirrings than because he had thus broadcast them, even under a
(transparent) assumed name. Moreover, a few particular phrasings —
e.g., in the chapter “Baylor Dreams of the Jmaa el Fna” — provoked
in her an unwonted wifely suspicion. Chiding herself, she nevertheless
poked about in his newly refurbished writing room one winter Sat-
urday when he was over in D.C. with fifteen-year-old Andrew (“Bay-
lor & Son Protest Our Presence in Vietnam,” for Esquire). On a shelf
of his books and notebooks, in no way concealed, she found his travel

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log from the family’s season abroad. Standing there among the regu-
lated clicks and hums of their pleasant house, she read it through.

As Native Son throttled down from planing speed at the entrance to
St. Thomas Harbor, Jane excused herself from the family group again:
to get a better view of the cruise liners from across the passenger
lounge, she said. But Joe Junior, prompted by Juliette and the sight
of the ferry’s orange life rafts, was in the midst of retelling his wartime
adventure in the South Pacific, and not only had we all (his niece
included) heard that remarkable story often before, but Jane found
such anecdotes distressing and thoughtless in the too-long absence of
any word from Drew. At least she wasn’t moving specifically away
from him this time, Baylor reflected; rather from his family in general,
of whom (including Juliette, her father’s darling) she had had a gutful
in the last twenty-four hours.
“Honey, I bailed her!” Joe was declaring in a cheery holler. “Didn’t
I bail her?” he demanded of his wife.
“You just better believe it,” placid Betsy affirmed on cue.
“That’s why I still get the willies e’en on a real boat like this one,”
he confided loudly to his brother. “Never mind your tippy little ding-
bat Whatsitsname!”
“So Far” his niece reminded him. “From exotic Akron, Ohio.”
He laid a red hand on her tan knee. “Lemme tell you this, hon:
when your damn flying boat won’t boat no better’n it flies, and then
your damn inflatable won’t more’n half inflate, and then your damn
island ’bout washes away from under you, old Akron Ohio gets to
sounding a lot like Heaven!”
“What’d you bail with, Uncle Joe?” Baylor’s daughter seemed to
enjoy thus feeding her uncle, who needed no feeding, and who seldom
in his brother’s memory had reciprocated that polite interest in other
folks’ doings. He left it to his wife, along with managing their house
and keeping the books for Behler Maintenance & Improvement, to
ask what Juliette was doing with herself this summer, and whether we
had heard anything from Andrew lately, and what “Sy’s” new book
was going to be all about.
“Same thing I caught and ate my seagull with!” Dropping his jaw
and widening his eyes in mock astonishment, he held up both meaty

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hands, fingers splayed. “Man gets desperate enough, he could bail this
whole damn harbor with his bare hands!”
“His fingers were so cracked and bloody they drew sharks,” plump
Betsy said. “But his last night out there he kept seeing this light, low
down on the water? So he kept on paddling with his two bare hands
the whole blessed night, sharks or not.”
“Paddling and a-bailing!” her husband roared. An elderly West In-
dian woman down-bench from them nodded affirmation.
Weary as Baylor was of the recitation — and still half dazed and
more than half depressed from yesterday evening and last night — he
still found the tale extraordinary, all but incredible, though his brother
was too guileless, for one thing, to invent or much exaggerate. Joe
Junior’s C-46 transport, loaded with Seabees and their equipment,
had crash-landed in the ocean when one engine caught fire, just as the
War Department’s telegram had more or less informed the family, and
had sunk very quickly thereafter, carrying with it the flight crew and
most of the passengers. Half a dozen, however, escaped in two sturdy
inflatable life rafts, and though one man died in the night from inter-
nal injuries, the others had the marvelous luck to be spotted and res-
cued only three days later by an amphibious PBY patrol plane on the
lookout for the overdue C-46. But for reasons unknown (the sea was
calm enough for the flying boat to “land” instead of merely radioing
the rafts’ position to a naval vessel), the PBY on takeoff “caught a wing
pontoon,” according to Joe, did a violent cartwheel, sheared the
caught wing, and flipped over, its fuselage broken at the waist turrets.
Joe Junior (who had been “bidding good-bye to them damn rafts”
from one of those turrets) found himself back in the water, bruised
and neck-wrenched but otherwise unhurt; his comrades were either
killed in that second crash or too injured to escape, he never learned
which. The capsized plane settled and sank as he swam back toward it
through a strew of debris, luckily including a life raft that was partially
punctured and smaller than the one he had just abandoned (now
blown too far away by the PBY’s prop-wash to overtake) but better
equipped.
There ensued an ordeal almost as long as the famous Eddie Rick-
enbacker’s and perhaps more heroic, for being endured alone. For
blazing weeks Baylor’s brother survived on the raft’s small supply of
water and rations, then on raw fish and (like Rickenbacker) raw sea-

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gull and sips from his own scant urine. Sun-fried, salt-blistered, storm-
swamped, shark-menaced, he paddled by hand, after losing the raft’s
paddle in a night capsize, to more than one hallucinated island — in-
cluding, Joe Junior liked to swear solemnly, hand on heart, “the Is-
land” in Island Creek, where he and his buddies had had themselves
many a good old time when they were kids; did Sy remember it? —
before following that aforementioned light to a real one. The tiny atoll
was uninhabited but fortunately not treeless; on it he found nothing
that could account for the light that had beckoned him there, but
enough coconuts, firewood, and catchable fish to make the next in-
stallment of his ordeal — the “Robinson Crusoe chapter” — seem a
beach party compared to what he had survived already.
Juliette sighed. “Boyoboy: no wonder you’re not crazy about
swimming and sailing.”
“Honey,” her aunt Betsy complained, “it’s a miracle he’s here. I
can’t even get him to Ocean City for a weekend!”
“Oh, I don’t mind watching you girls in your bikinis and whatnot.”
Joe patted his wife’s strapping, pants-suited right thigh with his left
hand, Juliette’s lean and bare brown left with his right. “But gimme
dry land to watch from, any old time!” He tapped his cigarette pack
and winked: “That’s why I like Camels!”
Rejoining us but not sitting, Jane declared that if dry land was the
order of the day, we had better come along and clear customs, or we’d
find ourselves headed back to Soper’s Hole. “Aye, aye, ma’am!” cried
Joe Junior, and all but Baylor set about gathering up cameras, hand-
bags, caps, and themselves for disembarking. He was in fact lingering
half in the unretold climax of his brother’s adventure (after a typhoon
nearly washed him off his desert island, Joe Junior had spelled out his
last name on the beach in ten-foot capitals with coral rocks and coco-
nut husks and, praying that it wasn’t Japanese, attracted the attention
of a reconnaissance plane by standing at the tail of the R and waving
a bright-orange nylon signal pennant from the raft’s survival kit) and
half in associated reveries, some long forgotten, some recent: “Prin-
cess Wakini” swimming nude in Lagoon; his wife doing likewise lately
off So Far’s stern in the crowded anchorages of Norman Island, Trellis
Bay, and Gorda Sound, and even in Soper’s Hole last night with Joe
and Betsy aboard. Jane had been not so much indifferent to nudity, in
her husband’s opinion (as were the French and Scandinavian charterers

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she had taken her cue from), as asserting her nakedness — Here it is;
what are you going to do about it? — and, in that last instance, de-
fying as well the cruising guide’s advice against night swimming in
tropical anchorages.
“It’s your party,” she reminded him now, obviously keeping her
voice under control. “Are you ready to come?” At forty-two, Jane
Price was a striking woman still, long and lean like their daughter
though more amply tushed and breasted, an eye-turner yet in snug
jeans and a sleeveless top that set off her fine arms and shoulders. Her
sunglasses were perched stylishly atop her walnut hair, the more at-
tractive for its seasoning with a touch of gray, as was her face for the
crow’s-feet forming at the corners of her eyes. Those eyes were the
color but (in present company, at least) not the warmth of the Sir
Francis Drake Channel, which So Far had crisscrossed for the past
week; her tone was no warmer. Baylor’s new lover — who would not
likely be in Jane’s shape when she reached Jane’s age, but that wasn’t
going to be any time soon — happened to have asked him that very
same question, in a quite different voice and quite other circum-
stances, the afternoon before he set out from Washington National
with his wife to rendezvous with Juliette in San Juan and go on to
Tortola. As he had done then, he replied now simply, “Yup.”

It was certainly not that Jane Price didn’t have just grievance, past and
present. She and Simon William Behler had married comparatively
young and comparatively innocent, even for the innocent American
1950s. Though neither had been virginal when we commenced our
premarital affair, our high-school and early college romances had been
transient and infrequently consummated. We had more or less redis-
covered sex together and had relished our discoveries. We had loved
each other, our married life, our babies, and our hardworking climb
up the postwar American middle-class ladder. Notwithstanding that
new abrasiveness in our relation after S. W. Behler left his staff job
with the Star, who could say that we might not be contentedly mar-
ried still, despite Baylor’s lapse with Teri-from-Teaneck, if he had
simply been grown-up enough not to let that adventure possess his
imagination, and above all discreet enough not to write it down? Good
people could lapse; good marriages survived such lapses. But Baylor
had not only dwelt upon and written about his single infidelity, in a

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way that made the family’s European odyssey a bitter exercise in hy-
pocrisy; he had published it to the world, or might as well have. Even
Teresa Anginelli, the aspiring College Park journalist whose apart-
ment he had lately been visiting before or after his evening workshop,
had been appalled when he told her about that; in motion astride him,
she had cheerfully promised instant reprisal in kind if he ever pub-
lished a “Baylor Tries Italian.” And this many years after Tangier, he
still blushed for shame, not at the incident but at his mishandling of
it, which had effectively poisoned at home the success of “Baylor” in
the larger world.
That said, however, he believed that an impartial jury would agree
that Jane’s reaction had been unusually vindictive and sustained. In the
seven years between his one-nighter with Teri-from-Teaneck and his
recent once-a-weeker with Teresa-from-Last-Semester, he had been
penitently faithful, striving earnestly to repair the damage he re-
proached himself for having caused. After the dreadful weeks of tears,
hysterics, and virtual nervous collapse that followed her discovery of
his European journal, Jane had retaliated by screwing cold-bloodedly
first the divorce lawyer whom she consulted as soon as she was on her
feet, then the clinical psychologist from whom she sought counsel on
the lawyer’s advice before taking legal action to separate, then her new
boss, when the psychotherapist advised giving the marriage a second
chance. Each time, she announced to her husband what she had done
and Baylor excused her — though he considered bringing a malprac-
tice suit against the psychologist and was not surprised when Jane’s
boss subsequently eased her out of his department. A season passed
before husband and wife made love again, and if on rare occasions
something of our old ardor returned, our innocent spontaneity never
did. Jane made it clear that she would never quite trust him again or
love him as she had before. As “Baylor’s” reputation grew, his wife
became ever more managerial, businesswomanlike, though her actual
office career declined to part-time stenography and filing. She quar-
reled with coworkers and supervisors, with maids and service people.
The couple did not quite separate, but our values did, and the voltage
between us through the intemperate High Sixties drove each further
from the middle ground than either would likely have moved other-
wise. Bell-bottomed, blue-jeaned Baylor was a moderately busy peace-
marcher against the Pentagon, a critic of domestic surveillance (“Baylor

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Bugged”), a civil-rights demonstrator, over Joe Junior’s objections,
back in their hometown (“Baylor Jugged”). Low-hemlined Jane grew
increasingly hawkish and anticountercultural; thought Martin Luther
King, Jr., a pious fraud and the Vietnam draft-resisters unpatriotic
cowards; advocated expulsion for college activists who struck or
trashed their campuses.
Of the twins, Andrew gravitated more and more toward his
mother, to Baylor’s disappointment. Never a scholar, the young man
matriculated in prelaw at conservative Washington and Lee, did not
resist the draft, and was drafted: unresolved oedipality, Baylor said to
himself, stung with guilt. Juliette shared many of her father’s values,
but as the “oldest child” (by an hour) she inclined to conservative
dress and unrebellious behavior, and strove with some success to me-
diate between her parents. We both credited her with, and sometimes
teasingly blamed her for, keeping the household together.
And we both — Juliette, too — rather expected we would split
once the twins were off to their respective colleges, but that final
breach had never quite come to pass. Indeed, with the turmoil of the
children’s adolescence behind us, the noisy 1960s officially over, the
war in Southeast Asia obviously winding toward its sorry finish, and
the family’s finances (thanks to the “Baylor” series) in ever better
shape despite college tuitions, the couple seemed in our forties to be
edging toward rapprochement. We exchanged our Columbia house
for an older, more gracious one in Bethesda; we bought a vacation
condominium near Ocean City and a small secondhand sailboat. Jane
sometimes accompanied her husband on his lecture trips (“Baylor”
was in middling demand on the campus circuit) if the place interested
her, though she avoided the lectures themselves and the attendant so-
cializing and would not read his books and articles.
In truth, those became the sticking point between us. “Baylor” was
not Baylor, but more and more the invented self supplanted its inven-
tor, who had perfected a merchandisable blend of candor and reti-
cence, biographical fact and imaginative projection. “Baylor” idealized
most appealingly Baylor’s actual faults and strengths: his innocences,
timidities, small vanities, frustrations; his patience and prevailing
goodwill, affection for his household and concern for his country; his
occasional braveries and small triumphs on the margin of history’s
larger text. Virtually everything in Baylor’s life was grist for “Baylor’s”

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mill, even the (discreetly intimated) strains of his marriage and the
temptations attendant upon “Baylor’s” increasing celebrity: “Baylor
Does a TV Talk Show,” “Baylor Encounters a Baylor Groupie.” “Bay-
lor’s” tattered innocence reflected WASP middle America’s, and
WASP middle Americans warmly responded to his narration of its
unraveling. The peculiar taboo in his house on acknowledging “Bay-
lor’s” existence no doubt helped sustain the enterprise, though it gave
Baylor the feeling that his life was being lived Voice Over; as if the
italicized narrator in his head more and more had all the lines.
Baylor Trips (1971), a collection of his articles from and about the
sixties, won the National Book Award for nonfiction and was nomi-
nated for a Pulitzer Prize as well. The title piece, one of many done
for Esquire, concerned a belated and disorienting experiment of “Bay-
lor’s” with LSD at the decade’s end, representative of his generation’s
and class’s experimentation with such other consciousness-alterers as
radical politics and countercultural “life-styles.” The tide also alluded
to “Baylor’s” stumblings, and those of many of his kind: literally, in
his instance, over his own feet (in a student apartment in Boston,
where “Baylor” had gone to deliver a lecture and visit his daughter
and been appropriated by graduate-student fans), but figuratively,
too; stumbling, also, upon the realization that he was finally and con-
tentedly “straight”: a preferrer of good Bordeaux to Acapulco Gold,
of struggling up to dropping out, of responsible heterosexual mo-
nogamy to “open-ended” and unorthodox “relationships.” Jane had
congratulated him with champagne but declined to attend the awards
ceremonies earlier this year; Juliette had proudly and handsomely
stood in for her mother at Lincoln Center. While he was in New York,
however, his wife broke her own rule and against her better judgment
read not the whole collection but the title memoir. It did not devastate
her, as his old travel log had done. But far from finding it prevailingly
affirmative of her own values and therefore encouraging for our future
(not to say moving, funny, and brilliantly written as well), she found
it disgusting. To “do” illegal drugs in his own daughter’s company; to
behave like an undergraduate in middle age among total strangers; no
doubt to “score” here and there with promiscuous and impressionable
coeds and bring home who could say what venereal infections — and
then to make a public disgrace of himself and his family by bragging
in print about such misbehavior … !

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There ensued on his return to Bethesda our most scarifying quarrel
in half a dozen years. Divorce was once again in the air; this time we
went so far as to propose — and argue over — hypothetical divisions
of property (“Baylor Pays Price,” he imagined himself writing). De-
spite his angry protestations of innocence, Jane remained persuaded
that he was an ongoing occasional philanderer and for much of the
spring refused sex with him. He began to suspect that she was retali-
ating as she had done before, this time without acknowledgment. In-
dignant at her accusations — he had had plenty of opportunities and
had declined them; that was virtually the point of “Baylor Trips” —
he made a flat-out pass at Teresa Anginelli after class one mid-March
Tuesday evening in College Park and learned that she had been won-
dering since Labor Day whether he would ever get up nerve enough
to respond to her obvious signals. Well, he had missed them; no doubt
there was a “Baylor” piece in that. Moreover, once he had got his
nerve up, it took three assignations to persuade his penis to follow
suit: a “Baylor” piece there, too. But when his potency more or less
returned, his manhood welcomely returned with it, like a strong
melody one had forgotten that one had forgotten, in the embraces of
this frankly admiring fan not much older than Juliette — a fan who,
despite her aforementioned threat, was amused to call herself “Baylor’s
Italian Piece.”
Jane must surely have detected the change in him — his renewed
self-confidence, his sharpened interest in all sorts of things, together
with a good-humored new indifference to her — and felt her accusa-
tion vindicated. That she did not make a particular issue of it or pursue
the matter of divorce reinforced his suspicion that she must have an
affair of her own in progress. Thus we entered the summer, in Baylor’s
narrator’s words, like a couple living in (and living out) a John Updike
novel.
But however uncertain and essentially unhappy his and Jane’s home
life, he had seldom felt his imagination so enabled as in this year’s first
half. His new book-in-the-works bade to be a corner-turner as well as
a page-turner, bringing together his earlier attempts at fiction and his
later strengths as personal essayist and commentator on our times:
tentatively titled Baylor’s Kid Sister, it was a satirical fantasy in the vein
of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, about a young Ameri-

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can hippie feminist in 1968 (the invented “kid sister” of the title, an amalgam of “BeeGee” Behler and Teresa Anginelli, garnished with a
touch of Teri-from-Teaneck), transported by drug abuse back to the
court of King Shahryar and Scheherazade. Posing as Scheherazade’s
younger sister, Dunyazade, and returning periodically “home” for ad-
vice from “Baylor,” “Sis” coaches Scheherazade through her thousand-
night ordeal and saves the kingdom by curing the king’s misogyny,
but against her own principles she falls in love with his male-supremist
younger brother, the handsome Shah Zaman of Samarkand, and only
reluctantly comes back to the here and now, annealed but chastened
by her adventure. It was — his editor, his agent, and his Tuesday-
night lover all agreed — a winner. Accustomed to working hard (how
little his typical writing students, even able Teresa, understood the
professional’s sustained hard labor), through April, May, and June he
toiled almost feverishly: at the novel, on the lecture circuit (Teresa
went with him to Albuquerque for a two-night stand, their first tryst
longer than two hours), on his new syndicated newspaper column,
called simply “Baylor,” and (it being an election year) on a number of
political-satirical “Baylor” pieces for Esquire, over and above.
Late in May, happily exhausted, he proposed to Jane a midsummer
sailing vacation in, of all July places, the Caribbean. It would be low
season down there then; yacht charters were cheaper and available on
short notice; the beaches and anchorages would be less crowded than
Ocean City and Chesapeake Bay, the weather no more subtropical,
the scenery better. Renting our vacation condo at local high season
would pay part of the freight; the balance we could easily afford
(though he had privately in mind something like “Baylor Cruises Vir-
gins in Sinking Ship” to justify charging off his share of the cost as a
business expense): call it his forty-second birthday gift. More experi-
enced sailor-friends had reported that the boat handling and inter-
island navigation were well within our capacity and had recommended
a reliable Annapolis agency for Virgin Islands bareboat charters.
Jane shrugged. Her latest job — volunteer office work with the
American Red Cross — was going the way of its predecessors; she
was convinced that the black office manager was practicing reverse
discrimination against her white staff, to the point where Jane was
ready to quit or bring suit or both. But was her husband prepared to
miss two or three in a row of his Tuesday nights out?

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She had taken, lately, to such knowing insinuations. “There are no Tuesday nights in the summer,” Baylor reminded her neutrally, hop-
ing he would remember that line for “Baylor’s” possible wry use.
“School’s out.” We could even bring Juliette along to keep us civilized,
he added good-humoredly, if our daughter can tear herself away from
her A-rab friend.
Jane shrugged again and poured herself another frozen margarita
from the blender.

The free port of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, noted Baylor the tourist
after clearing U.S. customs, is unscruffy by Caribbean standards, rich in
happily shopping Americans even in July, and in fact an agreeable place to
shop: Dronningen’s Gade and the other picturesquely peeling stucco alleys of
the restored market area. Remark, he instructed “Baylor,” that cars
drive on the left here, in the U.S. Virgins as well as in the British.
Remark that homely cotton pullover tops made of colorfully labeled
flour sacks from Guatemala are a big item this year with us affluent
Statesiders, both male and female.
Terra firma proved restorative for all hands. Joe and Betsy were
clearly enjoying themselves for the first time since deplaning yesterday
morning at the Beef Island airport in Tortola: it was their first vacation
ever outside the United States, and like kids turned loose in a Toys “”
Us, they were crowing now over the duty-free booze and Japanese
cameras. Juliette and Jane admired gold hoop earrings and agreed not
to buy their flour-sack tops until after lunch, by when they’d have
scouted the inventory. And Baylor’s head verged upon reclearing for
the first time since yesterday’s anchoring fiasco. Taking his cue from
his womenfolk, he only reconnoitered the waterproof Rolexes, Ome-
gas, and Seikos before lunchtime, to get a sense of prices and features
and of the competition among dealers in the neighborhood. By half
past noon, after an agreeable hour’s strolling among the gades, through
cassette-taped reggae and calypso floating from Sonys and Panasonics
in every market stall, he had narrowed the options to two models of
Seiko and two shops well off Dronningen’s Gade, where low-season
prices were a few percent lower yet.
“Conch-chowder time, Aunt Bets!” Juliette pronounced the mol-
lusk’s name “East Dorset-style,” the ch like that of chowder; it was the
forenoon’s running tease since her aunt had innocently read it off that
way from a restaurant sign back at the harbor.

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“I b’lieve she means conk kowder” came back her uncle Joe, an ever-
ready razzer. “Us poor rednecks’ll settle for a cheeseburger’n’a Bud.”
“You will not!” declared Betsy, and she punched his big arm; then
she added, to us, “I swear.” Juliette flagged a cab — since little-girl-
hood she’d had an odd gift for spotting empty taxis and cars about to
vacate parking spaces before either of her parents saw them — to fetch
us to the Sheraton St. Thomas, whose restaurant Jane believed she had
read a good notice about in the Times. With a large tip in advance, Bay-
lor bribed the cabbie to carry all five of the party, against company pol-
icy; four, however, the fellow decreed, must sit in the back. Joe Ju-
nior — the most “space-intensive,” as Juliette put it — was elected to
sit up front; the three women and Baylor, joking, chuckling, squeezed
themselves into the rear, lean Juliette perched on her father’s lap.
“Lucky mon, hah?” joshed the cabbie, and Baylor readily agreed.
It was, in fact, complexly stirring to hold his grown daughter thus as
the taxi wended through crosstown traffic. How many years had it
been since she’d sat so? In what foul and dangerous jungle was her
twin brother maybe sweating at that moment, he whom Baylor used
to gallop on one knee, with Juliette on the other, the day before yes-
terday, it sometimes seemed, two steeplechasers taking the jumps? The
recollection dizzied him; the apprehension for Drew’s sake, too. At
the same time, the gold hair fluffing into his face with the window
breeze, the trim thighs atop his Bermudas, shifting on his lap as the
cab turned corners — all felt indecently sexy. Juliette was a better-put-
together young woman than Teresa Anginelli; better-looking even
than Jane had been at her age. That Musalam was one damn lucky
Mussulman.
Their cabbie proved to be a cheerful and garrulous native son who
had once visited cousins in D.C. and claimed to be a fan of the Balti-
more Orioles but couldn’t recall having seen Chesapeake Bay. “God’s
country!” Joe Junior assured him. Betsy asked, incredulous, “You
mean you never ate steamed hard-crabs?” “Ate plenty steam conch,”
the cabbie teased, grinning in the rearview. “Crack conch, scorch
conch, fritter conch — just like home!” That subject broached, he ad-
vised against the Sheraton for lunch if conch was our objective and
recommended instead a place back near the harbor.
“Native place, is it?” Joe asked. Baylor winced at his tone: cordially
skeptical, as if he were back in Lagoon country instead of a bustling

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tourist port. And his brother added with a wink, “One of your cousins
runs it, right?”
But the cabbie seemed unannoyed. “No, mon! Cost too dear for
us! But the ladies like it, you know? Prit-ty place. Green Tree.”
In the event, we were all so taken with the fellow that we bade him
wait while we made a quick inspection of the Sheraton grounds and
restaurant (sure enough, no conch on the menu) and the associated
marina, where our driver pointed out to us serious cruising yachts
from around the world, many refitting after long ocean passages.
“Boyoboy,” sighed Juliette, smoothing her hair and shifting posi-
tion on her father’s lap. “Someday, huh?”
Then he drove us back harborward, nattering on agreeably en route
about his family in response to the women’s questions. His wife
(“smahta than me”) was a high-school graduate and worked in the
customs office; another, earlier wife had taken their young son off
with her to Toronto, Canada, some years ago. “Cold up there, mon!”
He himself had never seen snow. At the Green Tree Restaurant, Joe
Junior paid the fare, gave him another large tip, shook his hand sin-
cerely, and declared that he was right pleased to’ve made his acquain-
tance. Betsy, too, shook his hand. Juliette and Jane thanked him for
the restaurant recommendation — “Hope you thank me afta!” he said,
laughing — and Baylor instructed “Baylor” to perpend that the St.
Thomasians’ reputation for unfriendliness seemed a bum rap: not only
this cabbie but the ferry crew, the customs agents, and the marketplace
salesclerks had all been prevailingly cheerful, even high-humored, so far.
Over conch stew and Heineken’s dark — which even Joe Junior
mock-grudgingly allowed were worth passing up his usual lunch
for — Baylor decided, with Juliette’s help, to buy the Seiko Sports 100
with rotating bezel for measuring elapsed time instead of the dressier
fixed-bezel model, though both were waterproof, quartz-crystal jobs
and God knew what he’d ever use the bezel device for. Barbecuing
lamb chops?
“Navigating old So Far out of Soper’s Hole,” Joe suggested with a
chuckle, “better’n you navigated us in.” Though not malicious, the
tease was tactless; but it also oddly reprised Baylor’s narrator’s use of
the words so far a few sentences back.
“Time your lectures with it, Dad,” Juliette advised — another in-

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nocently unfortunate reference, as Baylor suspected that Jane sus-
pected he had not been alone that weekend in Albuquerque.
“I could do that,” he agreed, and he turned to his wife across the
table corner with what he felt to be a friendly smile. “Anyhow, I’ll
miss my old Bulova.”
Matter-of-factly she replied, “I doubt it,” and went on with her
stew.
“I will,” Baylor found himself insisting. To the company he de-
clared, “I’ve loved every wristwatch I ever owned, starting with my
Ingersoll Mickey Mouse. What a timepiece! And that Omega you sent
me for my fourteenth birthday,” he reminded his brother, “the same
day we heard you were missing: that watch lasted me through high
school and college, and it was still running fine when Jane gave me the
Bulova for my twenty-first. It’s in a drawer back home right now,
almost as good as new.”
“So why buy another one?” his wife asked without looking up.
“You didn’t need mine in the first place.”
“Mom,” Juliette protested. “That’s not what he meant.”
It was not, but Baylor let the provocation pass. As Joe Junior
started in on how his Navy Post Exchange Rolex had survived the
South Pacific with its owner, Baylor reflected about himself that he
had likewise more or less loved every woman he’d ever gone to bed
with — not a great number — and that that circumstance doubtless
helped account for his inordinate postcoital preoccupation, seven
years ago, with Teri-in-Tangier: a conditioned reflex of affection.
Other people’s wristwatches were usually replaced because they were
worn out; his had characteristically been set aside, still going strong,
because they were being replaced. He could almost imagine that his
old Ingersoll, wherever it was, would still tick along faithfully if re-
wound, as it had done through the years when, having outgrown it,
he wore Uncle Josh’s Longines-Wittnauer. He had in fact more than
once fetched out “Joe Junior’s” Omega to wear while “Jane’s” Bulova
was being cleaned and oiled, and had enjoyed each time the old feeling
that he was going back to where he’d somehow left off: rejoining
some parallel track of his life, resuming some alternative plot of “Bay-
lor’s” story. In the same way — until last night, at least — he had of-
ten felt that as the hands of those successive watches wound around, 

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and all about him aged and put their pasts behind them, there was a
part of him ready like his Ingersoll and Omega to take up exactly
where it had left off, as if no time had elapsed. His mortification over
that stolen Bon Ami cleanser, for example, still stung whenever he saw
a can of that product, as if the episode had happened last Tuesday
rather than twenty-eight years ago. Visiting the Dorset Municipal
Cemetery with Juliette some seasons past, he had told her the story of
the dandelions on “Bijou’s” grave and been moved to tears, not by
that memory alone but by an almost swooningly strong recollection
of his boyhood tryst there with Daisy Moore — in and out of asylums
herself these days, like her mother before her. He could pick up that
connection, he had felt, exactly where it had ended in 1944, except
that now he would bring to it a much more seasoned understanding
than he had been capable of back then. He clearly remembered lines
of their dialogue on the Island, just as he could still see clearly, apropos
of nothing, the “Lifter” out at the Albany Brothers cannery, the to-
mato truck overturned by angry picketers there in ’37, the seedy office
of the Bellanca pilot Howard Garton in the Avon airport, with its
smell of cigar smoke and “old Bessie’s” engine oil.

Baylor’s Arrested Development Jumps Bail.
Through the first, or “British,” half of his forty-second-birthday
gift to himself, things had gone well enough, considering. Waiting for
Juliette’s Boston flight to arrive in San Juan, he and Jane had actually
strolled the Aeropuerto Los Angeles hand in hand, “up” for our un-
usual vacation. On impulse he had bought in a concourse shop three
pukka-shell necklaces, and though Jane had declined to wear hers, she
had made no jibes about his “going hippie.” Our daughter, true to
form, had donned hers immediately after kissing us hello at her gate,
then rehefted her seabag and set about reinforcing the spirit of happy
family adventure. On the leg from Puerto Rico to Tortola, as the old
BVI Airways DC-3 banked over emerald and purple water, she looked
forward enthusiastically to snorkeling the reefs with her parents —
nothing to it, she assured us novices; not like scuba diving — and after
mentioning only once how much she missed her Musalam already, she
wished repeatedly that her brother could be with us: the family adven-
turing together again, as we had done through Europe. …
That evening in our hotel in Roadtown, and the next morning at

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the charter-skippers’ briefing and boat checkout, she had been a real
pal, reviewing with her father the unfamiliarities of diesel engines,
marine refrigeration, ship-to-shore radio, and battery banks (our little
sloop back home had a hand-start outboard and an icebox); going
over So Far’s galley equipment and provisioning with her mother. Af-
ter making our first short passage across the Francis Drake Channel
and our first Caribbean anchorage in the Bight of Norman Island, we
had agreed: “So far, so good.”
For some days thereafter, our weather held prevailingly fair as we
zigzagged upwind from island to island, anchoring here for lunch,
here for snorkeling or exploring ashore, there for the night. We be-
came adept at plotting compass courses between landmarks on the
chart; at jiffy-reefing our sails when the trade winds breezed up or a
quick afternoon squall swept down the channel; at judging depths and
spotting coral formations by the color of the water; at reminding
whichever of us was at the helm that the occasional red and green
channel buoys, like the vehicular-traffic rules ashore, were the reverse
of the U.S. system. Juliette duly instructed us in the pleasures of snor-
keling the rocks and reefs, dispelled our apprehensions about barra-
cudas and moray eels, which were essentially harmless, and pointed
out sea urchins and fire coral, which were not. Father and daughter
did most of the boat handling while Jane read and sunned herself, but
she was a good sport about lending an extra hand as needed, and she
planned and cheerfully supervised all the meals. Every afternoon, fol-
lowing the charterer’s instructions, we would anchor in one of the
recommended spots while there was still light enough to see the bot-
tom through the crystal water; we would “back down” on the anchor
to set it in three or four fathoms, and then Baylor or Juliette would
snorkel it, pulling themselves hand over hand down the line to make
sure that the flukes had good purchase and that any sharp coral in the
neighborhood would chafe against chain rather than nylon. After a
swim we would sip rum drinks and nibble hors d’oeuvres in So Far’s.
comfortably shaded cockpit; then by the long orange and violet eve-
ning light or a lamp hung under the bimini top, Baylor would barbe-
cue on the stern-rail charcoal grill whatever Jane had chosen from the
fridge while the women built salads and side dishes, or we would all
dinghy ashore to some little island restaurant we had radioed ahead to
for reservations.

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With double discretion Baylor logged for future reference his im-
pressions of all this: so as not to restir unhappy memories, he kept his
journal posting as much as possible out of Jane’s view and kept Teresa
Anginelli altogether out of the journal, though from time to time she
was inevitably in his thoughts. There was a trade-off in Juliette’s being
aboard: her presence was a pleasure in itself and no doubt helped
“keep things civilized” between him and Jane, but in the confines of a
smallish sailboat it also gave husband and wife (this husband and wife,
at this stage of our history) no convenient opportunity to make love,
as Baylor felt pretty sure we would be doing otherwise. The water and
air were so voluptuous on our skin, the sea and sky so beautiful, the
leisurely island cruising such exotic refreshment, and there was Jane
frequently topless on deck and nude in the water, as were some other
of the women on yachts round about. Ten years ago we would have
invited our daughter to take a nice little dinghy ride around the an-
chorage for an hour, if Juliette hadn’t initiated the idea herself, so that
Mom and Dad could have a bit of private time. She would still have
been more than willing now to do something of that sort at the least
hint, but no such hint forthcame. Even so, she would announce that
she was going to swim back and snorkel the Treasure Point caves
again, or dinghy ashore at cocktail time in Trellis Bay to check out the
Last Resort Restaurant even though we were cooking aboard that
evening. After a moment Jane would say, “I guess I’ll keep you com-
pany,” or Baylor, “Why don’t we all go?”
On our fourth evening out, in particular. …
We’d had a fine afternoon’s sail from Beef Island up past the Dog
Islands to the far end of Virgin Gorda; we had successfully negotiated
the breaking reef into Gorda Sound by way of a tricky set of sailing
directions in the cruising guide (from Mosquito Rock steer such-and-
such a course until Necker Island lines up with Prickly Pear, then aim
due south until the “Seal Dogs” reappear between Mosquito Island
and Virgin Gorda before turning to port into the Sound); we had
picked up a guest mooring for the night off the Bitter End Yacht Club,
where we had dinner reservations. No anchor to be snorkeled this
time, but we had taken a sweet late-afternoon swim and were loung-
ing in the cockpit over planter’s punches, pleased with ourselves and
the world, before taking turns in the makeshift shower and dressing
to go ashore. Deliciously fatigued and utterly relaxed, admiring his

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wife’s and daughter’s handsome bodies and for that matter his own as
well, Baylor realized that the day was Tuesday, and was by that real-
ization so aroused that he had to cover his lap casually with a beach
towel. Just a few minutes later, Juliette (who perhaps intuited other
things besides cars about to leave parking spaces a block away) ex-
cused herself to go wash up. Still camouflaging his tumescence, Baylor
moved across the cockpit into her seat, beside topless Jane, and took
his wife’s left hand in his right as if just amiably. How strange, that
even with Juliette out of sight he no longer felt free to take her breast
as well. It occurred to him to wonder, unfairly but not unreasonably,
whether there was some man back home who had that easy freedom,
once his.
“Are you glad you’re here?” he ventured. She compressed her lips
briefly — a flat-line smile, accompanied by a glance that asked, Are
you sure you want to raise that question? — and acknowledged, neu-
trally, “It’s nice.”
“Jane.” In one motion he bent to kiss her farther breast and tucked
our clasped hands under his towel. His wife neither recoiled from nor
responded to these overtures but sipped her drink indifferently with
her free hand while he stroked himself with her other and kissed her
nipple. Over his head then — in a tone more clear than intimate, and
tinged as much with sorrow and perplexity as with contempt — she
declared, “I don’t know what to call you.”
That was that. If Juliette hadn’t been along, Baylor guessed we
would have had something out then and there — and perhaps headed
back the next day for Tortola, Washington, and separation proceed-
ings. As it was, he let his wife’s equivocal challenge hang in the air
rather than blow the evening, the vacation, and what remained of the
marriage. Joe and Betsy — from whom the strains in Baylor’s house
had distanced him further than ever in recent years, and whom on a
reckless compensatory impulse he had invited to join us for the second
week of our cruise, not really expecting to be taken up on the invita-
tion — were scheduled to meet us in Roadtown two days hence; he
would hate to call that off, now that plans were made and money paid.
Moreover, whatever Jane had going on the side back home, if any-
thing (but there must be something: so still-vigorous a woman, and
so little real intimacy remaining between the two of us), it was likely
no more serious than his Tuesday-evening affair in College Park,

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which he had no interest in escalating. Who could say but that by age
forty-five or fifty we would have put these final growing pains behind
us and, disabused of innocence, learned to relove each other and value
our marriage till death really did us part? Though he detumesced al-
most at once, he nuzzled his wife’s right breast a few moments longer,
then bussed its companion and — when Jane turned her lips aside —
her cheek and her fingers before releasing her hand.
“Same here,” he said, just as equivocally, and he fetched up his
cocktail glass as if in toast. Jane bottoms-upped hers and asked politely
for a refill if he was going below.

The Bitter End Yacht Club (so named, Baylor reported to his journal,
aside from the nautical allusion, for its being the eastmost developed
anchorage in the Virgins and thus the turnaround point for most char-
ter cruises) maintained shark pens under the inboard end of its dinghy
dock — a half-humorous reminder that visitors not spending the
night ashore should mind their alcohol intake. Juliette assured her
parents that sharks in general were as misunderstood as barracudas
and moray eels, and that the particular specimens lazing on the bot-
tom under the dock lights were sand sharks, scarcely more dangerous
than large catfish and doubtless kept so well fed that one could swim
among them in entire safety.
“Our biological daughter,” Baylor teased. All the same, the three
of us stood soberly, so to speak, on the dock for some moments before
going in to dinner, and again en route back to So Far’s dinghy after-
ward, regarding the black shapes below. Jane, especially, seemed lost
in thought, entranced. Suppose she should fall, Baylor thought, watch-
ing her stand on the dock’s very edge, pensively stroking her fine chin.
Or jump. Would he leap in after her, reckless, or simply try to reach
out a hand from the high dock? He scolded himself for imagining
her … tearfully refusing his assistance. … No doubt he would miss
her dreadfully, despite everything.
The night was moonless and a touch cool for late June in the Ca-
ribbean. Once away from the dock, Baylor found himself motoring
the dinghy through near-absolute darkness toward the row of tiny
anchor lights out at the club moorings, of which ours was the farthest.
A fifteen-knot breeze piped through the slot between Virgin Gorda
and Saba Rock to the northeast, and although Eustatia Reef sheltered

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the anchorage from waves, he was reminded that that was the black
Atlantic over there, rolling vastly in all the way from West Africa.
“No stars!” Juliette called from amidships, over the racket of the
dinghy’s outboard engine. When Jane, in the bow, didn’t reply (it was
so dark that from his stern seat Baylor could scarcely see her up there),
he did:
“Nope.”
His wife had put away more wine than usual through dinner while
Juliette gave us to understand that Musalam was not to be regarded
as a passing fancy: when their Woods Hole summer ended, she would
be moving in with him back in Boston, and if his postdoc studies took
him elsewhere before she finished her baccalaureate, she was prepared
to transfer for her senior year or even postpone her degree. There were
things that Baylor much wanted to ask and advise, but he knew that
Jane half blamed him for this connection of our daughter’s — his “lib-
eral ideas,” his “permissiveness” — and after that standoff at happy
hour he was reluctant to say anything that might provoke a family
quarrel. Had Juliette chosen the moment deliberately, he wondered,
or had she simply been filling the dinner-table distance between her
parents? His resentment festered; once we had located and reboarded
So Far, the family went directly to bed, out of sorts. When Joe and
Betsy joined the party, he saw now, we would be a crowded ship’s
company for sure, even in the best of humors; for the present we slept
comfortably enough in three separate berths: Jane in the forward
“double,” Juliette in the fold-out dinette berth, also advertised as a
double, and Baylor in an ample though very low-ceilinged quarter-
berth aft, from which he had ready access to the cockpit if necessary.
There in the darkness he listened to the wind in our standing rigging
and the wavelets slapping our waterline, twelve inches from his ear,
and punished his wife with lustful reveries of Teresa Anginelli, who
had likely missed him that evening no less than he her. Indeed, once
he heard his daughter breathing deeply in her nearby berth, he dis-
creetly masturbated, postponing climax while the hum of shrouds and
stays increased to a whistle that rose and fell with the gusts. “Baylor’s
Italian Piece” was an intrepid semen-swallower whose winsome habit
it was to raise her large dark eyes unblinkingly to his while he ejacu-
lated into her mouth. As her image rendered him this service now, So
Far’s rigging positively howled. The sloop fetched up sharply on its

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short tether; a shower of lightning and a tattoo of rain swept Gorda
Sound.
The next two days were downhill. Intermittently squally weather
stayed with us: a “norther,” though the wind held mainly northeast at
twenty knots and more. We spent a morning grousing about ashore,
hoping the sky would clear. At an apparent near-noon break we un-
moored and headed out of the Sound, carefully reversing our entrance
maneuvers, only to find the Seal Dogs shrouded by a squall exactly
when we needed a fix on them to make our turn, and the water uni-
formly gray in the neighborhood of Colquhan Reef, where we needed
to see what lay ahead before our depth-sounder could tell us. Fright-
ened, we retreated and remoored, hired a taxi, and spent a sullen af-
ternoon touring Gorda Peak and snorkeling in light rain at the rock
formations called the Baths: like swimming in an unlighted aquarium,
Baylor told his journal that evening.
The next morning was only slightly better: overcast and even win-
dier but less showery. As our itinerary was downwind to Roadtown,
where we were to rendezvous that afternoon with Joe and Betsy at the
charter agency, father and daughter voted to slog through it if pos-
sible. Inasmuch as we were the boat handlers, Jane had no real veto,
but she pronounced the plan damn-foolish and sulked in the cabin.
Wearing life vests over lightweight foul-weather gear, we exited Gorda
Sound without mishap, powering into ever-larger seas as we entered
the more open waters of Drake Channel. Just when we had reached
the point where the larger waves were stopping the sloop dead in its
tracks, drenching us in cold salt spray, and making Baylor wonder
whether we weren’t being maybe dangerously foolish, we managed to
bear off around Mosquito Rock and put the whitecapped seas first
abeam and presently abaft, on our starboard quarter.
“Yay for us!” cheered sopping Juliette. Baylor, too, was exhilarated,
the more so when we were able then to crank out the jib, shut down
the diesel, and tear along Tortolaward at six knots plus.
But Jane wasn’t having it, even when the sun broke through and
the abovedecks crew shed their life vests and slickers. At Juliette’s urg-
ing she joined us in the cockpit, but she sulked against a cabin bulk-
head, read a Taylor Caldwell novel she’d bought in the San Juan
airport, and ignored the handsome views of the islands — Dog, Gin-
ger, Cooper, Salt — passing by to port. She had him in a corner, Bay-

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lor fretted to himself, what with his East Dorset kin about to join the
party, and she would make the most of it. In Joe and Betsy’s presence
she would cope amiably with the inconvenience of their company
while giving him a programmatic, spontaneity-killing cold shoulder
and, in whatever private moments befell us, letting him know that the
couple were impossible; that he had been a fool to invite them; that
his attempts to keep things high-spirited were ridiculous.
All of this came to pass. Jane stayed behind on the boat while Bay-
lor and Juliette taxied into town to meet the new arrivals, and his heart
sank at the sight of his older brother and sister-in-law climbing out of
the airport jitney. They were so big! Their clothes cried out American
Hick, and contrary to Baylor’s instructions they had brought along a
large Samsonite suitcase in addition to Joe’s old Navy duffel bag.
“Didn’t have but the one,” his brother would explain, dropping his
jaw and widening his eyes, as was his habit, “and be damn if we’d go
buy a fancy seabag for a six-day trip. Plenty of beer on board?”
Juliette’s presence now was all asset. Childless themselves, Joe and
Betsy had always been fond of the twins; Baylor was especially grateful
to his brother for having introduced Drew and Juliette to such tide-
water pleasures as fishing, crabbing, and waterfowl hunting, which he
and Jane had no taste for. Though the differences between the two
households — and between the brothers’ temperaments since earliest
boyhood — kept the adults from any real closeness, the twins had
spent time all through their childhood with their East Dorset aunt
and uncle, and by extension with their grandfather and their great-
aunt Rachel. Juliette could argue earnestly with her uncle Joe’s hawk-
ishness about Vietnam and his contempt for civil-rights “agitators,” as
Baylor could not without reopening serious old quarrels. She could
good-naturedly chide her aunt Betsy (as Jane could not) for wearing
a 1950s-style beehive hairdo on a sailboat cruise (“Fifties-style is what
I am, honey,” unruffled Betsy would reply. “We won’t be going in the
water anyhow”) and lay down the law about smoking when the sails
were up. Baylor had somehow repressed the fact that both Joe and
Betsy still smoked tobacco; his own household and nearly all their
friends had quit. He suspected thankfully that Juliette’s spiel about
windblown sparks’ burning holes in the Dacron sails was her tactful
way of reducing the amount of smoking on board.

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We were a long time getting the newcomers and their gear secured: one had to break into Joe Junior’s endless, battering, circumstantially
detailed anecdotes to point out anything about the scene around us or
the operation of the boat, even to move from jitney to cab, street to
pier, cockpit to cabin. He clearly preferred sitting around telling sto-
ries over beer to going sailing. “Iced tea for me,” Betsy called down
the companionway to Juliette in the galley, “with lots of ice and a little
lemon. Can we make some fresh?” Juliette told her, laughing, that
she’d have to settle for canned Lipton’s aboard and go easy on the ice.
The couple hinted broadly, Betsy in particular, that they were more
interested in exploring Roadtown than in putting out “right away” to
sea. “I’ve never been much of a one for boats,” she confessed. A quick
shower came through (“Good-bye, beehive!” Juliette teased), and by
the time Baylor cut into his brother’s relentless narration sufficiently
to make it clear that Betsy could use her portable hair dryer, if at all,
only when So Far was hooked up to dockside AC power — which
would be the case only right there right then at the charter dock — it
was really too late to set out for a decent overnight anchorage. Jane
poured herself a glass of white wine and regarded her husband word-
lessly. He and Juliette exchanged glances over Joe’s reminiscence-in-
progress, and his daughter suggested that maybe it would be a good
idea to stay put in the agency slip for now and start out fresh tomor-
row morning.
“I’ll buy that,” Joe Junior declared. “Bets’ll cook us up a mess of
steak and eggs for breakfast, and off we’ll go to see ourselves some
virgins.” He chuckled. “When I’uz in San Diego in ’forty-three …”
Through the cruise thus far, our breakfasts had been juice, coffee,
and half an English muffin each. Jane said nothing. The fivesome
ended up taxiing back into Roadtown proper (in two cabs, and a grim
ride it was for Baylor, alone with his wife in one of them) to stroll
about through what remained of the afternoon, ducking into shops to
avoid the brief showers. Then Joe Junior — who had literally almost
not paused in the anecdotes that everything put him in mind of, ad-
dressing most of them to Juliette because Baylor, for one, had heard
them all before — insisted on buying dinner for everybody while we
were right there in town, if his kid brother the world traveler knew of
a restaurant that we wouldn’t get food poisoning at.
Hours later, back at So Far’s slip, he mused loudly, “Akron, Ohio?”
and tapped his cigarette-ash into the harbor. Tired Baylor explained

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that charter-boat companies operated on “lease-back” to minimize
their capital outlay: a couple in Akron, say, would buy (and name) a
sailboat through the agency, lease it back for charter and maintenance,
write off the cost as a business expense over the allowable five-year
depreciation, use the boat themselves for two weeks each year (claim-
ing half their airfare to the Virgins as the cost of checking on their
investment), and finally either sell it or have themselves a free sailboat.
Less loudly, as if in reply, Joe Junior observed, “Your wife don’t
have much to say, does she.” He and Betsy and Juliette then made
noisy fun out of the cramped sleeping arrangements: Baylor and Jane
jammed into the forward vee, our feet overlapping in the vertex, Aunt
Betsy sprawled in the dinette “double,” Juliette made do in the narrow
settee opposite, and Uncle Joe squeezed his bulk into the aft quarter-
berth. “Feels like a gawdamn coffin!” When all the lights were finally
out, Baylor called wearily from his side of the vee-berth, “Sleep well,
everybody. Tomorrow we go sailing.”
“Yay,” said cheerleader Juliette.
“I’m for it,” her uncle agreed.
Her back turned to Baylor, from her side of the vee Jane hissed
furiously, “Asshole! You fucking asshole!”
The insult shocked through him like electricity. Even in her worst
hysterics upon discovering his journal half a dozen years ago, his wife’s
language had been only hurt and wildly angry, never contemptuous.
A folding door closed off our forward cabin; possibly the others
hadn’t heard her. Baylor’s nerves buzzed. He longed to lash out; in
twenty-one years of marriage he had never struck her, but she had
never called him such names before, either. So as not to make a scene,
however, he stayed his hand, held his tongue.
As if her reviling him had eased some pressure, in light cotton pa-
jamas Jane amiably scrambled eggs for all hands the next morning in
So Far’s galley, chatting with Betsy about Joe Senior’s declining health
while bedding was stowed and the family took clumsy turns in the
head compartment. Baylor, on the other hand, still shaken by the depth
and ferocity of his wife’s contempt, was subdued, passive. The weather
remained unsettled: many dark clouds, abundant bright-blue patches.
“On to Soper’s Hole!” urged Juliette: the next stop in our projected
itinerary. Through the day her uncle would make heavy ribaldries with
that name, wondering whether Mr. Soper had been an Ivory or a

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Lifebuoy man, etc.; the jokes stung Baylor afresh with Jane’s insult. It
was midmorning by the time we got away from the slip. The sunshine
continued off and on, but the wind had fortunately moderated, and
since our course was westerly it was an easy downhill sail for the new-
comers’ first day. In his brother’s company, it was not difficult for
Baylor to remain inconspicuously quiet; his hurt feelings hardened
into an amalgam of anger and relief as Jane’s triumphant cordiality
persisted through lunch and the afternoon. With Joe Junior she be-
came almost flirtatious. As the midday warmed, she changed into a
bikini even scantier than Juliette’s, and when Joe dutifully paused in
his anecdote to wolf-whistle, she struck a cheesecake pose on the cabin
top. Against his own prohibition of alcohol under way, Baylor went
below for a beer.
“Bring me up one, too!” his brother hollered after him. “I’m not
used to such sights!”
“Well, I guess you’re not,” affirmed placid Betsy.
Jane pointedly observed, “I thought we never drank alcohol before
anchoring time,” but she neither pressed the matter nor joined the
drinkers.
Despite our late start we made good enough time toward St. John
and Tortola’s West End to pause for lunch and a swim in the lee of
Fort Recovery before the final leg to Soper’s Hole. “Y’all go ahead,”
urged Betsy, who had not moved from her spot in the cockpit all day;
“we’ll just watch.” “’Deed we will!” Joe agreed, and he fired up a
Camel now that the sails were down. So weary of him by then was
Baylor that as soon as the anchor was set and cleated he dived over-
board from the sloop’s bow — and in midair realized that though he
had earlier changed into swim trunks, he had neglected to remove his
wristwatch. He turned and doubled, held his left arm high, and sur-
faced immediately, but the Bulova got soaked. What was more, in his
impatience he hadn’t lowered the stern ladder before diving, and Jane
was still busying herself in the cockpit while Juliette shut down the
engine and braked the steering wheel. He was obliged to paddle off
So Far’s transom for more than a minute, holding his wet watch arm
above water, before he could get his situation reported, the boarding
ladder deployed, and himself back aboard.
“Now that’s a darn shame!” Betsy sympathized, exhaling cigarette
smoke.

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Joe Junior put on his mock-astonished face and boomed, “Absent-
minded perfessor!”
“Shit shit shit!” Baylor said, almost ready to weep as he toweled the
Bulova.
“Should we rinse it in fresh water,” Juliette wondered, “and then
paper-towel it?”
“Soak ’er in oil,” Joe Junior recommended, “till you get ’er to a
watchmaker. Got ’ny Three-in-One aboard?” He began the story of
his wartime Rolex.
Already the watch had stopped: five minutes before one o’clock, as
if it were throwing up its hands.
“Nothing lasts forever,” Jane coolly declared, and she lowered her
sleek self overside for a swim. Nor did the accident dampen her spirits
through the afternoon, as it did Baylor’s. In the event, he both flushed
the Bulova with fresh water and dipped it in oil (Johnson’s Baby Oil,
from Juliette’s suntan kit, was as close as he could come to light ma-
chine oil), but there would be little chance of a watchmaker’s services
till he was back home, by when surely the salt water would have cor-
roded the movement beyond repair.
“That was my get-married-and-go-to-graduate-school watch,” he
mourned to his daughter. “It’s been with me longer than you and
Drew have. For twenty-one years I’ve never taken that watch off my
wrist except to shower and swim.”
“And not always then!” Joe Junior teased.
“Tomorrow’s your birthday,” Juliette reminded him. “If we go over
to Charlotte Amalie, you should look for a new one.”
“Waterproof,” her uncle advised. “Like my old Rolex. One time in
Honolulu …”
On the back of the Bulova’s gold-filled case, Baylor would note in
his log the next day, Jane had had engraved in 1951 her then love-name
for him, which she had used with little modification until our return
from Europe and never thereafter. So infrequently did he remove the
watch that he seldom saw the engraving and scarcely registered it
when he saw it. Rinsing and marinating the Bulova now, however, he
observed that the nearly two hundred thousand hours it had measured
of his life had so effaced the engraving that only one who knew that
pet name (there were but two such) could make it out.

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Jane, back aboard, said nothing. As we moved on to Soper’s Hole, the sun came out strongly for the first time all day, and though Joe
and Betsy elected to remain fully dressed in the shade of the bimini,
Juliette and her mother lotioned up and stretched out on the foredeck,
out of anecdote range, while Baylor steered the boat. Jane even re-
moved her bikini top and made no effort to conceal her still-handsome
breasts as she lotioned them.
The strength of Baylor’s remorse surprised him, for there were
things about that Bulova that he had never much liked. It was a less
dependable timekeeper, in recent years especially, than his old Omega
had been; it had no sweep second hand; its gold case and rectangular
design were a touch formal for his taste, particularly since the midsix-
ties. Yet he missed it already, felt lonely for it, as he had heard one
missed an amputated member. He was not in fact an absentminded
man; it was Joe Junior’s oppressive presence that had so rattled him,
and Jane’s sulking hostility. The sight of that naked bracelet of white
on his left wrist, echoing the white band of his wife’s toplessness,
made him almost dizzy (the unaccustomed lunchtime beer had gone
to his head, too). He asked his brother to take the helm so that he
could fetch sun lotion for the exposed area.
“Would you get our camera out of my stuff if you’re going down
there?” Betsy asked him. “I gotta have a picture of this to show Dad-
Dad and Aunt Rachel.”
“I’m Popeye the Sailor Man!” sang out Joe Junior at the wheel.
By afternoon’s end, when we rounded Frenchman’s Cay and mo-
tored into Soper’s Hole, the sky was gray again, and Baylor’s spirits
continued to sink with the hidden sun. Jane left her swimsuit top off
when So Far turned into the wind, but she pulled on a shirt, knotting
its tails instead of buttoning it. Space proved so tight among the un-
occupied yachts riding at permanent moorings that Baylor considered
picking up one of the few vacant buoys rather than anchoring, but
then he decided not to risk the owner’s showing up later and obliging
us to move elsewhere in the dark. Several times he threaded through
the anchorage, conferring with Juliette and the chart on the merits of
this or that spot while Joe yarned on. Here with our longer scope we
would possibly swing down on the moored boats if the wind shifted;
here there was swinging room, but the depth was too great for a
proper five-to-one scope, not to mention a more secure six or seven to

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one; over there the chart showed shallower water and perhaps ade- uate swinging room, but if we dragged anchor even a little way we
would go aground. No previous anchorage in the islands had posed
such problems. As we considered and rejected one alternative after
another, Baylor felt his wife’s impatience building in the bow and
asked his brother rather crossly to cut the monologue for a minute so
that he and Juliette could think.
“Aye, aye, sir!” Joe Junior replied, his astonishment this time per-
haps not entirely feigned.
When we finally chose the least unsatisfactory spot (one in that
third category), Juliette took the helm, as had become her custom,
while her father went forward to lower the main plow anchor with its
three-fathom lead of chain. From her perch on the cabin top, Jane
remarked uncordially, “You make such a production out of everything,”
and for the second time in twenty-four hours Baylor wanted to hit
her. He signaled Juliette to reverse the engine and paid out chain and
nylon line while she called out readings from the depth-sounder:
twenty-four feet, twenty, twenty-two, eighteen, sixteen. The sloop’s
anchor line was unmarked; when he estimated that he had fed about
a hundred feet through the bow roller, he took a turn around the cleat
to set the anchor — and for the first time on the cruise felt it skip and
skid along the bottom instead of digging in.
“Twelve feet, Dad. Ten.” The boat drew six, and two had to be
subtracted from the readings to correct for the location of the sensor.
Prudent Juliette throttled down and shifted into neutral just as Baylor
thought he felt the anchor take hold; but when we shortened scope to
back down again and set it, it pulled free. Nothing for it then but to
retrieve all that line, raise the heavy plow, maneuver back to our ap-
proximate starting place, and try again — and again the thing slipped
and slid along the bottom.
“Right tricky business, i’n’t it,” Joe Junior sympathized.
The sun was low now over Great Thatch Island, to westward, and
in those latitudes darkness follows quickly after sunset. Given Betsy’s
leeriness about boats (she had not budged from her cockpit cushion
since midmorning, not even to use the head), Baylor had been par-
ticularly anxious for things to go smoothly on her first night of “an-
choring out.” He was relieved therefore when, at the last possible
moment, the plow seemed to dig in. There remained, however, only

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two feet of Caribbean under our keel; in coral waters that was not a safe clearance, as it would have been in the Chesapeake or Sinepuxent
bays. But if a snorkeling of the anchor revealed it to be securely set,
we could take up scope into slightly deeper water for the night.
“I’ll go snorkel it,” he said — to Jane, without looking at her di-
rectly, and then he called back to Juliette to stand by with the engine
idling in case he signaled, through her mother, for her to back down
on the anchor again.
“I swear” Jane said, exasperated.
Ignoring her, Baylor asked his brother to stand by on the foredeck
in case the anchor had to be raised altogether and reset. “Aye, aye, sir,”
Joe Junior said again.
The light was failing; the harbor water was gray, uninviting, sur-
prisingly cool, but Baylor’s adrenaline took care of all that. In mask,
snorkel, and flippers he swam forward to the anchor line, took a large
breath, and pulled himself hand over hand down its long shallow angle
to the eighteen feet of chain leading from the anchor itself. The bot-
tom was a hard gray rippled sand prowled by spiny black sea urchins
and strewn here and there with dead and broken finger coral. The
plow, he was disappointed to see, had dug in only the point of its
blade; the main fluke was simply wedged against a small coral rock
embedded in the sea floor. He surfaced above it (four times his height)
and with shouts and hand-signs instructed the foredeck crew to tell
Juliette to back down again so that he could observe the set. Jane was
talking or listening to her brother-in-law, but evidently the message
got relayed; as he dived, Baylor could hear the diesel rev up and see
the slack line tighten. The anchor didn’t quite break free, but it set no
more deeply, either, and wobbled so against the little rock that he
knew it would drag in any real blow or shift of wind. He surfaced
again, his ears and lungs uncomfortable from the depth, rested a mo-
ment, and swam halfway to the boat to explain the situation and give
instructions. Jane, laughing at something his brother had said, ig-
nored him. Holding on to the anchor line where it emerged from the
surface, he shouted to Joe Junior that Juliette was to ease the boat
forward a bit to take tension off the line so that he could reposition
the plow by hand. Joe Junior was to take up the larger slack as neces-
sary to keep the floating nylon from fouling the propeller, but he was
not to uncleat the line; then, on Baylor’s signal, Juliette was to back

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down again slowly and Joe pay out the slack until the pull set the
anchor properly.
On Baylor’s end this was hard work, in ever poorer light. The an-
chor was heavy, even underwater, and more trouble to wrestle free of
its precarious grip than he had supposed. The bottom was like con-
crete — no wonder we had dragged. Shards of finger coral cut his
hands as he manhandled the plow to a new position, taking care not
to step on urchin spines. He imagined sharks gliding in from deeper
water, even glanced over his shoulder to check, but saw only their
normal prey: a few black-barred sergeant majors and silver-yellow
goatfish. His lungs aching now, he pushed surfaceward — three sto-
ries up! — fetching with him a bight of slack line that had not after all
been taken in.
When he regained both breath and bearings, he saw that Juliette
had properly moved So Far well forward (more so than necessary; the
hull was all but atop him); indeed, with so much slack line out, the
light breeze curling over Frenchman’s Cay had swung the bow off,
and he was able to give instructions to his daughter directly. That was
well, since Joe Junior and Jane appeared to be fooling around heed-
lessly up forward: Baylor saw his wife turn his brother’s John Deere
cap backward on his head like a baseball catcher’s and give him a play-
ful poke in the gut, while so much line floated about that it really
could reach back to the propeller.
“Hey, you guys!” he shouted from the water, flippering to stay in
place over the anchor while he gathered up large coils of the slack.
“How about some help?” It was useless at that range to scold them
for their negligence or repeat his instructions to Juliette; he might just
as well pay out the line himself as the sloop drifted back on the wind,
and then hold on while the last of the slack pulled him under so that
he could watch the anchor set. “Just don’t reverse hard till I wave you
back!” he called.
“Gotcha, Cap’n,” Joe Junior said back, and he tipped his cigarette.
Jane was perched now on the bow pulpit as if to be photographed.
Despite his labors Baylor began to feel chilled, and he knew that (Ju-
liette’s pooh-poohing notwithstanding) sharks other than harmless
prowled those waters, in which, the cruising guides agreed, one ought
not to swim after dark or with bleeding cuts. It seemed to take forever

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for the boat to drift down; in the gray light he was a lonely distance
from it, treading water, when finally the last loose loop pulled from
his hand. As it uncoiled he shouted “Okay!” — and then realized, as
he prepared to pull himself gamely under to inspect the anchor, that
that loop had wrapped itself around his left ankle, just above the
flipper. He felt it drawing tight, called “Wait!” and ducked under to
wriggle free while he could. The line had happened to coil, alas, “bit-
ter end under” — with the lower part running back to the boat, the
upper crossing it and dropping straight down to the anchor — so that
when now the last slack disappeared, the loop was cinched. Alarmed,
he thrust to the surface, churned with his free flipper to keep his head
briefly above water, waved both arms overhead, and shouted, “Neu-
tral! I’m caught! Neutral!”
His wife was alone in the bow, maybe fifty feet distant. Joe was for
some reason ambling back toward the cockpit. Baylor’s arm-signal was
surely unambiguous, his call audible from the bow if not from the
helm. In any case, voice and movement together must have spelled
distress. But his last sight through the half-steamed face mask, before
So Far’s momentum tightened the line further and drew him under,
was of Jane’s calmly signaling astern for their daughter to back down
hard. “Back,” she called. “Back.”
The anchor set, or at least it caught on something down there and
held, as it had done before. Eight tons of sailboat drew taut a hundred
feet of half-inch nylon, some inches of which cinched like a tourniquet
around his ankle. With not even a full breath left in his lungs after
shouting, Baylor was held in painful suspension halfway to the bot-
tom. Snorkel and flippers were useless; he could move neither up nor
down, forward nor back. Far off at one end of the line was the copper-
painted underbody of the sloop, black now in the dimming light, the
engine churning relentlessly; down at the other, nearer end he saw the
anchor arrested against broken coral. Well above his head a rippling
patch of greasy light marked the surface, but his kicks and yanks and
flipper-thrusts got him nowhere. The anchor line was as straight as a
bowstring; it felt to Baylor as though he would be dismembered as
well as drowned while dutiful Juliette, at her mother’s bidding, backed
and backed the boat. Heart and head pounding, he clawed off the
caught swimfin, which had impeded his efforts to twist his ankle free.
He pulled himself frantically head-downward on the line, at the same

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time waggling his trapped foot; in his struggle he bumped the face
mask against something — his arm, the anchor line — and it half filled
with seawater. His air was gone. Suspended, he felt his last seconds
run as if swept by a sweep second hand before his lungs must gasp
against his will and the water choke him. Those seconds ran. He gave
up clawing at his ankle bond, closed his eyes against the stinging salt
water, strained to hold and hold on yet to his nonbreath as he had
done in certain boyhood experiments, and found himself bidding
some sort of good-bye — not to anyone up there in the world above-
surface but to whatever it was that for four decades had been con-
scious of itself and done this and that, and had been called variously
Simon and ’Simmon and Sy, Behler and Baylor, William, Bill.
Then he died.
But just before he did, Baylor felt the line ease at last (his consci-
entious daughter finally satisfied, he supposed later, that the anchor
must indeed be set, or Jane that a different work had been accom-
plished). One simple motion freed his ankle. No longer suspended
between worlds, he thrust himself toward their beckoning interface,
at once immeasurably distant and just above reach. Surfaced at last, he
gasped and coughed, choked on water, breathed in air, rested faceup
to the gray sky before paddling weakly to where the line surfaced, too,
and he could hold on to it and rest again. His chest and temples
throbbed; he spat and snotted brine; his left ankle ached — but his
spirit was shocked calm. It scarcely surprised or bothered him that no
one was on lookout in So Far’s bow, or that when at last he made his
exhausted way to the stern ladder and hung on some moments longer
to gather strength, he heard the three women in the cockpit discussing
marinades for London broil.
“You okay, Dad?” Juliette asked mildly over the transom. Her tone
assumed he was.
“I’ll be up shortly,” he said back.
From out of view, Joe Junior called, “Rum and tonic or a beer?”
Baylor didn’t reply.
“See any sharks down there?” Betsy wanted to know.
“Oh, sharks,” he heard Jane scoff. “I’m going in for a dip myself
before we do dinner. Anybody else?”
As he climbed the ladder (no one thought to reach down and take
his remaining swim fin), Baylor understood that he would not even

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mention the extraordinary mishap he had just survived. “Lost a flip-
per,” was all he said, toweling off and at last approaching normal res-
piration. “Damn plow’s still not really dug in.”
His brother hmped. “Just ain’t your day, is it?”
To his daughter Baylor said, “After dinner we’ll put out the second
anchor, for insurance,” and he went down the companionway to get
into dry clothes.
“What for?” Jane called irritably after him. “We’ve never bothered
with that before.”
“Cap’n’s orders,” Joe Junior said, laughing, and he put on his fa-
vorite expression.
His wife’s provocation seemed to Baylor to come from another
world; likewise her warning to his brother not to peek while she
slipped out of her bikini and into the water. On a shelf in the head
compartment his old Bulova lay nested in a wad of paper towels. He
snapped on a cabin light and saw that in just the few hours since its
immersion it had begun to corrode: under the misted crystal its gold
hands were blackening already in that final Y, and its white face was
dramatically discoloring. He rinsed and toweled his own face briskly,
to revive himself.
But if Jane’s taunts had lost their power to touch him, his new
unprovokability seemed to spur her. “You’re just showing off!” she
charged — crossly, publicly — when after dinner he and Juliette did
indeed set out the second anchor, a lighter-weight Danforth, at a
forty-five-degree angle to the first. It, too, Baylor was pretty sure,
merely hooked behind some coral instead of burying itself, but the
two together ought to hold. All the same, with a hand-bearing com-
pass he noted the bearings of the lighted ferry dock across the harbor
and certain lights on nearby Frenchman’s Cay, along with the depth
shown on the sounder, as a baseline against which to check whether
we shifted position during the night. “He’s playing Captains Coura-
geous,” Jane said, sneering, to Joe and Betsy. “We’ve never done all this
nonsense before.”
Juliette mildly admonished her: “Mom.”
“Can’t be too careful,” Betsy supposed.
Baylor could have replied that Jane had never swum nude before,
either, except within the nuclear family (the term seemed apt for her

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volatility that evening), nor had she ever arguably tried to kill him
thitherto. But he was as removed from her jibes — indeed, from
her — as were the fish he imagined gliding past the anchors out there
in the dark. He felt down there still; something of his soul had accom-
panied that lost swim fin. Not only Jane but also Betsy and Joe and
Juliette (who was proposing a Dad’s-birthday trip by ferry tomorrow
to Charlotte Amalie) seemed to him to be floating in an enclosed dark
space at the far end of some line, from the low and distant other end
of which he watched and heard them.
Several times that night he left the forward berth and made his way
quietly aft to the cockpit, to recheck those bearings, the water depth,
and the lie of the boat. The readings were not consistent, but neither
were they wildly out of line with the normal swing of the sloop on its
anchors and the foot or so of Caribbean tide. In all likelihood, So Far
was staying put. Overhead in the spangled firmament the trade winds
moved through unfamiliar constellations. Joe and Betsy appeared to
be sleeping soundly after all in their separate berths. Once, as he
passed through the cabin, Juliette whispered, “Everything okay,
Dad?,” as if she were a child again in Columbia and he’d been check-
ing some noise downstairs. “No problems,” he whispered back. But
every time he climbed out of or back into his side of the berth, Jane
would hiss “Jee-sus!” or “What is it with you?” and draw her feet away
from any possibility of touching his.
Between these excursions he slept fitfully and dreamed, among
other things, that So Far had dragged anchor all the way into the
Behlers’ back alley in East Dorset. He saw the sloop high and dry out
there in the bright morning when he looked down from his bedroom
window across the back-porch roof and his catalpa-tree escape route.
Another time he dreamed of Daisy Moore and of Daisy’s shy, wide-
eyed sister, whose name just now eluded him, though she had become
a well-known photographer. He woke with a headache and a bone-
hard erection; it was gray morning in Soper’s Hole, and he needed to
urinate.
“Happy birthday, Dad!” Juliette cheered from her berth, to rouse
the others in time for breakfast and the ferry. But in the head-com-
partment mirror, Baylor looked to himself like a man who had seen
his own ghost. As for the old Bulova, just overnight it had sea-

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changed into an archaeological relic, the hands encrusted now in their
last position, the face stained with brilliant greens, blues, even or-
anges, as if the watch had been retrieved from a long-wrecked ship.
Which, in a sense, Baylor reflected to himself, it had been.

“On to the Japs!” Joe Junior cried when lunch was done, though in
fact one of those Seiko dealers off Dronningen’s Gade was Muslim-
Indian-looking and the other presumably Near Eastern, as his shop
was called The Marrakesh. “They’re getting even for V-J Day,” Joe
liked to say of the Japanese economic triumph — in 1972 even more
conspicuous in the free port of Charlotte Amalie than in the U.S. Here
one had to look about to find an American-made car, truck, or bus
(the few non-Japanese models were mainly Mercedeses); the shop
windows were all Sony, Panasonic, Hitachi, Minolta, Nikon, Yamaha,
as if Dronningen’s Gade were the Ginza. Joe himself, however much
he vowed that he bore no grudges from the war, stoutly bought
American, at least the big-ticket items, though it wouldn’t much sur-
prise him to learn that his Zenith television’s innards or his Chevy
pickup’s dashboard instruments came from Taiwan.
He decided now to have a look at the Texas Instruments pocket
calculators he had seen somewhere in the marketplace — “Better
check the place of manufacture,” Baylor teased — while the women
inspected Oriental rugs in a shop just around a corner from The Mar-
rakesh. Lest that name provoke yet more unpleasantness from Jane,
Baylor announced that he was going first to the Indian shop, Al Hind,
to get their price on the Seiko he had liked in “the other place” — the
model with the rotatable bezel. Should we lose track of one another,
we would meet down at the ferry dock a bit before four.
He was not all right. In the forenoon his head had seemed to be
clearing, but the lunchtime beer made him woozy again, as he had
been on the ferry. From the rug place he turned onto the side street
where he remembered Al Hind to have been located and found he had
confused it with The Marrakesh. Chances were that their prices didn’t
vary by more than a few dollars; rather than asking directions and
wandering about, he decided just to go in and buy the damned watch.
A different salesclerk was on duty: not the lean, light-coffee-
skinned fellow with fine white teeth and trim mustache who had
showed him watches that morning, but a young woman with hand-

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some, generic third-world features of a sort Baylor had seen before in
smart shops in Gibraltar and Tangier, a mix maybe of Berber and Lev-
antine with something farther east and, in this case, perhaps Carib-
bean as well. When the shop-door tinkled, she looked up from
adjusting dials on the inevitable tape player (from which whined
Moorish-sounding music), caught sight of him in the wall of filigreed
mirrors behind the jewelry counter, and smiled brightly even before
turning his way. He specified the make and model of watch he and
Juliette had decided on and, satisfied that the price was the same he
had been quoted earlier, paid for it in U.S. traveler’s checks without
further bargaining.
The young woman showed him how to set the date and day of the
week (abbreviated by the Japanese manufacturer in both English and
Spanish: its Western Hemisphere model) and advised him, in an ac-
cent as smooth and as difficult to fix exactly as her lovely features, to
let her make the stainless-steel bracelet quite snug, inasmuch as peo-
ple’s wrists “up north” are smaller in wintertime than in summer. De-
spite elegantly polished long fingernails she did this job expertly
herself, there on the glass countertop, removing several links with a
pin-punch and needle-nose pliers, fitting the watch to his wrist, re-
placing one link, fitting again till she was satisfied that the band was
neither too tight nor too loose. She was about Juliette’s age, maybe a
year or two older, and even slimmer than his daughter. Her skin was
untanned and flawless, her hair glossy black and lightly scented with
something that Baylor decided to remember as jasmine, whatever it
might in fact be. Her breasts were tiny but their nipples prominent
under her white silk blouse; as she held and turned his wrist to inspect
her work, he found himself musing on the disproportion between the
small motion it would require for him to caress one of those nipples
(three inches from his open left palm), as he suddenly yearned to do,
and the large repercussions of so slight a movement.
Over her jasmine-scented head, as she bent to write out his receipt
and to staple the spare links into a little envelope, he regarded in the
wall mirror the reflection of her slender, paisley-skirted backside and
of his own face contemplating it. He looked fifty at least! The plate-
glass storefront reflected the reflection: a faint, receding series of old
Baylors and of young, unaging women. So demurely yet untimidly
did she smile now, so almost affectionately thank him and bid him

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good afternoon, that he was speechless with stupid love. He could
only compress his lips and nod, stuff his folded receipt into a shirt
pocket, the link-envelope into his Bermudas, and hurry from the store,
shaking some inward head at himself.
In his addlement (he was also trying the Seiko’s bezel, to get the
feel of it and to refocus his mind) he turned the wrong way, either
upon leaving The Marrakesh or at the next corner, which put him into
a much narrower “gade” with only one or two shops. There was a rug
place, but not the same one: it was open to the cobbled alley like a
market stall. The lone old fellow nodding and appraising him from
among its piled-up wares looked to Baylor like an Iranian rendition of
his late uncle Josh, complete with cigarette holder. A hookah would
have been more in keeping with the fellow’s turban, the first Baylor
had seen in Charlotte Amalie. Maybe this was a back entrance to the
Indian place? He thought to retrace his way, but there appeared to be
activity ahead, where the alley opened onto a larger gade or market
square. Chances were he would see Al Hind up that way, or the Texas
Instruments place, and maybe find his womenfolk buying their flour-
sack tops.
Instead, he seemed to have strayed into some truly native quarter
of Charlotte Amalie, which he did not recall having read of in the
cruising guide. Nor were its natives your typical Virgin Islanders. The
little city is a free port, more ethnically diverse than Tortola’s Road-
town or Christiansted in St. Croix; but this square of hardpan and
dilapidated market stalls looked (and sounded and smelled) more
Maghrebi than Caribbean. There was not another Caucasian face in
sight, and most of the denizens wore caftans or djellabas. In the stalls
were brass and copper wares and mounded dyes and spices, along
with eggs, fruits, vegetables. Goats and sheep huddled near herd-boys
here and there in the square itself, where also a turbaned professional
storyteller held forth to a circle of listeners, as in the Jmaa el Fna. A
snake charmer would not have been out of place there, or a camel. No
automobiles or even motorbikes in sight; no streetlights, no sidewalks.
His unusual costume quickly drew small boys and others not so
small, speaking Baylor could not tell what language among themselves
and, increasingly, to him. As brightly as he could manage, he asked
“Dronningen’s Gade?” and pointed vaguely across the square. Much

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language came back, neither yes nor no, by the speakers’ looks. Some
smaller boys held out soiled hands for money. One touched Baylor’s
bare knee and laughed sharply with his companions.
“Made a wrong turn, I guess,” Baylor said agreeably. A wiry fellow
who could have been the brother of our morning taxi driver addressed
him volubly and not quite cordially. Baylor’s adrenaline stirred. Decid-
ing to appear decisive, he nodded shortly, said, “I’ll find my way,
thanks,” and turned to go back toward The Marrakesh. The boys
clamored after and before him. The older fellow strode purposefully
in step beside him, speaking sternly and gesticulating with one hand.
Several heavily loaded donkeys now blocked the nearest alleyway,
which anyhow didn’t look quite like the one he had wandered into the
square from. In braided cane saddlebags they carried firewood, cereal
grain, silent hens with trussed feet. Their drovers were brown, leather-
faced, gray-whiskered old men with bare feet, torn shirts, soiled head-
rags. Lean dogs yapped about their dusty ankles like the beggar boys
about his. He felt half panicky, and rather more than half when the
wiry fellow at his elbow now skipped a step ahead to face him with
what sounded like a peremptory demand.
“I’m sorry,” Baylor said, clearly but not apologetically. “I don’t
need anything from you, and I have nothing to give you. Excuse me.”
He strode on, but the fellow dogged after him, his tone unmistakably
abusive now. People turned from their marketing to watch, their faces
impassive. Some of the women were veiled! His heart beating faster,
Baylor pushed on toward the next alleyway, past bales of silks and raw
cotton, stalls of slaughtered fowl, rabbits, lambs. A bloodied butcher
called to or at him. The boys around him laughed — and one snatched
at his new wristwatch.
“No you don’t!” Baylor scolded. The older fellow scolded him
right back. To appease him, Baylor reached exasperatedly for a coin,
but he found in his change pocket only the stapled envelope of spare
watch links. “Here.” He thrust it at the ringleader. “That’s all you get.”
The ploy worked, at least for the seconds it took for the fellow to
inspect and rip open the envelope. Baylor stepped past him, the little
ones swarming after, demanding their share. Alas, that next alley, now
that he could see down it, seemed to lead not into town but to open
fields, almost desert-looking, where his annoyers would be more likely

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to set upon and rob him than they were in a public square. Immedi-
ately down from that alley, however, was another, at the corner of
which he thought he saw the “Uncle Josh” character standing, beck-
oning with short motions of his turbaned head. Forcing himself not
to run (the fellow with the envelope was angrier than before; he
waved the watch links before Baylor’s face and cursed, while the boys
caught at his shirttails, the legs of his Bermudas, his wristwatch
again), Baylor forged on, not even considering why the old rug mer-
chant should prove any less hostile than the others merely because he
resembled a good-natured uncle now dead.
But he was. Though the rug stall could not have been the same (it
was on a corner, for one thing), the dealer was the man he had passed
before, and to Baylor’s unspeakable relief he scolded the boys sharply
in their language, waved the angry young man away, took Baylor’s
elbow, and gestured him into his place of business. The boys stood
respectfully back. The “cabman’s brother” was not so easily put off:
he crumpled the torn envelope, threw it at Baylor’s feet, and spat after
it, rehearsing his grievance (Baylor guessed) to the elder man, who
replied more temperately while urging Baylor through the divided
counter of the rug stall and toward — welcome sight! — a doorless
interior room where more rugs were visible through the portiere.
“Not good to tour souk without guide,” his rescuer chided.
“So I’ve learned!” Baylor’s laugh was a touch feverish — and he
was not blind to the likelihood that a large tip, or maybe even a small
rug purchase, was in the offing. Any port in a storm! As if the mer-
chant’s thickly accented English had lifted some spell, the heckler
outside now found some English, too, for a final execration as they
pushed through the beaded portiere and into the inner shop:
“Go home New-York!”
“Mm mm mm,” the old man muttered. “You sit for tea. I speak
to Muhammud.” Gesturing toward yet another, heavier portiere at
one side of the little room, he stepped back into the outer stall to
reproach in stern but conciliatory Arabic (Baylor supposed) the indig-
nant “cabman.”
Mint tea, a scatter-rug souvenir — anything. Eager as he was to
make his way back to Dronningen’s Gade (he checked his new watch:
three o’clock already, or 15 on the international outer dial. The

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date window read sab i; he would have to reset the weekday to En-
glish), he would gladly pay his savior’s due. He spread the second
portiere, expecting a tiny inner sanctum with two hassocks, a hookah,
and a chased-silver teapot under a pierced-metal overhead lantern. In-
stead he saw a larger, brightly lighted display room, the far wall of
which was a plate-glass window that gave back his reflection as he
entered, in effect, from the rear. Karajas, Tabrizes; Bokharas hung re-
splendently about. On the street outside … tourists! Toyotas! Over
near the cash register — from which area sounded incongruous but
welcome calypso music — was indeed a teapot on an electric hot plate,
tended by a young woman in a bright-red djellaba, perched on a stool.
She looked his way and seemed a bit startled not to see the old fellow
who no doubt employed her to work the tourist side of his shop while
he handled the “native” trade. Although less delicate-appearing than
the Seiko salesgirl, she was even more attractive — beautiful, in fact,
with striking gray-green eyes and heavy, gleaming auburn hair.
She removed her eyeglasses. “Yes?”
“Yes!” Baylor said enthusiastically, chuckling with relief. “Your fa-
ther —” He grinned, shook his head in apology, indicated the room
behind him. “The gentleman back there. …”
She frowned uncomprehendingly. “I can show you something?”
Such eyes! “No, no,” Baylor assured her. “I was just … passing
through and made a wrong turn. Sorry to bother you!” Suddenly it
mattered not at all about the tea, the tip, the thanks: that old man was
no more going to come through that portiere than Uncle Josh himself
from the Other Side.
“No bother,” the clerk said mildly as he crossed the room. At the
glass front door he turned and called back, “Be seeing you!” His voice
sounded half crazed in his own ears. Traffic noise pushed in; the
entrance-bell tinkled. The woman’s gray-green eyes flashed himward
over a tea glass, at whose rim her lips were quizzically pursed.
Over there was Al Hind, the other watch shop! And a few doors
farther on, there were stout Betsy Birdsall Behler and slim Juliette,
picking up and setting down leather handbags at a sidewalk table.
Baylor waved and cried, “Jule?!” When his daughter looked around
and made a little wave back, his eyes teared.
“Where’ve you been?” she chided cheerfully when he reached them. He found himself hugging her, kissing her hair. “Hey!” she protested,

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laughing, and her aunt Betsy chuckled and said, “Welcome back,
stranger!”

Baylor’s life had changed.
Jane and Joe, Betsy reported, had finished their shopping and
started back to the ferry dock. “It’s time we did, too,” Juliette opined.
She was wearing her new flour-sack top: Molino San Rafael, with a
faded blue icon of the grain-bearing saint. Hands on hips, she turned
this way and that to model it for her father. He in turn showed off his
new watch: “First one I ever picked out for myself!”
“Things here really are a bargain,” Betsy declared. “It’s a shame I
don’t need a blessed, thing.” She had bought souvenir ashtrays for
“Dad-Dad” and “Aunt Rachel.”
As they strolled together down toward the harbor, Baylor ventured
that behind the rug shop they had seen him come out of (which had
to have been, he realized now, the same one his wife and daughter and
sister-in-law had planned to visit after lunch) was another, very differ-
ent part of town.
“It’s a reg’lar maze, i’n’t it?” Betsy agreed comfortably. “A person
could meet theirself coming the other way.”
Surprisingly, Juliette took his hand and squeezed it, and Baylor
understood that he would not try to tell even her, much less his wife,
what had happened back there. He himself could not account for it,
though as surely as he had known that “Uncle Josh” would not follow
him through that second portiere, he knew as well that a helicopter
ride, say, over the Charlotte Amalie marketplace would disclose no
such exotic square as the one he had just returned from. As to
whether, if he and Juliette should go back then and there to that rug
store, they would see a portiere in its rear wall, and what they would
find if they stepped through it — He checked his watch. They were
out of time.
Had he been visited by the first bona fide hallucination of his forty-
two years? If so, it was entirely unlike any hashish “pipe dream” or
acid vision he had experienced or heard of, more in the nature of an
absence, he imagined, of the epileptic sort — though an absence pre-
ternaturally present and filled. He would ask his doctor friends back
in D.C. to arrange whatever neurological testing might reveal whether

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his infrequent drug experimenting in the sixties had in any way af-
fected his circuitry, but he knew in advance that the tests would show
nothing.
Yet he knew also that he had been changed — no less profoundly
than his old Bulova, though less conspicuously — and that his life was
about to follow suit, perhaps from the same cause, as if, having been
pulled so deep, he had not altogether resurfaced and never would.
“What took you so long?” Jane asked indifferently as they ap-
proached. Beside her, on a bench in the ferry waiting room, Joe Junior
began an account of his own doings since lunchtime.
Clearing customs to reboard Native Son, Baylor regarded the famil-
iar stranger regarding him from his passport photo, and the arbitrary
symbols of the name beside it, which with only a slight refocusing of
his mind he could make look as outlandish and unintelligible to him-
self as Arabic. Juliette wondered whether the perky customs clerk
might be the wife of their forenoon cabbie. Her mother thought the
flour-sack top was a bit on the large side; Juliette agreed but guessed
that it might shrink and really didn’t mind either way. As if newly
endowed with genetic-X-ray vision, Baylor felt he could see more ex-
actly than ever what there was of Jane and what of himself in each of
their daughter’s speech-acts and gestures, and what of neither of her
parents.
“Anyhow, it was a bargain,” Betsy marveled.
With a kindred vision he tenderly regarded them all: his mock-
astonished brother, as deaf in his way as their father, and as much
without guile; Jane Price (she would gladly revert to her “maiden”
name, he knew, when the time came), who would soon enough part
company with the Baylor he had all but become, and he with her.
Mercy on them, every one.
Back aboard So Far, he and Juliette made a little happy-hour cere-
mony of pitching his old Bulova out toward their invisible anchors,
an offering to the spirits of the deep. “Good-bye, dear old watch,” he
said. Jane hadn’t even asked to see his new one; nor did she or Joe or
Betsy come forward from the sloop’s cockpit to see the gold-glinting
talisman arc up and out in the long Caribbean light and then plick
the calm surface of the harbor like an oyster shell. Now the five of
them would confer about what to do tomorrow and the days there-

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

after: a prospect that Baylor, fingering his pukka-shell necklace and hearing “Baylor’s” words in his head, contemplated with benevolent
equanimity.
But if he never told any of those aboard the full story of his third voyage,
he would one day write, to himself Baylor told it over and over and over
again.

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Five Interludes

1.

When Somebody, still stranded, wound up the story of his third voy-
age (a tale abbreviated in its oral presentation and more pitched, he
hoped, to its present audience and occasion), Sindbad the Sailor
cleared his throat, tapped his tub to rouse the baffled auditors, and
said, “Well!
“Well. Very well, now, friends! What do we think of my brother’s
story? I beg you not to wait upon my opinion, as you have kindly
done heretofore before voicing your own, but to speak your mind first
and freely.”
Ibn al-Hamra, on his left, had already raised one red-faced finger.
Without looking his way, Sindbad patted the fellow’s plump near
shoulder and declared, “We shall hear my soon-son-in-law’s senti-
ments soon enough, Allah willing. Let us hear some other first, if
other there is.”
Seven diners frowned at their laps. Of the rest, Ibn al-Hamra, wait-
ing his turn, made mental notes upon his fingers; Kuzia Fakan, across
from Still-Stranded, redrained her empty wine cup, burped politely,
and grinned at no one in particular; Yasmin turned uncertain eyes up-

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

table toward her friend the teller, who shrugged back. Her father re-
garded them, then said again, “Well! Wine, perhaps, to whet our fac-
ulties. Yasmin?”
Assisted by Jayda, his daughter made her intricate rounds. At their
fourth stop (after Sindbad, the distinguished-looking gentleman on
his right, and her prospective fiancé), she bent to whisper into the ear
of the beefy, dark-haired fellow who was seated this evening at her
own right hand. He looked up wide-eyed (but not yet openmouthed,
as was his habit) and pointed to himself in disbelief. But when Yasmin
favored him with a smile and a nod, he cleared his throat as his host
had done and, like him, said, “Well.”
Going on with her rounds, Yasmin declared sweetly, “Our faithful
Hajj Masud has something to share with us.”
“Yes!” that fellow conceded. “Well.”
“Hajj Masud,” Sindbad acknowledged, and with a gesture of his
open left hand, he bade him speak.
“Yes! Well. Allah knows I am no expert in the storytelling way, only
a purveyor of fine carpets by appointment to His Excellency our caliph
and to the port city of Basra as well, not to mention the potential
market in Serendib.” He blinked hugely, drew a breath. “I shall not
pretend to have understood, and so am in no position to judge, much
less to believe, the more fantastic portions of our new comrade’s
story — which is to say, alas, the bulk of it. But I must speak in praise
of the one episode I grasped, that in which the feckless cuckold Bey
el-Loor accidentally touches the magic amulet he has purchased un-
wittingly from an ifritah and is thereby transported from his Never-
Never Land to the endlessly fascinating Jmaa el Fna in Marrakesh, the
Red City, only to be wizarded promptly back to his joyless kind after
that taste of bliss. I particularly commend the portrait of that stern
but just rug merchant Sayyid Ankh el-Zhash, whose painful duty it
was to expel Bey el-Loor from Paradise, so to speak, before the cuck-
old could revenge himself upon his unfaithful wife — perhaps by cor-
rupting the morals of those charming Maghrebi beggar boys. The role
of rug dealers down through the ages in thus conserving the social
fabric, if I may so put it, has not been sufficiently acknowledged hith-
erto in our literature; I salute Sayyid Still-Stranded for at least at-
tempting to rectify that injustice. I myself have had occasion to do
business in the Red City, where I toured the lively Place of the Dead,

246

Five Interludes

admired the decorative rotting heads of decapitated malefactors, lost
my heart and very nearly my purse to just such winsome scamps as
our friend describes, and did sharp business with just such a master
rugsman as that Ankh el-Zhash. Indeed, were it not for the presence
among us of our host’s gracious daughter, for whose unsullied ears the
tale is not fit, I could tell you of an adventure that befell me there with
a certain woman of the Bedouin who was selling eggs in that very
marketplace. …”
Touching his forearm, Yasmin said, “Thank you, dear Hajj Masud.”
The rug dealer turned upon the company his look of abashment.
“Allah preserve the Badawiyyat!” cried Kuzia Fakan, and she held
out her last-place cup for refilling.
“Allah preserve the women of the Bedouin indeed,” Sindbad said,
“as I myself could wish to be preserved. Desiccation in their pure
desert sunlight turns tart currants into sweet raisins like our Kuzia,
whereas marination in the seven brines of the sea turns mild gherkins
into sour pickles. But let us hear now some counteropinion, if any
there be.”
“By Allah, there be!” said Ibn al-Hamra. He wet his lips so eagerly
with wine that even without his fiancée’s assistance he managed several
purple drops on his clean caftan. Kuzia Fakan rolled her eyes and took
another drink. Sindbad gestured for him to proceed.
“Our wise and ever-generous host,” declared Ibn, “has schooled us
in the art of swallowing the unswallowable. Our capacities enlarged
by his example, we have taken unto ourselves not one, not two, but
three several moral and aesthetic enormities, served up to us like a
serial feast of buzzard barf by an outlander who for reasons of his own
has seen fit to assume our host’s name, as by his own acknowledgment
he has assumed other names in the past.
“But having swallowed the unswallowable, comrades, are we now
to digest the indigestible? Ought we not rather to follow our host’s
example from the second island of his second voyage — Moral Lesson
Eight of the twelve given us thus far — and reregurgitate this narra-
tive? Granted (as my colleague Hajj Masud has observed), there is a
sop of Islamic realism among the slop of infidel hashishery — as if one
true magic charm could compensate for such false and charmless
magic as music issuing from a box, or aerial transport by neither roc
nor rug! In the same way we may find the odd scrap of decency floating

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

by like Bey el-Loor’s admirable brother’s raft, adrift upon a sea of
turpitude — as if a turban here, a veil there, could cover the naked
immorality of the rest! In place of proper monsters, this interloper
gives us monstrous improprieties; in place of straightforward giant
serpents, he offers serpentine insinuations.
“What shall we make of his story’s hero? Bey el-Loor’s wife com-
mits adultery for no better reason than that her husband has disported
with other women, but far from halving her with a scimitar, as justice
demands, or drowning her in a sack together with a live monkey and
a rooster, he forgives her! When the daughter of his infidel loins un-
derstandably gives her virginity to a proper Muslim (who, we note
with satisfaction, refrains from marrying the unbeliever), Bey el-Loor
mildly disapproves, but he seems not to appreciate that the girl’s value
in the marriage market is thereby so much lowered that he will likely
be obliged to sell her off to a white-slaver for whatever he can get.
Surely, my friends, we shall now agree that we have heard enough
from this narrative quarter. I for one beg our host frankly to call a halt
to his so-called brother’s so-called stories and get on with us to
Serendib!”
Breathing agitatedly, Ibn al-Hamra nodded his approval of his own
proposition. Sindbad repatted his shoulder while looking our man’s
way. “Perhaps my brother would respond to these hard words?”
Somebody shook his head. “Let the tale stand or fall on its own.
Its teller has had his say for this evening.”
“Other comments, then?” invited Sindbad down the table. Yasmin
returned to her place and raised her hand, but her father wagged a
negative finger at her. Kuzia Fakan flexed a few muscles where she sat,
preparing herself to dance. The diners glanced furtively at one another
and at her.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” presently said the gentleman on Sind-
bad’s right, who looked like a younger Hasib Ali or an older Hajj
Masud. Pleased, Sindbad cried, “My old and loyal friend Talib ibn
Sahl! The floor is yours; honor us with your opinion.”
“Well,” Talib said thoughtfully, “I quite concur with my distin-
guished colleagues that for recognizability and pungency, the market-
place episode of Sayyid Still-Stranded’s narrative stands head and
turban above the rest. I shall go so far as to suggest that in stories to
come he would do well to build upon this sound foundation and add

248

Five Interludes

further touches of a kind with that magic bezel. I myself am partial to
talking fish and the granting of extravagant wishes by beholden genies
and would be pleased to see such flourishes of verisimilitude in our
comrade’s next tale.
“As for the obscure stretches of this one and the inexplicable be-
havior of its principal characters, I believe they are meant to echo the
speech and behavior of those fearsome but ingenious apes in Sayyid
Sindbad’s story: unintelligible to us but not therefore meaningless. I
would even venture that the general drift of the stranger’s voyages
grows ever clearer and increasingly apropos: whereas our host’s sea
journeys go from this civilized center of the world out to its barbarous
margins and come richly back, our guest’s do the reverse. We have
now seen him for the first time stumble out of Ape-Land for some
moments and into such dear realities as the muezzin’s morning prayer
call and the colorful sayings of rejected solicitors in the Jmaa el Fna.
There are even nuggets of true wisdom, such as ought to have pleased
our impatient brother Ibn al-Hamra: Sayyid Ankh el-Zhash’s great
lesson, for example — ‘Not good to tour souk without guide’ — de-
serves to be graved in chalcedony, and when the cuckold repays that
good man’s kindness by slipping out of the shop’s back door without
buying so much as a prayer rug, his ingratitude is promptly punished
by banishment back to the Island of the Apes, to his virago of a wife
and his charming though compromised daughter. Are those not moral
lessons?”
He leaned forward to look down-table directly at Somebody the
Still-Stranded. “In sum, my friend, while much of what you say is still
ape-talk to our ears, your stories appear to be improving in clarity and
relevance night by night. If you harbor aspirations in the narrative
way, you might consider apprenticing yourself, even at your present
age, to one of our professionals, such as the one remarked by Bey el-
Loor in the Jmaa el Fna. In time your tales might well approach the
charm of theirs, and of our host’s.”
Both Sindbads bowed to this praise. Without waiting to be told,
Yasmin gratefully refilled the cup of Talib ibn Sahl. As she did so,
however, a dapper, keen-eyed fellow in the fourth place of honor
(at her left hand) seconded Ibn al-Hamra’s negative motion. If the
prediction of his esteemed fellow import-export merchant Talib ibn

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Sahl should prove correct, he declared, then the outlander’s fourth through sixth voyages must fetch him to the gracious house of Sind-
bad the Sailor — where he already was! “If we are to hear further
adventures of the cuckold Sayyid Bey el-Loor,” this critic concluded,
“let those adventures rather fetch him back whence he came, before he
corrupts the morals of this illustrious house as his own household was
corrupted.”
“Hear, hear,” applauded Ibn al-Hamra. Somebody, too, nodded.
“Alternatively,” proposed Ibn’s new ally, “I vote that he produce
for our inspection that magic talisman from Marrakesh. Perhaps if he
rotates its bezel the other way, he will find himself back on the Island
of False Virgins.”
“Ali al-Yaman!” protested Yasmin. But her father, stern-faced, held
up his hand for silence. “You speak of voting,” he said to Ali al-Yaman.
“Perhaps, indeed, before Kuzia Fakan delights us yet again, we should
vote on the question of whether tomorrow evening’s entertainment
shall continue these narrative preparations for Voyage Seven or steer
some other course.” Without consulting the sense of the table —
which would after all have been but voting on whether to vote — he
declared that he, Yasmin, Kuzia Fakan, his adopted brother, and all
other members of his household would abstain; of the remaining eight
diners, let all in favor of proceeding in their wonted fashion raise their
right hands to Allah the all-knowing. Talib ibn Sahl did so promptly,
followed by Hajj Masud, diagonally opposite him. The others consid-
ered one another’s faces. Presently the man seated between Talib and
Somebody raised his hand, as did, more timidly, the man between
Hajj Masud and Kuzia Fakan.
“But I should very much like to see that magic amulet,” this last
said.
“As should I,” Still-Stranded sighed.
“Opposed?” asked Sindbad. Up went at once the hands of Ibn al-
Hamra, Ali al-Yaman, and an older fellow on Ibn’s left. So meaning-
fully did those three stare then at the only uncommitted guest (a lean,
pale man about Somebody’s age, on Somebody’s right) that after some
moments of frowning and tugging his whiskers he half raised his right
hand — at the same time shrugging apologetically at our storyteller,
who smiled and shrugged back.

250

Five Interludes

“We have a tie,” observed Sindbad. “Loath as I am to contravene any of my dear friends, I suppose it falls to me to cast the deciding
vote.”
“No need of that,” his daughter declared from her table-end. “This
is no tie at all.”
Her father raised his eyebrows. “Four-four is no tie? When did
Allah change the rules of counting?”
“When He gave His followers the protocols of such feasts as this,”
Yasmin asserted. The eight votes, she then smoothly explained, ought
no more to be given equal weight than the eight voters, who other-
wise (no offense intended) should be stacked up in one another’s laps
at her father’s right hand. Weighted properly, Talib ibn Sahl’s vote
should be given eight points, inasmuch as tonight he occupied the
seat of honor; that of Ibn al-Hamra, in the second place, should be
counted as seven points, Hajj Masud’s as six, and so forth — down to
the vote of the guest in the eighth place (timid Abu Shamat), which
should count as one. By this reasonable reckoning the ayes had it,
twenty to sixteen.
More than half the company smiled, none more proudly than the
teller of the tale in question and erstwhile author of the Baylor series.
Sindbad himself tapped with pleasure his yellow-gold turban, as if to
compliment his daughter’s resourcefulness. But Ibn al-Hamra, after
busy tabulation on his fingertips and those of the elder fellow at his
left, raised his hand and (when recognized by the host) declared to
Yasmin, “Even by your ingenious system of counting, pure milady, it
is we nays who have it.”
“Light of my heart,” dryly asked Yasmin, “how is that?”
“Because,” replied her intended, “the ninth of our company, the
venerable and sagacious Hasib Ali, who until tonight sat always here
at our host’s seven-point left hand, has voted those points negatively
with his feet, if I may so put it. That makes the score twenty-three-
twenty against your interloper, O blossom of Baghdad.”
Ali al-Yaman, Abu Shamat, and the old man between Kuzia Fakan
and Ibn al-Hamra all nodded their heads sagely, as did Kuzia until she
saw her master’s frown.
“Sweet conqueror of my bowels,” Yasmin responded, “my recollec-
tion is that when Hasib Ali awoke last night at the end of our visitor’s
second voyage, he had only praise for the story of it. If according to

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

your remarkable reasoning his absentee vote is to be counted, it
should count in our favor: twenty-seven-sixteen.”
All were amused by this sally except him at whom it was directed.
Before Ibn al-Hamra could retabulate a comeback, however, Hajj Ma-
sud, nodding vigorously, said, “By Allah, she has got the better of you,
Ibo! And I must say in further support of her position that even if
Hasib had disliked the story of young Bey el-Loor’s second voyage,
his vote could not fairly be counted tonight upon the third, for I have
it on good authority that in withdrawing himself from this company
he has also withdrawn his support from our enterprise. Hasib Ali is
no longer an investor in Serendib Limited, and so the vote stands at
twenty-sixteen in favor of the stranger’s going on with his story.”
He beamed at Yasmin, then at her father — and found the one
covering her eyes with her hands, the other raising his to heaven.
Among the assembled there was murmuring.
“Jewel of the East!” cried Ibn al-Hamra to his fiancée, his ruddy
grin belying his words: “You have won indeed! On with your endless
tale, Sayyid Bey el-Loor! We shall see who’s here tomorrow night to
hear it, and how the vote goes thereafter!”
“For God’s sake, dance,” Sindbad the Sailor commanded Kuzia
Fakan. “Yasmin!”
His daughter poured wine, grimly careful not to splash any on her
prospective fiancé’s caftan. “Allah bless you,” murmured grateful Ku-
zia Fakan to her, and she rose for her performance. Sindbad fixed
grave eyes upon Somebody the Still-Stranded, who once more merely
shrugged. The tambourinist Fatmah Awad came forward, her instru-
ment sizzling and biffing; the piper-girl did likewise, and the music
commenced.
This time neither Yasmin nor Jayda excused herself: after a quick
whispered conference with Kuzia Fakan, Sindbad’s daughter returned
to her place, and old Jayda, surprisingly, seated herself in the place
vacated by the dancer and even took an impassive sip of wine under
her veil. All but Ibn al-Hamra, however (and our storyteller), were
too preoccupied with Hajj Masud’s news to attend either these re-
markable departures from household custom or Kuzia’s dance. Under
the pipe and tambourine and Fatmah Awad’s wild mournful song,
Yasmin spoke in private earnest with Hajj Masud, her eyes and ges-
tures stern. He nodded in either mock or real astonishment, clapped

252

Five Interludes

his brow, turned up his palms. Talib ibn Sahl consulted the diner on
his right, Ali al-Yaman the diner on his left, the others their wine cups.
What passed between Sindbad and the veiled Jayda, who regarded
each other without words, Somebody could not suppose.
But Ibn al-Hamra joyously clapped his hands more or less to the
tambourine’s beat as the page Salim and six other male servants, at
Kuzia’s signal, replaced her master’s Tub of Last Resort with the much
larger vessel from the courtyard and boosted her up and over and into
it. The dancer’s splashes revealed it to have been at least partly filled
with water for this performance. Within its chest-high walls she
danced, accenting Fatmah’s rhythms with resonant thumps of her still-
slippered feet on the tub’s bottom and raps of her knuckles on its sides.
Tonight her caftan came off first and was pitched out dripping to
Salim. After an appropriate number of splashy twirls and stomps, her
wet slippers followed, then sundry sopping skirts and filmy harem-
pants, each caught by the waiting page and displayed suggestively to
the distracted guests. Cheered on lustily by Ibn al-Hamra and politely
by Yasmin and “Bey el-Loor,” Kuzia next wriggled out of various che-
mises until only a jeweled halter (and, presumably, its lower counter-
part) remained. But as she then turned to display her bare arms and
shoulders, Talib and several others bowed their good-nights to Sind-
bad, Yasmin, Jayda, and still-stranded Somebody, nodded to the per-
formers, and rose to leave.
“Gentlemen!” Sindbad protested. “Does none among you wish his
laundry done? No need to remove it; simply join our able laundress in
her tub!”
“Yallah, Kuzia!” Yasmin called helpfully, as the busy dancer now
slipped out of her halter and tossed it over-shoulder to Salim.
“Yallah,” Somebody seconded. Even Jayda tapped her wine cup in
rhythmic encouragement on the low tabletop. On the tub’s far side,
Talib and his companions (Ali al-Yaman from Place Four, and Abu
Shamat from Eight) paused but did not reseat themselves.
“Badawiya-ya-ya!” Ibn cheered or jeered. A trouper to the end,
Kuzia Fakan turned to face the remaining guests, grinned deter-
minedly, jiggled her sequin-pastied breasts till the water flew, and set-
tled lower into the tub for her finale. When Ibn al-Hamra rose to peek
over its side, Jayda caught the hem of his caftan and peremptorily
yanked him back. A splash of red wine slopped onto his chest; he

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

laughed and pointed it out to Sindbad, who merely sighed and tipped
his turban tubward. Kuzia groaned, took a breath, and submerged
altogether. From the depths then, as the music achieved its dutiful
climax, her many-ringed hand appeared with the final undergarment,
a glittering bit that instead of tossing she dangled overside like bait.
Salim, on cue, seized its other end and, after a playful tug-of-war,
permitted himself to be pulled by its unseen owner into the tub. Piper
and tambourinist bowed in unison, winked (one her left eye, one her
right), and climbed in after him.
From the vessel’s farther side, Talib ibn Sahl complimented them —
“Mabrouk!” — but then moved courtyardward in deep conversation
with his two companions and Ibn al-Hamra. Sindbad clutched at his
turban and hastened after them. Hajj Masud and the other three re-
maining guests rose to follow, despite the beckonings of Kuzia Fakan
and her dripping comrades (Salim included) in the tub.
“My dear Hajj!” implored Yasmin, and hurrying to his side, she
whispered something in his ear, at the same time gesturing tubward.
“Laundry time, everybody!” Sindbad urged, returning to the hall.
“Come, Hajj! Come Sidi, Jafar, al-Fadl!” Jayda, doing her bit, handed
her wine cup to Yasmin, who merrily dripped a few drops onto Hajj
Masud’s caftan sleeve.
“Ah, well, then,” that fellow said, and he permitted the musicians
to assist him into the tub. The three others obligingly held out their
sleeves for Yasmin’s anointing. From out in the dry courtyard Ibn al-
Hamra called, “Till tomorrow, Bey el-Loor!”
“Tomorrow indeed,” muttered Sindbad, at the same time encour-
aging Hajj Masud’s companions to follow their friend’s example.
“Good night, all,” sighed Yasmin. Jayda moved to leave with her,
but Sindbad’s gold-djellabaed daughter declared that she could in all
likelihood find her own way tonight to the apartment in the women’s
quarters in which she had slept nearly every night since she was born.
“Perhaps you should escort instead the unhappy captain of the ship
Sofar,” she suggested. “To his customary chamber.”
She then exited, to sounds of dutiful wet merriment from her fath-
er’s great tub. Jayda stood by. Somebody looked apologetically to
Sindbad, who had returned to his seat at the head of the table, his
back to the laundering in progress, and was glumly nursing a final cup

254

Five Interludes

of wine. “Go, go,” the old man said. “Protect my daughter’s honor,
while the early rats abandon ship and her future sinks under us like a
wakened whale. We’ll speak of tomorrow tomorrow.”
“Salaam,” Somebody said, and he did as bidden.

2.

Installed already in his lamp-lit room and busily re-dressing when her
friend arrived with wordless Jayda, Yasmin turned to Somebody the
Still-Stranded much as young Daisy Moore had once to Simon Behler
on the Island of Island Creek, and spoke the first words of French ever
uttered by a member of Sindbad’s household:
“Bon ami, come: we have much business before the morning prayer
call.”
Her hair was braided up; her djellaba and undergarments lay dis-
carded on the rug. In their place, more or less, she was winding a strip
of yellow-gold turban around her lean hips and once between her legs,
like a silken diaper.
“Top-less,” she proudly pointed out. “Now I am Janeprize, the wife
of Sayyid Bey el-Loor, and he will do with me what she would not
permit that night aboard Sofar. Show me how you did in the days
when you loved her.”
Used as he was becoming to her whims, our man was still stopped
every time by the resplendent first sight of Yasmin’s body. He had
presence of mind enough, however, to reply that if she insisted on
taking these roles, she would have to show him how she imagined, et
cetera.
The challenge seemed to please her. Hands on hips, she considered
both him and it. From behind him, Jayda spoke their private language.
Yasmin shook her head, then asked what sounded like a question in
the same tongue, to which Jayda gave some answer.
“What I think,” Yasmin then came closer and declared, “is that
when you and Janeprize loved each other as husband and wife, you
came together in the light and spoke of other matters, to prolong your
pleasure. When you no longer loved each other, you came together in
the dark and thought guiltily of your lovers while you did what you
did.” She placed Somebody’s left hand solidly upon her right breast,

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

his right on the hip-knot of her turban. “Just now we love each other.
We will speak of other things while you unfasten my top-less and I
remove your clothes.”
This we did, with Jayda as usual standing by for the most part
impassively but volunteering comments or suggestions from time to
time in that other language. Yasmin explained (pausing in the divest-
ment of her “husband” to turn herself around for his review once he
had divested her) that this was, in fact, a Cairene dialect that the pair
of them had used since her childhood for private communication. We
needed to begin our lovemaking promptly, she went on to say — slip-
ping into a modest nightdress now and lying supine, her arms crossed
upon her chest — because Bey el-Loor’s third voyage had involved
him sexually with at least three women: his wife, Janeprize, the spirit-
woman Terifrum Ti-Nech, and his semen-swallowing mistress Terizah
Something-That-Sounds-Like-Bells-Ringing. One after the other, all
three would be his again before morning, and allowance must be made
for the long recovery time of Simon’s aging zabb.
“What shall we discuss first, my husband, while you lift my night-
dress and touch me here and here, which sets me on fire, and I do this
to you but not yet that, lest the game be over before it begins?”
“Hajj Masud,” Somebody breathed. “In the name of Allah, let’s talk
about Hajj Masud as if we were sipping mint tea in the courtyard.”
Jayda muttered something from the corner where she had settled.
“I know that,” Yasmin replied to her: “A proper wife does this, not
this, which is more in the style of the ifritah Terifrum Ti-Nech than of
Janeprize. But look what Sayyid Bey el-Loor wants to do to me, be-
fore he has even done the other things! Is that a proper husband or a
camel-driver?”
Hajj Masud, she then explained, was neither more nor less than
what Simon had seen: a long-standing admirer of hers and business
associate of her father’s. His intentions were the best in the world, but
he so invariably put his foot in his mouth and let cats out of bags that
she ought to have known better than to call on him this evening (“Bey
el-Loor! Husband of my body! Just there!”). He it was, by the way (she
presently went on), who had supplied Jayda with the rug in which to
spirit Simon from Basra to Baghdad after our fateful remeeting in the
marshy haunts of Mustafa the ex-Navigator — and back again when
Sindbad suddenly returned from Voyage Six. He it was also, she did

256

Five Interludes

not doubt, who, after the hijacking of the bride-ship Zahir, had
thought to minimize the damage to her reputation by spreading the
story that she had not been raped wholesale by the Qeshmi pirates,
but probably no more than once or twice, and by their captain. That
would be very like dear Hajj Masud — and would Bey el-Loor now
speak to his Janeprize of something else entirely while she floated to
the top of Adam’s Peak, as she felt herself on the verge of doing?
Simon complied, not easily. His “wife’s” “top-less,” he pointed out,
which had joined the rest of her ensemble on the rug nearby, hap-
pened to have matched her djellaba, which for the third evening in a
row had been of the same color as her father’s turban. Was there an
explanation?
Jayda said something sharp.
Breathed Yasmin, “There is.” Her eyes were open and fixed upon
Simon’s, as steady in midascent of that happy height aforementioned
as her voice was not: “Until I became the wife of your body … I
was … my father’s flesh and blood.”
Determinedly we spoke on: of Hasib Ali’s defection from Voyage
Seven, which had not been news to Yasmin and Sindbad but which
her father had hoped to talk the old man out of before it was con-
firmed. Of the possibility that Ibn al-Hamra would now raise his
dowry demands to eighteen or even twenty percent of the profits of
Serendib Limited: a further devaluation of Yasmin’s virginity! Of Ku-
zia Fakan’s dance, so unfortunately ill attended, which in Yasmin’s
view had been a clever echo of Bey el-Loor’s fateful submersion in
Soper’s Hole. Simon thought this interpretation overingenious, but
he forbore from saying so because he was preoccupied just then to the
point of speechlessness.
“There,” said Yasmin, satisfied, and she slipped out from under
him. “Janeprize is pregnant now with our seven children, five of them
sons.” She pulled the hem of her nightdress back down from under
her armpits and demurely put out the lamps, all except one. “We shall
sleep awhile, until the zabb of my heart reawakens.”
Sleep we did — Simon at least, though the word sons lodged under
his breastbone like a live coal, and his dreams, prompted as they were
by the story of Baylor’s third voyage, did not soothe him.
An uncertain while later he found himself wordlessly assaulted by
an ifritah. Gone were the nightdress and modest mien of “Janeprize”;

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

when he woke enough to grasp what was grasping him — and biting,
scratching, poking, pricking, tickling — he saw in the dim light a fury
of skin and wild, unbraided hair: Yasmin’s imagination of Teri from
Teaneck in Tangier. She was all over him at once; when he protested,
a little frantic, “Hey! That hurts!” she thrust her forefinger a whole
joint farther in, bit his thigh till surely she had drawn blood, slammed
her pelvis hard into his face. “Baylor” fought back; he had known his
friend not to be a weakling or sluggard, but her strength and agility
nevertheless surprised him, as did the degree of her mock ferocity. We
rolled, tumbled, pitched about the room; Jayda stirred in her corner,
drew herself out of harm’s way, and murmured approval when, as if
furious at Simon’s still-flaccid tool, Yasmin pinched its frenum with
her teeth until he shouted. Unrelenting, she muffled his outcry with
her crotch. He bit her there; she retaliated with a quick trickle in his
face and used her finger as she had before but gave over biting and
stanched his thigh wound with lips and tongue. Again Simon did as
he was being done to, not troubling even to moisten his entry first.
That hurt her, in a way he had been required to see her hurt more
than once before; she gasped into Jayda’s skirts, against which we had
by that time rolled. He made at once to withdraw, gently, quickly —
but Jayda herself caught his hand, held it in place, moved it thus and
so, and obliged “Bey el-Loor” to press his advantage until “Terifrum Ti-Nech” gave out a different, longer sound.
Enough theater, he told her then, in effect. Or, if we were going to
play this game of erotic recapitulation, let’s play it both ways. What
partners of Yasmin’s (other than the piratical one just now unhappily
evoked) might he reenact, beginning with her first? Had that been
“dear Hajj Masud,” perhaps?
Jayda half whispered in Cairene.
“There was no first,” prone Yasmin murmured into those skirts.
“My darling is a virgin,” her overseer affirmed, smoothing her
charge’s touseled hair.
Eyes closed, Yasmin corrected her. “I never was a virgin. I was
deflowered by a mighty ifrit in my mother’s womb. He took my maid-
enhead before it was formed, and his terrible zabb lit a fire in my
wâhât that no mortal lover can put out. He made me into an ifritah.”
She turned her head to glance up at Simon. “Terifrum Ti-Nech?”

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Five Interludes

He kissed her lightly between the shoulder blades. “That ifritah has now been exorcised, Allah be praised. No more this one and that one:
henceforth be you Yasmin and I Whoever-I-Am.”
She did not protest, but announced, “Whoever-He-Is will hold me
now while we sleep till his poor cock crows.”

Sleep we didn’t, however, at least not for long. To Simon it seemed
that the vessel of his consciousness had scarcely slipped its exotic pres-
ent mooring when it was recalled by the somnolent voice of Jayda,
speaking now not Cairene but our common tongue:
“Chapter Six of Allah’s great tale of Jayda the Cairene,” that voice
declared, “its Author has seen fit to divide into two parts, of which
the first cunningly precedes the second. That much-violated but still-
irresistible flower of the Nile, when last we saw her, had been cured
of her monkey-pox, refitted with her third and most convincing maid-
enhead by the wily artisans of Malabar, and sold to the young but
seasoned merchant-mariner Sindbad the Sailor, who knew exactly
what he was buying and what use he meant to make of his purchase.
To that latter end, one might recall, as we returned together from his
famous third voyage he examined me as thoroughly and expertly as if
he were the caliph’s Chief Inspector of Wâhâts, and while doing so
examined the inside of my head as well.
“‘Have you observed,’ he asked me, ‘that the hand with which I am
admiring your excellent new equipment is missing portions of both
its ring and little fingers?’ I answered that while neither digit was pres-
ently in my view, I could tell by the feel of the former that only its first
joint had been taken. My sojourn with the fishermen-pirates of Zabar-
gad inclined me to think that the barracuda that had bitten it off must
have been no more than two feet long and had probably mistaken for
a minnow the flash of his signet ring — a gold one, by the feel of it,
studded with either turquoise or amethyst.
“‘By Allah, young woman,’ Sayyid Sindbad cried, ‘that is astonish-
ing!’ And he told me the story of his interisland tub trip in Voyage
One, which had cost him two toes and part of that finger. ‘But I see
tears in your remarkable eyes,’ he then declared. ‘Are you weeping for
my old injury, or can it be that a mere two thirds of a ring finger
discomforts your exquisitely refurbished wâhât?’ As to that, I replied,
his examination gave me more delight than discomfort, and even far
greater discomfort at his hands, so to speak, would give me joy. But

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

by the feel of it, that turquoise-studded gold ring on the finger in
question, at least the intaglio cursive S of the signet itself, was the
work of an accomplished Egyptian goldsmith, most probably from
Giza but in any case from no farther down the Nile than my home
city. No proper Muslim daughter could be thus reminded of her late
father without tears.
“In similar fashion I was able to identify the species of fish that had
relieved him of two toes (a small reef shark), and though I misguessed
the giant baby buzzards from Voyage Two that had made free with
his left pinkie-tip and a portion of his right buttock — I have never
known one feathered creature from another — I managed to read my
new master’s character and certain features of his past by mere visual
inspection of his zabb, a skill that I had acquired over the years with-
out trying to and that I was able to put to use in this instance when
he dropped his drawers to test me in the matter of his vultured but-
tock. If he would deign to put that zabb where his ring finger was, I
told him, I could read his future as well.
“This he would not do, for the prudent reason given at the end of
Chapter Five of Allah’s story in progress: time must prove me loyal
and uninfected. But so impressed was he by the several talents of that
story’s main character, that he repeated his promise to reward me well
if I would be his eyes and ears in the women’s quarters of his new
household.
“When his ship at length reached home port, my master left it al-
together at the disposal of his faithful captain, Kasim of Basra, vowing
that he himself would never go to sea again. Indeed, so eager was he
to put all things nautical behind him that he would not even make the
trip from Basra up to Baghdad by riverboat, but packed me and his
other treasures on donkey-back to the City of Peace. There he installed
me in the empty harem of this house, and though I was not yet twenty
years of age, he entrusted me with the selection of the female domes-
tics whom he set about then to hire or purchase as attendants to his
bride.
“As to the choice of that lucky woman herself, whose office it
would be to bear his children and in all ways so entertain and delight
him that never again would boredom tempt him to the salty bosom
of the deep: he reviewed the most eligible young women of this city,
and after rejecting this one because her character fell short of her

260

Five Interludes

beauty, and that one because her beauty was not the equal of her
character, and this third because though excellent in both those re-
spects she was of too willful and sharp a temper, and this fourth be-
cause she was on the contrary too docile and empty-headed to be
interesting, he narrowed the field of his courtship to three and finally
to two candidates, high-breasted young virgins so comparably excel-
lent of face and figure — both of them carefully brought up in illus-
trious households, well versed in the fine and social arts, lively but
sweet, firm-charactered but of gentle disposition — that the Prince of
Believers himself could not have chosen between them but would have
had to marry both.
“This my master was prepared to do, but such an arrangement,
though forbidden by neither God nor nature, would have displeased
both young women and their families. Having consulted his closest
friends and found their opinions as divided as his own, Sindbad was
finally driven to ask my advice: which of this pair of prizes, in my
judgment, would more likely so please him by night and by day as to
cure his wanderlust as completely as my monkey-pox was now cured?
I asked him to arrange for me to spend a half hour alone in the com-
pany of each, after which I would venture my opinion.
“You must understand that after that thorough shipboard inspec-
tion, my master had not touched me further, though by his own ac-
knowledgment I was now cured and available for his pleasure, and
though he cannot have failed to observe in our daily consultations on
household business that my heart was as much his property as was my
new and untried wâhât. Nor did he avail himself of the other women
we bought or hired in various domestic capacities or of the dancers
brought in from time to time to entertain his guests, though he had
been long at sea with no better company than his fellow merchant-
traders and assorted ogres, apes, and serpents. It was his program, he
confided to me, to starve himself so in this quarter that he would come
to the bridal bed like a pious Muslim to the end of Ramadan, his
appetite whetted for the feast. I shook my head inwardly at this rea-
soning, but in the trouble I foresaw therefrom for him, I foresaw op-
portunity as well as danger for myself, and therefore I kept my own
counsel.
“He arranged with the families of the two young women for me to
have private interviews with them, in each case representing me as not

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

only his womanservant but also an expert appraiser of jewelry (which
in fact I was) whose advice he would rely upon when buying gifts for
his bride-to-be and who needed therefore to have a look at and a word
with the potential recipient. I saw at once that choosing between these
jewels of Islam was like choosing between two matched and flawless
specimens from the Valley of Diamonds on Island Two, Voyage Two.
Just as I could discern, without seeing directly, that each was blessed
with skin like uncurdled cream, breasts and buttocks like canteloupes
at their first moment of ripeness, and a wâhât like a fresh mountain
spring at which no tongue has sipped, so I could divine without ask-
ing directly that each was as eager and able as the other to delight her
bridegroom both in and out of bed. If finally, when my master pressed
me for my decision, I found a syllable’s worth more of praise for Mar-
janah the daughter of Sidi Ahmad than for Habibah the daughter of
Muin, it was because, even more than her rival, this Marjanah had
been after me for advice on her prospective husband’s tastes. From my
knowledge of Sindbad the Sailor, would he prefer his wife to entertain
opinions of her own or only to echo his? Should she conceal the fact
that her father had taught her the intricacies of business, or would it
please her husband that she knew such things? If he chose her over
Habibah, would I promise to be her friend and confidante and to
instruct her in the art of love? For though she had read this and that
in the poets and had been told certain things by her mother and other
things by her girlfriends and married sisters, she knew nothing in this
line at first hand.
“Sindbad was as pleased to receive this report as was I to deliver it,
for I saw in that last request, particularly, an opportunity for my own
preferment. How had I answered the girl’s questions? he wanted to
know. As to the first and second, I told him, I had replied that my
master was looking for neither a mirror nor a parrot but a wife, who
would do well to have knowledge and opinions of her own, but that
he was on the other hand not looking for an adversary or a school-
master, and so she would do well to put her learning and judgment,
like her body, actively at his service when they were desired, and never
otherwise. As to that other matter (I told him I had told her), she
could depend on me to be her steadfast friend but scarcely her instruc-
tor, inasmuch as I was as virginal as herself. ‘Can I believe such a
thing?’ I reported that Marjanah had exclaimed. ‘A prize like you, the

262

Five Interludes

mere glance of whose eyes must make every zabb in Baghdad stand
like a minaret, and he does not mount you five times daily after pray-
ers? What sort of lover is this fiancé of mine?’ ‘One who readies him-
self for a feast by fasting,’ I told him I told her, ‘rather than training
for a championship race by riding every mare in his stable into the
ground.’ I insisted then that she verify my maidenhead (I said to Sind-
bad) by a simple and harmless procedure I had learned from my
mother, which must however be done gently lest it rupture what it
had set out to confirm. As she feared she might in her inexperience
apply too much force to the verification, I then demonstrated upon
her, with my middle finger, exactly the requisite degree of pressure.
Laughing and lingering over the job like two schoolgirls, Marjanah
and I then and there satisfied ourselves in the matter of each other’s
virginity and in some other matters, too, which I kept to myself.
“So fired was Sindbad by my edited report of this news that he
rewarded me with a complete new wardrobe and married Sidi Ah-
mad’s daughter as soon as the wedding could be arranged and a king-
size sleeping tub constructed in the courtyard for the bride and
groom. Though I would have given much to be in her place in that
tub on the bridal night, my jealousy was tempered by Marjanah’s love
and trust, which I found it no chore to reciprocate within the con-
straints of my pact with my master. The morning after her wedding
she flung herself upon my neck with tears of joy and insisted that
before I display to the household the bedsheet blazoned with her vir-
gin blood, I must verify the entire absence of what I had previously
verified as present; she promised to tell me as I did so every detail of
what a man’s instrument was like and what tricks it could perform —
so much larger and livelier than a girlfriend’s finger! — in order that I
might not be surprised and alarmed when my turn came. And she was
so excited still by her first taste of love that her recounting of it, to-
gether with my examination, fetched her for the first time not to
Adam’s Peak but to Eve’s, which she had glimpsed but not managed
fully to ascend on her maiden night with Sindbad the Sailor. I assured
her that she would do so every night thereafter, now that she knew
the way to that summit; nevertheless, she begged me to go the route
with her once more to fix it in her mind, and so we spent half the
morning laughing and playing again like naughty schoolgirls in the
harem, until she bade me stop lest the husband of her body begin to

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

wonder and perhaps grow suspicious at his bride’s absence. Was he,
by the way, to my knowledge, of a suspicious or jealous nature? She
had meant to ask me that question before, and had forgotten to.
“I replied, honestly, that I did not know but would endeavor to
find out. Sindbad then summoned me, not Marjanah, to a private
audience in his great tub and demanded a full confidential account of
his bride’s report to me of their wedding night, so that he could verify
his own happy impressions and strive to perfect both her pleasure
and his own. His delight in her both stung and warmed my heart, as
had hers in him. I reported truthfully that his bride had been exalted
by her defloration and four subsequent impalements and that tender
though she was this morning from that white night, she was eager for
tonight and all their nights to come. ‘That is well to hear,’ Sindbad
said, ‘for to tell you the truth, though I know well enough that her joy
was unfeigned, in none of our five couplings did she reach that height
of bliss to which you and I both know a woman can be elevated. In
this I was just a touch disappointed, but whether with myself or with
beautiful Marjanah I don’t yet know.’
“‘As to that,’ I assured him, not quite honestly, ‘she said nothing,
for the reason that in her complete innocence she believed her joy
complete as well. I cannot easily tell her otherwise while pretending
to be more innocent than she; nor need I do so, for from what she
reports of the prowess of my master’s zabb, it will surely bring her
tonight to that joy which you and I have each known separately but
of whose existence your Marjanah is not yet aware.’ ‘May it be so,’ said
Sindbad, ‘for that young woman’s beauty and my long abstinence are
so well matched that I can think of neither sailing nor selling but only
of the sweetnesses of herself. Even to speak of her like this rekindles a
fire in me that only she can cool, and that not for long. By Allah,
Jayda, I can’t wait for nightfall! Tell Marjanah to make ready for me
now; then speak with her privately tomorrow morning as you did
today, and afterward speak privately again with me.’
“I did as he commanded, and so excited was my mistress at the
prospect of so soon again riding and being ridden by her groom that
she quite forgot the question she had asked me about him until I
apologized for having forgotten it myself in our interview. ‘I mean the
question of whether he is by nature a jealous and suspicious man with
respect to his wife,’ I reminded her, adding that that was after all not

264

Five Interludes

the sort of question one could ask him directly — at least, not one in
my position. Marjanah, in her perfect innocence, wanted to know why
not. Because, I said, such a question might very well inspire the very
thing it asked about, might it not? ‘How could it do that,’ she won-
dered, laughing, ‘unless my husband is jealous and suspicious by na-
ture? A man not disposed to anger will not become angry at being
asked whether he is disposed to anger. Really, Jayda,’ she said, you
know nothing at all about men! Come: brush my hair now before
Sayyid Sindbad arrives, and wash me in the places I can’t reach for
myself. When he finishes with me, I promise to tell you everything
that passed between us, so that you can know the secrets of men as I
do.’
“To this I said nothing, though I might have said much. That same
afternoon in the bridal tub, by her own testimony, Marjanah scaled
Adam’s Peak once while seated upon Sindbad’s lap with her back to
his chest and again astraddle him as he stood, both of which positions
she demonstrated for my enlightenment with me in the place of my
beloved; and that night she reached those heights with him a third
time, hind-to on all fours, and almost a fourth time by a means that
altogether surprised her, as it entailed no insertion of his zabb at all
but only a clever reciprocity of tongues, such as two women might
manage quite as readily as a woman and a man.
“‘How can that be?’ I asked her, as if I hadn’t learned how a thou-
sand nights before she did and practiced my learning two thousand
times since. And curious as I was to hear how her interrogation of
Sayyid Sindbad had gone, I was readier yet to let her show me this
new trick she imagined he had invented. In the course of her demon-
stration, as if by happy accident I easily took her where he had not
managed to by that means, and permitted her to take me there as
well — my first nonsolitary visit since Sindbad’s shipboard inspection
of me.
“Thus again we spent half the morning, until our master sum-
moned me to the courtyard to make my report. One glance told me
that something was troubling him, even after I had declared that Mar-
janah had reported only bliss from their connection thus far. That
much he had observed for himself, Sindbad replied, except that to-
ward morning, as they had done such-and-such while his tool recov-
ered from so-and-so, he had been unable to fetch Marjanah once again

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

to Paradise or to attain it himself, so distracted had he been by a ques-
tion she had baldly put to him in the midst of their sport — to wit,
was he of a jealous and suspicious nature? At the time, he had been
too surprised by the question, and too busy as well, to do more than
laugh and mildly chide her for imagining such a thing of him. But
why in the world, he demanded now of me, had she asked him that?
“Because, I told him, she was a young and inexperienced but lively
and intelligent woman, in love with her husband and naturally curious
to know as much as she could learn about him. Now that he men-
tioned it, I said further, she had asked me the same question about
him, both yesterday and today, and I had assured her both times that
though my connection with her husband was in no way intimate
(alas!), to the best of my knowledge he was free of any such unworthy
sentiment as doubts as to her fidelity. By Allah the All-Seeing, I re-
minded him, he had taken her maidenhead just two nights past and
had scarcely given her an hour’s rest since! Nor had there been another
zabb besides his on the premises since the wedding guests departed.
When and with whom could she have been unfaithful, even if, as was
unthinkable, she had been so inclined?
“Much relieved, Sindbad said, ‘You’re right, of course — though
none knows better than yourself that ecstasy can be feigned even more
readily and convincingly than maidenhood. By Allah, Jayda!’ he cried
then. ‘I have done nothing day and night but dote upon that woman
from the hour she came into this house! Why does she doubt me,
unless there’s something on her conscience?’ I urged him to calm him-
self while I prepared his bride for their afternoon’s dalliance, as I had
done the day before. No, he said: he was afraid that if he sent for her
now, Marjanah would see at once how distraught he was, how suspi-
cious of her suspicion, et cetera, and that could only cause her pain if
she was innocent or put her on her guard if she was not. Besides, in
his preoccupation with courtship and marriage he had neglected both
his business and his friends in the city. He meant to spend the after-
noon making up for that neglect and to bring a few of those friends
home for dinner; he would see his bride then.
“Thus begins the end of the marriage of Sindbad the Sailor and of
Part One of Chapter Six of Allah’s great tale of Jayda the Cairene.
Marjanah wept and tore her garments when she heard that her hus-
band had gone into the city for the afternoon instead of coming to

266

Five Interludes

her. She had displeased him with her foolish question, she declared,
exactly as I had warned her she might, and no doubt displeased him
in their tub-bed as well. His dear zabb had not even risen, she confided
to me now, when they played the game of arsey-turvey last night —
no doubt because she hadn’t known to do that extra little thing I had
happened to hit upon this morning when she taught the game to me.
We had no time to waste, she said then: I must both prepare her to
look her best for the company that evening and take the role of her
husband that afternoon so that she could practice how better to please
him that night.
“Needless to narrate, despite her apprehensions she was unsurpass-
able that evening, both for beauty and for wit, and would have been
unsurpassable as well in her husband’s arms that night had it not been
for the fact that he had observed by then, correctly, that every man in
the room was smitten by her, and had concluded, incorrectly, that if
some one of them was not already her lover, or had not once been, it
was only a matter of time till one would be. And the more skillful she
became, under my disguised tutelage, at the arts of love — my every
lesson taught so cunningly that the pupil believed herself the teacher,
and all my tutoring done with no other motive than to give the master
of my heart, through his wife, what he would not take from me — the
more persuaded he became that some other man was her instructor.
Once the seed of his suspicion was well planted, anything Marjanah
did sufficed to nurture it. When she wisely ceased to ask whether he
was suspicious, he grew more suspicious; if in her ardor she took the
initiative in their couplings, he suspected that she was covering her
adulterous tracks, and if to allay that suspicion she restrained her ar-
dor, he suspected that she had somehow spent it elsewhere — all be-
cause she had once innocently inquired whether he was of a jealous
and suspicious nature!
“Readers of Allah’s great tale of Jayda the Cairene may be wonder-
ing at this point why Sindbad’s jealousy did not fall upon that tale’s
narrator and principal character, since I was his bride’s constant and
only companion besides himself and since he knew me to be well
versed in the world’s wiles. The answer to this question is in several
parts, of which the first is that to some extent he did suspect me (or
pretended to) of complicity in Marjanah’s imagined adulteries, espe-
cially when she now became pregnant and he drove us all crazy by

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

imagining that the child in her womb might not be his. In order to
extract a confession from me that I had played go-between for Marja-
nah and some one of his business associates, instead of putting me on
the rack he took me into his tub, knowing well that I had loved him
from the day he purchased me in Beypore, and justifying his behavior
on the grounds that he would be a fool to remain faithful to a faithless
wife. Thus for the third time, at long last, I lost my maidenhead — for
the first time giving it up willingly, to a man I loved — and the joy of
that surrender would have been the greatest of my life had I not by
that time come much to pity and care for my poor mistress. Not ap-
preciating this, Sindbad intended so to play upon my passion for him
that I would betray her. Instead, without meaning to do so, he discov-
ered to me the real cause of his jealousy, which he himself did not
understand.
“As Allah wrote earlier in this chapter, out of my unusually large
intimacy with males of every sort and size from all the principal higher
species, I had learned to read zabbs the way Gypsies read tea leaves
and Chinamen yarrow sticks, only more precisely. From my one and
hitherto only glance at my new master’s tool, back there on Zahir, I
had divined among other things that he was not, in fact, of a jealous
and suspicious nature. I could therefore have answered Marjanah’s
question myself before she asked it of her husband, had I not cruelly
hoped back then to gain some advantage from her distress; and for
months thereafter, having come to love my mistress almost as much
as I loved my master, I had berated myself for not having done so. But
the instant he fulfilled my dream by plumbing my wâhât almost to its
depth, it was as if the scroll of truth had been unrolled before my eyes,
and by the same means whereby I had discerned the origin and nature
of his signet ring, I now discerned the cause of his causeless jealousy.
That diagnosis I might have withheld to my gain, but such was my
devotion to both of Yasmin’s prospective parents that I unhesitatingly
declared it.
“‘In your zabb of zabbs,’ I told him as soon as he was securely
mounted, ‘if not in your heart of hearts, you know as well as I that
Marjanah has known no other man than you, nor ever wished to, and
that the child in her womb is as exclusively yours as is her heart. Were
this not the case, you would long since have said three times to her “I
divorce thee” and packed her home to her parents if not to the grave-

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Five Interludes

yard. What drives you to torment both her and yourself is not jealousy
of your merchant friends but envy of their merchant-voyaging. You
long for Zahir and the open sea and your old Tub of Last Resort, for
new islands and abandonments and rescues, fortunes lost and regained
and redoubled, and because you married in vain hope of curing this
itch (the strength of which you have kept secret even from yourself),
you resent the love that keeps you from your true desire.’
“‘By Allah!’ he exclaimed at once, and he prematurely fired his
charge. ‘What you say is true, though until you pronounced it I would
have sworn otherwise. I have been a cruder ogre than that cannibal
giant of Island One, Voyage Three, who merely killed and ate his vic-
tims but never tormented them beforehand. I shall go to Marjanah at
once to beg her forgiveness and make amends as best I can!’
“Alas for our lovemaking, this he did, without telling his wife by
what means the scales had fallen from his eyes. Marjanah straightway
forgave him, and his relief at knowing the cause of his discontent was
so great that all his friends remarked upon what a changed man he
had suddenly become: the lively and large-spirited Sindbad they had
known of old, and whose wedding they had celebrated just a few
months past. Thus for a brief while all were happy except Jayda the
Cairene, who had had a sample of what she craved and now therefore
craved it all the more.
“Soon enough, however, she was to sample it again, less hurriedly,
for it was not long before Sindbad realized that my naming his prob-
lem had nowise solved it but only changed its terms. He no longer
mistook his wanderlust for jealousy over Marjanah, but once he ac-
knowledged it for what it was, it grew upon him more intensely than
had his suspicion. At the same time, now that his eyes were cleared,
he loved his wife even more than on their wedding night and could
not bear the thought of separation, particularly as she approached her
confinement. He briefly considered taking her and the newborn with
him aboard Zahir once her labor was done, if he could restrain himself
even another month before setting out for Basra and Voyage Four —
but all his nautical experience taught the folly of that consideration.
“At last he was so at war with himself that again he sought my
counsel in his courtyard tub. ‘Wise and patient Jayda!’ he saluted me
(in his distraction forgetting to add that I was still beautiful as well).
‘Once upon a time you told me you could read in a man’s zabb not

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only his character and history, as you have ably proved, but his future
as well. Here now is mine, which rightly belongs to your mistress
alone but which you must read chapter and verse of for her sake as
well as mine. It has told you already how vain was my hope that mar-
riage and fatherhood would cure my wanderlust. Though I love Mar-
janah and my child-to-come as I love myself, I have sent word to
Kasim in Basra to refit Zahir for the fourth voyage of Sindbad the
Sailor. You must tell me now whether that voyage will be shorter and
safer if I commence it at once or if I wait till after Marjanah’s confine-
ment, for in no case can I postpone it further. Remove your clothes,
please, open your legs, and make ready to prophesy.’
“‘Ruler of my soul!’ I replied to him. ‘No task could afford me
greater joy! But I have no more wish to deceive my mistress than does
she to deceive you, and to make a prophecy of such particularity and
consequence will require sustained and concentrated effort on both
our parts, if I may so put it. You must dip your pen into my inkwell
again and again till its screed be scrawled; dot your has and double-
dot your tas, loop your mints and squiggle your shins, cross your khas
and hook your zas, and recopy any obscure passages till they come
clear. Moreover, since you’re so impatient to be read, you cannot write
in leisurely installments, as does the Author of us all, but rather must
ply your quill day and night upon my parchment till we reach the
passage in question. Granted that I am yours to inscribe as you see fit,
in my opinion Marjanah had better be told — or, rather, asked leave
of, since this inscription is in her interest as well.’
“‘Pearl of Cairo!’ Sindbad exclaimed. ‘Wise as you are canny, and
honorable as you are wise! Let us tell Marjanah the whole tale thus
far, ask her blessing upon its sequel, and get down to it.’ This we did,
and astonished though she was to hear my hard history — and not a
little dismayed at our having hid it from her till now — she accepted
that everything we had done had been to the end of keeping her hus-
band home with her. She therefore forgave our deception as she had
forgiven Sindbad’s jealousy: the bad side of a good coin. And as much
as it distressed her to imagine him in another’s arms, she was consoled
by the fact that those arms would be the same that in months past had
so often consoled her, and had cured her husband’s doubts about her
fidelity. As to the prophetic labor now proposed: if he must make
another voyage and leave his family behind, she, too, wished him the

270

Five Interludes

shortest and safest of absences from her side, and so she gave our
project her reluctant blessing. It did occur to her, however, that a man
who took such extraordinary measures as Sindbad had taken, first to
verify his bride’s virginity and then to guarantee her fidelity, must
be — how else to put it? — of a jealous and suspicious nature, my
reading of his zabb to the contrary notwithstanding. She hoped my
fortune-telling would be more accurate.
“And so it was, though this observation of hers temporarily un-
manned Sayyid Sindbad and got our séance off to a lame start. I was
obliged to persuade him that zabbs cannot lie, and that therefore his
elaborate pretense to Marjanah that I was a virgin proved not that he
was of a jealous and suspicious nature but rather that his craving for
dry land and a happy marriage had led him to act contrary to his
nature, which was essentially trusting though not naive. After some
consideration Sindbad declared, ‘I accept that. Off with your clothes,
and let’s get to work.’
“To his disappointment and Marjanah’s (if not mine), our first cou-
pling, then and there as soon as she left us to our courtyard soothsay-
ing, revealed to me only the outlines of my master’s youth, the death
of his father, young Sindbad’s squandering of his patrimony, and the
details of his first voyage, including the ship’s bill of lading, the names
of her captain and the other merchant passengers, and what meat had
been roasting on the shore-side cookfires that waked the whale that
was Whale Island. Our second, an hour or so later, did likewise for his
second, and our third, after dinner that evening, for his third — dur-
ing which, with the excuse of better focusing my wâhât’s second sight,
I obliged him to recopy twice the episode of his first inspection of me
aboard the Zahir. A little crossly, Marjanah told me to spend the night
with him as well, so that we might get to the future and have done.
She was even inclined to remain in the bedroom with us, to make sure
we attended strictly to business, but her husband cautioned her
against becoming of a jealous and suspicious nature, and I voiced my
doubt that successful sooth could be said under such surveillance.
“Strive as we did, however, Sindbad and I, our night’s labor
brought us no further forward than the present moment of our cou-
pling, in which — reading my weary lover’s mind through his ex-
hausted instrument — I divined that though he was convinced of my

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

abilities vis-à-vis the past, he had all but lost confidence in me with respect to the future, and that one more failure on my part would
arouse suspicion on his and jealousy on Marjanah’s. Just at first light,
therefore, when the muezzin’s prayer call detumesced my master and
he slipped from me like an anchovy from the fisherman’s fingers, I
cried, ‘There is no god but God, and Mohammed is His prophet, and
in that last slight movement of yours, one or the other of Them gave
me my first glance into your future!’ ‘None too soon,’ sighed Sindbad.
‘Do I leave for Basra this morning or wait until after my son is born?’
“From so tiny a motion of so depleted a zabb, I replied, the most
prescient wâhât in Islam could not be expected to read so much as
that. What mine had foreseen was merely that he was about to sum-
mon Marjanah to our tub after all, remove her nightclothes, and bid
her assume the first position for copulation.
“‘How could I be about to do such a thing as that?’ he scoffed. ‘It
is true that after the novelty of retracing voyages One through Three
with you in this peculiar and dangerless fashion, I found myself wish-
ing I could board Marjanah for Voyage Four, for despite her advanced
pregnancy she is as fresh and lively a bottom as my dear Zahir was on
her maiden voyage, whereas — no slight intended — boarding you is
like reboarding the Zahir on which I first examined you, or my old
Tub of Last Resort: seasoned and seaworthy, tried and true, but tried
and tried and tried again. You know as well as I, however, that in
Marjanah’s condition she cannot in fact be mounted in Position One.’
“‘Men may lie or be mistaken,’ I maintained firmly, ‘but their zabbs
cannot. Yours has whispered to me plainly that you were about to
summon Marjanah exactly as I have said, whether the rest of you re-
alized it or not. Fetch and strip her, then, as you will, and Allah will
show us how to proceed.’ ‘As I will?’ he wondered, but fetch and strip
her he did, full of sleep and puzzlement though she was, and bade her
lie upon her back on the tub floor and prepare to be mounted. ‘Dear
Jayda!’ she cried to me then, in a voice that I would hear years after-
ward from her daughter. ‘See what my darling means to do with me
despite my great belly, which makes the thing not possible! Have you
not yet shown him Position Fourteen, or even Twenty-seven, as you
once showed me, for occasions like this? And what happened to your
prophesying?’

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Five Interludes

“‘Never have I seen the next moment of the future more clearly than at present,’ I replied to both of them. And in truth, so beautiful
was my mistress naked, even then, in her last weeks and days, that at
the sight of her the fine print of Sindbad’s scroll of truth rose to up-
percase bold before my eyes, and I declared, ‘Bism Allah! Hear and
behold! My tongue will now repeat to my mistress in Position One
what my master’s zabb tells me in Position Three of his love for her.
This time, I clearly foresee, he does not intend to make that great
declamation into my oasis, as he has done every time so far without
our once finding there the prophecy we seek. Allah help me, he means
instead to make an inlet out of my outlet and so to force that narrow
khawr with the vessel of his husbandly passion that as surely as One
and Three make Four, my poor tir’at will be inscribed for weeks to
come with every detail of his impending voyage!’
“Said Marjanah with a sigh, ‘So be it. Better yours than mine.’ As
for Sindbad, he acknowledged that once again I had spelled out what
he had not known till then were his intentions. We therefore set to as
I had foreseen, and if his dhow was not the first to make a dawhat out
of the bi’r next door to my wâhât, it was the largest, stoutest, and
most fraught. So eloquently did it convey to me his love for Marjanah,
and I relay it to her, and her dainty mugharet speak to my tongue of
her love for Sindbad, and I relay it to him, that the three of us all too
soon climbed Adam’s Peak as one, and I was so previsioned both stern
and stem that for some moments I left this world altogether.
“‘Tell us!’ they both demanded of me when I was myself again.
‘Are we to name the boy Muhammad or Du al-Zaman, the Light of
the Age? Will his father return quickly and safely from his fourth voy-
age? Should he set out at once, the sooner to return, or see his son
safely delivered before he goes?’
“Ah, handsome listeners asleep in each other’s arms, rejoice that
you are but minor characters in Allah’s great tale of Jayda the Cairene,
for clearly the adversities of its heroine will end only in its final chap-
ter. Here at the close of Chapter Six, Part One, she was so stricken by
her double-ended revelation that it took her some while to find her
voice again and yet some while longer to sort out what she had seen
and think how best to give it tongue. At length, with tears in my eyes,
I said to Marjanah, ‘Dear milady: your birth-labor will be short and
your baby flawless. Beyond that, Allah has not shown me.’ And to

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Sindbad, ‘Dear my master: you will return from Voyage Four as from
its predecessors, safely but not soon, your fortune lost but ultimately
redoubled. Under no circumstances, however, ought you to leave
Marjanah’s side before your child has been brought to light, for the
time of your waiting will be as short as that of her labor. As for the
child at the end of it, a better name for her than either Muhammad or
Du al-Zaman will be Yasmin. Ask me no more, for before the rest I
now draw my veil as Allah has drawn His.’
“Distressed though they were, Marjanah especially, to hear that
Sindbad’s new voyage would be another long and arduous one, they
rejoiced at my forecast of its ending and at my other tidings, ignoring
my hint that I had spoken more truly than fully. Even the news of a
daughter rather than a son did not dampen their joy. ‘Wallahi!’ said
Sindbad. ‘So it is written and so it shall be! We will lay the keel of
Yasmin’s little brother in this same tub when Zahir brings me back to
Baghdad at last. How can we thank you, faithful Jayda?’
“I had already drawn my veil, even before I reclothed the rest of
my body. But I replied that they could in fact thank me in three ways:
first, by Sindbad’s setting forth this time in some other vessel than the
one that he and I had last returned in and that he had lately compared
me to, not altogether flatteringly. Second, by his never again inscrib-
ing on my behind what lay before, but rather accepting what was to
come as it came. And third, by their loving each other for the remain-
der of their days as I loved them both, and leaving me to sit in peace
on the rest of my previsions.
“Even as we three embraced then for the last time, Marjanah cried
out that the time of her labor had come on her. As I foresaw, her pains
were brief, and she brought forth a perfect baby girl. All joy, Sindbad
kissed his wife and infant daughter and myself as well (through my
veil, which I would not remove). He named the child Yasmin and set
out that same day for Basra with his old Tub of Last Resort, his trad-
ing goods, and a sealed message from his faithful slave Jayda the Cair-
ene, to be opened at sea. By the time he embarked, Marjanah was dead
of childbed fever, as I had foreseen but not foretold because all the
precautions in Islam could not have saved her or stayed him. What
was more (as he read in my letter when his hired ship had cleared port
and was standing down the Persian Gulf for Muscat), had he remained

274

Five Interludes

at home, his daughter would have succumbed as well. He must count
on me, I wrote, to bury and mourn his wife with full honor and re-
spect and to raise Yasmin in her parents’ absence as if she were my
own, until his fortune found her another mother. Finally, I cautioned
him that on this voyage he must be as wary of what he swallowed as
on the last he had been of what might swallow him — though I myself
could no more explain this warning than I could explain why Allah
chose just here, at this unhappy juncture, to end Part One of Chapter
Six of His epic of Jayda the Cairene, whom we now leave weeping
with the other domestics of the harem over the dead body of our
mistress, even while I stanched with my perfect though milkless
breasts the hungry cries of the baby Yasmin until wet nurses could be
fetched to feed her. But end it here He did, for the reason that Part
Two, which cunningly follows it, follows it. Now good night.”

Yasmin here paused in her reenactment of “Terizah” (as she called
“Bey el-Loor’s” third-voyage mistress), cleared her throat, and whis-
pered, “Good night, dear Jayda. You were a mother to me indeed, and
whatever ills befall your daughter in what follows of this sixth chapter
or in the chapters after, they will never be of your doing but rather
will come to pass despite your best efforts to shield me from them.”
Of this, Simon was less than perfectly convinced. But the recipient
of Yasmin’s tribute was asnore, and though his lover, too, had seemed
to doze through the early history of her father’s marriage, she had
stirred at about the time of her conception, embraced him tightly
through the recital of her birth and orphaning, as if to comfort herself,
and left his arms at Sindbad’s embarkation on Voyage Four to slip
down into her version of young Teresa Anginelli. Simon himself was
very nearly too absorbed in Jayda’s story (and too needful of sleep) to
resume his own, but as his role in this particular episode was passive,
requiring only that he stroke his partner’s hair while she went about
her patient impersonation, he mused, half asleep, upon what he had
just learned and what Jayda’s next installment might disclose — until
the slowly intensifying excitement down there in “College Park” re-
called him to that season of guilty pleasure. Like her original, as she
felt him approach climax in the gray first light of morning, “Terizah”
raised to him her great luminous eyes — in their earnestness almost

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

brown instead of green, Italian lapsed-Catholic instead of Muslim
Arab — and regarded serenely his self-emptying. But where a muezzin
ought to have chided us that prayer was better than sleep, or an am-
bulance wailed by from the D.C. Beltway, or the East Dorset air-raid
siren sounded, we heard instead a knocking and hallooing at the
courtyard gate, insistent, unabashed, imperious.

3.

Notwithstanding which, from sheer exhaustion Somebody slept, stir-
ring only slightly at the sensed departure of Jayda and Yasmin for their
own quarters and at the distant, intermittent hullabaloo. Voices rose
and were quieted. Footsteps from somewhere hurried elsewhere.
Then either all grew still again or our man’s late sleep deepened. His
dreams — of the life wherein, in the smithy of imagination, he had
forged an identity and found his forging forgery — seemed more real
and less remote than the reality Salim waked him to.
“Fwff,” the page said. “Guarding Yasmin’s honor must be sweaty
business. This room smells stronger than Sindbad’s great tub did
when Kuzia Fakan and I were finally let out of it.”
Replied Somebody, “You were washed as you worked; my vigil
was as dry as it was solitary. I take it your master is ready for our
morning interview.”
“Sayyid’s Tub of Truth is drained now, like his page,” Salim af-
firmed. “He awaits you in it with his half an arse on his cushion-and-
a-half. Here’s water to wash with, but don’t be long — the fat’s in
the fire.”
He fetched in then a pitcher and basin of what our man hoped,
aloud, was not the drainage of last night’s frolic, and stood by while
Somebody washed up from his own. Despite the page’s teasing and
prying curiosity — Salim’s eyes flashed about the room and lingered
on its occupant’s scrubbing — Simon let him stay through his toilet,
to hear and gauge his gossip. That early-morning noise, he learned,
had not been the drunken exit of those lusty rascals al-Fadl, Jafar, and
Sidi Numan, whom Salim and Kuzia Fakan and Fatmah Awad and
Nuzhat the piper had tubbed into the small hours on Sindbad’s behalf,
to forestall their defection from Serendib Limited. It had been, in-
stead, the arrival of a messenger from another and more formidable

276

Five Interludes

Jafar, surnamed al-Barmaki, grand vizier to Caliph Haroun al-Rashid
himself, the Prince of Believers. And though that messenger’s message
had been for the ears of Sayyid Sindbad alone, it was already common
knowledge among his servants that it expressed the caliph’s impatience
with Sindbad’s delayed departure on Voyage Seven.
“If that is the household’s common knowledge,” opined Somebody
the Still-Stranded, “then we may be sure that the vizier’s message had
to do with something else — perhaps with new and harsher penalties
for those who repeat his confidential dispatches.”
To which the page responded, in the experimental tone that Some-
body knew from occasions past, “Night after night under Sindbad’s
nose, while he and Ibo dicker over Yasmin’s virginity and dowry, you
and she go at it with Jayda’s connivance, and you did the same through
the month of Sha’ban while he was off settling scores in Serendib.
Why does he permit this?”
The fellow put his question from safely out of range as they entered
the courtyard, where Sindbad’s great tub was in its customary place
between camel and palm. All the same, he took a quick farther step
away when Somebody (to test him) slipped one hand through a side-
slit of his caftan, as if to reach for Mustafa’s fish-knife but in fact to
adjust his drawers. “Perhaps that is the very question asked by Jafar al-
Barmaki,” our man suggested, “or perhaps his message is the answer
to it. More likely, however, it is a sentence of slow castration for those
who defame in a single breath their own mothers, their masters, and
the caliph’s special agents. I shall ask Sindbad the Sailor. Salaam,
Brother Sindbad!”
“Salaam, Brother Sindbad!” the call came back, as if echoed from
the tub. “Join me here again, please, after dismissing your guide.”
“With pleasure. But I believe Sayyid Salim has a thing to tell and
another to ask you before he leaves us.”
“Not at all!” the page said at once. “Only to report that the caliph’s
messenger has been fed and rewarded, and to ask whether I ought not
to stand by lest your private conversation be overheard.”
Sindbad’s head, turbaned this morning in sea-green silk, appeared
over the tub’s edge. “If you stand by, our private conversation will be
overheard. You served me well last night, lad; I am mindful of that.
Serve me again now by standing watch over yonder, as far from Mus-
tafa as Mustafa is from me. Brother, come aboard.”

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

The page withdrew beyond the camel as instructed. Still-stranded
Somebody mounted the dry tub’s stile, or boarding ladder, and at
Sindbad’s invitation cushioned himself opposite his host, who, while
offering mint tea and a plate of pastries with pomegranate conserve,
asked casually, “You slept well?”
As well as he could, replied our man smoothly, without neglecting
his duty to Yasmin’s honor, until this morning’s racket woke the whole
household.
His host regarded him. “And Salim will have told you the whole
household’s opinion — that Haroun has grown impatient with my de-
lays and dispatched that messenger to launch me off to Serendib.”
“Salim has,” Somebody acknowledged. “And I have told Salim that
common opinion of that sort is most often common error.”
“So it is.” Sindbad sighed. “And would it were in this instance. But
old Hasib Ali, it seems, has expressed to Vizier Jafar al-Barmaki the
misgivings that led him to withdraw from our enterprise, and the vi-
zier in turn has questioned Ibn al-Hamra, and to advance his own
claims Ibn has neither refuted nor affirmed Hasib’s slanders but has
raised his demands to twenty percent of the expedition’s profits, along
with the rest of Yasmin’s dowry. The upshot is that despite the six
several fortunes I have brought into this city, I am ordered to set out
on the caliph’s embassy to Serendib before the end of Shawwal, or
show cause why I should not be charged with fraud.”
“To Serendib before the end of this month!” Our man set down
his tea glass, aware that his reaction was being carefully observed. “My
brother is scarcely dry from his last visit there! And what is this talk
of delay, not to mention fraud? Serendib is not a place to be voyaged
to on a moment’s notice!”
“So I am told,” Sindbad said, relieved. “And so I told Haroun
when he first commissioned me to return there with his gifts of reci-
procity. His reply — the vizier’s, rather — was that I could have the
whole month of Ramadan to rest and make my plans and gather trad-
ing partners. But now he gives me three days to present him with my
sailing directions and a timetable for Voyage Seven, with the stipula-
tion and the warning that I spoke of.” He regarded his tubmate. “Is
this news to you? Do the caliph’s agents not speak with one another?”

278

Five Interludes

“What concerns the eye,” Somebody replied, “is not always the ear’s affair, and vice versa. Moreover, it’s common knowledge by now
in your household that I am not really the caliph’s agent but a nameless
impostor who, like a false eunuch in the harem, makes free with what
he’s set to safeguard. Ask Salim.”
Sindbad scowled. “Salim’s kind tell before they are asked.”
“In any case,” our man went on quickly, “inconvenient as the vi-
zier’s new directive may be, it only presses forward what was already
in progress. Three weeks seems time enough to finish commissioning
a ship and crew, and as for Yasmin’s marriage, you need only say yes
to Sayyid Ibo and the thing is done. But does the caliph appreciate
how peculiarly difficult the sailing is to Serendib? Mustafa mu-Allim
himself could not easily retrace that route.”
Sindbad closed and then opened his eyes. “Have a look at our other
Mustafa,” he requested quietly, “and see where that shaitan of a Salim
is.” Somebody did so, in time to see the page retreating to his assigned
distance like a runner caught off base. “Farther, Salim,” he called.
“Stand your watch at the gate itself.” Sindbad nodded approval, then
beckoned our man to sit. “Brother,” he said, “there is a time for dis-
sembling and a time for candor. Frankly, what passes between you and
my daughter, as long as it does not interfere with my plans for her, is
between you and my daughter. As for Ibn’s dowry demands, I have
my reasons for not yielding too soon, quite apart from what they
imply about Yasmin’s honor. My resisting his percentage lends credi-
bility to Serendib Limited and helps encourage the others not to fol-
low Hasib Ali’s bad example — and now Talib ibn Sahl’s, I fear, and
perhaps Abu Shamat’s as well. You see how open I am being with you
this morning! Time now for you to tell me not what your real name
is or how you spend your time after we say good night or what stories
Jayda entertains you with while you entertain yourself but rather …
what our old friend Mustafa the Navigator, to whom it seems you
have been closer than most, has told you about my most recent voy-
age, to Serendib.”
Still-stranded Somebody nodded, deliberately sipped his tea, set
down his glass, and fingered his short-bearded chin. “Mustafa the
Master Navigator,” he declared presently, “to whom several times over
I owe my life and whom I revere beyond my own father and all the
teachers of my youth, is a man as discreet as he is sea-wise. Despite his

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

vow after your sixth voyage to live in utter isolation from his fellow
men, when he recognized me cast away in the Basra marshes he took
me in and restored me to life. But of that last voyage of his with you,
and of the final fate of the ships Zahir and Shaitan and their crews, he
would say nothing, in keeping with another vow that he had made to
you. Salim tells me, without my asking, that en route home from Ser-
endib you settled certain scores with certain adversaries — but that’s
Salim. All I know for certain of your celebrated sixth is that though
with Mustafa’s assistance you set out properly for Serendib, and with
Mustafa’s assistance returned, it was not from Serendib that you
brought those gifts to Haroun al-Rashid, for you never reached that
fortunate island.”
This time Sindbad himself rose with some difficulty from his cush-
ions, grasped the tub’s edge with his eight whole and two half fingers,
peered overside, and softly cursed. “Here the bastard comes with that
damned messenger, just when you and I most need to speak further.”
Our man shrugged. “What’s the urgency? You have three days to
give him your reply.”
“Three days,” said Sindbad, “during which that moon-faced fellow
will be watching and reporting every move I make.” He wiped his
forehead with his caftan sleeve. “Look here: you said a moment ago
that I set out properly for Serendib, but I believe you know that in
fact Mustafa and I did not set out for that island at all. Serendib was
our name for something else.”
“Indeed,” said Somebody the Still-Stranded. “And until we have
occasion to resume this frank and open conversation, you might tell
the vizier’s man that the problem of your seventh voyage begins just
there. To sail from Serendib to Basra, one sets a course for Basra, but
to sail from Basra to Serendib is quite another matter. As we both
know, it is in the nature of that elusive island that under no circum-
stances can it be reached by heading in its direction. Among the other
valid reasons for your apparent procrastination is that difficult prob-
lem, which you are on the verge of and surely shall succeed in solving,
with my assistance and perhaps Mustafa’s as well.”
“And what is your percentage?” Sindbad wondered aloud — but
then he replied to his own question, as Salim announced from camel
range his approach with the caliph’s vizier’s messenger, “No matter,
Brother Sindbad: salaam.”

280

Five Interludes

4.

Dismissed, our man withdrew to his room, as was now his morning
custom, hoping to rebecome, first in sleep and then in written words,
the “Baylor” who he had by force of imagination once upon a time
become. Dispatched by Jayda or her son, or perhaps by Sindbad him-
self, chambermaids had been at work there; he found the place
cleaned, aired, and straightened, the bedding freshened, a supply of
quills, ink, and paper on the low table near the courtyard window.
Weary though he was, the sight of those alternative clean sheets gave
him pause: his two roads home to Wherever, until and unless he dis-
covered a third.
Experimentally, he dipped a quill and drew in block capitals the six
letters of his more or less established name. The B reminded him this
morning of Yasmin’s sweet buttocks last night, when at some point in
Jayda’s narrative she had turned onto her side, hind-to, and nestled
into him. The A was the lower half of a short-skirted stick figure,
standing assertively with her feet some space apart, as Daisy Moore
must have done in 1944 to piss her name in the sand of Island Point;
it was the letter she had ended on. The Y … his current lover’s dear
initial, to be sure — but by that BAY he was at sea, out of analogies,
adrift again in home waters and others, brooding upon “Janeprize”
and the unhappy last leg of their long connubial voyage.
Under the caps he rewrote the name in script: his professional sig-
nature. Its familiar cursive, looping and circling but, like narration
itself, always returning to connect the thing behind to the thing be-
fore, was so agreeable to the muscles of his spirit that for some while
he scribbled on: Through the first, or “British,” half of Baylor’s forty-
second-birthday gift to himself, et cetera, word joining word and event
event as his script linked letter to letter. What had irrelevantly been in
fact, he omitted; what had not been but for design’s sake needed to
be, he did not scruple to rearrange or invent, until hours and pages
later he reached the words Baylor’s Arrested Development Jumps Bail.
There in the early postnoon he came to himself, bade a pained good-
night to Jane Price, to their daughter, to their son (no more lost now
than his father), and, marveling that he had got so far in his reretelling
without interruption, drew the curtains, turned to those other fresh
sheets, and slept.

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

From near-dreams of near-drownings at the Boundary — Island Point
on the Chaptico, Soper’s Hole, Adam’s Peak — a piping piped him
briskly up, gratefully gasping, to and through the surface. Whistled
on deck as by a tuneful bos’n, he got breath and bearings: Somebody,
he was, or other, still stranded but anyhow alive and not the unluckiest
of mortals.
“Come in,” he called to Nuzhat, whose piping by now he knew. In
she swirled, her music likewise, both dark delights. Without ceasing
to play (and all the while glancing busily about the room), she bowed
to the bedded one, stepped aside, and skirled a signal toward the cor-
ridor from which now came a familiar sizzle-snap.
“Come in, Fatmah Awad,” called weary Somebody. She did, her
rhythm unbroken, and then bowed bedward like her colleague (sizing
up our man, who sat now on his sleeping-couch), stepped to the door-
way’s other flank, and, with the briefest nod to Nuzhat, switched to
fanfare. Smiling, Somebody moved from couch to cushion, put a sec-
ond in place before him, and bade Kuzia Fakan, “Come, Kuzia, come,
for pity’s sake. No need for such ceremony between friends.”
All the same, that one spun in with a dancer’s flourish even as he
spoke, and the three made as one a choreographed salaam. “Bravo,
then,” our man said. “My compliments, too, on last night’s dance:
your best.”
“So far,” the dancer agreed, and she sat. “Pearls before porkers, in
our opinion. But Yasmin tells me that you, at least, saw our point: my
submersion echoed yours, and all hands got fucked underwater, one
way or another.” She glanced over her shoulder. Nuzhat and Fatmah
Awad, watching each other’s faces to stay in sync, announced in uni-
son, “We’ll stand watch,” and exited in step. Our man nodded and
declared, noncommittally, “Another busy night for you.”
“Fuff” scoffed Kuzia. She conned the room brightly, as had her
companions, and even reached to the writing table and picked up a
page of script. “Compared to your girlfriend’s fiancé, Hajj Masud and
company were no more than a warm-up exercise — but that’s enough
water sports for this Bedou. Is this your report to the caliph’s
messenger?”
“Perhaps.” He turned the page right side up and pointed to his pen
name. “What do these letters tell you?” 

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Five Interludes

 “That I can’t read Arabic, Sayyid Bey el-Loor, much less Serendi-
bian. What do they tell you?”
“Everything except who I am,” our man replied, impressed. “In
fact, though, this is the name I made for myself, once upon a time.”
Examining the symbols, Kuzia declared soberly, “Jayda says our
names are signs of our fate.”
“Who can doubt Jayda? But the trick is to read those signs.” For
his visitor’s amusement, then — but also to harmonize their instru-
ments, as Kuzia herself had put it, for further music-making — Some-
body told her what he had imagined not long since in the first two
letters: side-turned buttocks (never mind whose) in that B, a striding
young woman from his “second voyage” in that A. …
“Aha,” quick Kuzia said. “This next then must be Yasmin.”
“How did you know that?” asked surprised Somebody. “Our Y
looks nothing like your ya.” He drew the Arabic letter, a cobra coiled
to strike.
“But it looks like Sindbad’s daughter,” the dancer replied. Grin-
ning, she traced with her fingernail the Roman letter’s fork and stem:
“A slitless wâhât with virgin thighs pressed tight. If that brings us to
the present, then Bey el-Loor’s future must lie in these last three signs.
And now that you’ve taught me the trick of reading from the waist
down, I can see pretty clearly what lies ahead for a certain pair of
lovebirds. I envy them.”
“In the name of Allah, read!”
Kuzia pointed in turn to the L, the O, and the R. “This is the
lover’s zabb, erect and ready to pierce at last this, a certain famous
maidenhead. And this is the result: her belly so swollen that she must
put her best foot forward to keep her balance.”
“For our mistress’s sake,” Somebody said, “may her future be as
you foretell. Thank you for those good wishes, Kuzia Fakan.”
“For our mistress’s sake,” responded Kuzia, “may it be the right
zabb when push comes to shove. It’s your name we’re reading, not
Yasmin’s, and I’m too new at this game to know for sure what’s future
and what’s past. You may thank me by drawing my name now.”
Our man readily did so, but he got no further than KUZIA before
the dancer said, “Enough. It’s just as I suspected.” Glumly she pointed
to the first two letters. “There I am, climbing into his great tub night

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after night, trying every trick I know as his famous amulet loses its
charm and I lose mine. And here I am now, down on my knees. …”
She indicated the middle letter: “Am I praying to Allah to make the
old tool stand, or presenting myself arse-up, the way he used to like
it? Maybe both. In any case, I’ve one last card to play, and tonight I
mean to play it.” Turning then to the penultimate letter, she said,
“There’s the key to my future, right enough, but whether it’s pointing
up or down, only Allah knows. If it’s hanging limp, then there’s Yours
Truly at the end there, all by her lonesome, pissing letters in the desert
like your friend Day-zee.”
“Bravo again.” Somebody applauded and added his hope to hers
that that I would stand skyward, by whatever charm, or else that that
A would stand for al-Hamra, whom, camel-driver or no, one gathered
she would settle for if things happened to turn out that way.
The Bedouin, Kuzia Fakan declared, knew how to drive a camel-
driver, once they got a secure grip on his reins. But why speak of such
daydreams? It was that camel-driver who had Sindbad by the reins,
now that Hasib Ali and those other two had jumped ship, so to speak.
There would be no Yasmin for Bey el-Loor, and no al-Hamra for Ku-
zia Fakan: the caliph had called the old man’s bluff. Redbeard Ibo
would open the bottom of that Y and get his twenty percent, too, and
the likes of present company might as well go water the dunes.
“Our instruments are now in tune,” Somebody said. “Let’s see
whether we can play to our joint advantage. I offer you the informa-
tion that Sindbad the Sailor has never sailed to Serendib. Is that news
to you?”
Kuzia considered his eyes, nodded.
“That name,” our man went on, “was what he called his project in
Voyage Six: recouping the ransom he had paid to Yasmin’s hijackers
and revenging himself on them. I don’t know every detail; Ibo must
hear none.”
Kuzia nodded again. “I suspected this, but till now I knew nothing.
The camel-driver shall know less. Then where did that magic amulet
come from, if not from the King of Serendib?”
“That is the tune you must play for me.”
“I will,” the dancer promised, “as best one can who knows only a
note or two. But let me offer again my suspicion that Voyage Seven
has no more to do with Serendib than did Voyage Six. That’s why

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Five Interludes

Sayyid Sindbad was too alarmed by this morning’s messenger to climb
me, even though I had roused him for the first time in a month with
a charm that I stumbled on by happy accident.”
“I had thought to trade news with you, Kuzia, not suspicions,”
Somebody said. “What was this happy accident? What is this charm?
And what and where is that amulet?”
Teased Kuzia Fakan, “You speak like a man with Sindbad’s prob-
lem. And yet every morning lately in Yasmin’s face I see that whatever
your problems may be, his is not one of them.”
“My problems are three,” declared Somebody. “I happen to be in
love with this new friend of yours, and more determined than she is
that Ibo shall not have her. I want to take her with me back to the
Serendib I came from, but I have no more idea of how to get there
from here than her father does. Yet instead of helping me find my way
by speaking as straightforwardly to me as I’m speaking to you, you do
another striptease. Another Kuzia Fakan!”
“Kuzia Fakan,” the dancer said calmly, “is who I am. And because
I happen to know who I am, I sometimes amuse myself by imitating
others. Fatmah Awad says I do Jayda to perfection, and so last
night — this morning, I should say, when Hajj Masud and his friends
had left and the Tub of Truth had been drained and dried and Sayyid
Sindbad was snoring away in there — well, Hajj had only stirred me
up, as I mentioned before, and since I couldn’t get to sleep, it occurred
to me to snuggle behind my master and whisper in his ear the way I
imagined Jayda might have done before I took her place, and also to
do certain other things in her fashion to see what might happen. If I
say so myself, it was a good piece of work, but Sayyid slept right
through it. By that time I was half asleep as well, and so I let my
imagination wander. All the while holding his mouse in my hand, I
did Fatmah Awad; I did Nuzhat; I tried Jayda again as I thought she
might have been years ago, when she was my age. No use: the mouse
slept like its owner. Then, just before I dropped off to sleep myself, I
remembered some gossip I had heard in the harem once about Sayyid
Sindbad’s wife, Yasmin’s mother. Even though she died before I was
born and I’m not certain of her name, I reckoned that she and Yasmin
must have traits in common, and so by thinking of the daughter I
pretended to be the mother, and I whispered and touched him
through his sleep in that role. Abracadabra! Though the master slept

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

on, the mouse awoke and turned into a mongoose in my hand! At
that moment, alas, Allah saw fit to send the caliph’s messenger to wake
the whole household, and there went my mongoose and the ghost of
Yasmin’s mother. But I will raise her again tonight, Inshallah, and we
shall see what we shall see. There are your first two questions an-
swered, friend. Do they show you the way to Serendib?”
Somebody shook his head, but to show his gratitude for her can-
dor, he touched the dancer’s arm.
“As for that charmless amulet,” Kuzia then said, “I’m sorry to
report that your guess is as good as mine. He keeps it in a little
pouch of calfskin strung from his waist, underneath his drawers, as if
it were an extra pair of eggs. But eggs they aren’t, neither hen’s nor
cock’s — this much I know from having once grabbed that pouch in
the dark, thinking it was the other. What I squeezed, for an instant
only, was small and hard and clicky in the hand, like a jeweled necklace
or a pendant on a chain. Sayyid then struck my hand away and threat-
ened to sell me to a lepers’ brothel if I ever touched that charm
again — and there began the decline of its magic powers, for which
he blames me.”
“Good Kuzia Fakan!” Somebody said warmly. “No more than you
do I believe in any other amulet than desire. But we must find out
what’s in that pouch, if we can do it without packing you off to the
lepers.” He put both his hands on her shoulders. “The name of Yas-
min’s mother was Marjanah. May that name bring you better luck
tonight than it ever brought her.”
Skeptical but grateful, Kuzia shrugged. “May it indeed.”

5.

Sindbad’s daughter, not her father, at his nod saluted the company
that evening in the banquet hall, her wine cup raised: “Friends assem-
bled! Loyal supporters of my father and canny investors in Serendib
Limited! Faithful members of our household and honored new
guests! Last but most especially, perspicacious betrothed of my bosom
and bowels! Tonight it falls to me to bid you eat and drink and con-
verse unstintingly, without waiting for my father’s lead, for we have
arrived at that somber midpoint and turning point of his maritime
adventures: his fourth voyage. In memoriam whereof, though he

286

Five Interludes

would have you make free and merry as always under this roof, he
himself will fast and remain silent till he tells his tale. Let us fall to!”
Those who remained did so, with varying degrees of appetite. As
had been forefeared, Talib ibn Sahl, the chief investor in Voyage Seven
after old Hasib Ali, had taken his cue from that gentleman and de-
fected — a loss that still-stranded Somebody felt along with Serendib
Limited, for under Yasmin’s scoring system Talib had been a high-
point supporter of his narrative continuance. Gone, too, as foreseen,
was the least of Sindbad’s investors and Somebody’s critics, Abu Sha-
mat. New to the table (as a seated diner) was Jayda, in the tenth po-
sition, halfway down on Sindbad’s left, and new to the company, in
the place of honor, at Sindbad’s immediate right (which place Ibn al-
Hamra had insisted on giving up to him), was the caliph’s vizier’s
messenger. This was a gray-turbaned, gray-caftaned fellow of indeter-
minate age and much-pocked face, large of eye and ear and foot, as
befit his function, but otherwise as blank as paper awaiting pen, and
as silent.
The others, all familiar to our man by now, were in the places they
had been assigned the night before, except that he himself had been
promoted to the empty eighth (Abu Shamat’s, two down on Yasmin’s
left) and Kuzia Fakan to the ninth (beside him and directly across
from Jayda). With this the dancer was delighted, no doubt because it
at once confirmed that she was ranked above her predecessor, put her
stranded ally on her right flank, and set her in better view than previ-
ously of Yasmin’s fiancé. She and he set to with the most conspicuous
appetites: Ibn al-Hamra was clearly triumphant at the new defections,
at the appearance on the scene of the caliph’s vizier’s messenger (who
volunteered no other name than that title), and at his own consequent
added leverage over his prospective father-in-law. Kuzia all but winked
with relish at the red-cheeked apple of her eye as she gorged and guz-
zled, and she did in fact wink sidewise at Somebody every time silent
Sindbad shifted on his cushion-and-a-half. She even managed, it
seemed to Somebody, to wink conspiratorially at Yasmin, but only Ibn
al-Hamra responded in kind. Loyal Hajj Masud, at Yasmin’s right
hand, did his best for appearance’ sake to fall to as well, but his heart
was not in it; he chewed long before swallowing. Yasmin did likewise,
resplendent tonight in a sea-green djellaba that matched exactly her
matchless eyes as well as her father’s turban of the day. The remaining

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

investors — Ali al-Yaman on Cushion Four, at Yasmin’s left hand; Sidi
Numan on Five, between Kuzia and the caliph’s vizier’s messenger;
Jafar across from him, on Cushion Six, between Ibn and Jayda; and
al-Fadl on Seven, between Jayda and Hajj Masud — ate as circum-
spectly as they spoke, glancing often at the blank-faced new arrival
and at one another. As for Jayda, she dined as stolidly as she sat, often
moving her lips as if narrating to her dinner plate, with accompanying
changes of expression.
Stranded Somebody munched and monitored, bethought himself,
painfully, of his own fourth voyage. Al-Hamra it was who through the
dinner most often thrust: “High time for us to speak of commission-
ing and provisioning! What ship, Sayyid? What master? Which of us
to sail in her, and when?” Yasmin would parry: “What? Speak of
Seven, when we have yet to resail Four? Light of my liver, you crave
your dessert in midmeal!” Or Hajj Masud: “Why did the Prince of
Believers in his wisdom command his vizier to instruct his messenger
to return Sayyid Sindbad’s answer in three days, if not to give us time
to bring the past up to the present before addressing the future?” Sidi
Numan or Jafar would allow thoughtfully, “Indeed, that may be the
reason,” and the others would exchange glances, and Sindbad shift
position, and Kuzia wink at one or another of her winkees, and Ibn
al-Hamra grin and wink, too, but at the caliph’s vizier’s messenger,
and say to Yasmin, “So be it, Pearl of Pearls: our ears are agape to
swallow whatever monsters may attempt to swallow us in this even-
ing’s stories.”
“Among those who think without speaking,” suddenly declared
Sindbad toward this uneasy dinner’s end, “mind what you swallow,
lest you become food for their thought. With this lesson in advance,
my friends, and appreciative of your patience, I now break my fast of
speech. Yasmin.”
She made her rounds, and after tapping for attention on his Tub
of Last Resort — tap tata tap-tap, tap tap — her father began: “Those
of you who know me know that just a few years after returning from
my third voyage, which I had resolved would be my last, I packed up
this steadfast tub and set out from this peaceful city yet again, restless
as ever for sharp trading and marine adventure though rejoicing in the
pure love of my wife and the birth of my daughter: a blessing to me
yet as she was then.”

288

Five Interludes

All present drank to this except Yasmin herself, who fixed her bril-
liant eyes levelly upon her father.
“Yet not even these blessings,” he continued, “could keep me home.
No sooner was Yasmin’s birth-cord cut than that other cord pulled me
down again to Basra, with a word of advice and a sealed prophecy
from a certain young Cairene slave whom I had bought in Beypore at
the end of Voyage Three, and whose extraordinary gifts I had so come
to admire and trust that I left my wife and infant daughter with full
confidence in her care.”
Another toast, in which Yasmin joined, and the recipient, too, as if
saluting her former self.
“Her word of advice,” grave Sindbad went on, “was to sail this time
in some other vessel than my beloved Zahir. The sealed prophecy,
which I was not to open till the port of Basra had dropped astern, I
assumed would explain that warning. If I did not hasten to open it,
the reason is that I believed I foreknew its content. The method by
which my comely young Cairene used to receive her visions of my
future is our secret, but now and then a message would come through
so strongly from me to her in our Tub of Truth that its sender became
its receiver, so to speak. Moreover, my three previous voyages had
yielded, along with three several fortunes, four morals apiece, and
though some of those twelve were corrections of their predecessors,
all together they gave me ample and hard-won wisdom. Tour fourth
voyage, Jayda had prophesied, though ultimately successful, like the others,
will be neither short nor easy. And Do not sail in your Zahir. Adding
those warnings to each other and to my nautical lesson-book, I con-
cluded that whereas on voyages One through Three my vessels, in one
way or another, had lost me, on this one I was fated to lose my vessel.
“Therefore (as on Voyage Three) I hired a ship that to my seasoned
eye looked only moderately seaworthy, despite its being larger by half
than Zahir, and upon it I loaded a comparably larger cargo of stock-
in-trade, despite my assumption that I would lose it. These invest-
ments I deemed necessary to encourage my fellow merchant traders,
for by now I had acquired a reputation for being a fortunate venturer
myself, but one whose good fortune was not invariably shared by his
companions. As if Allah the All-Powerful were not master of all our
fortunes, and such superstitions not arrant blasphemy! Perpend that,
comrades.

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

 “With my old captain Kasim of Basra in command, we then set sail
down the tranquil Gulf of Persia. So as not to distract him from his
responsibilities, I kept to myself the real reason for our going in a
chartered vessel rather than in Zahir, declaring instead (and it was true
in its way) that the larger ship was required for my larger cargo. This
cargo I had chosen, as I had my shipmates, by the proven principles
of Voyage Three: it was valuable enough to serve its purpose in the
early stages of the voyage but not so precious as to make me inconsol-
able over its later loss. So confident was I of what Jayda’s sealed mes-
sage would say that even when Basra dropped below the horizon I did
not at once open it, but took what pleasure there was to take in my
new companions and in trading for the mere sport of it in the coastal
ports along the gulf. And lo, restless as I had been to put Baghdad
once again behind me for the zesty melodies of wind and water and
the spirited harmonies of haggling, I found my pleasure in that music
much diminished this time by thoughts of my wife and child —
whom for obvious reasons I had not brought with me. It was more to
enjoy a souvenir from home than to have confirmation of my assump-
tions that at last, in the Hormuz Strait, I unsealed and read Jayda’s
prevision.”
Here Sindbad paused and, for the first time that evening, drank.
His listeners took the opportunity to do likewise, all but Yasmin,
Jayda, and Somebody the Still-Stranded.
“The words I read,” Sindbad then told his cup, “were thunderbolts
beside which those that presently wrecked our vessel were no more
than the popping vowels of ape-talk on Island One, Voyage Three.
Whoever knows me knows those words; whoever does not must ex-
cuse my not respeaking them, since I can no more bear to do that than
to repeat my lost wife’s name. At the mere memory of those words the
world still turns blacker before my eyes than in any approaching sea-
storm. What I cried out as I rent my garments was in no language but
that of pain; I so wished to join my wife in death that despite the final
warning of that message — to be as wary on Voyage Four of what I
swallowed as I had been on Voyage Three of what might swallow
me — I literally ate the whole poisonous prediction (which by that
time, if accurate, had already come to pass) and rushed to fling myself
into the Gulf of Oman.

290

Five Interludes

“From this objective I was restrained by my fellows, who supposed  I had gone mad. Kasim and the crew, who knew me, imagined that I
had espied the first monster of our voyage. In vain they stationed look-
outs to confirm my sighting, and would gladly have posted me in that
office except that by then I had fallen insensible with grief.
“For several days and nights thereafter I lay like a dead man in my
quarters. When at length I regained voice and movement, I tearfully
reported to my companions that part of the dreadful prophecy con-
cerning my wife and directed Kasim to turn the ship homeward. But
though I was the largest single investor in the voyage, the other mer-
chants together overruled me, and Kasim had no choice but to abide
by their decision, however reluctantly, even when I added shipwreck
to the prophecy. They sympathized with my loss, if indeed I had suf-
fered one, but the words that had so afflicted me were, after all, not a
news report from Haroun’s town crier, only a Cairene prophecy. If
the prophet spoke truly, then what was to happen to my wife had
happened, and our returning could not restore her to me; if she spoke
falsely, then what was to happen had not happened, and I should pun-
ish her on our return. As to the predicted shipwreck, I must excuse
them for suspecting that I had added that item for persuasive effect.
“These words of theirs I found as hateful as those I had swallowed.
Though I could not gainsay their speakers, I would neither speak nor
listen to them thereafter, nor associate with them in any way. In a
black fury I withdrew to my cabin and would not even eat what was
brought to me, but fed on grief and rage alone while waiting for the
typhoon inside me to be matched by one without. A foul and silent
while later — during which interval the others traded their goods
from port to port and island to island, shaking their turbans at my
folly — this came to pass. One afternoon I heard Kasim, on deck
above me, cry, ‘Every man for himself! We are lost!’ ‘So be it,’ I said
to myself, and I did not even leave my cabin for my faithful tub on the
quarterdeck.
“There followed a tempest such as would have sunk even Zahir,
and which simply splintered our ungainly craft into its component
timbers, as if she had been dropped by a roc into the Valley of Dia-
monds. She did not go down but rather came apart, and so instead of
going down with her I found myself astride one of those timbers in
midocean, indifferently watching my Tub of Last Resort drift away
from me and scarcely caring whether I sank or floated.

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 “That timber happened to be a large spar, upon which I was soon
joined by a number of my fellows, Kasim included. To none of them
would I speak — not even to him, though after my warning he had
had no more taste for the voyage than I. When he took command of
what was left of the ship and ordered all aboard to paddle with hands
and feet toward an island he saw on the horizon, I sat on the aft end
of the spar, facing backward, and fed on my resentment as fishes fed
upon the digits of the paddlers.
“By the time we reached shore (after a night of paddling toward
low watchfires on the island), my sparmates would have no more to
do with me than I with them. All had lost toes and fingers; they were
prevented from feeding me to their nibblers only by Kasim’s remind-
ing them that I had returned a fair share of myself to Mother Ocean
on voyages past and might have useful survival advice to offer in our
present stranding, if I could be induced to speak. But when, after lying
exhausted on the beach for half a day, we saw the usual odd-looking
building in the nearby trees, I still so nursed my grudge that I made
no cautionary mention of roc’s-egg temples or the dwellings of one-
eyed cannibal giants, but kept my own counsel and distance, idly
watching for apes to gabble from the trees, giant serpents to hiss from
behind boulders, or rocs to swoop from the sky. Instead, we found
ourselves corraled, suddenly and silently, by a ring of dark and naked
men as wordless as myself. Though they offered no clear threat, so
inhuman was their want of speech and gesture, even of expression,
that some of my erstwhile colleagues fell to their knees to beg for
mercy or commend their souls to Allah; others (notably Kasim, from
habit of command) addressed our surrounders in clear Arabic and
other tongues, including the universal language of gestures, to indi-
cate that we were shipwrecked and famished sailors. The naked
ones — how can I call them men, who would not register and return
such eloquence? — simply herded us buildingward, and this silence,
between assemblages of the same species if not of the same race, I
found more ominous than the gibber of the apes on Voyage Three,
however much it suited my own humor.
“What happened next you will have heard: how we were brought
before one who seemed to be the ruler of our captors or rescuers; how
he likewise spoke no words but gestured us to sit and help ourselves

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Five Interludes

to a feast of exotic victuals laid out in his banquet hall. Kasim and the
others had no difficulty in understanding this invitation and respond-
ing to it; they gorged and gulped, thanking the king and praising
Allah between bites and swallows. But though I aped the motions of
eating like the others, in fact I hung back once again, out of my on-
going despair and resentment as well as from hard-learned caution and
in deference to Jayda’s warning. You might ask, since I cared so little
now for my life, why did I not swallow recklessly with the others? The
answer is that, first, I had no appetite, and second, if I had lost my
taste for life, I was not however altogether indifferent to the manner
of my death, and something in the smell of that feast put me in mind
of the ogre’s den. Day after day I forbore, quite as I had done on
shipboard after reading Jayda’s words. The dark, speechless men did
likewise, and while I noted their abstinence, they ignored mine, as I
was already from my grief the puniest of the lot, and thus beneath
their notice.
“Meal by meal, as my fellows swilled like hogs at the trough, they
came to speak likewise, their noble though mercantile Arabic trans-
formed into a language of oinks and slurps, farts and belches, as their
bodies swelled marvelously, like sausages about to burst their casings.
It was not long before they were turned out of the king’s hall and into
his pasture, where under the silent wardenship of their keepers (whose
watchfires were those we had navigated by) they rooted on all fours
as contentedly as the livestock they had become. I slipped out with
them on hands and knees, swallowed up by the herd, and hid among
the hummocks to watch the first brace of them be butchered. Kasim,
as befit his rank among us, was gutted and roasted for the king’s table.
The chief of the merchants after myself, who by now was the fattest
of the lot, the wordless herdsmen made dinner of in their fashion, raw,
while his doomed companions imperturbably grazed on.
“That spectacle cured me at last of my resentment and, oddly, of
my despair, as well as of any appetite for meat for years thereafter. My
appetite for life, however, returned. Inasmuch as my former fellows
were beyond rescue, I made shift now to rescue myself, and in doing
so regained myself as well. Without difficulty I slipped into the bush,
away from those mouths that were no more than maws. Feeding my-
self at last (on herbs and greens) and talking myself back to life, in a

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

mere six days I made my way to that island’s other side. There, on the
seventh day, I came upon a people whose civilized work was growing
pepper; who never ventured to that island’s barbarous other side; who
themselves wore clothing over their skin and — wonder of won-
ders! — spoke not only a language but my language. At the sound of
it I wept for joy and, swallowing my customary caution, ran calling to
them through the pepper plants and rejoined the human race.
“Oh, my friends, what medicine it is to tell our stories! I who had
eaten so little but taken in so much now disgorged to the pepper
farmers the tale of my shipwreck and my companions’ fate, and
though that fragment was but the recentest installment of my history,
the telling of it made me whole. My old self again, scarred but ready,
when the pepperfolk spoke of their king on a neighboring island, I
said, ‘Of course, of course: let us be off to Island Two, Voyage Four.
I shall apply to be your king’s registrar of cargoes, and we shall see
what we shall see.’
“My new associates were not in fact disposed to take an unsched-
uled trip to their king’s island, this being the peak of pepper season.
Moreover, they doubted that any registrar of cargoes was needed in
their land, as they were a self-sufficient people who neither imported
nor exported anything. Even their pepper was for domestic consump-
tion only. A less seasoned castaway might have despaired at this news:
without interisland commerce, how to get home? But I doubted that
the pepper people had learned their Arabic directly from Allah himself
and guessed therefore that their isolation was less than total. Besides,
if they were only half as insular as they claimed, they were bound to
be ignorant of many a thing taken for granted by us more traveled
folk, and in this I saw opportunity. Indeed, what persuaded them at
last to make an inconvenient ferry trip for which I had no money to
pay them was their bafflement at my talk of import and export, which
they hoped their king or his viziers might understand as they did not.
What did they do, I asked them, with their surplus pepper, of which
in good years there was bound to be a store? What else, they said, but
throw it into the salt sea, as custom decreed? For otherwise there
would be no need to plant next year’s crop, and they would have noth-
ing to do with their time and skill. Could they not trade that surplus,
I asked them, for silks from Al Sin or ivories from Zanj? ‘Of those

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Five Interludes

things,’ they replied, ‘we clearly have no need; otherwise we would
know what they were.’
“In short, they took me to their king as an amusing curiosity: one
who spoke what sounded to them like Arabic but who was neverthe-
less in large measure unintelligible. Sure enough, my first hour in their
capital city revealed to me a dozen ways to make my fortune. Straw
hats these pepper people had, for example, but not turbans, a dozen
times more versatile. They had adequate roads and even canals but had
never thought of bridges, even to cross the narrowest ditch. They
grew excellent grapes but for purposes of intoxication depended upon
a crude homegrown bhang, since they had never heard of wine.
“My only problem, it seemed, was to choose from among their
ignorances which one to enlighten them on first for best effect, and
the solution became obvious when the king and his advisers galloped
down to the harbor on horseback, as was their custom, to learn why a
pepper boat had returned so early in the season. Excellent horsemen
all, with fine mounts, they used bridles but had evidently not heard of
saddles and stirrups, and were therefore (as I saw firsthand) often
thrown despite their skill. Even as I salaamed before their bareback
king, I knew where to begin.
“As all Baghdad has heard, I introduced these people not only to
saddles, bridges, turbans, and wine, but also to hookahs, turnspits,
hammocks, and a dozen other marvels — including, remarkably
enough, pepper mills, of which they knew nothing. Needless to say, I
soon became as close to this king as to my royal friend on Island Two
of Voyage One, and at his insistence I assuaged my unassuageable
bereavement by marrying the most beautiful, rich, and accomplished
woman on the island after the queen herself. Yet though it would have
been tactless to say so, I longed for my home and the infant daughter
I had never seen, and successful as I was at pleasing the court with my
several innovations, they brought me no closer to the City of Peace,
for the reason that in certain areas the king and his subjects were im-
pervious to novelty. To new contrivances they were quite open, but
new concepts were another matter. Import-export trade the king
would not hear of; it was contrary to custom and therefore probably
impious. Let me show him a better-designed vessel for ferrying pep-
percorns from the island next door, and he would reward me with

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

ten gold rings (of local manufacture), but I must speak no more of
ships capable of venturing beyond the horizon: that was contrary to
custom.
“What would have happened, I asked my new bride, if my mer-
chant vessel had survived that storm and put in at Pepper Harbor to
do business? Insofar as she could comprehend the idea (and she was
by no means dull), it amused her: why should anyone trouble to ex-
change his dinner for his neighbor’s dinner instead of each eating his
own? But suppose, I asked her, that I had two dinners and no turban,
while my neighbor had two turbans and no dinner? Why, in that case,
she supposed (laughing and refilling my cup with new wine), I would
first exchange one of my dinners for one of his turbans, and then the
pair of us would consult the court physician so that he might cure the
madness that had led me to cook two dinners for one person and him
to make a turban he didn’t need when he hadn’t yet got his dinner. In
any event, she concluded seriously, exchange with a neighbor was nei-
ther unheard-of nor unreasonable, but the same with strangers was
strictly contrary to custom.
“Thus we passed some seasons in reciprocal love and benign in-
comprehension, which Time might have turned corrosive had not ca-
tastrophe saved Time time by quickly turning the next page of my
story. While I racked my wits in vain to find some way to fetch my
wife and myself back to Baghdad (where, I was confident, she would
prove to be a fine stepmother to the daughter of whose existence I had
not yet seen fit to apprise her), as if inspired by her reference to the
court physician, an illness befell both my wife and the wife of my
neighbor Zuraik, and I found myself in the presence not of the cus-
tomary monsters to be expected on a voyage’s second island, but
rather of a monstrous custom, enforced absolutely by that custom-
bound folk. Instead of marrying, as we do, until death do us part (or
until the husband repeats three times ‘I divorce thee,’ whichever may
happen first), these people of the peppercorn bound themselves to
make that final voyage together as well. When Zuraik’s wife suc-
cumbed of her illness, her family and neighbors proceeded to the
customary place of burial, a large underground cavern in a hill over-
looking the sea, into which cavern the dead woman’s coffin was low-
ered on ropes through a small hole, as though down a well. Then,

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Five Interludes

horrible to relate, her perfectly healthy husband — whom I had tried
without success to console for his loss with the example of my own
bereavement and second joy — permitted himself to be lowered after
her with seven loaves of bread and a jug of water, whereafter the rope
came up empty and the hole was recapped with its cover-stone.
“‘By Allah!’ I cried out to those who had lowered him. ‘What con-
dolence is this? Why did you not haul that poor fellow back to life, as
my shipmates once hauled me, instead of abetting his desperate grief?’
Not for the first time, they looked at me as if I were mad and let me
know that grief and condolence had nothing to do with what I had
witnessed. It was, rather, the custom of the country, decreed by the
king himself and from which not even he and the queen were exempt;
if my neighbor Zuraik had not voluntarily gone down that hole, he
would have been forcibly consigned there.
“How I prayed then for my wife’s recovery! But like a popular
storyteller, once Allah hits upon a brave effect, He inclines to repeat
it. Just three days later I was again a widower, but so overmastered
this time were love and loss by terror that when I dashed seaward it
was not to drown myself for grief (as my neighbors charitably sup-
posed) but to swim for my life.
“As before, however, I was prevented: to follow my latest late
spouse in any but the customary way was contrary to custom. ‘Devil
take your customs!’ I railed at them. ‘I am no Peppercornian, but a
salty citizen of Baghdad, with three wives and seven children in that
city!’ To this exaggeration they replied with dignity that it was Allah’s
custom, not theirs, to allow any Mussulman four wives; theirs was to
confer upon me by virtue of my fourth marriage the privileges and
duties of a pepper person. Therefore they bound me up despite my
struggles and, chiding me for my bad manners, lowered me into that
dreadful cavern with my wife’s coffin and the customary seven loaves
and jug — this last, in token of my many beneficences to their nation,
containing wine instead of water.
“One glance around that charnel house of a cavern was enough to
send me shinnying up that rope as fast as they paid it out, until in
disgust they threw it in after me, capped the hole, and left me to die a
most horrid and protracted death in that frightful place. How I cursed
the wife I had so lately cherished, for plunging me (through no fault

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

of her own) into a blacker pit than even my first bereavement had!
And yet … this was a different Sindbad from the feckless fellow
whose world had gone death-dark at Jayda’s message. Here was a lit-
eral blackness, laid upon me by others, not myself; here was a silence
not of the unspeaking but of the unspeakable, and I resolved to escape
it somehow, as I had escaped other monstrosities on other islands. I
undid my rope, nibbled my bread like a rat in the dark, even sipped
my wine, and reviewed in vain the thirteen lessons of my past predica-
ments for help in this one.
“In that perpetual and fetid blackness, time soon died, as had my
neighbor and most immediate predecessor in this vile custom, a robust
man carried off by the Destroyer of Delights before he had finished
the third of his seven loaves. This I discovered when, by gruesome
trial and error, after an indeterminate period of groping among
corpses new and old, I became able to move about in that black hole
as easily as a blind man in his own house.
“‘Unhappy Zuraik!’ I addressed him when I found his body atop
his wife’s coffin. ‘Did you die so quickly of the same disease to which
our wives succumbed, or of the terror of dying slowly in this place?
And has your death but prolonged my own dying, or has it given me
more time to find a way back to life?’ For now, you understand, I had
eleven loaves and two jugs instead of seven and one — enough to keep
me nourished for more than a week even after the grave-rats stole their
portion.
“I say a week; in fact, I had no way to measure time but by the
rhythms of my hunger and my sleep, both of which were no doubt
deranged, as, intermittently, was I. But five or six loaves into my con-
finement I realized that though my cavern was crowded with coffins
and bones, they were not so numerous as to comprise the whole dead
of Pepper City. Moreover, the coffins were uniformly fine, as were the
robes and jewelry of the dead survivors, such as Zuraik. Only the no-
bler sort of couples, it seemed, embraced their last in this particular
hole: the folk of my neighborhood. Along about loaf ten, in a lucid
interval, I estimated the population of that neighborhood and its
death rate, based upon the passing of my wife and Zuraik’s and the
state of decomposition of the other uncoffined spouses round about,
and calculated a probability of one new burial every eight days. If ten
loaves’ worth of time had passed since my own interment, either I was

298

Five Interludes

eating too much or else Allah was compensating for the irregularity
of my wife’s having so soon followed Zuraik’s.
“Therefore I nibbled my final loaf more sparingly. For if as yet I
had no plan for how to escape my fate, I had at least a plan to give
myself time to find a plan. Sure enough, not long after my final crumb
was eaten, I heard the cover-stone being removed, and once my eyes
accommodated to the light I saw a new coffin being lowered amid
sounds of mourning, and after it a well-dressed elder lady with her
seven loaves and jug. I hid myself behind my own spouse’s coffin till
the hole was resealed, then armed myself with a leg bone from the
nearest skeleton and stalked up behind my new cavemate, who was
busy scolding her dead husband. ‘See what you’ve done, Abdul! As if
I hadn’t warned you a thousand and one times not to walk in the hot
sun at your age without your straw hat! Allah forgive me, you are so
bullheaded about such things, sometimes it makes me want to kill
you!’ ‘Allah forgive us both,’ I said then, and I did her the mercy of
cracking her skull with my thighbone club before possessing myself of
her loaves and jug.
“In this manner I survived for how long I do not know or wish to
know. The Destroyer of Delights being who he is, my provisioning
was unpredictable: at one time I had twenty loaves and three jugs and
at other times I was down to gnawing bones with my fellow rats,
whether because no one in my old neighborhood happened to expire
on schedule or because the deceased was a child or an unmarried
adult. Even when, as you have heard, I discovered an exit from that
cave by following a larger-than-rat-sized animal (a wolf or wild dog, I
believe it was, attracted by the smell of carrion to burrow in from the
seashore) and found myself on a blinding beach separated from Pep-
per City by a well-placed mountain — even then, as I had no surf-
fishing gear and could find neither freshwater springs nor any edible
plant more nourishing than pepper, I returned to the cave for my
weekly bread, so to speak. Just as I had at the outset been sickened by
the smell and blinded by the dark of that place but had grown in time
altogether used to them, so I grew so accustomed to my mode of
survival that I cracked my erstwhile neighbors’ heads with no more
compunction than you would crack a coconut. Indeed, I cannot deny
that if the luckless widow happened to be a young woman and my
loaf supply was ample, in my desperate new callousness I would help

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

myself to her as well as her provisions until scarcity obliged me to end
her shame. And if none of these killings gave me pain, neither did any
give me satisfaction, except the last of them.
“As I was once again on an island beach, with the familiar blank
sea before me and no monsters behind more dangerous than myself, I
took to coldly robbing my necessary victims of their goods as well as
their victuals, and to plundering the coffins of their spouses as well. In
this way I soon amassed from the accumulated dead a considerable
fortune in robes and jewels, which I sorted into piles on the beach
while waiting for Allah to send me a passing ship. What He sent me
instead, one fine morning, was my trusty old tub, as weathered and
barnacled from its sojourn at sea as Zahir had been when it rescued
me on Voyage Three. I fished it ashore as it fortuitously drifted by,
but instead of embracing it like a long-lost friend, I coolly set it aside
and went on with my business.
“A thing that puzzled me in that business was that while my death-
rate calculations had proved to be close to the mark (as attested by my
survival), the number of uncoffined skeletons was so small in com-
parison to the number of coffins that even after correcting for the
unmarried, I judged that the Peppercornian custom of burying the
living with the dead could be of no more than a decade’s standing.
Sure enough, one afternoon when I returned underground to find or
await my next week’s rations, I heard above me an unusually clamor-
ous mourning, and when the capstone was removed I learned the an-
swer to that puzzle. A coffin richer than any other in the cave was
lowered, and after it — objecting as mightily as I had, and like me
refusing to undo the rope that he and his loaves were let down by —
came my erstwhile benefactor, the king himself.
“‘Allah curse you!’ he shouted up at his lowerers. ‘This is regicide!’
‘We are but following Your Majesty’s strict order,’ one of them called
back (I recognized the voice to be that of the king’s vizier), ‘to which
you yourself bound us with the most solemn oaths ten years ago.’       ‘I was a young and foolish prince back then!’ the king protested. ‘I 
wanted to impress my bride with a grander love-gesture than any she
had heard of back home on Salt Island, to show her that her bride-
groom was a kinglier king than her father! How was I to know that a
woman ten years my junior would die before me?’ ‘We sympathize,

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Five Interludes

Your Majesty,’ replied the vizier. ‘Damn you, Tammuz!’ the king then
shouted. ‘I decreed this practice then, and now I undecree it! Haul me
up!’ ‘Decree it you did, Your Excellency,’ his vizier called down, ‘and
your salty young bride was no doubt as impressed by that decree as
we were. Your undying love for her killed my mother and a hundred
other noble Peppercornians before their time. We would dishonor
their memory if we broke the vow you swore us to in your reckless
passion for the Salt King’s daughter: to see to it that death would no
more separate you two than it would separate from that day forward
any other Pepper spouses. Having now fulfilled that cruel vow, how-
ever, we welcome your rescindment of it. Your Highness may rest
assured that he is its last victim.’
“With that, the vizier tossed his end of the rope down into the hole.
The king cried up to him, ‘Tammuz! My queen was healthy as a horse
till just last week! I believe you poisoned her when your own wife
took sick, to save your skin!’ ‘That,’ responded the vizier, ‘is a senti-
ment unworthy of the Sultan of Peppercornia. Your Majesty must ex-
cuse me for not repeating it to your successor or these noble courtiers.
Close the hole, please, gentlemen.’
“With a right goodwill they did, whereupon with like satisfaction
I shortened the anguish of the man whose heedless passion had been
the death of so many of my neighbors and almost of me as well. His
grave-treasure and the queen’s completed my fortune. She was indeed
a salty, well-born beauty, scarcely stiff in her coffin and withal so fresh
in death that it would have embarrassed me to strip and dejewel her
had I not by that time passed beyond every civilized compunction.       I say no more.
“It pleased Allah then to conclude my season of monstrosity by
forthwith sending a merchant vessel past my beach, the first I had seen
since my own went down. I hailed it in my customary fashion, turban-
on-a-stick, paddled out to it in my tub, and, saying nothing about
either the speechless cannibals or the Peppercornians, simply gave its
captain to believe that my treasure had been salvaged from the wreck
of which in truth I was the sole survivor, and offered to reward him
handsomely for coming to my rescue.
“That little speech was my first utterance since the day months past
when I had saluted my initial victim in the cave. The captain thanked

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

me but, to my surprise, declined any payment for his act of mercy.
‘Men should behave to men as men,’ he declared. To this reminder I
made silent salaam but to myself remarked, ‘Alas, good sir, they do.’
“As this vessel was, like all my rescuers, bound conveniently home
for Basra with trading stops en route, the final leg of Voyage Four was
as profitable and peaceful for me as had been the last legs of the three
voyages before it, except that from time to time the memory of my
underground interlude would drive me quite mad. For a whole day,
then half a day, then an hour, then half an hour, the good captain or
his men would be obliged to restrain me from flinging myself into the
sea; and this they gently did, supposing me innocently deranged by
mere maroonment. Each time, I offered again in vain to reward them
and was told, ‘Men should behave to men as men.’ By when we
reached home port, my mad spells were down to a dark quarter hour
every seventh or eighth day, during which I was not responsible for
myself. Nowadays they come on me no more than once a season.
“That excellent captain taught me the remaining three lessons of
Voyage Four, whose first moral I served up to you at its outset. He
was himself a widower who called himself Allim al-Yom, or Navigator
of the Day (a surname that we shall, alas, hear more of in voyages Five
and Six), and his three rules for daily navigation were the same: first,
Men should behave to men as men. Second, Men should behave to
men as men. And finally, Men should behave to men as men. Yasmin.”
Replied Sindbad’s daughter, “Father,” and she rose quietly from
her place. Jayda did likewise, and together they made the wine-cup
circuit. In marked contrast to the denouements of Sindbad’s previous
voyages, this one was met with neither salutes from the listeners nor
hearty urgings from the teller to wash down his tale with wine. The
host relapsed, grave-faced, into the silence that his account had bro-
ken, and from him the guests took their cue. Yasmin it was who, once
her rounds were made, raised her cup high with one emerald-sleeved
arm and, emerald eyes flashing down the table’s length, by way of toast
proposed, “To all men who behave to men as men!”
“Amen,” Somebody seconded, and all save pensive Sindbad drank.
As that latter contemplated his cup, Ibn al-Hamra, on his left, pro-
posed in Yasmin’s direction, “To women who behave to men as
women!” Only al-Fadl, Jafar, the caliph’s vizier’s messenger, and Kuzia
Fakan joined him. That last then countertoasted, with more success,

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Five Interludes

all men who behaved as men to women — a proposition equivocal
enough to raise Hajj Masud’s cup, along with Sidi Numan’s and Ali
al-Yaman’s, but not those of Jayda, Yasmin, Still-Stranded, or (for
whatever reason) Sindbad the Sailor. Seeing Yasmin refrain, the
abashed Hajj quickly lowered his cup without drinking.
“To men and women alike,” Somebody proposed finally, “who be-
have to one another as fellow human beings, for we are all strandees
together upon this great and monstrous island called the World.”
To this even Sindbad nodded assent and sipped; of the others, all
drank except Ibn al-Hamra and his cohorts Jafar and Ali al-Yaman.
Yasmin then turned upon that toast’s proposer a smile brighter than
every lamp in the banquet hall and declared, “Though the Baghdad
that my father came back to was still Baghdad, the Sindbad who re-
turned there from Voyage Four was a stranger to the Sindbad who
had set out. This other stranger, however — the gentle Sayyid Some-
body whom it pleases my father to call his still-stranded brother and
whom we have learned to call Bey el-Loor — set out a fourth time
from that world whereof we know nothing beyond his telling and
wound up here in ours, where he languishes yet. Now we shall hear at
last how that accident befell him.”

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Somebody’s Fourth Voyage

Through the first, or “Malaccan,” leg of our fiftieth-birthday present to
ourselves — a retracing of “Sindbad’s” return to Baghdad from a composite
of his voyages to the Far East — things have gone about as problematically
as we expected. The second leg, to “Serendib,” we trust will be another story.
One half of that “we” is our old traveling companion Simon Wil-
liam Behler — a.k.a. “’Simmon,” “William Baylor,” and more recently
the noted New Journalist, no longer new, who signs himself simply
“Baylor.” The other half? Surprise! “Crazy Daisy” Moore’s kid sister,
our man’s supercapable current bunkmate.
Julia Moore! Shy string-bean Julie from River Boulevard: she of
the olive eyes and wheat-bran freckles, orthodontic braces and rapid-
fire opp-talk. No nobody herself these days, “J. Moore” in her twenties
and thirties established herself as a free-lance photographer and a bit
of a daredevil, the Margaret Bourke-White of the Kennedy-Johnson
era: not only a forward-area cameraperson in Vietnam and the Middle
East but an ardent rock climber, white-water rafter, hang glider, solo
sailor. Now in the second half of her forties, she has eased off a bit on
the sustained high-exertion stuff but will still go anywhere for a pic-

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Somebody’s Fourth Voyage

ture; she’s a regular in National Geographic as well as Sports Illustrated
and the resurrected Life (and in their British, French, and German
counterparts), no less a name in her field than Baylor in his, though
perhaps less well known outside it. If you know photography, you
know J. Moore; you may have heard of Baylor whether you read many
books or few.
The two most celebrated living natives of the town of Dorset were
not unaware of each other’s success. Not only did Baylor note with
pleasure J. Moore’s photo essays in the magazines, but his family over
there — his father and Aunt Rachel while they lived, Mr. and Mrs. Joe
Junior thereafter — would occasionally mention Sam Moore’s other
daughter, the one who had made good, and shake their heads over her
two elder sisters. Julia Moore’s parents, while they lived (and when
Mrs. Moore was lucid), and her surviving siblings likewise (Brinsley,
the oldest, died in a drunken car-crash not long after Somebody’s Sec-
ond Voyage) did the same concerning “Mayor Behler’s boy from over
in East Dorset, who used to have such a crush on Daise?” Indeed,
Daisy Moore herself, after the publication of “William Baylor’s” early
SF fantasies and historical novels and even more so after “Baylor’s”
New Journalistic hits, scrawled him cards and letters of congratulation
from various places, in which she seldom failed to mention “the other
great love of [her] life, and that redneck burg’s other famous escapee:
the jewel of River Boulevard.”
These messages came at first from Dorset proper, four of whose
five electoral wards were scandalized by Daisy’s “running off” in 1962
with an incendiary black civil-rights leader, bearing his child, and di-
viding her time between Washington, D.C., and Dorset’s black Sec-
ond Ward after her hero abandoned her; later from Havana, whither
she defected with her mulatto daughter to protest, by some logic of
her own, the growing U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia; later yet
from Key West, where, disaffected with Fidelismo, she settled for a
time with her Cuban expatriate lesbian lover; next from the Sheppard
and Enoch Pratt psychiatric hospital in Baltimore, where she affirmed
her solidarity with the resident ghost of Zelda Fitzgerald while la-
menting that “Persimmon” had not been her F. Scott; and finally,
when the money ran low, from “Eastern Sho’ State” (as she gamely
called the old asylum on the Chaptico, as if it were a branch campus
of the University of Maryland), where her mother had died and

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whence she fondly chided Baylor for the “fig-leaf liberalism” in his Es-
quire pieces while repeating that he and “J. Moore” were her dos favo-
ritas on this dying planet.
“She loved you,” Julia Moore told him with a shrug in Andalusia
late in ’75, when the writer’s and the photographer’s paths recrossed.
“As much as Daise ever loved anybody outside the house. Her thing
with the Black Panther wasn’t love; it was a political statement. But
you were so green back then, Bee! Greener than he was black! Daise
knew you’d catch up one day and leave her behind, but you had so far
to go!”
“Yeah, well,” B acknowledged, “I went.” Indeed, what had fetched
him back to the north of Africa and the south of Spain ten years after
his initial, life-changing visit to those places was a suspicion that he
might no longer be “going” but instead might already have been —
that his celebrity might have peaked in ’73 with Baylor’s Kid Sister, a
success both critically and commercially, and then turned with the tide
of events later that year: the Yom Kippur War and the consequent
Arab oil embargo, which, along with the U.S. withdrawal from Viet-
nam, spelled the real end of the Swinging Sixties. The relative fame
and fortune attendant on that book’s success had been its author’s
chief, though inadequate, compensation for sundry losses and failures:
the son literally lost in South Vietnam, an MIA; the acrimonious di-
vorce proceedings initiated by Jane Price soon after their Virgin Is-
lands misadventure, both parties’ bitterness being exacerbated by the
news about Drew and by BKS’s climb up the best-seller lists; their
daughter Juliette’s distancing herself to the Pacific Northwest with her
Muslim marine biologist (“Musalam the Mussulman mussel-man,”
Baylor called him); the petering out of his affair with great-eyed Te-
resa Anginelli, whose devotion saw him through these traumas and
convulsions but who thirsted — forgivably, at age thirty-five — for
exactly what her lover was divesting himself of: marriage, parenthood,
a house in Bethesda and a condo on the Shore. And beyond all these,
a cloud no bigger than the blank sheet of 8½ x 11 in his IBM Selec-
tric: whither Baylor next?
A year passed, then two years, by which point normally he would
be winding up Baylor’s next big one and have placed half a dozen spin-
offs from it in his usual periodicals. In romantic collaboration with
Teresa he did a series on the old Italian-American neighborhoods of

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Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston (“Baylor Goes Ital-
ian,” sure enough), but it had no more bite than overcooked linguini
or the airline in-flight magazine that commissioned it, and he took
little pride in the resulting coffee-table book, with its tourist-bureau
photographs. Where was Baylor’s Kid Sister’s big brother?
“Lost in the Virgins, I suspect,” he once opined to Teresa Angi-
nelli, “where a wrong turn in Charlotte Amalie can land you in Mar-
rakesh. The guy who came out of that space-and-time warp wasn’t the
guy who went in.”
The trouble with Teresa’s reaction to her lover’s account of that
baffling episode was that she believed it, as she believed in ESP and
astral projection, whereas Baylor himself believed in nothing more
mysterious than hallucination under prolonged stress. But inasmuch
as that interlude in the “Jmaa el Fna” of Dronningen’s Gade remained
as palpable in his memory as any experience in his life — not an “al-
tered perception” but a quite ordinary perception of an unaccountably
altered reality — to call it hallucination was tantamount to calling his
whole life hallucination, from, say, that scary anchor-line incident in
Soper’s Hole to the present moment.
“I never resurfaced,” he proposed to Teresa Anginelli. “My wife
drowned me, and I’ve lived happily ever after.”
“More poetry than truth in that,” his friend replied, no doubt wish-
ing he would stop calling that woman his wife. She then added, re-
markably, “Maybe it’s the other Marrakesh you never came back from.
Where the hippie girl balled your brains out?”
“Tangier.”
“Wherever. You got in, but you never got out, and this Baylor
character went on with your story.”
When, however, these notions thereafter took possession of our
man’s imagination to the point of his resolving to do a Theseus-in-
reverse — to follow Baylor’s thread back into the labyrinth in hope of
leading some antecedent out — his friend quietly bade him addio.
Such sentimental journeying was best done solo, no? She sensed any-
how that their little intermezzo had about run its course; so did he, if
he was honest about it. They had had a real couple of years, but they
weren’t a real couple. From a certain sentimental revisit of her own
she looked up at him, sadly but gamely, and said, “The best-planned
lays, as we say in Little Italy, gang aft a-gley. Capisce?”

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Baylor smoothed her hair.
El Caudillo the Generalissimo Francisco Franco having finally com-
pleted his protracted dying, our man tied in a National Geographic
commission (“Spain’s Long Siesta Ends”) with a resurrection of Wil-
liam Baylor’s abandoned Court of Lions project — this version to be
narrated in the street-smart style of Baylor’s Kid Sister rather than the
sober cadences of Zanzibar! and The Magnificent — and, bidding
heartfelt arrivederci to his dark-eyed friend, set out for Marrakesh by
way of Iberia. The solid, self-effacing discipline of old-fashioned jour-
nalism he found both bracing and soothing: not Baylor-in-Córdoba
but just Córdoba, registered to be sure in the Geographic’s trademark
first-person singular, but by an I who unobtrusively asked and lis-
tened, who looked but stayed out of the picture. The preliminary leg-
work, a month of touring and interviewing from La Coruña to
Barcelona to Cádiz, went quickly and well; whoever that “I” was, he
listened sympathetically to Basque and Catalonian separatists, to aging
Falangists still fearful of the Comintern, to U.S. military personnel in
Rota and Terrejón, to the popular socialist candidate for prime min-
ister, to teenagers in American-style jeans and hard-rock T-shirts, even
(his entree being the magazine’s prestige, not Baylor’s own) to the
diplomatic tightrope artist King Juan Carlos — a sailing enthusiast
who voiced his hope someday to cruise Chesapeake Bay.
Then, greatly impressed by the Spanish people and not displeased
with himself, either, he hired a little villa on the Costa del Sol up
toward Nerja, which the booming new high rises hadn’t yet reached,
and settled in to organize his notes (and to work up a handle on Baylor
in the Court of Lions) before re-viewing the New Spain more selectively
with whichever photographer the Geographic assigned him.
“Hey there, Persimmon?” The phone call came via satellite from
Dulles Airport one Nerja evening as he was eating smoked-mussel
tapas on his patio, worrying about his daughter (who had announced
from Seattle her marriage to Musalam), and admiring a pollution-
enhanced Mediterranean sunset: “Guess who!” Grinning all the way,
he packed a bag and flew up from Malaga to meet the plane in Madrid,
as good a restarting place as any. Tall and pale and rusty-haired, long
(and straight) of tooth and limb, gangly still but efficient of move-
ment, in manner still a shade shy but not in act, her eye-corners per-
manently crinkled from four decades of high spirits, J. Moore was

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already clicking away at him with her Hasselblad from the far side of
customs as he waited to embrace Crazy Daisy’s grown-up kid sister.
“Isn’t this the wildest?” she wanted to know over roast suckling pig
at Botín’s. Julia Moore was at least as familiar with Madrid as he; both
could think of half a dozen less touristy lunch places for toasting their
reunion with Codorniú and beginning to catch up on each other’s
lives while eating their way across post-Franco Spain. But Daisy’s kid
sister was a fan both of Ernest Hemingway and of Spanish custard,
and the novelist James Michener had once mentioned to Baylor that
“Hemingway’s Favorite Restaurant in Madrid” had renamed one of
its desserts Flan Michener in honor of his addiction to it. “I’ve got so
much to tell you! You’ll have to fight to get a word in edgewise!”
The camera, though, and her appetite and high curiosity took care
of that. Julia Moore talked much — about her parents and siblings,
her beloved Daisy in particular; about her energetic life since River
Boulevard days; about places and politics and photography and
flan — but she also plied Baylor with questions (“’Simmon? Simon?
Bill? Can’t I call you just B?”) and, while attending his responses at
any length, snapped away at Awakening Spain with her several lenses
and took unto herself its cuisine. Once she had reviewed and approved
(over Flan Michener) “B’s” projected ten-day photo itinerary, she pro-
posed that they hotel themselves promptly to get rid of their bags,
then rent a car and shoot a few rolls in the Plaza Mayor and the Retiro
to remind her of the feel of Spanish afternoon light, then resume their
catching up over a dinner early by Madrid standards, grab a solid
night’s sleep, and at sunrise tomorrow really get cracking on that
agenda.
They did: two singles in a quiet little hotel Baylor knew off the
noisy Puerta del Sol; good New Spain shots of kids “break dancing”
in the Plaza Mayor and couples necking openly in the park; a many-
course seafood dinner in several places that each wanted to show the
other. Only the solid night’s sleep went by the board; over Fundador
and coffee, jet-lagging Julie laughed and listened and talked till mid-
night (only 7:00 p.m. by her body clock), but good as her word, she
rapped on the writer’s door at dawn to hustle them out to the Escorial
for some Old Spain contrast shots before the sun got high. In the
course of that first evening, B spoke in a preliminary way of what he
would later come to think of as Somebody’s second and third voyages:

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his adventures on “the Island” with Daisy Moore and in the Virgins
with Jane Price. (“Opp-talk!” crowed delighted Julie over mariscos and
Monopole: “OppI’d fopporgoppottoppen oppopptoppalk!”) And in
a preliminary way he learned in turn that though handsome J. Moore
had never married or wished to marry (she guessed old Sam had
spoiled all three of his daughters for marriage), she had enjoyed a
series of more or less important long-term affairs and — like Daisy,
but single-handedly and more successfully — had raised a daughter,
in Julia’s case sired by a Mexican foreign-service officer early in that
series. Conchita Moore was currently a sophomore at the Rhode
Island School of Design. Further, that her brothers had all grown
up to be respectable burghers who saw to it that their surviving sisters
did not want for nieces and nephews, and who in all likelihood hadn’t
the least suspicion to this day of what it was that had driven Brinsley
out of the house and into a lamppost, Daisy over the edge (and away
from “’Simmon,” without telling him why), and herself, perhaps, into
traveling light.
“You had your catalpa tree to escape by,” she reminded him (Baylor
had forgotten it, as she had forgotten the sisters’ opp-talk). “Daisy
was my catalpa tree.”
“Bee,” as his name became the next day, reserved one or two ques-
tions in this area for a later time, and the pair set to work. Unlike
writers of pure fiction, Baylor was as used to working in collabora-
tion — with photographers, researchers, commissioning editors, even
coauthors — as he was to working alone, but not even with Teresa
Anginelli had he so enjoyed professional partnership. In truth, good
Teresa had been an able but permanent amateur, deferring on almost
every journalistic point to her former teacher, for the excellent reason
that she knew enough to recognize that his ideas were usually better
than hers. J. Moore was a seasoned pro, at collaboration as well as
photography. From that first jet-lagged perusal of Baylor’s prospectus
she clearly grasped the piece’s handle and set about efficiently and
high-spiritedly to illustrate it in National Geographic style: weathered
old-timers with Eyes That Have Seen Much, bright-faced children
Confronting an Uncertain Future, portentous visual metaphors re-
deemed by superb photographic composition and exposure.
“Winds of Change, Bee!” she would holler as the windmills of La
Mancha hove into view, and together they would quickly choreograph

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what Baylor came to call “logistically assisted serendipity.” A fast
phone call to the Club Madrileño de Hang Gliding (with whose mem-
bership Julie had “hung out” one afternoon on a previous assignment)
set up a perfect Heavy Metaphor shot for later in the day: a colorful
flock of young high-tech daredevils circling at the magazine’s expense
over Don Quixote’s slumbering giants. While Baylor made these ar-
rangements by pay-phone from a nearby service station, Julia collared
a brace of leathered, crash-helmeted hombres who were refueling their
motorcycles — one of them lanky and grizzle-bearded, the other as
short and plump as Cochinillo Botín — and, in exchange for picking
up their modest gasoline bill, posed them before the famous windmills
on their Suzukis: a modern-day knight-errant and squire.
“Let the editors choose,” she said, laughing, as their rented Seat
zipped south that evening toward Toledo. “Or the caption writers,”
Baylor replied. “They’re the real artists in this operation.” Over Quar-
ter-Hour Soup and Partridge Stew Toledaña, among other courses, at
Hotel Cardenal in Toledo’s Arab Walls, with a soft red wine from
nearby Valdepeñas and music from a strolling tuna universitaria, they
agreed to become less efficient as of the next day; otherwise, at their
present rate of progress, they would complete their assignment before
they completed their reacquaintance, and neither of them thought that
a good idea. Let’s hear more about Sister Daisy as Julia’s “catalpa
tree,” for example: Baylor well remembered his old friend’s fierce gen-
eral protectiveness of her younger sister, Daisy’s impassioned convic-
tion that “Jule,” along with “’Simmon,” mattered, as she herself did
not, and that they two must therefore hold themselves to more rigor-
ous standards than applied to the likes of her. …
Julia Moore rolled her olive eyes and responded, not quite to the
point, “Ai-yi, those standards!” Had Bee ever known such … Dostoev-
skian moral intensity as Daisy Moore’s? “Never,” he concurred. “I used
to fool myself into imagining I knew who I was, and then the Gadfly
of Dorset would show me that it was all pretension and affectation.”
“Innocent pretension and affectation,” Julia corrected him, and,
grinning, she reached across the table-corner to pat his left hand.
“Then she’d lay you, right? To let you know she was deflating you out
of love and not out of spite. Me she just hugged and kissed, but she
told me all about the Bon Ami business and the Island and Baylor’s
Kid Sister’s grave.”

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 “Twin sister,” said blushing B, who was also feeling his Valdepeñas
and admiring for the manyeth time that day his colleague’s full breasts
under her khaki work shirt. “Same name as yours, come to think of it:
BeeGee-Bijou-Jewel-Jule-Julia.”
Daisy’s sister applauded. “Bee to Jay in four moves. Are we
predestined?”
“Que será, et cet. Come to think of it further, I named my only
begotten daughter after you, too, without realizing it: Juliette P. Beh-
ler. There’s foreshadowing.”
Julia made a mouth, squeezed his hand, and withdrew hers.
“There’s pretense and affectation, Persimmon. Not particularly
innocent.”
“And there’s deflation,” he came back quickly. Just as quickly she
smiled and returned, “But not out of spite,” and he, teasing, “How
can a boy tell for sure?”
The woman sized him up, her face serious but her eyes twinkling.
“A boy might need proof, but a man ought to know. Hey, Bee, I
thought we’d agreed to slow down!” Taking his hand again, she
turned his wrist to check his watch against her own — also a Seiko
sports model, not much smaller than his. “Mañana,” he reminded her.
“Right you are,” she agreed, and that being the case, she proposed
that they go back to their rooms at the parador national, which over-
looked splendid Toledo from high bluffs across the Tagus, so she
could shoot the near-full moon over the city of El Greco. They did;
she did; and when Baylor, watching, admiring, and picking up on
their earlier dialogue, remarked that the winds of change didn’t
change everything — either for post-Franco Spaniards or for escaped
Dorseteers, in whom the proof-needing boy still sometimes dwelt —
she grinned, cocked her head a bit behind the camera, held out her
hand to him, and said, “Proof time, then, I guess.”
Daisy Moore at fifteen had been brown and bony. Her kid sister,
three decades later, was white from top to bottom despite her outdoor
life, red-haired and lightly freckled likewise, athletically muscled but
thickening a bit in middle age at her waist, hips, thighs. Released from
their C cups, her breasts seemed to embarrass her: “They’re too big!”
she couldn’t help groaning when Baylor first covered them with kisses.
Indeed, about sex in general Julia Moore proved to be a touch self-

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conscious; she went at it with her characteristic combination of shy
manner and forthright action. To a woman of her independent spirit,
“self-surrender” did not come naturally, and for that very reason it
excited her. In making love she preferred a passive role, though there
was an alertness, even an energy about her passivity that made it clear
it was a role: the tomboy pleased to put on girlishness for her date. In
the balcony moonlight her white body all but luminesced, especially
after their foreplay worked up a small sweat. “My ass is like sandpa-
per!” she complained when B busied himself in that neighborhood. In
truth, she was not the physical specimen that young Teresa Anginelli
had been, not to mention Jane Price. But even in Baylor’s initial, rou-
tine caresses Julia Moore took an uncommonly intense and (as time
would prove) unfeigned delight, while his subsequent, less routine
ones made her gasp with pleasure. That first night in the aptly named
Parador Nacional Conde de Orgaz she climaxed more easily and fre-
quently than any woman our man had ever made love with — so
readily, indeed, that “climax” would have been a misnomer had not
her peaks, like the Pyrenees, had their own variety. She would con-
tinue to do so to Voyage Four’s end, and her new lover’s pleasure in
her pleasure more than compensated for any less-than-perfections in
Julia Moore.
They did not catch the next morning’s long early light, the photog-
rapher’s favorite time for outdoor shots. Baylor woke to find his new
partner moving naked, white, and quiet about the room, focusing him
happily from various angles without clicking the camera’s shutter.
They made love again, went down to a late breakfast of coffee and
churros, and came back to make love yet once more, more or less, in
his room this time, before checking out. “Boyoboy, Bee,” Julia sighed
atop him, sweeping those breasts slowly back and forth across his face,
“did we ever get inefficient.” But when, then, decidedly terminado,
Baylor withdrew in a single slow motion both his spent and tender
organ and, from elsewhere, his index forefingertip, she efficiently came
one final time.
In Granada that evening (Parador Nacional San Francisco: good
view of the Generalife from their double room, but Awakening Spain
nowhere in sight) she rummaged through her sparsely packed bag —
“Less is Moore,” she had quipped in the Madrid airport, clearing

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customs — and brightly bade him close his eyes just where he stood
and … open his fly. Gently then she twice circleted his weary instru-
ment with something comparably limp but metallic: a heavy silver
I.D. bracelet, its still-blank nameplate dulled with age and a patina of
tiny scratches, the same one (he now confirmed when he caught it as
it fell to the rug) that Daisy Moore had returned to him on his four-
teenth birthday, then impulsively asked him to relend her, some while
after, for their next “date” (which turned out to be one of their last)
and never got around to rereturning, nor he to asking for it. The fad
passed; Daisy began her willful, unexplained withdrawal from him
and their high-school friends; before long he found other girls, at once
less generous and less exacting.
Having thus boldly made her presentation, Julia Moore declared
to him shyly, “Daisy’s blessing, I guess; she said to give it back to you
if we happened to end up in bed. She’s been wishing us on each other
since nineteen forty-five, but she never pushed.”
Baylor wondered: logistically assisted serendipity? But what he
asked was, “Is this what she told you to do with it?”
Strictly her own idea, Julia assured him, chuckling. After growing
up on Daisy’s accounts of their making out, how could she not think
of him as a sex object? In counterinspiration he then ordered her to
take her clothes off and “put that trinket where it belongs,” though he
had no idea where that might be. As he had divined, however, the
challenge amused, baffled, intrigued, and excited Julia Moore: she
considered aloud and reasoned herself out of the obvious options and
some not so obvious, displaying each like an amateur porn model for
his delectation while he remained fully dressed and seated like a con-
test judge. At last he said, “Give it up, Jule; the right answer keeps
changing,” drew her laughing onto his lap, took the peripatetic talis-
man from her hand, and, kissing her mouth, cupped it decisively be-
tween her legs. Her orgasm was prompt and formidable.
In the event, that bracelet changed hands (and wrists, ankles, pock-
ets, travel bags) as frequently as the lovers changed pet names. Starting
there in Granada — where the Alhambra’s lions maintained their
stony, reproachful silence — they got back down to serious work be-
tween their other pleasures, and though they lingered overtime in the
Parador Nacional San Francisco in vain hope of rerousing Baylor’s

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muse, by Seville and Córdoba they were back on schedule. B’s travel
notes grew into text, by turns inspiring J’s photographs and taking
inspiration from them, so readily that he could scarcely imagine going
on to Morocco alone after Spain’s Long Siesta reached its end.
Shortly before that, somewhere in Catalonia, he circled back to a
subject raised but set aside during their first evening, in Madrid.
Granted, the general tenor of Sam Moore’s interest in his adolescent
daughters had been obvious; at least it was so in retrospect. But for-
bidden inclinations came in many shades of latency and manifested
themselves in sundry forms and to various degrees, and early-teenage
girls were not in every instance the most reliable interpreters and re-
porters of such manifestations. Looking back now as a stable and sea-
soned adult, to what extent did Julia think her father had … acted
upon his inclinations? It was something Baylor had wondered about,
off and on, for thirty years.
Her expression, wary at the start, grew merrier as he strung his
query out. “Why is that important to you, Bee?”
“Not important,” he said at once. “Well, a little bit important. Map
checking? Focus correction?”
“We think our Bibi wants to know what he’s getting mixed up with
before he gets any more mixed up.”
“You mentioned that Daisy had been your escape route. …”
“Not only from Dorset.” She shook her head, perked up. “Me he
only got his hands on, maybe half a dozen times. ‘Look what a big
girl our little Julie’s getting to be,’ that kind of thing. Always with our
clothes on, okay? Plus a couple of wandering-ins to pee while I was
taking a shower.”
Baylor shrugged. His friend went on, her voice still bright but her
expression watchful of his: “Dear old Sam. Brinsley he fondled under
her nightgown from age twelve on, on his lap in his famous den with
his famous brandy sniffer, and once he got her to handle his equip-
ment: the illustrated facts of life. It took Brins a while to catch on,
Bee, ’cause she was the first and ’cause Sam was always so good-
humored and unmenacing about these things. Playful, sweet — even
witty. In Brins’s sophomore year of high school Ma went off to East-
ern Shore State for the first time, and Sam came into her room one
night with nothing on under his bathrobe and reminded her, half

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teasing, that we were all counting on her to take Ma’s place while she
was away. Brins had agreed that if she was grown up enough to have
the car she’d been begging for for her sixteenth birthday, she was
grown up enough to take on some extra chores around the house.”
“But no heavy lifting.”
“That’s about what Brins told him that night. And lots of nights
after.”
“She got the car, though,” Baylor remembered.
“Of course.” Julia frowned in surprise. “The car came before the
proposition. My father didn’t rape, Bee; he seduced. You knew Sam
Moore: he was a flirt and a tease, never a bully.”
“A snifter.”
Julia smiled. “A sweet old snifter. And so easy to say no to that it
was hard to say no to him. But Brins finally said no.”
“So why’d she leave home?”
“’Cause she told Ma all about it, and Ma got jealous and threw her
out. Ma loved Sam Moore to death; the rest of us just loved him a lot.
So: there’s me, and there’s Brinsley.”
Like many another through Voyage Four, this conversation took
place in a restaurant, in this instance in the uplands behind Barcelona.
Julia Moore glanced sidelong at her tablemate, who happened to be
fingering the links of their joint I.D. bracelet like worry beads. He
raised both it and his eyebrows. She cocked her head. “And there’s our
dear Daisy,” she said. “I got pawed; Brins got fondled; Daisy got
fucked. Not in that order.”
“Often?”
“How often is often?” Julia considered her own question. “Yeah:
often. Daise didn’t tell me about it directly at the time, the way she
told me about you and her other boyfriends, but I more or less under-
stood what was going on. When I was safely off to college she told
me all about it; it was still going on even after Ma died, but I guess
not often by that time. And after Dad’s death she gave me chapter and
verse: the whole Tender Is the Night. You want chapter and verse?”
Baylor guessed not.
“Thing is,” J. Moore went on, “I got these different versions. Daisy’s
is that she let Sam in to keep him off me. Ma’s was that Daise seduced
him, the way Brinsley had tried to. Ma actually talked alienation-of-
affections and claimed Daisy told her the suit wouldn’t stand up ’cause

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the plaintiff was in the bin. Brins seemed a little jealous herself; she
told me Daise always had to go her one better.”
“What do you think, Jule? Now?”
His long friend considered, cocked her head. “I think I think that
the sexual exploitation of human beings is a crime against humanity
and that as charming as he was about it, my late father’s incest streak
was unpardonably exploitative, to put it mildly. Okay? And he was
charming, Bee. We were all crazy about him, all except Brinsley, and I
think her resentment came from her having been crazy about him, too.
Sam’s to blame, for sure, but everything is true. Daisy balled him to
spare me. Did she really have to? I’ve decided to be grateful anyhow.
Ma’s accusations were exactly as crazy as Ma was, but what made her
crazy? What was cause and what was effect? Daisy liked playing wife
and mother in that house. Maybe she even needed to feel exploited
and doomed, awful as that is to say. Look who she had for a role
model!”
She uncocked, then recocked her head. “Samuel Bennett Moore
shouldn’t have been interested in humping his teenage daughters, nice
as he was about it. It screwed us all up, more or less. But long after I
was out of the house and Ma was kaput, Daise went on taking care of
him. I believe she happened to love old Sam more than she loved her
other men, and I can’t help thinking that in a different world every-
body could’ve shrugged their shoulders and got on with it.”
She considered. “Incest is a loaded word, Bee. Exploitation is
the crime. Sam should’ve kept his hands off us till we were our
own women. Experienced. Independent. How we handled him then
would’ve been nobody else’s beeswax. But don’t ask me how I
would’ve handled him, okay?”
Marveled Baylor, “‘Nobody’s beeswax,’” and he might have de-
clared his love then and there to Julia Moore had not her sister’s pres-
ence — in the I.D. bracelet, maybe — stopped that precipitateness in
its tracks as Daisy herself used to stop him, clutching his arm with one
hand and clapping her brow with the other on the corner of High and
Holly or halfway across the old Dorset Creek Bridge. Instead, as the
pair celebrated the winding-up of their Spanish project with a week-
end in Gibraltar (from where, through J. Moore’s telephoto lens, they
could read the hour on the town clock in Ceuta, across the strait in
Africa), he told her in more detail the story of his “third voyage,” in

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particular that disorienting episode in Charlotte Amalie’s Dronnin-
gen’s Gade, her opinion of which he very much wanted to compare to
Teresa Anginelli’s.
“Cock your head and consider, good friend,” he bade her at the
story’s end. “Where was I?”
Julia Moore’s general intention, at this point in our travels, was to
make her way back to D.C. and on to something more adventurous,
if not more agreeable, than the assignment she was finishing: a solo
sail to Hawaii, maybe, or something strenuous in Alaska. But she was
in no rush. Baylor’s was to cross that nine-mile gap out there between
Hercules’s Pillars, Gibraltar and Jebel Musa, and to rewind the Moor-
ish invasion of Al-Andaluz — and his own previous, corner-turning
sojourn — back to Marrakesh, the Jmaa el Fna. … But he was in no
rush at all, and kept forgetting, in fact, lately, what the urgency of that
pilgrimage had been, if not its point.
Across the gap between them (a table-corner), his friend declared,
“Maybe the question isn’t where, but who. However, that’s a question
I don’t take much interest in.” Did B remember, by the way, all those
books her parents used to press on him, her mother especially, back in
his Daisy days? Of course B did, and gratefully: CARE packages from
River Boulevard to the culturally undernourished of East Dorset.
Why? Oh, Julia had been reminded when she was reading Baylor’s Kid
Sister: the Thousand and One Nights business, plus what Daisy had told
her about those dandelions on “Bijou’s” grave in the Dorset Municipal
Cemetery. …
“I’d forgotten,” B confessed, much stirred. “It was on River Bou-
levard that I first crossed paths with Scheherazade. Allah bless your
poor mother, Ju!”
“And bless Sam, too,” his friend insisted, “the most civilized man
in Dorset, I’ll bet, in most ways. Maybe the only one. He told Daisy
those books might help you find out one day who you were. Did
they?”
“Allah bless your whole house, J. Moore. Marry me, okay?”
Unsurprised, head duly cocked, she declared, “I’d call us engaged,
Bibi. Let’s stay that way.” Getting back to the subject: what she
thought she thought, she said, was that what had happened back there
in Charlotte Amalie had doubtless been wished into being by B’s Kid
Sister, which had been very much in gestation at the time, together

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with the stress of Baylor’s failing marriage and Jane Price’s equivocal
near-drowning of him the evening before. But B had better under-
stand that for his new bunkmate there was not only no other world
than this one (and therefore no “boundaries” of the sort he had men-
tioned) but scarcely any time besides the present. Here, Now, and
Tomorrow were her coordinates, and of those she took Tomorrow
seriously only because you couldn’t pop off in a cruising sailboat from
Marina Del Rey to Maui without a bit of advance planning. Would he
care to come along? Believe her: if he would rather chase his own tail
in Marrakesh, she would truly understand — but from a distance. Ei-
ther way, he had her blessing.
“But not, as they say,” Baylor said, “your heart.”
J. Moore winked. “Didn’t I tell you? That belongs to Daddy.”

In the event, we become a couple but not regularly a team. Engaged
indeed, we give no further thought to marriage and prefer as a rule to
work on separate projects, though now and then we enjoy a joint
commission. Our Arlington townhouse becomes the writer’s daily
workplace, the photographer’s home base between gallivantings ev-
erywhere, often of several weeks’ duration. The bond between us
proves no less strong for its elasticity. In our frequent separations, our
missing each other takes the agreeable form of our looking forward,
not of our hurrying back; each genuinely misses the other but wants
that other to make the most of whatever is in the works, personally
and professionally.
For Baylor, at least, one interesting consequence is a prevailing if
not quite absolute sexual fidelity, of which no pledges have been ex-
changed. One evening while J. Moore is off shooting oil rigs on Alas-
ka’s North Slope, he gets a call from Teresa Anginelli; she needs a
letter of recommendation for her prospective new employer, the Na-
tional Geographic Society, for whose magazine she aspires to write
photo captions. Baylor proposes hand-delivering the letter to her at
dinner somewhere in town, and when she teases him over dessert with
her version of the song she used to sing after their Tuesday-night
class — Won’t you come home, Bill Baylor? Won’t you come home? — they
end up in a familiar bed in a familiar College Park apartment. She’s
doing all right, Teresa supposes; not to worry. She understands things
are well with her old evening-school teacher, too, and wonders when

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there’ll be another Baylor book for her to enjoy. It is a sweet and oddly
guilt-free evening, but B declines her invitation to stay for breakfast,
and declines as well, gently, her subsequent suggestion of another such
rendezvous the next time he’s “by himself.” He enjoys imagining that
Julia wouldn’t much object, as long as he doesn’t get “involved” or
bother her with the story. He enjoys his like absence of jealous curi-
osity regarding her nights away from Arlington; enjoys not exercising
his presumable freedom; reckons he must be getting older, maybe
even growing up. When he can’t be with Julia Moore, he finds, he
would as leave be with himself, whoever that is becoming.
Not long after our return from Awakening Spain, we visit Daisy
together in “Eastern Sho’ State.” Her building is bright, clean, fairly
quiet — not at all the snakepit of Baylor’s boyhood imaginings. But
Daisy has become not only an old woman but a physical wreck, almost
a witch caricature: wild hair, glittering eyes, bad teeth and skin, a too-
ready and too-shrill laugh, even a hooked nose complete with hickey.
The visit is uncomfortable. She calls him Persimmon and challenges
him to tell Julia how he got that name; she teases him about Lagoon
and Princess … Wahoo, was it? Lieutenant Pinkerton? Regarding the
pair of us together, she several times declares, “The jewel is in the
lotus. Now I can die, right?” And the following winter she is indeed
found naked and dead of exposure in the woods of the little island in
the mouth of Island Creek, to which evidently she swam one frosty
night from the hospital grounds.
At her funeral but seldom thereafter Baylor remeets the brothers
Moore, who are as Julia has described them to him: polite, taciturn,
unassuming, uninteresting and uninterested. With Julia’s daughter,
Conchita, on the other hand — a bright and lively black-haired
beauty, few of whose genes appear to be her mother’s — he gets on
warmly and easily in the role of sort-of-stepfather: it revives for him
some of the pleasure of seeing his own Juliette into her early-woman-
hood, with none of the attendant responsibility and mildly nagging
guilt.
That young woman’s life — as the 1970s run like sand through an
egg timer — does not go particularly well, nor does Baylor’s career.
His daughter and Musalam separate, then divorce: “Irreconcilable cul-
tural differences,” Juliette reports from the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Musalam returns east (the American East, not the Middle); Juliette

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remarries within her own eth but outside her profession — a Seattle
divorce lawyer, himself divorced and ten years her senior, to whom
Baylor cannot cotton at all — and conceives his first grandchild. Jane
Price, remarried also and redivorced, moves out that way to monitor
their daughter’s pregnancy, an arrangement with which Juliette re-
ports herself not altogether comfortable but willing to go along for
her mom’s sake. The girl seems to her dad to be not thriving since the
loss of her twin brother. B has been half proud, so at least he feels
now, of the nonconformist streak that led her into her Muslim alli-
ance, regarding which he set aside his own considerable reservations
because Jane Price so flatly opposed the match from the start. He has
been more than half proud of his daughter’s nontraditional choice of
profession. But she is, evidently, not a marine biologist of Musalam’s
caliber; she complains that federal research-grant money is drying up,
though that appears not to be the case for her ex-husband back at
Woods Hole. Baylor much wishes that his Juliette were an established,
publishing doer of science, if not necessarily a distinguished one; his
impression, however, is that she is little more than a lab assistant these
days, not at all certain there’ll be a place for her in Friday Harbor after
her maternity leave and inclined to blame the scientific patriarchy for
her unsuccess.
But who is he (he is the first to ask) to tsk? Who is he anyhow?
With a few prominent exceptions, the “new journalists” and “nonfic-
tion novelists” do a slow dissolve in post-Vietnam America (Good,
pronounces J. Moore, a photographer suspicious of “images” and
“names”: a little anonymity may be just the ticket to her friend’s dis-
covering, belatedly, who he is). Baylor’s end-of-the-seventies book is
less of an accomplishment than Teresa Anginelli had looked forward
to, though its tide — Baylor Won’t You Please Come Home? — has a
special voltage for her. A tongue-half-in-cheek social history of the
slow dissolve of the New Journalism in Gerald Ford’s and Jimmy Car-
ter’s America, it fails to recover for its publisher the considerable ad-
vance on royalties given to the author, a sum negotiated in the first
place only to entice him to leave his old house for a new one on the
make. His next book, he knows, must pay its way, or else.
By decade’s end, in short, though in other respects a more con-
tented man than he can recall ever having been before, Baylor has
unquestionably become the sixties souvenir that he had feared in

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Spain he might be becoming. His reading of the cultural-political near
future is that the pendulum of taste for what made his name won’t
swing his way again before 1990 or thereabouts, when, after more than
a decade of conservative reaction, the sixties will recycle back into
style. Meanwhile …
“Meanwhile,” Julia Moore one day reminds him — as perdurably
handsome a woman at the end of her forties as she was when we first
remet — “we never took that sailboat ride we came home from Spain
to take.”
Well, B acknowledges, that’s true. We have chartered nearly every
June on the Chesapeake, and Februaried here and there about the
Caribbean; together we have done a seagoing photo essay in the
North Pacific on the macho whaling-fleet disruptions of the ecological
activist outfit called Greenpeace, and another on a convocation of Tall
Ships from around the world. But Marina Del Rey to Maui never
quite materialized, and J. Moore is itching for some such shared ad-
venture, in part to steer her mate out of his obvious doldrums.
On the other hand, one more middle-aged couple’s cruising chroni-
cle would be a less than trail-blazing opus, no? Turns out she has
something more ambitious in mind for us, involving not the middle-
aged but the Middle Ages. In the course of her professional travels she
has caught wind of an exploit-in-the-works that, in her own words,
she would kill to get the pair of us in on:
To demonstrate the feasibility of the Irish monk Saint Brendan’s
legendary sixth-century voyage to “The Fortunate Isles” (in a bull’s-
hide boat, so tradition has it), a canny British adventurer has success-
fully crossed the North Atlantic westward from Ireland with a crew of
four in a thirty-six-foot wood-and-leather coracle. This remarkable
feat of research, design, planning, and seamanship the same fellow
now means to surpass. Just as Odysseus’s mythic wanderings are held
by some to be the accretion about a single figure of the actual voyages
of ancient Greek mariners, so this Mr. Tim Severin is persuaded on
good evidence that the seven voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, as retold
by Scheherazade in The Thousand and One Nights, are the amplified
echoes of actual expeditions to the limits of the known world by Arab
maritime traders between the eighth and eleventh centuries. From il-
luminated manuscripts of the period, Julia Moore has learned, Severin
and his associates are working up designs for a careful replica of a

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medieval Arab trading vessel. If he can find the required funding, he
intends to have the vessel built by isolated Arab craftsmen who still
employ such ancient methods as sewing ship’s timbers together with
ropes of coconut fiber — arid then, with a mixed crew of Arabs and
Europeans, navigate her by medieval techniques from Sindbad’s fa-
mous starting place (or somewhere farther down the Persian Gulf if
international politics rule out Basra), across the Arabian Sea to India
and “Serendib” (now Sri Lanka), across the Bay of Bengal to Sumatra
and Malaysia, and up the South China Sea all the way to mainland
China, the fabled “Al Sin” of Sindbad’s time.
“Doesn’t that blow you away?” she demands to know. “Was any-
thing ever so tailor-made for Bee and Ju?” She cocks her head. “Sche-
herazade! The Next Voyage of Baylor the Sailor, as photographed by
Crazy Daisy’s Kid Sister! We gotta be on that boat, Beebs.”
“We’ll think about it,” responds B, to whom for a couple of reasons
the idea does not immediately appeal. If this Severin fellow is like your
typical modern-day private adventurer, he points out, he will be count-
ing on such media spin-offs as books, magazine pieces, and public-
television documentaries to support himself and the project, and will
not welcome another pen-and-camera team aboard. What’s more, B
suspects for reasons given earlier that Baylor the Sailor went down
with the ship of Won’t You Please Come Home?, which sank almost
without a trace, and that he oughtn’t to be refloated until and unless
he undergoes some deep sea-change. Pearls for eyes, coral bones —
the works.
“I’m for that,” seconds his friend, whose admiration for Baylor’s
books has never fully extended to his authorial persona. “Ding-dong-
bell for old Baylor, as long as some things stay the same.” Very well,
then, she proposes: no Baylor the Sailor. But somebody’s next voyage,
surely — some newbody’s maiden voyage, maybe? What likelier locale
for a deep sea-change than the Indian Ocean? She’ll count on him to
work that out; meanwhile, if he’ll excuse her, she means to give this
bit of serendipity a little logistical assistance via comsat, aerogram,
even a tête-à-tête with the brainchild’s father, if necessary. Every pro-
fessional intuition tells her that here is something J. Moore and her
friend Whoever ought not to miss; every personal intuition tells her
the same for “Ju and Bee.”

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Has B mentioned that he loves this woman? Simon William Behler loves Julia Bennett Moore. We are a couple unlike either him and Jane
Price (our man the breadwinner, his mate the homemaker, nest-
building together and raising both their fledglings and themselves, up
the economic ladder) or him and Teresa Anginelli, say (he the estab-
lished male lead, she the eternal ingenue). In J. Moore’s competent,
venturesome company B feels a touch less macho-manly, a touch more
passive, more than a touch more humanly himself. By this point in
our story we’ve come to know and respect each other’s strengths and
weaknesses. Julia Moore, e.g., thrives on physical activity with people
but is shy of such social rites as cocktail and dinner parties, which B
rather enjoys. He is the more patient and stoical of us, the less daring,
the better organized, the more articulate; she’s the more logistically
inspired, the stronger-feeling and more caring, the less attentive to
detail, the better at improvisation, the less serene, the more deeply
moral. In our couple-chemistry there is scarcely less sexual passion
than there was in Baylor’s early marriage or, with its different flavor,
his affair with Teresa Anginelli. And there is no less love and rather
more adult, unquestioning commitment. As Julia Moore would ask,
Okay?
Okay. Half hooked already on his friend’s proposal, B stands by
while J makes her initial inquiries and finds his apprehensions to have
been “spot-on” (she comes away from her transatlantic phone calls
mimicking Brit slang). The Sindbad project organizer is polite but
both busy and wary: it is his voyage, for his book, his film, his National
Geographic piece, etc. A woman crew member, moreover, absolutely
will not do, given the large “native” crew he anticipates, with their un-
Western notions of gender difference and the primitive conditions of
life aboard a crowded Arab boom. Besides, did Sindbad ever sail with
a woman aboard?
“Well, he fully intended to, coming home from Voyage Four,”        B points out — promptly to Julia, eventually to Mr. Severin himself,
whom we intercept for that purpose on a sponsorship-arranging
swing through Washington. The tip comes from T. Anginelli, photo-
caption writer at the Geographic, and B’s information from Mardrus
and Mathers’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights, in which
B finds himself reimmersed. “But his new wife on Peppercorn Island
up and died on him before he could set sail with her back to Baghdad.
She very nearly took him with her instead.”

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 “I’ll never do that,” oddly promises Julia Moore. Mrs. Sindbad
didn’t mean to, B assures her, and he recounts that ghoulish episode
and then gives Mr. Severin and the Sindbad project his best shot when
our several paths cross in D.C. Baylor’s sense of capital-N Natives (as
he declares to the enterprising and engaging younger man over lunch)
is that they regard Western professional women as an exotic species
not all that different from Western men and somehow exempt from
nature’s usual and regular sexual distinctions. J. Moore, he attests, has
without hassle lived and worked with Natives more capital-N by far
than assorted Muslims on location. As for any writing that the project
may inspire from the likes of “Baylor,” the author guarantees that it
will advance the cause rather than compete with its organizer’s own
anticipated work. An early magazine article or two should attract fa-
vorable attention and perhaps additional sponsorship; a Baylor book,
if one ensues, he will bind himself to publish only after Severin’s ac-
count has been safely marketed. Let the gentleman be reminded fur-
thermore that in us he would be getting a publicist and professional
photographer who are also competent sailors. …
See here, mates, protests, in effect, the lean and cordial professional
adventurer: Lessim!, as his new Arab sailor friends say — Ease off! He
knows who we are, separately and together, and compliments our
work: the Greenpeace piece, the Spain piece. But what we’re propos-
ing to him simply won’t do. His objective is to keep both ship and
voyage as “authentic” as possible. He wishes the whole ship’s company
except himself could be indigenous — cameramen, sound technicians,
divers, and scientists as well as deckhands — because experience has
taught him that the essential moments of such replicated adventures
are those when nothing in sight suggests the Here and Now. But he
has already found the perfect sponsor for his project, he’s happy to
report, the young Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman; and that sponsor,
though he is as magnanimous as a benevolent genie from The Arabian
Nights, has stipulated that the voyage must begin during the celebra-
tion of his sultanate’s tenth anniversary, little more than a year hence.
In that short time, Severin must complete the boom’s design, find and
assemble materials and craftsmen to build it, plan an itinerary both
appropriate and feasible, secure governmental permissions where
needed (one doesn’t simply cruise up to the People’s Republic of
China, for example), and recruit his crew. Among this last, if only for

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want of time, he is obliged to depend upon ten or so non-Arab spe-
cialists of his acquaintance, including some veterans of his “Saint
Brendan” voyage. The cinematographer and still photographer are al-
ready signed up.
But see here, mates, he adds, in effect: he doesn’t mean to be un-
cordial. There’s nothing to prevent our doing interviews and photo
coverage from “outside,” if we care to. We can watch the boom’s con-
struction and launching and setting out; we can meet it at its ports of
call, perhaps even arrange to visit aboard en route, once things are
shaken down and the crew is welded into a team. He respects our
talents and will value such extra publicity as does not displace his own
contracted articles and subsequent book.
“Hell with that,” Julia says once we’re home, and her disappointed
friend agrees. For a while we consider “covering” the Sindbad project
from a vessel of our own, buying or chartering a modern sailboat in
which to follow Severin’s medieval boom from port to port, not com-
petitively but cooperatively. The idea appeals to neither of us.
“Let’s scoop the sumbitch,” J. Moore next proposes. She means
let’s let Severin (whom despite her language she not only admires and
envies but likes) play Sindbad in his tacky replica with his capital-N
Natives and his petrodollar budget; let’s us buy ourselves a good sec-
ondhand cruising sailboat in Singapore, say, and sail Sindbad’s return
route a full year before Severin sets out. She fetches an atlas: from
Singapore through the Strait of Malacca to the western tip of Sumatra
for a shakedown, then across to “Serendib” and up the Malabar Coast
of India to the Arabian peninsula; two months ought to do it — three,
tops — and we can sail up to Oman in time to cover Severin’s launch!
Okay, so we’ll be fiberglass and stainless steel instead of teak logs and
coir, Dacron and sextant instead of sailcloth and kamal; we’ll be high-
tech westward-sailing secular Americans instead of turban-topped
eastward-facing Muslims; there won’t be those “essential moments”
when nothing in view reminds us of the Here and Now. But B knows
her line on all that: one can have such moments with a lot less bother
just by standing naked in the woods or on a remote enough beach,
and to J. Moore’s way of thinking they’re more than a touch bogus
anyhow, like this replica craze that Thor Heyerdahl started with his
Kon-Tiki. The Here and Now is inside our heads as much as out there,
and for J. Moore, at least, it’s all there is in any case.

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 “Let’s do it, Bee. After we’ve scooped Severin on Sindbad we can
keep right on to the Mediterranean and do Odysseus or Aeneas, okay?
Then we’ll do Columbus from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean
and Whatshisname from the Caribbean to the Chesapeake — that
sixteenth-century Spaniard. What’s his name? Never mind. Shit, Bees,
let’s do it! One last big one before we turn fifty.”

Through the first, or “Malaccan,” leg of our fiftieth-birthday present to
ourselves (B duly wrote in “Baylor’s” travel log) … things have gone
about as problematically as we expected. The second leg, to “Serendib,” we
trust will be another story.
And so it was.
We did it, up to a point. Although the planning and preparation,
as we ought to have expected, took longer than we expected, we
did it: cleared our calendars, honed our navigational skills and man-
overboard routines on the Chesapeake, studied charts and piloting in-
formation on the areas we meant to sail through, shopped by mail and
telephone through the international brokerages for a suitable boat,
saw Conchita Moore safely wed to a Boston architect and Juliette Beh-
ler Grossmann roundly reimpregnated by her lawyer husband after the
miscarriage of their initial pregnancy. We did it despite the mildly
disappointing circumstance that by the time we leased our Arlington
town house to a freshman congressman and flew to Singapore to buy
a boat, Tim Severin’s Sohar (named for the Omani seaport tradition-
ally said to have been Sindbad’s birthplace) was nearing completion
on schedule in the coastal town of Sur, on the easternmost tip of the
Arabian peninsula. There would be no scoop after all — but we had
long since dismissed that objective as unfair to Severin and unworthy
of us, and looked forward to a friendly rendezvous with Sohar some-
where along “Sindbad’s” route.
We did it, finally, in face of the scary happenstance that Julia
Moore — rust-haired, fair-freckled, outdoors Julie — was found in
midpreparation to have a class B melanoma smack between her milk-
white shoulder blades (“Hardest place to reach with the sun lotion”),
the timely surgical removal whereof left her with a fifty-fifty chance of
five-year survival. Stoic B was shaken to the soul; not-so-stoic J was
stoical: “Fifty-fifty’s fifty-fifty, Beeswax, and Here and Now is here
and now.”

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So we did it, with no further comment on metastatic probability
but with — for Baylor, anyhow — an entirely new lens upon the
world. From harborside quarters in Singapore we quickly narrowed
our shortlist of floating possibilities to three boats of comparable suit-
ability. One we eliminated by marine survey (corroded wiring
throughout and electrolysis problems with some through-hull fit-
tings); the tie between the remaining two we broke by invoking the
old sailor’s superstition that it’s bad luck to change a boat’s name after
christening and launch. Both had been built in reputable Taiwan yards
and were offered “fully found” and ready to go, but the ketch, though
a few feet longer and a few years younger, happened to be named
Moonraker, and the prospect of repeating so schmaltzy a name in sen-
tence after narrative sentence B found intolerable. Whereas the
double-ended, thirty-foot, seven-year-old cutter …
“It’s an Arabic term for an Arabic legend,” he explained to Julia
Moore. “Imagine some unobtrusive object — it may take different
forms in different epochs — that has the power once your eye falls
innocently upon it to gradually take possession of your mind, the way
a computer virus gradually takes over the computer’s memory bank.
Finally you can think of nothing else except that one thing, and you
freak out altogether. It might be a paper clip or the ashtray on your
desk, or one particular pine tree in a pine forest, or one brick no dif-
ferent from all the other bricks in a building, or an incidental face in a
crowd shot. But if it happens to be the zahir, then bingo.”
Whether the legend or for that matter the word was authentically
Arabic, B couldn’t in fact say, but he recapitulated the famous short
story of that name by Jorge Luis Borges (in which the zahir is a
twenty-centavo coin unwittingly accepted by the narrator, along with
other small change, in a Buenos Aires bar) and made bold to explicate
it: the aging narrator steps into that bar for a drink en route home
from the funeral of a woman whom he loved in his youth; the zahir —
so apparently unremarkable but in the event so potent — represents
any unexpectedly obsessive image or memory. A youthful romance. A
quietly perfect small work of art.
Cancer, we both said to ourselves. “Serendib!” offered smiling Julia
Moore, her head cocked. “Sold.”

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And so we did it: bought, launched, and commissioned Zahir (no christening necessary, as she was Chinese⁄Muslim and already named;
we merely toasted her unforgettable handle with Singapore Slings),
fitted her with self-steering gear, and provisioned her with one
month’s supplies, as we had no intention of sailing nonstop through
such colorful geography. We ventured out of the famous harbor and
back a few times to get the feel of her hull and rig and test all systems;
we made wish-us-luck phone calls to our separate daughters; and then
we slipped our hired mooring one hazy equatorial a.m., dieseled out
through giant tankers and freighters from around the globe, raised all
plain sail, hung a hard right at the bottom of Malaysia, and beat into
the great Strait of Malacca on a starboard tack against the same north-
east monsoon that was driving Tim Severin’s Sohar down the Arabian
Sea from Muscat toward Malabar.
Our thousand-mile “shakedown leg” had two joints: the two-hun-
dred-or-so sailing miles from Singapore to Malacca itself, through the
narrowest stretch of what we came to call Tanker Turnpike, and then
the six-hundred-odd miles of ever-widening strait from Malacca past
Kuala Lumpur to the northwestern tip of Sumatra. There, at the gate-
way to the Indian Ocean, we planned to rest, regroup, make repairs
as needed to boat and crew, and reprovision for the thousand-mile
nonstop reach to the port of Matara in “Serendib.” Both joints proved
to be shakedowns indeed. The first we came to call Breakdown Pass
for Zahir’s plenteous gear failures, glitches, and crew errors — not
many more than we had anticipated for an unfamiliar boat in unfa-
miliar waters, but a number of them alarming, at night especially, amid
such heavy, fast-moving ship traffic in contrary winds and currents.
Our nominal watches — four hours on, four shared, four off — nearly
never worked out that way; we reached Malacca red-eyed and dizzy
from lack of sleep and shaken from half a dozen apparent near run-
downs by supertankers plowing toward Japan, our repertory of curses
exhausted upon Zahir’s inattentive previous owners, upon the manu-
facturers of sundry items of marine hardware, and upon the oblivious
bridge-deck lookouts of assorted merchant shipping, who we con-
cluded must be stoned to the eyes on Sumatran hashish. Any more
shaken down, we agreed, and we would be disassembled, but our re-
sourcefulness and stamina had been duly tried along with vessel and
gear, and had failed less frequently. Sobered but nowise daunted, after

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only a brief breather in Malacca — shave and haircut for B, picture
taking for J — we addressed the first leg’s second joint, through which
we hoped to do less motoring and more sailing (even if all to wind-
ward), with ampler elbow room and fewer alarms. 
This one, however, got itself dubbed Breakaleg Leg, for the squalls
that funneled viciously into the strait one after another from the An-
daman Sea (“Bahr Kalah Bar” to Sindbad’s navigators — the fourth
sea of the seven between home and China, China and home). More
extended tandem watches, sleepless stretches, navigational crises, plus
literal as well as figurative rough going. Knockdowns, green seas
crashing aboard, seasickness, lacerations and contusions. By lightning-
flash one embattled black night, Allah alone knows where in His ex-
ploding ocean, Simon William Behler saw his beloved friend cock her
drenched head over-shoulder to shout aft through machine-gun rain
(from the foot of the mast, where she was harnessed to the “chicken
rails” and struggling with the mainsail she had insisted it was her turn
to go forward and double-reef): “I love it! I love it! I love it!”
The single-jointed second leg, though — Sumatra to Sri Lanka —
proved to be a leisurely foretaste of Paradise, not only by contrast with
what we had survived but by any sailing standards. R & R’d per pro-
gram for a full fortnight just off Sumatra’s far end, on the pleasant
island of Sabang, we aimed Zahir due west, picked up over our star-
board beam the steady monsoon winds blowing down from Burma,
and reached along day after delicious day, self-steering for Serendib.
Modern passage-making sailors seldom touch the helm: on watch we
navigated, tended sails, adjusted the wind-vane steering gear, did rou-
tine maintenance chores; off watch we exercised and slept, made meals
and love, wrote and photographed, read and fished. The occasional
squall, like the occasional becalming, we took in stride, seasoned
hands now, not troubling our off-watch mate unless things got truly
hairy or noteworthy. Mainly we surged and glided on the all-but-
unvarying breeze off the Bay of Bengal, escorted by porpoises through
blue-and-gold days, planetarium nights. In these two weeks or so —
which we wished might never end, so sweet and easeful were they —
we became a couple as never before, each depending absolutely now
on the other, now on him⁄herself, and through our shared watches
working perfectly together, almost wordlessly: one person in two bod-
ies. By an order of magnitude ours was now the most sane and solid,

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straight and straightforward, committed and equal connection B had
ever been party to. Who anyhow had been this Baylor?
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured
(His glassy essence) …
Deep-sixed. Full-fathom-fived.
Was there a book in all this? I scarcely cared. Purged of tentativ-
ity — after fifty years! — or all but purged, Simon William Behler in
mid-Indian Ocean understood that with Julia Moore he was most
himself, or most, at least, on the verge of so becoming: most likely to
complete at last the long and undramatic task of learning who he was,
perhaps in time to do something worthwhile yet with that hard-won,
essential news.
When our dead-reckoning plot showed us to be only a hundred
nautical miles from landfall in Sri Lanka, we learned through ham-
radio contacts that Tim Severin’s Sohar, after a sail-replacement stop
in Beypore, had rounded the tip of the Indian subcontinent and was
currently crossing the Gulf of Mannar, bound like Zahir for the south
coast of Sri Lanka. The next day we raised that coast, likewise our
shatter-proof acrylic wineglasses, and with French champagne bought
in Singapore and sipped at tropical world-temperature we toasted
what we had found without really looking for it:
“Us,” we said, as one.

Another spell of radio fiddling put us in touch directly with Sohar’s
wireless operator. After an exchange of salutations and compliments,
with a bit more back-and-forthing we not only arranged a cordial ren-
dezvous in the port town of Galle (which we readily substituted for
Matara as our Sri Lankan stop, since getting there would give us two
more days of the true Serendib aboard Zahir) but received — if we
were willing to lay over there till Sohar set out again for where we had
just come from — an invitation to visit aboard, sail alongside awhile,
whatever we pleased. The only stipulation was that J. Moore not wear
shorts or other revealing dress.
“Jesus,” said Julia, who at the moment was worrying her cancer-
conscious friend by wearing nothing but number 10 sun lotion. “Tell
him I always sail in long johns under a Mother Hubbard. Purdah.

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Anything he wants.” The sight of land was already working changes
in us, bringing out the professionals. Hello Sri Lanka, farewell
Serendib.
We rendezvoused on schedule and more or less reprovisioned       Zahir, even down to fresh batteries for our trusty Seiko watches, though we were no longer sure wherefore; our adventure seemed done. We admired the remarkable sewn ship Sohar, reacquainted ourselves with its intrepid and ingenious skipper, and made friends with his crew, a colorful lot of Omanis, Baluchistanis, Beypore Indians, and Europeans, all wearing the versatile long loincloths called wuzaras. Though the expedition’s still photographer was in fact leaving the company at this stop, his replacement was already standing by; nor did J. Moore any longer long, as she once had longed, for that berth. Satisfied that our presence was neither obtrusive nor competitive, Sohar’s skipper gave us full access to the boom during its brief layover in Galle and permitted us each some hours aboard during its first days back at sea, while the other of us sailed alongside in Zahir. But novel and even exciting as those hours were — with the crew chanting in Arabic at their labors and even the Europeans (except the new hands) looking like grizzled medieval mariners — we had no wish to prolong them. One day more of century hopping, we agreed, and we would forsake the replicated tenth for the all-too-real twentieth and our fifty-fifty chance of five-year survival. Solipsistic or not, we who had given each other so long a leash had come to prefer being alone together (on
Zahir, at least, unforgettably en route to Serendib) to being with others in the world.
Alas for stirring marine photography, the wind this last day stood
as still as time seemed to aboard Sohar. All through the crystal night
before, we had admired in the Sri Lankan distance the lamps of pil-
grims ascending Adam’s Peak, where the first man is said by Islamic
tradition to have left a giant-size footprint after his expulsion with Eve
from Eden. Chagrin, we supposed. In the first calm predawn light, as
our little cutter drifted not far from the boom, three times its size, that
mountain loomed above the surface haze like an airborne Gibraltar or
Dante’s Mount of Purgatory as beheld by Ulysses on his final voyage.
J. Moore, off watch, clicked away busily across the glassy space from
various locations aboard Zahir. Then, unexpectedly at that hour, word
came from the larger vessel that its navigator was free just now to give

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our skipper a little lesson in medieval Arab navigation, in which I had
expressed some interest, if I happened to be free to dinghy over to
Sohar while the North Star could still be seen.
“Hey!” my friend protested, not crossly. “Tell that limey we’re both
skippers over here, okay? This tub is an affirmative-action, equal-
opportunity cutter; whoever’s on watch is the skipper.” “I mentioned
that, Jule,” I said, “but since it happens to be my watch just now and
I’m the one officially interested in kamals and azimuths, I guess he
means me. Mind?”
Of course she didn’t — though it was in fact my watch, and this
spooky calm was certainly photogenic. But it also left the “skipper”
with nothing whatever to do except be technically in charge, and so
of course I should go ahead; she would shoot away while minding a
store that needed no minding.
I went, via our inflatable dinghy, which since leaving Galle we’d
trailed astern to facilitate our shuttling to and from Sohar. In air so
still that our limp sails hung unluffing, I learned to gauge latitude from
Polaris with a little wooden rectangle attached to a knotted string.
Each knot, I learned, represented a port of established latitude. Per
instructions, I held the “Sabang” knot in my teeth, extended the kamal
till the string was taut, then aligned its bottom edge with the northern
horizon and its right edge with the azimuth of Polaris. If that star
(very near the horizon in any case, this close to the Equator) hung
above the kamal, Sabang’s latitude lay to the south of us; if below —
as in this instance it did, a little — to the north of us. When it rested
exactly on the kamal’s top edge, Sohar and Sabang were on the same
parallel of north latitude. There were other, larger kamals for use in
higher latitudes (the practical upper limit of the device corresponded,
handily, to the northern limit of classical Arab seafaring; lacking chro-
nometers, their navigators could only guess at longitude) as well as
other, comparably elegant gadgets and formulations of the same in-
genious provenance. With a little wave to Zahir (there was J. Moore
on our port-side gunwale with her faithful Hasselblad), I went below-
decks with my instructor to the navigator’s station, redolent of the
fermenting vegetable oil in which the aini-wood timbers and their coir
stitching had been marinated, to inspect copies of Sindbad-vintage
charts and translations of contemporaneous Arab sailing directions for
the Bahr Harkand, the Bahr Sulahat, the Bahr Kalah Bar.

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 “Awesome,” I declared, without overstatement — and was at that
same moment distracted from my awe at the civilization of medieval
Islam by a sudden heaving and creaking of the ship, shouts in Arabic
from on deck, and the unmistakable sound of wind in sails and rig-
ging. We clambered up to find all hands busy coping with a strong
north breeze from nowhere, the two great settee sails and jib full and
drawing, the boom already heeled to starboard and gathering way.
The surprised Europeans on deck, like all but one of the “natives,”
laughed and cheered as they scrambled after lines and loose gear. Only
the Omani helmsman, from his vantage point high in the stern at
Sohar’s ten-foot tiller, seemed alarmed as well as excited; while the
others called instructions back and forth and applied themselves to So-
har’s many sheets, guys, and braces, he called directly to us in clear
(though to me unintelligible) distress, pointing aft off the boom’s star-
board quarter.
For he alone had seen that fell puff from Polaris strike Zahir as well
as Sohar. Our headsails were furled, but our mainsail had been close-
hauled to reduce slatting in the glassy swells. The gust had struck the
cutter broad on the starboard beam, and either the bellying of the sail
or the sudden heel to port had pitched “the camera lady” overside.
“Uh-oh,” said my navigation coach. “Your friend’s in the water, I’m
afraid.” To helmsman and crew he called commands in Arabic;             I dashed aft, ahead of him, to see where the busy helmsman still pointed with his right arm while bracing his stocky brown body against the huge tiller and keeping an eye aloft at the boom’s great press of sails. The slick gray surface had turned as suddenly angry as the sky to eastward, where a huddle of clouds obscured the sunrise. Zahir, un-
tended, was looping off downwind; in the hostile reach between us
and it I saw Julia Moore’s face, a white speck in the building seas, and
one white arm holding up her camera. She appeared to be sidestroking
toward the cutter, but even had its mainsheet been free, leeway would
have carried the boat downwind about as fast as she could swim in
those circumstances. As it was, the close-hauled sail would fill, drive
the hull along for several lengths, bring the bow to windward, luff,
bear off, and fill again.
All this I took in at a glance or pieced together later from that scene
photographed forever on my memory. Backing Sohar’s sails and bring-
ing the ungainly craft about was going to take a while. My head surg-

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Somebody’s Fourth Voyage

ing, I hurried for the port-side midships rail, where a boarding ladder
ran down to our tethered dinghy — but the distance seemed impos-
sibly far, in the wrong direction, as if I were running from rather than
to. In a panic I bolted back, past the grim-faced skipper and the anx-
ious helmsman; vaulted the high aft bulwark between the rudder post
and one of the “balconies” hung off either quarter to serve as shower
stall and latrine; leaped eight or ten feet feetfirst into the sea, and
struck out in what I hoped was still my friend’s direction.
This must be told carefully. One is ill advised, as a rule, to go into
the water oneself to rescue a person overboard, unless the manned
rescue boat is standing by and the person overboard is injured or oth-
erwise needful of additional assistance from the water. Julia Moore
and I had conscientiously practiced our man-overboard drills, aboard
both our smaller boat in Chesapeake Bay and Zahir off Singapore
Harbor. They did not apply here. Correct practice, in this instance,
called for at least one crewman aboard Sohar to be assigned the sole
duty of keeping J. Moore in sight — pointing always in her direction
as the boom was slowly stopped and brought about — while I and
one or two others made haste to fetch her in the inflatable dinghy, on
whose transom a small outboard engine was mounted. If the victim
needed no immediate postrescue attention, and conditions permitted
our going on to overtake the cutter, well and good; otherwise, tant
pis: better the boat lost than a life, very possibly two lives.
But that was not “the victim” out there; it was Julia Moore, my
priceless jewel, in serious trouble, maybe drowning, and canny hands
aplenty on Sohar were doubtless making ready to do all the above.
Like them, I was barefoot and shirtless, wearing only the wuzara I had
bought in Galle in imitation of the Omani sailors — in short, unen-
cumbered for swimming, and I was a reasonably strong swimmer, lean
and fit from our recent weeks at sea and our earlier months of prepa-
ration. My objective, I suppose, was to reach my Julia before the din-
ghy could and to render assistance, or at least keep her company, until
it arrived. But these are reasonings after the fact, as is my assessment
of the risks — that with only our heads above water I might be unable
to find her in that ever-rougher sea; that a motorized dinghy with a
lookout, even given a later start, could probably locate and reach her
before I could; and that my additional presence in the water merely
doubled the problem: two small white faces now for our rescuers to

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

distinguish from the whitecapped seas, keeping one of us in sight
while retrieving the other. It was out of pure panic concern for Julia
Moore in distress that I jumped, and though the instant I resurfaced I
saw the folly of my impulse, I managed after all to reach her side. We
are talking not of half a mile but merely of a few hundred feet of rough
water — across which, however, I could see my friend only in those
moments when neither of us happened to be swallowed by a wave
trough. Did she see me? I’m confident she did, for she no longer side-
stroked toward our cutter (which by now was far downwind) but
bobbed in place and — Allah be praised! — was apparently no longer
being more careful of her precious camera than of herself. Moreover,
when I was closer and another wave lifted her into view, I saw with
enormous relief that unlike me, she was wearing her flotation vest (our
rule was to wear one not only in foul weather but anytime either of us
was alone on deck). I could almost swear she grinned at me over her
shoulder, half scared but half exhilarated, as when she had cried from
the foot of Zahir’s mast, “I love it!”
“I love you!” I tried to call to her — and took a mouthful of the
next wave that crested over both of us.
But when I got my breath back, cleared my eyes, and closed the
remaining distance between us, I found her dazed to the point of un-
consciousness. The lifevest held her up, her head not cocked now but
lolling, her eyes partly open but not evidently seeing, her mouth
alarmingly half open, too. Her vest was collarless; the collared kind,
which floats an unconscious victim faceup, J. Moore had found too
confining for serious photography. Another wave broke over us just
as I caught the limp left arm on which she wore our nameless bracelet.
When it passed I saw her facedown in the water.
The sea was wild now, and I was winded from exertion and fear,
coughing salt water, blinking to clear my eyes. I pulled Julia’s head
back; my own went under. A wave knocked us apart; I called her name
and barely caught the loose cuff of her shirt (long-sleeved, in deference
to the “natives”). I neither saw nor heard our dinghy coming, though
in that wind and sea it might well have been not far off. Lacking a
flotation vest myself, I was not rescuing Julia Moore so much as half
clinging to her now to keep myself from going under. Sohar, I saw
between wave crests, had finally come about, but seemed so far away
that I could scarcely imagine I had swum that distance; Zahir I could

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Somebody’s Fourth Voyage

no longer see at all from where I was. I did, however, catch sight at
last of the inflatable, bouncing and surfing more or less in our direc-
tion, maybe halfway between the boom and us, bobbing in and out of
view as Julia’s face had done.
It would never reach us in time. I could not be certain that its crew
even saw us; often as not it seemed to be off course, maybe headed for
our errant boat while searching for us, maybe only coping with the
difficult sea. I shouted, a waste of precious breath in that wind; I
waved my free arm at them, lost my hold on Julia’s sleeve (and very
nearly my watch as well, its clasp loosened by my flailing) when the
next crest swept by — and, instead of struggling yet again to refind,
rereach her, panicked off in the direction of our rescuers.

At this point in many survival narratives comes the spacebreak, the
fade; the hero loses consciousness and revives elsewhere. Likewise,
often, in the accounts of actual survivors: “Next thing I knew, here I
was in this hospital bed.” But Simon William Behler remained con-
scious through another, desperate paragraph, conscious of himself
swimming, swamping, struggling not to go under, to the boundaries
of his strength and breath and beyond, refinding and relosing both,
and himself as well, as often under as upon the surface, wave after
wave breaking over a mind mindless of everything now except the
panic labor of its body and finally even of that, a drowning animal not
quite drowned and then perhaps quite, for the next thing I knew, I
knew nothing.

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Four Interludes

1.

Silent Sindbad sat. The company likewise, perhaps waiting for Some-
body to go on with his story. But what went on was that fellow’s
pause, even when Kuzia Fakan, on his left, elbowed his ribs.
Most looked then to Yasmin to commence and lead their critical
discussion, as she had done the night before, and perhaps to tally their
votes as well. Somebody, too (having smiled and shaken his head ab-
sently at Kuzia), turned Sindbad’s daughter’s way, for a different rea-
son, and for some moments she met his calm gaze calmly.
Of the others, Ibn al-Hamra regarded the fingers of each of his
ruddy hands in turn, counting off one two three and four on his left,
then one and two (or five and six) on his right, and nodding to himself
with uncordial satisfaction. Old Jayda regarded Sindbad, who now
leaned back against his Tub of Last Resort and not so much regarded
as studied his stranded namesake. As for Haroun al-Rashid’s messen-
ger (that is, the emissary of Haroun’s vizier, Jafar al-Barmaki), in clear
and utter incomprehension he frowned and looked from face to face.

338

Four Interludes

“With my father’s permission,” Yasmin now said quietly, “I shall defer tonight to the present mistress of his house, my talented friend
Kuzia Fakan.”
Beaming, the dancer raised her long-empty wine cup in salute to
Sindbad’s daughter and herself. Sindbad studied Yasmin for some mo-
ments, as he had Still-Stranded, then gave his aquamarine turban a
tiny nod.
“Indeed,” Yasmin went on, rising from her place, “when I have
refilled your thirsty cups, I shall ask you to excuse me from your de-
bate.” Accompanied as always by Jayda, she filled first her father’s cup,
then the messenger’s. Next, instead of proceeding to her fiancé, in the
second place of honor, she went directly to Kuzia Fakan, at midta-
ble — the lowest-ranking occupied place, since Jayda had risen from
Seat Ten — and filled both her eager cup and Still-Stranded’s, which
Kuzia obligingly held forth in her other hand. Without looking di-
rectly at our man, Yasmin then conferred in busy whispers with the
dancer, who nodded, whispered back, set down the filled cups, said
something with her hands, fished into the neck-opening of her caftan
(“Ya! Ya! Badamyah!” cheered Ibn al-Hamra), and briefly pressed
Yasmin’s free hand between both of hers. Turning then to the com-
pany, Kuzia drank off her wine, wiped her lips with the back of one
hand, rose from her place, and, stepping onto the low table, struck a
dancer’s preliminary pose.
“Yallah!” Ibn cried again, and he rapped lustily on the table as if on
Sindbad’s tub. Two flickers of Kuzia’s eyes fetched her accompanists
from somewhere. The tambourinist, Fatmah Awad, took up station at
Jayda’s empty place; the piper, Nuzhat, instrument in hand, stood be-
hind Yasmin, who herself stood behind Kuzia Fakan’s vacated cush-
ion. After a short fanfare, the dancer gestured here, then there and
there, and Yasmin, instead of leaving the room, spoke as if for her:
“Venerable and dauntless Sayyid Sindbad the Sailor. Distinguished
Commander-of-the-Faithful’s Vizier’s Messenger. Tireless guests of
our intrepid host. Misfortunate and still-stranded stranger. Gentlemen
and ladies of this house.”
She danced more, and Yasmin translated: “Unaccustomed as I am
to public speaking, I shall not speak publicly but rather will make my
statement in my customary way.” Kuzia paused, grinned and nodded
at her spokesperson, then spun nimbly amid the cups and pastry

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

plates. “In my master’s continuing silence,” Yasmin interpreted, “and
my two mistresses’ … abstention? Yes, abstention … it falls to me
now to invite each of you in turn, in the order of your seating, to air
your opinions of Sayyid Bey el-Loor’s affecting, even heartbreaking
latest story and to cast your allotted votes on the still-open question
of its continuance.” Kuzia danced a flourish at her accompanists. “My
able colleagues, Nuzhat and Fatmah Awad,” read Yasmin, “will tally
your votes — Fatmah the ayes, Nuzhat the nays. And my steadfast
friend Yasmin has agreed to postpone her good-night long enough to
turn the speech of my body into words … as necessary.”
All hands applauded. Even silent Sindbad seemed pleased.
“Let us begin,” proposed Kuzia⁄Yasmin.
“Let us indeed!” cried Ibn al-Hamra. “Needless to say, pretty Nuz-
hat the Nay-Sayer has all seven of my votes.” He raised his left thumb.
“To begin with —”
A tambourine-snap and Kuzia’s hand-clap interrupted him. The
dancer then placed a forefinger on his rosy lips and salaamed before
Sindbad the Sailor, who shook his head and tipped his turban toward
Haroun’s vizier’s messenger. “What is this?” Ibn complained, but he
contented himself with catching and playfully sucking the dancer’s ad-
monitory finger.
“Our host and master defers to the faithful messenger of Jafar al-
Barmaki, Haroun al-Rashid’s all-wise vizier,” Yasmin explained. “As
tonight’s foremost guest, he it is who should speak first and cast his
seven votes as he sees fit. Only then, Lord of Yasmin’s liver, will you
and your six votes have their say.”
“Queen of my spleen,” retorted Ibn, not to Kuzia Fakan. “So be it.
That will make the count thirteen for our melodious Nuzhat and zero
for our rhythmical Fatmah Awad.”
As Allah wills, said Kuzia, in effect. Distinguished messenger, the
floor is yours.
That fellow looked on, appreciative, open-faced, and clearly mysti-
fied, until Sindbad himself more or less broke his silence to whisper in
his ear. “Ah, so,” the messenger said then. “Well, now, sayyids, I am
only a messenger, and since I have delivered my message this morning,
it is not my place to speak further, no, but rather to listen and report.
I pray you therefore let me pass, like Sayyid Sindbad, and reserve my

340

Four Interludes

vote, at least till I’ve heard how the more practiced among you go
about this business.”
“Well spoken,” Ibn al-Hamra declared at once, and once again
he ticked his left thumb with his right forefinger. “Now, to begin
with —”
“Point of order,” Yasmin objected, using her interpreter’s tone,
as if the point were being raised by Kuzia Fakan. In the same man-
ner — with Kuzia rapidly translating Yasmin’s words into dance,
rather than vice versa — she went on to declare that at this advanced
stage of their nuptial negotiations, the Esteemed Sovereign of her
Very Saliva must surely be reckoned a member of the household,
and as such should disqualify himself, along with his bride-to-be
and prospective father-in-law, from voting on Sayyid Bey el-Loor’s
poignant, gripping tale of love and loss in the romantic Ocean of
Al Hind.
The more eloquently to express this procedural point, Kuzia Fakan
slipped out of her caftan and danced Yasmin’s proposal before Ibn al-
Hamra in her working costume: sequined bodice and halter, filmy
harem pants, and sundry underthings. But Ibn laughed his reddest
laugh and replied that not until the jewel was securely in the lotus (to
borrow a quaint expression from Bey el-Loor’s mad former concu-
bine) would he be an official, nonvoting member of Sindbad’s house-
hold. Until that happy day and happier night, he was free to protest
to Allah’s high heaven that the company had been sorely cheated of its
promised reward for enduring yet another of the outlander’s outland-
ish and salacious narratives. Did Bey el-Loor not promise us only last
night that tonight we would learn how it came to pass that we are
afflicted with his society? But far from learning by what means he
came here, we have been told only how he left “there” — there where
he disported with his mannish, seagoing strumpet, his “Jew-Moor.” If
we mourn his apparent loss of her, it is because we wish he abode with
her yet, far from the City of Peace and the “Here and Now” (as the
Moor herself picturesquely put it). This fourth of his baffling voyage-
tales he cheats his way out of with a trick no self-respecting Muslim
storyteller would stoop to: “The next thing I knew, I knew nothing”!
Were we to permit him a fifth, he would not be above beginning
it with “The next thing I knew, I found myself aboard Sindbad’s

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

daughter’s bride-ship,” which we now know bore the same unforget-
table name as the one that earlier unburdened itself of him.
“May we be as wise as that ship, my friends!” he exhorted the com-
pany in conclusion. “Otherwise, far from supplying the missing links
between there and here, Bey el-Loor’s sixth tale will surely begin, ‘The
next thing I knew, I found myself aboard Sindbad’s daughter’!”
At this sally more than one listener smiled. Haroun’s vizier’s mes-
senger laughed aloud, then saw his host’s dark frown and, with his
right hand, literally wiped the smile from his own lips. As her fiancé
approached his speech’s close, Yasmin moved with the wine jug
around the table to stand behind him; when at its end he waggled his
eyebrows and held up his cup to her in salute, she emptied that flagon
slowly upon his head. Through the burgundy cascade Ibn redly
laughed and exclaimed to Kuzia and her comrades, “What laundering
you girls must do tonight! Six votes against Bey el-Loor!”
Covering her brow with one hand, as if her head ached, Kuzia
Fakan swirled down-table to Nuzhat the piper, then back to thrust her
backside six times toward the happily dripping Ibn al-Hamra. Peep
peep peep, piped Nuzhat, peep peep peep, and Yasmin (taking a fresh jug
from Jayda) dutifully announced, “Nays, six. Ayes, zero.” Moving
then, as did the dancer, to the far end of that same table-side, she
smilingly filled the cup of her beefy, blank-faced ally there and in her
interpreter’s voice (while Kuzia salaamed before him) declared, “Hajj
Masud: five votes.”
“Hajj Masud?” That black-bearded fellow turned on his look of
astonishment. “Yes! Well! Hajj Masud, to be sure: that is my name.
Now! What does Hajj Masud think of the story of Bey el-Loor’s
Fourth Voyage? Well, my friends! Graceful Yasmin! Supple Kuzia
Fakan! Friends one and all!”
Sitting Turk-fashion directly in front of him on the table, Kuzia
Fakan drummed her fingers on one knee. Fatmah Awad rustled her
suspenseful tambourine. “Our dear friend Hajj Masud will now
speak,” Yasmin prompted.
“Yes, indeed! Well.” Blinking as many times as he had votes, he
declared that unlike his esteemed friend Ibn al-Hamra, he himself,
Hajj Masud the rug purveyor, had once again found Sayyid Bey el-
Loor’s latest story somewhat more pertinent than its predecessors,
taken all in all. True, Voyage Four lacked the fine carpets and admi-

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rable vendors of Voyage Three, not to mention the winsome beggar
boys of the Jmaa el Fna. One might even quibble that for the narrator
to promise his listeners a revisit to Marrakesh and then to fly instead,
as if by magic carpet, from Al-Andaluz to Serendib, by way of Allah
knows where, constituted a breach of narrative contract. But who
could resist the appeal of those rugged Omani sailors, especially that
steadfast helmsman in his wuzara, or deny the charm of such familiar
names as Bahr Kalah Bar, Serendib, Sohar, and that other ship’s name
that kept slipping his mind, the vessel that Bey el-Loor and his exotic
mistress named after Sindbad’s own favorite ship …
Yasmin bent to whisper in his ear.
“Zahir, of course,” said Hajj Masud. “I can never remember it.
Who can deny that in the presence of such landmarks we are nearing
home? My only real criticism of this story, other than the absence of
such heartwarming characters as Ankh el-Zhash, is what strikes me as
a lapse of verisimilitude in the portrayal of Bey el-Loor’s mixed-breed
lover. As has been noted, he calls her his Jew; he calls her his Moor.
Yet he gives her milk-white skin, green eyes, and hair as red as Sayyid
Ibo’s. Has any one among us ever seen a pale-skinned, green-eyed, red-
haired Jewish Moor?
“But that I take to be innocent narrative license, as forgivable in
measured doses as narrative licentiousness, if I may say so. In conclu-
sion, though I agree with my distinguished critical colleague that to-
morrow night’s story must not cheat us with such tricks as ‘The next
thing I knew, I woke to find myself aboard that other … whatsits-
name? … Zahir,’ I trust good Bey el-Loor to supply us clearly with
the missing links between there and here, then and now. In that trust,
Hajj Masud the carpeteer casts his five votes aye. Aye, aye, aye, aye,
and aye!”
Five times Fatmah Awad clapped her tambourine, in unison with
Yasmin’s applause and the forward thrusts of Kuzia’s hips as she
danced the tally before Hajj Masud and her interpreter called out,
“Ayes, five!” Peep peep peep, peep peep peep, then duly piped Nuzhat:
“Nays, six!” Sindbad’s daughter beamed encouragingly at our
stranded teller — who, however, seemed still adrift in the ocean of his
story.
Around the table-foot next to Cushion Four, where from her own
place Yasmin filled the cup of keen-eyed, dapper Ali al-Yaman. Kuzia

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Fakan spun, slipped off her bodice, and with her haltered breasts made
movements, that Yasmin read as “Ali al-Yaman: four votes.”
Even as the dancer then salaamed, that fellow briskly declared, “My
friends, I’ll speech you no speeches. I am a practical sort of fellow who
cannot enjoy what he doesn’t understand, and however meaningful
my left-hand neighbor’s ramblings may be to himself and his kind, to
me they’re ape-talk.”
“Yallah!” called Ibn al-Hamra.
All nodded his way. “I grant that what we do not understand, we
may accept on faith, if we trust the source; therefore I accept that
Adam left his footprint on a certain peak in Serendib because our
sacred tradition has it so, and therefore I have accepted also that our
resourceful host plans a seventh voyage to that same peak because his
wealth attests the success of his first six voyages. But as I know nothing
of my left-hand neighbor beyond what I hear from himself and certain
others, I see no reason to invest ever more faith in him night after
night.”
“Four more nays!” called Ibn, and Kuzia, frowning, rose to turn
her negative side accordingly. But Ali al-Yaman held up his hand and,
looking from face to face, except that of his left-hand neighbor, went
on:
“Hear me out, comrades. For this reason I voted Nay last night,
and was then outmaneuvered by our resourceful hostess. For this rea-
son I would vote Nay again tonight — but as it happens, I regret to
say, my confidence in Serendib Limited has waned to match my con-
fidence in my left-hand neighbor. With respect to both I judge it time
to cut my losses, and inasmuch as I shall not rejoin this delightful
company tomorrow night or the nights thereafter, it is of no conse-
quence to me whether my left-hand neighbor wakes to find himself in
the City of Peace or on Adam’s Peak or at the bottom of the sea. In
all fairness and indifference, therefore, I shall divide my four votes
evenly: two nay, two aye, and good night all.”
Amid general consternation he rose and bowed: to Sindbad the
Sailor, who nodded gravely, as if to himself; to Yasmin and to Ku-
zia’s pelvis and rump in turn as they read out Fatmah’s and Nuzhat’s
tallies — “Ayes, seven; nays, eight!” — and even to still-stranded Some-
body, who lifted his left hand in mild farewell. But our man’s right-
hand neighbor, though he left the table, did not yet leave the hall; he

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Four Interludes

stood between Sindbad and Haroun’s vizier’s messenger, beside the
Tub of Last Resort, to watch the outcome.
“Sidi Numan: three votes.” Dancing out of her harem pants as she
passed before our storyteller, Kuzia Fakan bowed to the merchant on
Cushion Five, between her own vacated place and that of Haroun’s
vizier’s messenger. Her movements before him were as hopeful as
Yasmin’s at his side as she filled his cup, for Sidi last night had cast
his vote in Somebody’s favor. Tonight, however, he took a pensive
draught of his wine, set down his cup, and said, “By what I under-
stood of our foreign friend’s story, I was impressed. I extend to him
my sympathy for the apparent drowning of his latest unusual concu-
bine. The mixing of breeds, like the mixing of flavors, often makes a
more savory dish. Jews and Muslims in particular, like oil and vinegar,
each gain piquancy from the other; a woman blended of both must be
a delight to her master’s tongue.
“I am impressed also, if not equally, by the decision of my friend
Ali al-Yaman to join Hasib Ali, Talib ibn Sahl, and Abu Shamat in
their withdrawal from Serendib Limited, but in that matter I shall not
follow his example, yet. I shall, however, follow his lead in dividing
my three votes: one nay, by way of caution to our host’s still-stranded
namesake not to open his fifth tale tomorrow night as he closed this
fourth tonight, with some narrative sleight of hand, but rather to tell
us plainly at last how he came from Serendib to here. And two ayes,
for that is a passage worth our careful attending if we are ever to get
from here to Serendib.”
With what chastened gratitude did Kuzia thrust at the assembled
first her sequin-fraught pudendum — “Aye aye aye! Aye aye aye! Aye
aye aye!” called Yasmin and Fatmah Awad — and then her likewise
glittering rear (“Ayiyi!” echoed Ibn as Yasmin and Nuzhat tallied up
the matching nays)! “Nine-nine!”
“My friends,” cautioned Somebody the Still-Stranded at this point,
“do not expect to hear from me more than I know myself. From the
broken bracelet of my voyages, at least one link is lost.”
Yasmin and Jayda had been circling the head of the table, around
behind Haroun’s vizier’s messenger, Ali al-Yaman, and Sindbad’s tub,
en route to the merchant Jafar on Cushion Six, while Kuzia Fakan
danced the shortcut directly across from Sidi Numan. At Somebody’s
words, Sindbad’s daughter paused between her father and her wine-

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

soaked fiancé and confidently declared, “This canny Cairene lady who
raised me from babyhood has often told me that from scattered pearls
a knowledgeable jeweler can infer the string. In the same way, I’m
sure, those of us with ears to hear will be able to supply any missing
links in either my father’s voyages or our stranded guest’s.”
To this, Kuzia Fakan gave such an artful shake of agreement that
her halter-top removed itself and left her breasts covered only by her
hands and certain sequined disks. “Sayyid Jafar: two votes.”
“As for Jafar,” that stern-visaged fellow promptly said — and he
covered his cup with one hand to prevent its being refilled — “he feels
quite as does his colleague Ali al-Yaman and will follow that col-
league’s prudent example on both counts. One vote against this so-
called second Sindbad’s going on with his narratives, which offend
both propriety and good sense. One vote in their favor, inasmuch as
any who return for yet more must have other motives, which such
offense will either strengthen or overwhelm at last.”
Cheered Ibn al-Hamra, “Hear, hear!” and he offered Yasmin his
turbaned head, but she forwent this invitation to rewine him. Jafar
raised his hand, stood, and bowed to Sindbad, who seemed still lost
in contemplation of the table before him. “It cannot be denied,” the
merchant went on, “that the food and wine in this house are superior,
the entertainment and general hospitality likewise. As for the stories
of Sayyid Sindbad the Sailor, they remain as marvel-rich on third and
fourth hearings as they were on first, and will no doubt be even richer
on fifth and sixth. They deserve to be transcribed for the ages and
retold for a thousand nights and a night. But I believe their teller to
have been sorely misled by his alleged namesake, and not even our
supple Kuzia Fakan can lure me to throw good dirhams after bad. I
shall neither listen further to false Sindbads nor invest further in Ser-
endib Limited. Allah bless you all, and good night.”
Peep-peep-peep-peep-peep! Peep-peep-peep-peep-peep! piped Nuzhat to
the tune of Kuzia’s busy rump, while Fatmah Awad after each of these
nays tapped off a forward-thrusting aye. “Ten-ten!” announced Yas-
min. Following his leader’s example still further, Jafar did not quite
leave, but instead stationed himself on the near side of Sindbad’s tub
and looked with the others to the one remaining voter.

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Four Interludes

“Our precious al-Fadl,” Yasmin crooned, and she knelt beside
Cushion Seven to refill the little man’s cup as solicitously as Kuzia knelt before him, moved her hands from her bare breasts to her bare
shoulders, and with her whole upper body declared, “One vote,” add-
ing, “but what a vote!”
Al-Fadl blinked. Perspired. Began: “I think …” His voice failed.
He sipped and dripped his wine, worked his jaw-hinge, tried again:
“I think I think … I think I think I shall follow, in my small way,
good Sidi Numan’s example. I mean … I think I mean … not yet
abandoning our enterprise, but dividing my vote: one half yea, one
half nay.”
Kuzia re-covered one breast and began the tally, but both sides
protested this fractioning of the crucial vote. “Come, man!” urged
Hajj Masud at al-Fadl’s left elbow, Yasmin at his right (in Jayda’s
empty place), and Sidi Numan from up and across the table — this
last adding that to follow his example truly, al-Fadl ought at least to
divide his vote two thirds to one third, giving Still-Stranded the vic-
tory by a third of a vote. “A thousand and one nays to that!” cried Ibn
al-Hamra, supported, from both sides of the tub, by Jafar and Ali al-
Yaman. “To divide our votes may be all very well, but in the matter of
fractioning them, the three of us here have the votes to outvote the
two of you — even the three of you, if al-Fadl votes with you on this
procedural question.”
“Jewel of my lotus,” Yasmin corrected him, “you have no such
thing, for unless your nay-saying neighbors have not after all said nay
to Serendib Limited, they left their voting privileges on their vacant
cushions. But I think that even Sidi Numan will agree that if single
votes are fractioned, we shall never break our tie.”
“Agreed indeed,” said Sidi. “Aye or nay, my friend.”
All the other voters nodded. Fatmah Awad rolled her tambourine.
Al-Fadl sweated. Swiveling before him with her thumbs hooked in
readiness under the waistband of her drawers, Kuzia Fakan made it
known in the subtle language of dance that he would be rewarded
whichever way he cast his vote, but that he must neither fraction it
nor abstain. Al-Fadl’s eyes grew large; the color left his face; he looked
imploringly from our storyteller to Sindbad the Sailor, to Yasmin, Sidi
Numan, Hajj Masud. All looked sternly back. At last he whispered or
at least mouthed a silent but unmistakable “Nay” and swooned side-
ways into Yasmin’s arms.

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

“Eleven-ten!” cheered Ibn al-Hamra, and he rose to salute the vote as Kuzia commenced her tally. “The nays have it, and Sayyid Inter-
loper can keep his missing links in his pocket for all we care. Into the
tub with you, Kuzia! Dance for us!”
“Not just yet, O Ruler of my Roost,” sweetly but firmly objected
Yasmin, and she shifted al-Fadl’s head from her lap onto Jayda’s cush-
ion. “It is time now for Haroun’s vizier’s messenger to deliver us his
seven-vote message.”
“I suppose it is,” that fellow agreed. He held up his cup for refilling
and with the other hand beckoned Kuzia himward. Yasmin and the
dancer hurried to oblige, but the royal messenger took time to savor
both the wine and Kuzia Fakan’s electioneering before he went on:
“And now that I understand the agreeable customs of this house, my
seven votes are easily cast. Of this strange fellow’s story I understood
no more than three words in all. Since I am likely to be punished for
reporting such stuff to my master, you young ladies may pipe me three
nays before I say another word.”
He sat back, sipped, and watched with satisfaction the rumping
and peeping of those nays. But Ibn al-Hamra, counting redly on his
fingers, was not pleased, nor was Yasmin.
“On the other hand,” the messenger continued — and Ibn switched
hands accordingly — “the three words I understood, I have often
heard exchanged between my master and his master, Caliph Haroun
al-Rashid, upon whose head may Allah forever smile! I mean the
words Sohar, Zahir, and Serendib. As for the rest, nonsense or not, I
cannot report to Vizier Jafar al-Barmaki what I myself have not yet
heard, and since Sayyid Sindbad the Sailor has yet to favor me with
his reply to the caliph’s message, I cast my remaining votes in favor of
this fellow’s going on with his fantastical tale while I await that reply.”
He cleared his throat. “My profession teaches that just as many a mes-
sage makes sense to its sender but not to its receiver, so others make
sense to both but not to the messenger. On, therefore, with your
strange story, Sayyid Whoever-You-Are, and know that whatever I
hear, the vizier hears as well. Aye me four ayes, young ladies.”
“No need of that,” Yasmin said with a sigh. “My red and lusty lord
is not the only one among us who can count to fourteen twice. We
are back where we started.” So saying, she returned in fact to her place
at the foot of the table, from where she and our storyteller agreed with
their eyes that she had certainly done her best. Kuzia Fakan, mean-

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Four Interludes

while, having squatted before the caliph’s vizier’s messenger to drum
her disappointed fingers on her disappointed knees, turned now a
quarter turn to await orders from her master.
“Perhaps …,” said a faint voice down the line — al-Fadl, whom
Jayda had set upright in his own place so that she might retake hers —
“I ought to reconsider. …”
“Don’t trouble yourself,” suddenly and clearly said Sindbad the
Sailor, entirely wakened from his trance. “This is still my house and
household, my table, and my impending voyage to Serendib. Sayyid
Sindbad the Still-Stranded is still my brother and still my guest, as are
whichever of you choose to return tomorrow night. I shall then retell
my fell fifth voyage from first to last, and he likewise his, even if our
audience be none but each other and this tub.” He rapped upon it.
“Nor shall there be any further mincing and haggling, debating and
voting, either upon these tales or upon Voyage Seven. Swallow them
whole or spit them out, but chew them openmouthed no longer at
Sindbad’s table. The dance is danced, sirs; I bid you good night.”
Without even his usual “Yasmin,” Sindbad then withdrew to the
courtyard and climbed the ladder into his great empty sleeping tub,
pausing only at its rim to summon Kuzia Fakan with a glance and
then lowering himself inside. The dancer happily hurried after him,
paused likewise at the ladder-top, turned first to Yasmin and then to
“Bey el-Loor,” and to each said with a wink (in the language of her
dance), “Aye!” Our storyteller — no expert reader of that tongue —
thought he saw her mouth as well what might have been the name
Marjanah!
Murmuring among themselves, the company dispersed in three
several groups. Ibn al-Hamra, Ali al-Yaman, and Jafar left together,
supporting among them the still-apologetic al-Fadl. Likewise exited
Hajj Masud and Sidi Numan, after a head-shaking short conference
with Yasmin. Nuzhat and Fatmah Awad escorted Haroun’s vizier’s
messenger off, perhaps to join Salim and the other attendants else-
where in the house. Jayda, Yasmin, and our storyteller alone remained
in their places, silent, until presently from the courtyard tub Sindbad’s
voice resonated after all:
“Yasmin.”
Without turning her head, she cowled it, called back “Father,” and
rose at once.

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

 “I need words now with Jayda,” the voice said on. “You yourself
will kindly show my bereaved brother to his room.”
Black-caftaned Jayda grunted heavily to her feet. Yasmin turned her
hooded face Somebody’s way. “Your will be done.”
“See that it is,” replied her invisible father.

2.

So bold with her lover in Jayda’s presence, Yasmin seemed in her ab-
sence almost shy. Wordlessly we walked by lantern light up and back
through her father’s house to the guest apartments near the women’s
quarters. Her stalemate storyteller took her hand to reassure her and
startled her instead. He kissed that hand, held it, but we proceeded
then not as man and woman walking hand in hand from banquet hall
to bedroom (a thing not often to be seen where we were) but (a sight
less rare) as man leading woman by the hand from table to bed. At
our corridor’s end, in the shadows — was that Salim? No doubt, and
no matter. More ushered than usher, Yasmin hesitated at the familiar
door, as if prepared to say good night there, until her friend opened
it and handed her inside.
He waited then for her to initiate what and as she would. She set
the lamp down on his writing table and stood by. For the pleasure of
seeing her eyes and hair, he slipped back her djellaba-cowl. She re-
garded him tentatively, then lowered her glance to the light.
He read her sense. This evening’s narrative was not the first men-
tion she had heard of “Baylor” and “J. Moore,” their lively comrade-
ship and its terrible end. We had had occasion before to review each
other’s lives: in hesitant bits aboard her bride-ship and through our
joint ordeal with the Qeshmi pirates, and more intimately in Yasmin’s
rooms through our hidden, healing month of Sha’ban. But those had
been reticent allusions, quick takes, glimpses. Tonight, in public and
in one piece, she had heard, if not quite the story, anyhow one story
of her lover’s late love and loss, by which she seemed both touched
and distanced. Her previous responses — as to his renderings of
“Day-zee,” “Janeprize,” “Terifrum Ti-Nech,” “Terizah” — would
scarcely serve. She waited for him.
And, waiting, happened to touch her fingers to the paper on which
she had set the lamp, to the block capitals he had glossed that after-

350

Four Interludes

noon for Kuzia Fakan, and Kuzia in turn for him. “Bey el-Loor” she
murmured, pleased at her own half-guess, half-recognition, and hav-
ing thus blessed that equivocal name with her lips, she lightly bent to
kiss another blessing upon its letters. “Is this other the name of your
lost jewel?”
“It is only our friend Kuzia’s,” he said. To lighten our air and give
the two of us accommodation time, he reviewed for her his musings
on the B and A, then Kuzia Fakan’s upon the Y the L, the O, the R.
Meant to amuse, they brought tears instead to those djellaba-colored
eyes, which, alarmed, he quickly kissed as she had kissed those sym-
bols. “Yasmin,” he told her, “is my jewel.”
She shook her head but permitted her tears to be thus stanched,
and with some of her customary forthrightness removed and neatly
folded her sea-green robe and matching undergarments. Then she
turned, not to the bed’s edge (where her friend now awaited her plea-
sure and his consolation) but away from him, back to his writing table
(Behold, he could not help thinking as she bent over it: Baghdad’s
beautifulest B). Dipping her left forefingertip three several times into
the ink jar, she stood with her back still toward him and her feet apart
(Aroused already, he admired Allah’s uncrossed A) and drew upon
herself, out of his sight, three swift strokes.
“Let my lost sisters Day-zee and Jay-Moor remain Bey el-Loor’s
lost jewels,” she declared while doing this, “Jay-Moor especially, a
bold, free spirit whom I love and envy.” Then she turned, arms
akimbo, head just slightly cocked, to show him her name’s initial let-
ter, his name’s third, its three arms drawn from her perfect navel up to
her nipples and down to her crotch. “Yasmin tonight is Simon’s writ-
ing paper. Inscribe yourself on her, and in your writing I shall read
our story’s next chapter.”
That sweet collaboration we forthwith set about, without recourse
to further ink or literal quill. So painfully, even in our faint light, did
Yasmin’s eyes remind him tonight of “Jay-Moor’s” that Simon kept his
own carefully elsewhere: upon the crux of that Y, whose triple arms
he retraced with kisses; upon their dainty termination points and the
rest of this body so unambiguously Yasmin’s. In lovers’ script he wrote
upon her his familiar, heartfelt plaint: My stillborn twin; my first and
all subsequent lovers; my wife; my son and daughter, too; my brave and
free and latest-lost companion — none is more lost than he who lost you all.

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Whereto, in like language, his living parchment made its like reply:
Whatever has before been written here is no less lost, erased by love. Our
page is blank. Write on.
These salutations exchanged, there followed the body of our text,
which, though it comprised but a single word, might be said to have
read, The page that love renews need not be new, nor the pen untried to
write with clear new point. Our newly freshened, sweetest page commands,
“On me inscribe Yourself” — but welcomely supplies, for starting point,
its own initial. To which dear Y our dedicated pen, replenished, freshly
pointed, need but add the word that like that letter fuses two by love’s warm
confluence into one, mates pen to paper, Simon to Yasmin: ourself.
Thus glossed, this inscription so soothed both scribe and scribed
that history for a while relaxed its hold. We slept.

“Marjanah Marjanah Marjanah,” Jayda’s voice incanted some while
later in our heads. Our lamp was out; we stirred in each other’s arms.
The familiar voice complained from the foot of our bed, “He wants a
word with Jayda, declares Sindbad the Sailor, and what does that
word turn out to be? Marjanah!” After some grumbling in another
tongue, she went on in ours, “Every man’s key hangs between his legs,
and Kuzia Fakan believes she can unlock Sindbad by impersonating
Marjanah. Little does she know how little she knows, but she knows
she’s onto something when our lord and master summons her again
tonight into his Tub of Truth, despite this fiasco of an evening. Then
he summons me in there, too, the first time in years, and says to me,
regarding her, ‘This Bedou fly-bait imagines she can please me by imi-
tating my late wife, but as she never had the pleasure of that lady’s
acquaintance, she might as well be doing Mustafa the camel. Perhaps
if you,’ he says to me, ‘who knew Marjanah better than her husband
ever did, were to watch and coach her imitator, she would fail less
miserably tonight than she did last night.’”
Yasmin’s body tensed against her friend’s. He pressed her head to
his shoulder, her groin to the hip against which it rested. Stroking
then the small of her back, his hand bumped the speaker’s, which was
doing likewise as its owner spoke on:
“So he puts her through her paces, and wretched though her imi-
tation is — in her double ignorance of her model — Kuzia Fakan is
canny enough to have got hold of something after all. Well: without

352

Four Interludes

going half as far as I might have gone, I quickly show her one thing
and another that Sindbad himself had no doubt forgotten — not that
but this, not there but here, meanwhile doing thus but never so — all
things I taught Marjanah herself once upon a time. Then I am obliged
to stand by and watch the old goat in a rut such as he has seldom risen
to since I first procured that Bedou belly-shaker for his dry-land joy.
“Now then, beautiful and privileged listeners: as everyone knows
who has heard Part One of Chapter Six of Allah’s great tale of Jayda
the Cairene, its heroine possesses among her many gifts the ability to
read men’s zabbs as other folk read the Koran. Upon Sayyid Sindbad’s,
risen from the dead like the Messiah of Unbelievers, I plainly read Part
Two of that same chapter of that same tale. Following closely upon
Part One, it had to do with our heroine’s nearest approach to happi-
ness in the story thus far, and it went as follows:
“When Sindbad the Sailor returned to Baghdad from his horrific
fourth voyage (of which he gave a fair account tonight), he found his
house no less altered than himself. Hearing of his approach from Basra
and not knowing in detail what had befallen him on his long voyage
or how he had reacted to my shipboard message about Marjanah’s
death, I dressed the whole establishment in mourning, even down to
little Yasmin, who by then was two or three years old. Thus we assem-
bled to greet him in the beflowered courtyard, our hearts as full as the
fountains and fish pools that in those days graced this place.
“After glowering silently from one of us to another — especially at
myself and the daughter whom he had not seen since her birth-day —
he declared to us all, ‘Men should behave to men as men!’ He then
picked up Yasmin (who had even less idea than we what he was say-
ing, but who bravely overcame her fright and kissed her father) and
repeated to her that men should behave to men as men. Putting
her down, he ordered everyone except Jayda to return to their usual
employment. Me he directed into his erstwhile bridal tub for a pri-
vate audience. Presently joining me there, he spoke only one word:
‘Marjanah.’
“I supposed he wanted from me a full firsthand account of how my
hard-won prophecy had come to pass — Marjanah’s childbed fever
and the rest. But before I got fairly into my preamble, I saw a strange
dark look come over him like a roc’s wing over the sky. He sprang
upon me where I sat, hauled up my skirts and down my drawers, and

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would have forced my wâhât had it not been brimming already with
anticipation. ‘Marjanah!’ he cried again as he drove in — and now my
nether eye read plainly the message of his zabb: how the tidings of
Marjanah’s death had unstrung his senses for weeks, and how the later
horrors of Voyage Four plagued him yet with mad fits from time to
time. What exactly those horrors had been — the fate of Captain Ka-
sim and his other surviving shipmates on Island One, his own live
entombment on Island Two and the desperate measures by which he
had preserved his life, the loss and miraculous recovery of his Tub of
Last Resort — I read this first time only in outline, along with the
news that in his spells of madness (which by then came on him no
more than once a week, for half an hour) he relived both his passion
for Marjanah and that baseless suspicion of her fidelity which I had
once cured him of. Such a fit (I read further, to my disappointment)
was upon him at the moment; he not only invoked his late wife’s name
but called me by it and vented upon me his conflicting feelings for her.
The better to assist their ventilation, I did a thing or two that I had
once taught his bride to do, while giving her to believe that she was
teaching me. Sure enough, they brought him to a frenzy of coupling,
kissing, and cursing his ‘darling harlot Marjanah,’ after which he
quickly recovered his senses.
“In ordinary postcoital Arabic then he thanked me for having seen
to his wife’s funeral arrangements and for supervising his household
and his daughter’s upbringing in his long absence — not to mention
having given him lifesaving prophetic advice. Any sort of unpleasant
treatment I might have just now received at his hands, he warned
me, I could expect whenever his madness was on him. But those fits
appeared to be slowly abating in frequency and duration, and if I
thought myself able to cope with them, he would be pleased to have
me manage his household in his presence as I had in his absence.
“How my heart and wâhât together yearned to cry yes at once,
without reservation! But my better judgment imposed one condition:
he must give me a fair prevision of the arrangement he proposed, and
then permit me either to accept it or to decline and take my place
instead among his ordinary womenservants. How could he do that,
he asked me, when he himself had no clear idea of what he meant to
do next with his life? I reminded him of the means whereby I had
foreseen certain things before; he reminded me that I had forsworn

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any future such prophesying and had urged him to accept what was
to come as it came. Should I not follow the same advice? Perhaps, I
granted, but given his new and unpredictable seizures, if precautions
might be taken for his welfare and his daughter’s, for example, I
wished to foresee and take them.
“‘My daughter,’ he repeated, as if to convince himself. He then
agreed to my condition, on two conditions of his own. First, whatever
I might see in the dark well of the future and however I might act
upon what I saw there, I must say nothing of it to him — nothing
more specific, at least, than ‘Mind what you swallow, lest your mind
be swallowed’ or ‘Sail this time in some other vessel than Zahir.’ Sec-
ond, I must contrive some way to reinvigorate his instrument of
prophecy, which had altogether spent itself on ‘Marjanah.’
“That latter requirement I quickly and joyfully fulfilled, for it was
not Marjanah or Marjanah’s handmaid he was dealing with now,
but the central character of Allah’s great narrative of the world: Jayda
the peerless Cairene herself. In less time than it takes to say ‘Men
should behave to men as men,’ I had his zabb even readier for Jayda’s
bi’r than it had been for ‘Marjanah’s’ wâhât. I assumed the position of
prophecy, and without more ado Sindbad the Sailor plumbed the
strait passage of things to come, doing to me as men do to men who
do to men as men do to women.
“In view of what was thereby previewed by me, however, his other
stipulation proved harder than his zabb. My inmost, furthest-seeing
eye thus opened, I saw what I saw: what in the weeks and months and
years thereafter I would see again, both approaching and come to
pass. I keened. Believing he had hurt me, my rider made to dismount,
but it was what I saw and could not save us from that hurt. ‘Drive in
and on,’ I bade him, and I keened again. Good as my word, though, I
spoke not a syllable of what was revealed to me, but declared myself
ready to accept his proposal.
“Thus commenced, despite its darknesses, the brightest interlude
in Allah’s chronicle of Jayda the Cairene. She became Sindbad the
Sailor’s concubine-in-chief, mistress of his house, foster mother of his
daughter. Sharing his bridal tub, she shared more fully his hard his-
tory, the details of which his zabb inscribed in her as in a logbook,
and she came to love and pity him more than herself. Ably, when the
fit was on him, she played ‘Marjanah’ till that fit passed, though she

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shuddered at what she knew his mad mix of love and rage would lead
to. For in those fits he railed not only at his ‘faithless wife’ but at the
doubly innocent Yasmin as well, calling her no daughter of his at all
but the spawn of some nameless interloper upon her shameless
mother. Then, when presently the fit passed, there was no more dot-
ing father in all Baghdad than Sindbad the Sailor, who claimed to
remember nothing of his mad behavior.
“Just a few pages into this interlude, there came one day to our
gate, as I foresaw there would, an elder man leading a beautiful boy-
child of four or five years and begging an audience with Sindbad.
When my master saw him, they fell upon each other’s necks in joyous
reunion and then spoke together privately at length in his Tub of
Truth. That night I learned from the messenger in Sindbad’s drawers
that the man at the gate was the navigator Mustafa, first officer aboard
the ship that had lately rescued Sindbad from Peppercorn Island. That
ship’s captain, Allim al-Yom (the one who had refused payment for
his act of mercy, declaring that men should behave to men as men),
had alas just died, leaving behind an orphan son and — having guided
his whole life by that virtuous motto — no money for the child’s sup-
port. Mustafa himself subscribed to that same principle and had there-
fore taken the child in rather than see him beg on the street, but being
unmarried as well as virtuous and poor, and a mariner by profession,
he could not provide for the boy. Remembering Sindbad’s thwarted
wish to reward the good captain who had saved him, Mustafa now
presented him with a chance to fulfill that wish.
“‘Men should behave to men as men,’ Sindbad’s zabb told me its
owner had affirmed. Extending that precept to boys as well, he forth-
with took into his household both the navigator and the orphan child,
which latter he consigned to my care, instructing me to behave to the
boy thenceforward as to his own flesh and blood.
“Now: this man-child, Umar al-Yom, was indeed as bright and
sweet as the morning light that first strikes the caliph’s minarets and
causes the muezzins to cry out for holy joy. Being so close together in
age, he and Yasmin quickly became as brother and sister and were
inseparable. Everyone in the household loved him, from the master to
the lowest kitchen slave. Even I, who might have been expected to
resent his introduction into the family (and so I did) could not but
return the ready and radiant love of Umar al-Yom.

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The hearer of Allah’s great tale may wonder, why should Jayda
have harbored any such resentment? Why, because my master’s zabb
had spoken yet another thing to my wâhât along with its nightly news
reports, and when Mustafa mu-Allim the navigator came knocking at
our gate with Umar al-Yom, my womb was big already with that ut-
terance. Thus it came to pass that by the time my first- and only-born
was born, he had a virtual older brother as well as a true half-sister.
All this, mind, I had foreseen with my hinder eye when Sindbad
plumbed the Well of Things to Come — this and more besides, de-
spite which I mothered Umar al-Yom as I mothered Yasmin and —
after I had all but followed Marjanah to the grave breech-birthing
him — my son, Salim.
“As for the navigator Mustafa, Sindbad commissioned him to find
a new captain for his ship Zahir, one as shrewd as he was skillful and
as closemouthed as he was shrewd, able both to follow his master’s
orders and to improvise to advantage when circumstances warranted.
Zahir itself he intended to refit in certain ways under this captain’s
direction for a different sort of merchant trading, inspired by his so-
journ underground on Island Two, Voyage Four: having accustomed
himself there to killing and robbing in order to survive, he had ad-
vanced to doing the same in order to prosper. These commissions and
intentions Sindbad repeated to me unwittingly in zabb-talk, together
with Mustafa’s reply: without inquiring into the exact nature of the
projected voyage, he believed he could steer Sayyid Sindbad to just
the right captain, one Abu Hosayn of Siraf. While men should no
doubt behave to men as men, declared Mustafa, the navigator’s only
job is to navigate — that is, to determine his vessel’s position, not its
destination, and to plot its course, not judge the reason for the voyage.
This he pledged himself to do, out of gratitude for Sindbad’s having
made a virtual son of Umar al-Yom.
“The new captain was found, as foxy a fellow as his name, and in
the years therefollowing he captained Zahir on a series of highly prof-
itable short voyages before the long one that Sayyid Sindbad now calls
his fifth. Not to put too fine a point on it, Sindbad the Master of
Survival had been transformed by his fourth voyage into Sindbad the
Predator, Sindbad the Shark, almost into Sindbad the Pirate. I say
almost because though Zahir’s new business was not piracy itself, her
new cargoes were pirates’ booty, of which Sindbad became the chief

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importer in the City of Peace. In Qeshm and certain other islands of
the Bahr Faris and Bahr Larwi, such goods were cheaply bought
wholesale from their barbarous interceptors, who dared not retail
them directly. In Baghdad they were readily and dearly sold when
their distributor happened to be a man of Sindbad’s reputation.
“Our dinner guests were now those merchants who were willing
to retail such stock without inquiring overclosely into its origins, to-
gether with occasional captains of the sort who supplied Zahir with
our goods. Truth to tell (I learned from my usual informant), Hosayn
the Fox’s sailing orders did not prohibit the odd piracy of his own, if
our stock-in-trade happened to be scarce at second hand and Sindbad
himself happened to be ashore; he was only to spare his employer the
unpleasant details of such transactions, so that Sindbad could plau-
sibly deny any charges of complicity. Thus do men behave to men,
and if such free and easy society was not the most illustrious in Bagh-
dad, it was one to which Jayda the Cairene’s youthful adventures in
Zabargad and elsewhere had quite accustomed her. I presided over
the foot of Sindbad’s table then as does our Yasmin now and was his
unquestioning ally and confidante as well as his bed-partner and the
mother of his son.
“His son! O beautiful and privileged hearers of Allah’s epic in prog-
ress: who could have guessed, besides the boy’s mother and Allah
Himself, that my Salim was Sindbad’s son? Unlike Yasmin, whose fa-
ther lavished his love upon her when he was himself and cruelly
spurned her when he was not, Salim he neither acknowledged nor
denied but took no more notice of than of any other serving-maid’s
bastard, who might be his own or some scullion’s spawn. Granted, the
boy was no Umar al-Yom; not even his mother could imagine that.
But he was the true get of Sindbad the Sailor by the heroine of this
story, and it galled his mother to see his father dandle Yasmin on his
left knee and Umar on his right while I dandled on both of mine the
runt Salim. But presently Sindbad’s madness would come upon him;
I would shoo the children out of harm’s way and for better and worse
transform myself into ‘Marjanah’; he would bless and abuse both my
wâhât and my bi’r; and in those latter depths, when he saw fit to
plumb them, I would be reminded of what was to come and reen-
couraged to bide my time.

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“Thus passed ten years of tempered bliss; a dozen; fifteen. While my Salim skulked and sneaked, my Yasmin grew from a beautiful child
into an even more beautiful young woman, the pomegranate of her
father’s eye except during his ever rarer (but no less severe) mad sei-
zures. Though she was too loving and charitable a soul ever to scorn
outright her nanny’s son (and her own unacknowledged half-brother),
she could no more take pleasure in Salim’s company than could I,
so painfully finer and more akin were her character and Umar’s. As
for that splendid young man, he had in effect three fathers to Salim’s
none, for Sindbad early apprenticed him to Mustafa the Navigator
and to Captain Abu Hosayn, both of whom prized him as did Sind-
bad himself. From every one of his voyages with them, Umar re-
turned yet more handsome and in all ways more appealing than
before, and more worldly as well, though with a persisting and en-
dearing innocence that Zahir’s peculiar commerce seemed not to
touch. Shielded by Mustafa mu-Allim from the true purpose of these
brief voyages, he made them as if their single aim was to bring him
back with new trinkets and tales of far-off places for Yasmin’s delight;
and that young lady thirsted for his return as I did for her father’s. A
mere seashell fetched home from some desert shore by Umar al-Yom
she would prize above any diamond from the Valley of Rocs and Ser-
pents, regretting only that she could not voyage with him to find such
treasures.
“Well now, sir and lady: I here confess that much as I loved Umar
myself — as who could not, especially one who had mothered him
from his childhood and whose affection he repaid as my own child
could never? — I grew ever more jealous of his well-justified prefer-
ment over Salim. Yet I bided my time, bided my time, until both
my nether and my hinder eye agreed that Part Two of Chapter Six of
this story was approaching its disastrous conclusion, which goes as
follows:
“There came a long season through which Sayyid Sindbad found
himself free of his spells of madness, and this was well, for of late those
spells had taken a new and ominous turn. Believe it or not, the beauty
of Jayda the Cairene is not altogether impervious to time, and in his
recentest seizures Sindbad had taken to reviling me not only in his
customary terms, as the roundheeled strumpet Marjanah, but as the
roundheeled ugly old strumpet Marjanah, whom he could scarcely

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bring himself to skewer upon his zabb. And sweet Yasmin he had come to excoriate (in his fits) not only as her sluttish mother’s daugh-
ter but as one who, being no kin of his, deserved no better of him
than any kitchen wench. Brokenhearted, she would fling herself upon
his bosom with appeals to his better nature and protestations of in-
nocence and daughterly love, and I would see in his eye a certain glint
that I had first seen in the eyes of the pirate fishermen of Zabargad.
Then the fit would pass, together with his memory of it; he would be
surprised and pleased to find his darling daughter embracing him, and
would wonder solicitously at her tears, which were of pity more for
him than for herself.
“Has Allah reported to His listeners that these fits of Sindbad’s
were for the most part our secret, Yasmin’s and mine? If not, He here
does so: even Umar al-Yom was barely aware of them, rapt as he was
in his own innocent adorability, his love of sailoring, and his soul
mate Yasmin, who was ashamed to speak of them to him. The rest of
the household likewise suspected little or nothing — except perhaps
Salim, whose back-alley nose smelled unsavoriness both where it was
and where it was not.
“For Yasmin in particular, therefore, unable as she was to see as I
could the next episode of this tale, it was sweet to imagine that her
father was cured at last of his disfiguring affliction and that she and I
would be slandered no more with those mad charges, of which I had
assured her that her mother was as innocent as herself. As for Jayda
the Cairene, her mention of the Zabargad pirates a moment ago
brings her now to the subject of Sindbad the Sailor’s fifth voyage. The
fact is that what it pleases him to call by that name was originally
meant to be merely the next in that series aforedescribed, aboard his
beloved Zahir, with one difference. Ever more impatient with the wild
and untrustworthy pirates who supplied his stock-in-trade, he had in
his latest two or three forays been inclined to secure a larger fraction
of his merchandise directly, bypassing those unruly middlemen by not
only authorizing Abu Hosayn’s incidental piracies but supervising
them himself; he took care only that young Umar should remain be-
lowdecks with Mustafa through such engagements. In truth, Sindbad
had become a pirate at heart, and despite the risk to his reputation he
planned this time to make a wholly piratical voyage under the guise of
his usual business, hoping to get by with the story that the vessels thus

360

Four Interludes

pirated by Zahir were themselves pirate vessels, whose cargo he was
in effect reclaiming for Haroun al-Rashid and the City of Peace.
“All this I knew without his having mentioned it to me in words,
and realizing that so flimsy a fiction would not go long unexposed,
one night I proposed to him — in what we had come to call our Tub
of Truth — a cannier lie. If his object was to become his own middle-
man, let him give out that his swift and able Zahir was to be laid up
for extensive overhaul in her captain’s home port of Siraf. Let him then
hire in Basra, as he had done in days gone by, a larger, slower vessel,
put aboard some legitimate trading goods, induce a company of fellow
merchants to join him, and make in fact a trading voyage profitable
for all, as if for old times’ sake. Let him then so arrange matters that
en route home up the Gulf of Persia, his profit-laden clunker would
be intercepted, perhaps off Siraf, perhaps off Basra itself, by a certain
foxy pirate in a certain swift and able ship, and her entire cargo taken,
her crew and passengers dealt with as the pirate captain saw fit, and
perhaps even the vessel itself scuttled. Let only Sindbad survive to tell
the tale, as he had so often done before, reaching Basra perhaps in one
of the lost ship’s boats, or rescued by another merchant vessel conve-
niently passing by. He would have lost his goods and his companions
and would for the first time have returned to Baghdad empty-
handed — and therefore free of suspicion. But not long thereafter, his
refitted Zahir would serendipitously reappear in Basra, back in busi-
ness, fetching its owner a treasure from who knew where, the equiva-
lent of his and all his lost companions’ lost fortunes put together. …
“‘Pearl of Cairo!’ Sindbad exclaimed upon hearing this plan. ‘You
have read the fine print of my mind!’ I acknowledged that in a manner
of speaking, I had — and then I seized the occasion of his gratitude to
bring up another matter. Although his daughter and his foster son,
Umar al-Yom, had been raised together as sister and brother, I re-
minded him, in truth they were unrelated by blood and knew them-
selves so to be. Yasmin, while unquestionably still virginal, was a ripe
young woman nowadays, with breasts and buttocks ready to melt in a
lover’s mouth. Umar as well, while no doubt still innocent of women,
was a young stallion too zabbed and egged to remain innocent much
longer. Moreover, it was clear to everyone in the household, with the
possible exception of the two young people themselves, that they were

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either falling in love or had already so fallen. Used though they were
to having the same childhood freedom with each other as sibling play-
mates, in my opinion they had outgrown that freedom and ought to
be separated, as sparks from tinder. Let Umar henceforward pay his
court to Yasmin as a suitor should, I proposed — from a proper re-
move, through her father, as other young men of the town had begun
to do — and let Yasmin veil her face in Umar’s presence and subdue
her free and easy manner with him, lest their intimacy lead to some
untoward consequence.
“‘Umar and Yasmin?’ Sindbad responded. I saw that the notion
took him altogether by surprise and both interested and troubled him.
He bade me say and do nothing further in the matter until he had
observed the pair together in this new light; he would then confer
with me on how best to manage the situation.
“But my earlier proposal, regarding his next voyage, possessed his
imagination. While he did not dispatch Umar al-Yom to Siraf along
with Abu Hosayn and Mustafa aboard Zahir, but instead kept him at
home on the pretext of teaching him how ships were leased and
stocked for extended trading, the pair of them were so occupied to-
gether in Basra that for all Yasmin and I saw of them, they might as
well have been at sea. At one point I could not help complaining to
milord that our own Salim, no less than Umar, could use such tutelage
from his father. ‘Salim!’ Sindbad exclaimed, altogether incredulous,
and for some moments he looked as if he were about to be seized by
his first mad fit in half a year. Yasmin, who happened to be with us,
rose — either to forestall him with embraces or to retreat, as the situ-
ation might warrant. But then he simply laughed, as though I had
been teasing him with that name and epithet — our own Salim! —
not to mention that absurd suggestion. His laughter cut me to my
bowels, but I pressed the matter no further and was relieved to see his
expression return to normal — except for that certain eye-glint when
Yasmin salaamed before him and kissed his hands.
“Back in the harem, she and I praised Allah for thus sparing both
Sindbad and ourselves, and Yasmin vowed to that deity, now that she
was a grown woman herself, never again to let her dear nanny suffer
alone her poor father’s madness, should his fits ever recur, as I had so
often suffered them through her childhood. For this I thanked her,
but I kept my own counsel and bided my time.

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 “Of that last there was little more to bide, inasmuch as Chapter Six,
Part Two, had remaining to it at this point but a day and a night. The
day (the next after the foregoing) was Sindbad’s last in Baghdad be-
fore setting out for Basra and Voyage Five, the arrangements for
which, both official and secret, were now complete. The trading ship
was leased, stocked, and provisioned, and his fellow merchants were
forgathered at the port and eager for the voyage, while Abu Hosayn
and Zahir, under the pretext of laying up in Siraf, stood by there to
meet, accompany, and ultimately pluck the fruit when it grew ripe.
This last was Sindbad’s amendment to my proposal: so as not to keep
Zahir unprofitably laid up till his return (the date of which not even I
could predict, nor plot the fatal rendezvous so far in advance), he
planned to make Siraf an early port of call, and there, finding Zahir
overhauled ahead of schedule, newly armed, and ready for sea, to com-
mission Abu Hosayn to escort the larger merchant ship and ‘protect
it from pirates’ — as the herdsman protects his herd from wolves until
it is fattened for slaughter.
“After a farewell dinner that evening (during which a blind man
might have seen that Yasmin and Umar had eyes only for each other
and could scarcely bear the thought of their impending separation),
Sindbad sent word to the harem that I should join him tête-à-tête in
his Tub of Truth. ‘Allah’s blessing on you, dear Jayda!’ rejoiced Yas-
min, who was with me when smirking Salim brought this message. It
had been long indeed since I was last thus summoned to a night of
love (as she supposed), and I heard in her happy sighs a yearning for
the time when Umar al-Yom would so summon her. ‘May it be,’ I
replied — but inasmuch as I knew that calamity was about to overtake
us, my sigh was less joyful than hers. ‘Rub-a-dub dub,’ commented
Salim, whose insinuating mouth I bade him go rinse in the hammam.
“When we two were tubbed, Sindbad said shortly, ‘I have sum-
moned you for prophecy, not for general dalliance. Kindly assume the
vatic position and, as you did once before, without distressing me
with details of what lies ahead, give me whatever advice you can for
young Umar’s preservation and my own on this fifth voyage.’ ‘I hear
and obey,’ I said, and did, and was straightway administered such a
poke of prescience that tears sprang from all my eyes. ‘Speak,’ Sindbad
commanded. At what I saw ahead from behind I gasped again, then
gathered my breath and uttered two prophetic advisories. ‘First,’ I

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declared, ‘should you find yourself bestrode and all but ridden to earth
by some ancient, unshakable hunger, I bid you feed that rider till he
falls of himself from your back.’ What this warning signified was no
clearer to the warner than to the warned, but as it appeared to have to
do with swallowing (on which subject my earlier advice had proved
to be sound), Sindbad perpended it with thanks.
“‘Second,’ I continued, ‘ — and pray don’t ask me the wherefore of
it — do not take with you on this fifth voyage Umar al-Yom, or any soul
else whose life you value.’
“Without bothering to ask what I had bidden him not to, Sindbad
here angrily withdrew his divining rod and accused me straight out of
falsifying my readings of it in hope of persuading him to leave his dear
Umar behind and take with him instead my whelp Salim, to be edu-
cated in the arts of maritime sharp trading and shipwreck survival. ‘O
more perfidious even than Marjanah!’ he railed. ‘I need no hinder eye
to see the thing clearly! You and your trollop of a daughter are setting
your snares for my Umar! You want to pack off old Sindbad and the
cur Salim so that the pair of you can play mare to that young stallion!
Confess it, Marjanah: even on our bridal night you were no more a
virgin than Yasmin is now. Your maidenhead was but one more of
wily Jayda’s artifices, and your fidelity another!’
“By this point, needless to say, I understood that my well-meant
advice had set off that fit we had seen a-building the day before — a
fit all the more severe, like the storm that breaks a heat wave, for its
being so long overdue. This much I had foreseen, but not the full
extent of that storm’s fury, which inspired my master now even to the
Muslim ritual of unmarrying. ‘Foulest of females,’ he cried, ‘I divorce
thee! I divorce thee! I divorce thee! From this moment you are my
wife no longer, only a chattel of my harem, and your daughter an-
other — no more kin to me than Jayda the Cairene. I here consign the
pair of you to her wardship: you shall obey her in all things and hence-
forth come to me only as it shall please me to send for you through
her. Begone now, out of my tub and out of my sight!’
“Such was his fury that as he divorced his late wife he tore off his
turban and madly exorcised her ghost by snapping it at me like a silken
whip, a trick he had perfected in voyages Two and Three for driving
off giant buzzards and vipers of moderate dimension. Bare-arsed as I
was from prophesying, I felt those silk-snaps no less than his ravings.

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Four Interludes

As I scrambled into my caftan and out of their range, I heard beyond
the tub wall Salim’s familiar snicker and another, equally familiar voice
rebuking him. Up the ladder then and into the dry tub to my rescue
(as I clambered out and down) came not the brave and stalwart Umar
al-Yom — though he surely would have had he not been sleeping like
a baby in his own quarters, carried off to dreamland by a single cup
of bon-voyage wine — but our even braver because less stalwart Yas-
min. Her surpassing love for both her father and her nanny, which
had made her swear to intercede on my behalf should he ever again
relapse into his madness, had given her to fear, as I did, that just such
a relapse might ensue upon his summons. Boldly therefore she had
followed me to the courtyard and stood by in secret near our Tub of
Truth — as Salim was wont to do for less creditable motives — and
so got the drift of what passed between us. At the sound of those
turban-snaps she rushed to interpose herself for my sake, believing (as
the young and good and innocent are prone to believe) that her youth
and goodness and innocence could not but prevail over their contrar-
ies. Thus Jayda the Cairene herself once upon a time believed, back in
Chapter One of Allah’s world-story, until the Zabargad pirates edu-
cated her out of this delusion.
“Did I say that Chapter Six, Part Two, here concludes? Then I said
truly, for just as Sayyid Bey el-Loor, earlier this evening, piqued his
listeners by declaring, ‘The next thing I knew, I knew nothing,’ so I
must report that the next thing Allah’s peerless heroine knew, she was
in Chapter Seven of her epic tale. Wherein, fearing for her darling
Yasmin’s safety, she flies from the courtyard (pausing only to swat her
sniggering son), rouses Umar al-Yom from his righteous though
wine-induced slumber, urgently dispatches him to rescue her res-
cuer — and herself withdraws to the security of the harem while what
follows follows.”

Tense in each other’s arms, Jayda’s wakeful listeners bated their breath
and listened until we heard her snore. Yasmin then turned quietly onto
her twice-stroked back, did something small with herself in the dark,
reached to take her companion’s writing hand, and said, “Now I shall
read what is written.” She snugged that hand against the foot of her
self-inscribed Y. “Here is Baghdad, where Simon’s sixth and latest
voyage has left him stranded. …”

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

 “Peace be on this dear place,” that voyager affirmed, “this daintiest
jewel of a city.”
“As Allah wills.” From there she drew our hands slowly up the
letter’s stem toward its fork, declaring, “Kuzia Fakan last night danced
a certain dance with my father and contrived to borrow from him,
without his lending them, what may be the missing links in Bey
el-Loor’s story. She has given them to me to return to you, if yours
they are.”
“Yasmin!” our man could not help exclaiming — for in her navel
his fingertips touched what felt like literal links from some metal band
or bracelet. “We must light the lamp!”
“Morning will light it soon enough,” she said, pressing his hand
against her belly. “And whether or not my father makes a seventh
voyage, my Simon will. Very soon he will say good-bye to his friend
here in the City of Peace.” She re-touched “Baghdad” with his fingers,
which now held the links, and then retraced with them the stem of the
Y: “From Basra he will set out as if for Serendib” — she traced the Y ’s
left arm, up to her right breast — “and with the help of these magical
links, in some way beyond my understanding” — from her navel again
she moved his hand up the Y ’s other arm, across her heart — “he will
reach his home.”
It wanted only her enouncing that destination for our man to re-
alize its emptiness. Pressing the unseen links into her hand now and
enclosing that hand in his, on his knees beside her in the dark he
declared that there was another, better way to read that letter — a way
that did not divide but rather merged us, as the Tigris and the Eu-
phrates flow together into the Shatt al Arab and thence into the Per-
sian Gulf. Moving her hand back down from her left breast toward
her navel, he said, “Here is Yasmin, voyaging through her girlhood
into her womanhood and surviving that rough passage.” Leaving her
hand there, he next moved his own from her right breast toward that
same destination. “And here comes Somebody-or-Other, no sooner
finding a self for himself than losing it or leaving it behind. At this
point here — let’s call it the Axis of the World — their separate voy-
ages cast them together.” His hand met and clasped hers at that con-
junction. “From it we presently set forth, hand in hand.” He moved
our linked hands down the stem. “And whether our voyage fetches us

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Four Interludes

back to Baghdad or on to Baylorville or down to the bottom of the
sea, if we reach it together that place is Serendib.”
Yasmin squeezed our hands between her thighs (returning to him
as she did those precious links) and drew Simon’s face to hers. So
ended, where it had begun, this reading exercise.

3.

In his refreshened room that afternoon, while awaiting interruption
by Kuzia Fakan and company, Somebody wrote these English sen-
tences, among others:
Between my pen hand and my inkpot, as if transported from that “Jmaa
el Fna” in Charlotte Amalie’s Dronningen’s Gade, lie what we’re calling
my “missing links.” But missing links imply a chain in hand, whereas these
present stainless hits are from a missing … amulet, let’s say: not “Baylor’s”
nameless bracelet, lost and gone forever with its owner and his beloved Julia
Moore, but the faithful keeper of my time, reckoner of my position. From
time to time …
From time to time, much moved, he paused to touch those linked
bits to his lips, his nose, even his tongue, imagining that they bore the
savor of at least two lives and worlds. Then he wrote on, for who
knows whom: not the story of “Bey el-Loor’s” fourth voyage, as told
last night up to “The next thing I knew, I knew nothing”; not notes
toward the tale he might tell tonight, to whoever might be there to
hear, of the next thing Somebody knew after that. He registered,
rather, one more found piece of a missing puzzle: this morning’s tête-
à-tête with Sindbad the Sailor, in their customary conversation place.
The page Salim, as usual, had brought the forenoon summons. As
usual, too, between the writer’s room and the deserted courtyard the
page attempted to pump dry the summoned by pumping him full.
The whole kitchen staff now understood, Salim insinuated, glancing
often at our man’s face as he spoke, that Sayyid Still-Stranded and the
caliph’s vizier’s messenger were colleagues, communicating by secret
signs down the dinner table as they prepared to expose the grand fraud
of Sindbad’s next voyage.
“You have found us out!” Somebody exclaimed, as if consternated.
“A sharp fellow like you would do well in the vizier’s service! Was it

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

our wine-cup signals you deciphered, or the code of our votes? And
does Sayyid Sindbad suspect us?”
“You tease me,” Salim replied. “But I know what I know, and if
you don’t soon spring your trap, Sayyid Ibo will spring it for you.
Even Hajj Masud can’t be fooled forever; soon there’ll be no chickens
left for Sindbad to pluck.”
“Or to divide his profits with,” Somebody suggested instead. “We
believe your father knows what he’s doing.”
“My father!” The page spat on the ground and, in vulgar but sub-
dued Arabic as the pair approached the camel Mustafa and the lad-
dered courtyard tub, swore that he aspired one day to fist-fuck
Sindbad the Sailor in his half an ass for all the father that man had
ever been to him.
Said Somebody, “Filial love takes many forms. Good morning,
Brother Sindbad!”
“Brother Sindbad!” the old man’s voice called back from inside the
tub, hollowly but cordially. “Kindly join us here while Salim kindly
waters Mustafa.”
The page made a fist of his left hand, extended it tubward, and
thrust into it the thumb of his right before moving off. Still-Stranded
Somebody mounted the ladder and found his namesake turbaned in
resplendent ultramarine, and not alone. Cross-legged to the left of him
sat black-veiled and -caftaned Jayda, as impassive as always. Prostrate
before him, Kuzia Fakan was busily kissing the tub floor between his
feet. Both of her arms were stretched before her, and old Sindbad
gripped her firmly by both wrists. She waggled her costumed backside
high, as if in desperate greeting.
“Be seated, Brother! Over here, perhaps.” Sindbad tipped his tur-
ban toward the vacant cushion on his right quarter rather than the one
opposite him, from which Kuzia evidently had been drawn. As won-
dering Somebody sat, the dancer rolled her eyes in an uncertain signal
and rekissed the floor.
“Well, now,” Sindbad said. “Jayda reports that my daughter’s
honor was so closely guarded through the night that she’s sleeping
still.”
Her guardian made a small salaam of acknowledgment. Kuzia
Fakan rapped her forehead on the floor until her master let go of one
wrist to silence her. Head pressed to the floor, she mouthed in Some-

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Four Interludes

body’s direction something silent, urgent, but alas unintelligible. Sind-
bad next declared that as for himself, despite last evening’s defection
of several more investors in Serendib Limited and the prospect of fur-
ther such defections to come as certain poisonous slanders got about;
and despite the pressure on him from Haroun al-Rashid, by way of
his vizier, by way of his vizier’s messenger, to reply forthwith to the
caliph’s directive; and despite the prospect of banishment if not death
should he fail to come up by tomorrow with a final sailing plan (of
which, he candidly admitted, he had in fact not even the hint of a
beginning); and despite the regrettable circumstance of his being
obliged to chop the hands off a certain thieving whore of a dancer and
to sell the rest of her to the keeper of the Baghdad lepers’ brothel for
stealing a certain small treasure from him yesterday and attempting to
steal a greater one early this morning — despite all these considera-
tions, he found himself in good humor. For when she was not busy
being a common thieving Bedou whore, Kuzia Fakan was an uncom-
mon thieving Bedou whore, and last night (her final night in his
house), before she attempted the impermissible and was subsequently
revealed to have done the unpardonable, she had contrived with the
aid of Jayda’s coaching and her own native desert wit to delight him
in a fashion in which and to a degree that he had not been delighted
for a good many years — so much so that notwithstanding the Islamic
justice that he must now inflict upon her (and that Haroun might
soon inflict upon him) nothing could altogether dampen his spirits
this excellent morning. “Peace, therefore, Brother,” he concluded,
“and the blessings of the day be on you.”
“On yourself as well,” replied Still-Stranded. “Likewise upon these
canny and formidable women of your house.” Without asking then
why exactly he had been summoned to this domestic business —
which his host’s manner and Kuzia’s face-talk told him was, though
serious, rather less dire than it sounded — he declared straightway
that it was himself who must be disciplined for theft. “The hand that
took these links from you,” he said, and he displayed them in his open
palm, “was the one you hold. But the arm was this that now returns
them. Kuzia Fakan acted on my orders.”
“Yours!” But Sindbad seemed to Somebody not altogether sur-
prised, just as his threat of punishment had seemed less than literal.
Nor did he move immediately to reclaim the missing watch-bracelet

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

links. Our man deposited them near his slippered feet; Kuzia kissed
them welcomely, then picked them up between her lips and, like an
obedient puppy, placed them in the hand her master presently ex-
tended. “And whose right arm are you, of which this Bedou is the
hand? Vizier Jafar al-Barmaki’s, or that of Haroun himself?”
Our man responded simply that those links came from where he
himself came from and were his only present link thereto. In hope of
reachieving their source, he must know where and how his host had
come by them. Only with that knowledge might he — just possibly —
be of assistance in Sindbad’s present plight as well as his own.
Scowling and murmuring, the old man now briefly inspected the
bits of steel in question. Evidently satisfied, with surprising quickness
he then lifted one buttock (the less-cushioned left) and thrust them
under it. “Not content to be my brother,” he grumbled to Jayda or to
himself, “he would be my son as well.”
As Somebody considered that remark, his host pronounced a con-
ditional reprieve for Kuzia Fakan: he bade Jayda take her back into
the harem for further instruction of a particular sort and to fetch her
back to revisit him later in the day, before the evening’s feast and ex-
change of tales. Should she improve yet more upon her last perfor-
mance and complete the restitution that his brother had begun, he
might even pardon her offense.
“Fountain of mercy!” the dancer duly cried.
Said Sindbad the Sailor, “Don’t speak to me of fountains,” and —
bidding Somebody to remain with him and Jayda to clear her snoop-
ing son from the courtyard — he dismissed the two women.
“What then shall we speak of?” our man asked presently. “Seren-
dib, perhaps? Where I come from, we say of situations like yours that
the clock is running … by which is meant, let’s say, Allah’s hourglass.”
As if to his beard, Sindbad responded, “Mine has all but run. I am
an old man, easily baited if not so easily bested. Serendib for me is no
brine-soaked island but some dune-girt oasis five hundred parasangs
from the nearest sea. To live out my last years in bone-dry peace in
such a desert wâhât, with none to attend me but Jayda and my daugh-
ter … I would trade all this.” Without raising his eyes, he indicated
with a wave of one hand his tub and, presumably, the house and
household therearound. “Let younger Sindbads feed themselves to

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Four Interludes

Allah’s sharp-toothed swimmers,” he went on. “The only seventh voyage I crave is aboard the camel Mustafa, with the crew afore-mentioned, to some such arid Serendib.”
He glanced up shortly at his listener, who ventured in reply that
such an inland trek was in secret fact the very voyage that his host and
“brother” had all along been planning — perhaps dispatching a decoy
ship from Basra on a wild-goose chase to “Serendib” while he ab-
sconded with the bulk of his partners’ capital? In this reading (our
man ventured further), the whole protracted dowry negotiation with
Ibn al-Hamra, for example, was no more than a diversion. If Sindbad
was less than devastated by the recent defections from Serendib Lim-
ited, was that not because he was more than desperate over Haroun’s
having called his bluff, and was prepared to settle now for merely
escaping the caliph’s wrath? With full saddlebags, to be sure, and
agreeable company. …
Sindbad sighed. “Whoever you are, you are indeed my brother.”
But even while sighing, he flashed Somebody a reappraising glance;
then, rather than asking the price of confidentiality and possible assis-
tance, he waited, as if to hear it.
“A moment ago you called me your would-be son,” our man said
instead. “How is that?”
For the first time in this interlude, Sindbad smiled. “Because if you
came from where Kuzia stole those links from, my son you’d be. But
ask me no further questions on that head,” he added sternly, “or I’ll
bid you good day until this evening.”
“Then I can do nothing for either of us.”
“As Allah wills. The blessings of the day be on you.”
Sindbad’s stubbornness, however, seemed clearly experimental.
“‘The day,’” Somebody repeated, “al yom. My fifth-voyage tale this
evening ends with al layl, the night. Will yours begin with al-Yom?”
The old man’s startlement appeared authentic, his groan sincere.
“Umar! That shaitan of a godchild, who played all his fathers false!”
Presently he let go of his beard, recomposed his turban and himself,
and declared that while he would no more repeat that false son’s name
in public than repeat the name of that despicable Qeshmi pirate Sahim
al-Layl (and was therefore obliged, whenever he recounted his fifth
voyage, to speak more or less figuratively), if his brother insisted on

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

hearing in confidence the literal and sorry truth about Umar al-
Yom — and would press him no further in the matter of those metal
trinkets — he would tell it.
Still-stranded Somebody shook his head. Regarding those links, he
regretted to say, he had no recourse but to press, press, press, to the
end of the chapter and beyond, or else fling himself into the Shatt al
Arab. He could promise no more than to postpone further pressing
till after the telling of this other tale, in which he might be said to have
an official interest, as he understood it to involve the honor he was
pledged to protect: Yasmin’s.
“It most certainly does that,” dour Sindbad acknowledged. “But
give me your word that what I say will remain within this tub.”
“So be it; and let this tub be where the tale begins. I’ve heard from
here and there how the boy Umar came into your household, and how
you kindly raised him as if he were your own son and Yasmin’s
brother. …”
“Men should behave to men as men,” Sindbad said gloomily.
“What else have you heard?”
“How he took to sailoring, like his father and his foster father,
and how he looked forward to his first real trading voyage with you.
Perhaps you can begin with the night before that voyage, here in
this tub.”
Once again, nodding, Sindbad assessed his tubmate’s tone and face.
Then he told this tale:
The night before any voyage, he had learned from experience, was
normally a restless one for him. Was everything in order? Would he
ever see his home and friends again, and if so, after surviving what
perils? Through the night before Voyage Five, however, he slept like
a newborn, or as his sturdy but sensitive godson was wont to do after
but a single glass of wine. There had indeed been good wine at the
farewell banquet earlier that evening, and despite Sindbad’s making
free with it (for he did not permit himself wine at sea), he had not
failed to notice that his daughter seemed even more distressed at her
“brother’s” imminent departure than at her father’s, and that Umar’s
eagerness for his first major voyage was tempered by the prospect of a
long separation from his “sister.” As the young pair were not in fact
blood relatives, and as Sindbad loved them equally, the happy thought
had occurred to him (he said) of perhaps marrying Yasmin to Umar

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Four Interludes

al-Yom when the time came — maybe when Voyage Five was safely
behind them.
Furthermore, though it had been his practice ever since Voyage
One, in order to compose his spirit for the rigors ahead, to sleep alone
in his Tub of Truth just before setting out for Basra with his Tub of
Last Resort, that practice did not forbid a little good-night sport —
provided in this instance by his then favorite, Jayda. Already by that
time she was no longer the Cairene beauty he had fetched home from
Voyage Three: bearing and nursing the whelp Salim, in particular, had
taxed her charms. But in the dark (if Sindbad might speak so freely),
she had still an uncanny knack for impersonating other women, her
younger self included. In this specialty, as Still-Stranded had lately
heard him attest, the dancer Kuzia Fakan was no slouch, either, but
her bedtime improvisations could not fetch tea for Jayda’s in her
prime. On the evening in question, as a bon-voyage gift, the Cairene
had done to a T Sindbad’s late beloved wife, of whom Somebody had
heard in the tale of Voyage Four. Sindbad could have sworn she was
Marjanah’s ghost, come back full-fleshed as his virgin bride! Even the
tricky business of a maidenhead Jayda had managed with more than
usual cunning, along with Marjanah’s winsome combination of shy
modesty and eagerness to please. …
All this was by way of accounting for his uncharacteristically solid
slumber on the night in question, for if “Marjanah” was as spry and
fresh as on their wedding night, her bridegroom was not the lusty
young Sindbad who had survived Voyage Three but rather a weary,
wine-drowsed old shark not many years younger than the one now
speaking. His every appetite presently sated, “the next thing he knew,”
he was being gently shaken awake (from dreams of beautiful Marjanah
and her look-alike daughter) by the whelp Salim and eager young
Umar, the latter declaring that it was time to set out for Basra and
their great adventure.
“How I loved that boy!” Sindbad here exclaimed. “The image of
myself at his age, ready to seize life by the turban and ride adversity
like a Bedou horseman! What hopes I had in him for my elder age,
what trust! A trust that (unknown to me, despite certain ugly insin-
uations from Salim, which I dismissed) he had already betrayed!”
En route down to the port, however (he presently continued), the
lad was not his usual sunny self; even at the time it seemed to Sindbad

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

that something heavy was on the young man’s mind, which he wished
to speak of but found it difficult to broach. For his part, Sindbad, too,
had had a disagreeable announcement to make. Perhaps his stranded
brother had heard that Voyage Five, like its predecessor, had not been
sailed in the redoubtable Zahir. following certain warnings and pre-
monitions that experience had taught him to trust, Sindbad had leased
a larger though less able vessel for the trading voyage proper and had
commissioned Zahir as an armed escort at least through the gulfs of
Persia and Oman, which were every year more infested with pirates.
Such was Umar’s love for him (so Sindbad had believed) that not until
they reached their first port of call — Persian Siraf, halfway down the
Gulf, where Zahir waited to join them — did he have the heart to tell
the boy that he was transferring him there to the escort vessel for the
remainder of the voyage, and even then he shied from telling him the
reason, for he knew that to Umar al-Yom the prospect of shipwreck
(which Sindbad foresaw) would be but one more splendid adventure,
the more so at his foster father’s side.
And so indeed Umar protested, without Sindbad’s even having
mentioned shipwreck specifically, when the time came to set out from
Siraf. As much as he loved Mustafa mu-Allim and Zahir, Umar de-
clared, he loved Sindbad many times more, and would as leave stay
behind in Siraf, or even make his way home to Baghdad, as not sail at
his mentor’s side, in whatever vessel and through whatever tribula-
tions, learning from him the subtle art of survival with profit.
At that mention of home and Baghdad, Sindbad had nodded to
himself, knowing well what the real attraction of that place was for
Umar. It occurred to him then (as he set aside once more Salim’s
troublemaking innuendos) that perhaps what had been bothering the
young man lately was the prospect both of having to explain that he
had fallen in love with his adopted “sister” and of asking his “father”
for permission to marry her. As Sindbad had not yet consulted Yas-
min’s feelings on the matter, he said nothing of it to Umar (and would
in any case have withheld his consent till the voyage’s end, even if the
young man had raised the subject); he overrode his objections, or-
dered him aboard Zahir, and refused to hear more on the matter.
In every subsequent outbound port of call, when the two ships
moored together, Umar stubbornly repeated his request; Sindbad
stubbornly denied it without explanation (lest rumors reach his fellow

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Four Interludes

merchants of their expected fate); and the young man grew ever more
downcast and sullen. At one point Mustafa mu-Allim even came over
from Zahir to intercede on Umar’s behalf and was reminded by his
employer that the navigator’s responsibility was position-fixing, not
crew assignment. One final time Umar made his plea — at the port of
Kulam Mali, at the southern tip of Al Hind, just prior to the little
convoy’s long leg across the Bahr Harkand to the Bahr Salahat — and
was again refused.
Now it happened that a few of the merchant traders, whether they
were unused to the rigors of voyaging or simply unlucky, had fallen ill
on the outbound passage and either had died at sea or were put ashore
at Kulam Mali to recover; their places were filled by other Muslim
traders in that port who were eager to try their fortunes farther east.
Among this number was a cowled and muffled young man who no
sooner came aboard than he retired below, claiming seasickness even
before the ship made sail, and remained abed there, the butt of his
fellows’ jokes, until the merchantman and its escort were well out to
sea. Just about then the two ships were separated by the first serious
storm of the voyage, and though Zahir was nowhere to be seen when
that storm passed, and Sindbad trembled for its welfare and Umar’s,
he comforted himself that there was no sign of floating wreckage,
either, and that his less seaworthy merchant vessel had survived. All
the same, when several days went by with no sight of Zahir on any
horizon, he withdrew to his quarters and prayed aloud to Allah to
preserve from harm his dear son Umar al-Yom.
Thereupon the seasick young merchant rose up from his berth
nearby, disclosed himself to be that same Umar, begged Sindbad to
pardon his ruse on the grounds that its motive was loving, and in one
burst confessed his love for Yasmin and begged for Sindbad’s permis-
sion to marry her. Overjoyed to see him safe, the older man embraced
the younger at once before scolding him roundly for his disobedience
and impertinence. He explained to Umar then why he had assigned
him to Zahir and why the boy must return to that vessel as soon as
the ships refound each other. Meanwhile, so as not to arouse the other
merchants’ misgivings, he must remain incognito but position himself
as near Sindbad as possible at all times, repeating like prayers the six-
teen lessons of voyages One through Four and hoping to rendezvous
with Zahir before the inevitable disaster overtook them. As for that

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

other matter, to teach the lad yet another lesson, Sindbad steadfastly
refused to discuss it until and unless they safely regained Baghdad.
As he had anticipated, the young man was undaunted by the pros-
pect of nautical catastrophe. But chagrined though he obviously was
not to have his marriage proposal ratified on the spot, he agreed to
abide by Sindbad’s stipulations. There followed the several celebrated
episodes of Voyage Five proper, which our narrator said he would
pass over here, inasmuch as he would be rehearsing them tonight. He
did assert, however, that when the party made landfall at the usual
uninhabited Island One of every voyage, and came upon the usual
windowless dome that was in fact a roc’s egg, it was Umar al-Yom,
not the naive merchants, who rashly smashed it and slaughtered the
near-hatchling inside for the ship’s meat locker. Given that none be-
sides his mentor knew better than Umar the peril of this folly, Sindbad
could only conclude that in his eagerness the boy had broken the egg
deliberately to precipitate the omelet of adventure. Sindbad himself
fled at once back to the ship and his tub, entreating Umar (within the
constraints of the latter’s incognito) to do likewise, but the young man
smilingly declined and stayed behind with the other merchants to
butcher the giant chick.
For the first time then it occurred to Sindbad, he declared, to won-
der about his protégé’s motives — the more so when, back aboard at
last with his terrified companions as the chick’s vengeful parents cir-
cled overhead with huge boulders in their talons, Umar still refused
the Tub of Last Resort and stood by a spare plank instead, at the
opposite end of the deck. As Allah would have it, the ensuing bom-
bardment sank not only the fleeing ship but, for the first time, the
faithful tub as well. Sindbad himself, needless to say, survived; like-
wise Umar, lashed to his plank but sorely roc-rocked. All the others
drowned.
The young man’s subsequent behavior, Sindbad even yet endeav-
ored to persuade himself, must be attributable to his injuries. When
the veteran survivor, dazed by the furious bombardment and the loss
of his trusty tub, swam gratefully over to that plank to preserve his
own life and assist his injured ward, Umar actually struck and kicked
him away, cursed his very beard and turban, and swore by Allah he
would have Yasmin to wife — over her father’s dead body, if need be!

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Four Interludes

And so he might have, Sindbad said, had those injuries not carried
the day. Himself weakening fast from immersion and shock, Sindbad
clung as best he could to one end of the plank, enduring both physical
and verbal abuse from that least expected of sources until at last, to
save his own life, he was obliged to promise Yasmin to Umar in ex-
change for a more secure survival perch. Almost grudgingly the young
man agreed, and thus they drifted for three uneasy days, Umar grow-
ing ever weaker while Sindbad, an old hand at this mode of seafaring,
regained his strength. When at length the boy had clearly passed the
point of posing any threat to him, Sindbad declared, in effect, “Un-
grateful fellow! It was your late father, Allim al-Yom of blessed
memory, who taught me that men should behave to men as men. In
honor of him and that precept, I forgive you this shameful episode on
the grounds of your injuries, and I pray that Allah will do likewise. It
goes without saying, however, that the promise you extorted from me
is null and void. I intend to do my utmost to save your life as well as
my own, and never to mention this interlude again — but perish the
thought of your ever having my Yasmin!”
To this, with what proved to be his last breath, the young man
laughed and replied that as to that, he had already had Sindbad’s
daughter masthead to keel and stem to stern on the eve of this same
voyage, so basting and infusing her with the nectar of his zabb that
even as he now spoke she was doubtless belly-full of him in Baghdad.
So saying, he died, and though at his taunt the world turned nearly as
black before Sindbad’s eyes as before Umar’s, the older man managed
before fainting to cut loose his godson’s lifeless body and bind himself
to the plank with those same lashings. “The next thing he knew,” he
said, he was reviving on the paradisical beach of Voyage Five’s Island
Two, almost ready to believe that all that had transpired since the roc
wreck, perhaps even since the storm, was an evil dream inspired by
Salim’s malicious mutterings.
There followed the rest of Voyage Five, whereof more tonight: his
encounter with the Old Man of the Sea, his eventual rescue by a land-
ing party from Zahir, and the voyage’s profitable completion in that
vessel. Through it all, Sindbad said, he sustained himself with the pre-
sumption that Umar al-Yom’s dreadful words, like his atrocious be-
havior, had been the effect of injuries that had left him not himself.

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To Zahir’s captain and navigator he affirmed that his godson had
jumped ship in Kulam Mali, not to make his way home to Baghdad,
as they had supposed, but to be with his foster father, and that he had
alas gone down with the merchant vessel that Sindbad had tried to
keep him from: a story true enough of the young man whom they had
all so loved. Thus Sindbad both pretended to mourn his loss and truly
did mourn it, but he ended Zahir’s voyage some months short of its
maximum profitability in order to get back to Baghdad and put his
mind at ease regarding his daughter.
Once home, he straightway summoned both Jayda and Yasmin to
the Tub of Truth. Whether because rumor had preceded him from
Basra or because Jayda had foreseen the news, there was no need for
Sindbad to inform them of Umar’s fate; the two women, already
dressed in black, were red-eyed from mourning. Instead, he demanded
directly of his daughter (no use doing so of the wily Cairene or her
spawn) that she look him in the eye and say whether she was still
virginal.
“Of course my darling is still virginal!” Jayda replied indignantly.
“Why should she not be?” But Yasmin only stared at him, her whole
expression (Sindbad said) declaring otherwise.
When he regained his voice, her father next asked her whether she
had been forced.
“Why, certainly she was forced!” Jayda cried at once. “Can anyone
imagine that my darling would yield her flower willingly before her
wedding night?”
Her eyes never faltering, Yasmin admitted, “The thing you speak
of happened with my consent. I did not resist.”
Only when Sindbad next demanded “Where is the child?” did his
daughter turn away, to weep on Jayda’s shoulder. There was no child,
her guardian reproved him; the whole unfortunate indiscretion and its
consequences were past and private history, of which no one beyond
present company need ever know — just as the perpetrator himself
might well not have known, so out of his head had he been with wine
when he forced Yasmin.
“No man will ever force me!” Yasmin cried again, even as Sindbad
groaned, “He knew, all right! He knew! And will your royal bride-
groom not know as well, on your wedding night?”

378

Four Interludes

He then informed them bitterly that en route home from the Sea of Pearls he had stopped at his birthplace, the port of Sohar, and had
been so well received there by the young Omani prince Jabal, who was
preparing to make a state visit to Baghdad, that he had every hope of
soon returning that hospitality. Until now, he had even dared hope as
well that the handsome young bachelor prince (who was said to be
scouting all Islam for a bride) might look favorably upon Yasmin. But
why should royalty give a second glance to shopworn merchandise?
Yasmin only wept for her lost “brother”; Jayda answered firmly,
“Leave everything to me.” But though for Sindbad’s diversion she
soon after found in the slave market the frisky young Bedou dancer
Kuzia Fakan, her master was scarcely placated until the following year,
when Prince Jabal not only fell in love per program with Yasmin but
was so desirous of marrying her that he was willing to go against his
vizier’s advice and accept no further verification of his fiancée’s maid-
enhood than Jayda’s oath. A dowry was arranged to the satisfaction of
both parties; by quiet decree, the name Umar al-Yom was forbidden
to be mentioned in the house. The good ship Zahir, with her faithful
captain Abu Hosayn and navigator Mustafa, was recommissioned to
ferry the bride, her attendants, and half her dowry down the Gulf to
her wedding and her new home. So as not to jeopardize their safety,
her father (applying now the twenty lessons of his five voyages) made
ready to follow after, fingers crossed, in a second vessel with the re-
maining portion of the dowry — and then disaster, like a mighty roc
rock in Qeshmi pirate form, removed to the realm of grim nostalgia
all concern for such niceties as the success of Yasmin’s reconstructed
innocence.
“Such is the honor that you have, in your fashion, kindly been
safeguarding,” Sindbad concluded bitterly to Somebody the Still-
Stranded, “and that Ibn al-Hamra has been negotiating for in com-
plete though delicate bad faith: an honor compromised, to put it
mildly, long before the Shark of Qeshm devoured it utterly.”
“Be that as it may,” our man replied, “it is Allah’s truth — as I’ve
told you before but you have chosen not to believe — that that shark
never took one bite. Look here, Brother Sindbad: you think no more
of Sayyid Ibo than I; you would need to despise your daughter to
marry her to him, on whatever terms. But in truth you love her almost
as much as I do.”
“You!”

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

 “And in fact, as you’ve all but acknowledged, the dowry game with
Ibn al-Hamra is no more than bait for Serendib Limited — a bait that
lures fewer fish each night.” Straight out, then, to astonished Sind-
bad’s further astonishment and even, a little, his own, he proposed
that he himself marry Yasmin. Moreover, that he himself, “Sindbad
the Still-Stranded” — in the company of his bride and with the advice
and assistance of Mustafa mu-Allim — skipper Sindbad the Sailor’s
next and seventh voyage, to Serendib.
Incredulous, his host exclaimed again, “You!”
“Myself. Sell your house and goods, Brother, and fill your camel-
bags as you please. Give me and Mustafa just enough to build and
equip a small boat especially for carrying Haroun’s embassy-gift to
Serendib. Return your investors’ money and keep their goodwill; I
believe Yasmin and I can explain things to the caliph’s satisfaction. Or
make off with their money, if that better pleases you, and disappear
into the Sahra al Hijarah with Jayda and Kuzia Fakan for com-
pany. …”
“You!” Sindbad repeated, frowning but (Somebody noted, and
now makes written note of) no longer altogether disbelieving his ears.
Indeed, this time he added, as if grudgingly, “And what dowry would
you demand?”
Our man pointed unhesitatingly at Yasmin’s father’s crotch. “The
thing that those links came from, if it is still in working order.”
Not merrily, Sindbad laughed. “Allah be praised, my zabb and eggs
are still in working order! Sufficiently so, at least, that I’m not yet
ready to make a gift of them to any son-in-law for my daughter’s
entertainment! Ibn himself has yet to demand that bride-price!”
But it was clear enough to still-stranded Somebody that his host
understood what was being asked for. “Consider this, Brother. What
you take to be an amulet may be in fact a key: the key to my returning
to where I came from. I’ve yet to find the door, not to mention its
lock, but with the key perhaps I can at least sail off in search of them.
The amulet you need is dry desert air and the caliph’s pardon for de-
ceiving him. There is no other.”
To which Sindbad shortly replied, “As regards my needs, it is not
for my brother to describe and prescribe. But you’re right in saying
that there is no such amulet as the one you believe I believe in; there
are only those bits of metal that Kuzia stole and you kindly returned.

380

Four Interludes

I keep them about me as a souvenir of my recentest voyage: my sixth,
on which I lost Zahir but quite avenged my daughter’s honor.”
And on that surprising note (Somebody noted at this writing’s end),
Sindbad ended, and would say no more.

4.

Having considered through that afternoon, among other troubling
matters, the discrepant versions he had heard of Sindbad’s fifth voyage
and the events immediately preceding it, our narrator waited for Salim
to summon him as usual to the evening’s feast; he had questions for
that page. But it was Kuzia Fakan and comrades who, when the time
came, came to fetch him. Sizzle-snap: Fatmah Awad spun in, sa-
laamed, stood by. Close behind piped noodling Nuzhat and did like-
wise. The dancer herself then hauled herself unceremoniously into the
room and plopped onto a cushion.
“Dinnertime,” she announced, glumly massaging her legs. “Let’s
fill our bellies before the roof falls on our heads.”
By which she meant (Somebody learned as the four of them made
their musical way down through the courtyard to the banquet hall)
that for everyone except Sayyid Ibn al-Hamra things appeared to be
moving from bad to worse. There were new defections, perhaps many,
from the ranks of investors in Serendib Limited. Rumor now had it
not only that Sindbad’s projected seventh voyage was a swindling
fraud but that his sixth had not been what he claimed it was, either,
and perhaps the earlier ones as well. Rumor had it further that the
caliph was about to seize the old man and confiscate his property;
Haroun’s vizier’s messenger was now insisting on a full response to
his master’s message by dawn tomorrow.
“On the other hand,” Somebody pointed out, “Kuzia Fakan is still
here with us instead of in the lepers’ brothel, and every new defection
moves her higher up the table. The next thing we know, we’ll see you
dining in Brother Sindbad’s lap.”
Tambourine and pipes applauded, but Kuzia declared that she had
done time enough today already in that seat of honor, with such
mixed results that she had all but given up trying to understand where
she stood, so to speak. Having been rescued in the forenoon by pres-
ent company (for which Allah bless him!) and sent back to the harem

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

for “further instruction” from Jayda, she had been resummoned just
an hour or so past to what by then was her Tub more of Artful Simu-
lation than of Truth. There she had “done” the late Marjanah so
thoroughly and cunningly as to half fool even herself into believing
she was Sindbad’s bride. Really, at the risk of boasting, she would have
thought her master so roundly Marjanah’d that he’d have made her a
gift of his eggs themselves if she had asked for them, not to mention
any leathern accessories hanging thereabout. She had expected him to
be so altogether wâhâtted that she could have made off with his very
zabb, the way she had made off with certain oversatisfied customers’
purses back in her apprentice days. Instead, alas, the old scoundrel had
been so preoccupied — apparently with whatever had passed between
himself and his “brother” in the interim between her tubbings — that
far from being transported to Serendib, he was by turns amused and
mildly annoyed by her virtuoso performance. He had both applauded
the refinements of her impersonation and criticized its unavoidable
shortcomings. Her figure, for example, he had complained, was all
wrong: Marjanah, like her daughter, Yasmin, had had small breasts,
slim-boyish hips, and a tight little rump, not the moon-melon opu-
lences above and below Kuzia’s muscled Equator. Granted, he had
been much roused for the couple of minutes that were all he could
lately manage — but for that he credited his amulet at least as much
as her skill, and he had so carefully guarded that treasure that she not
only hadn’t a second to snatch it but couldn’t even find it, either by
sight or by feel. She was persuaded now, Kuzia declared, that Sindbad
had deliberately permitted her to steal those few links last night in
order to see whether she would do so and to discover who wanted
them and why.
“Somehow or other,” she concluded as they approached the hall,
“you’ve managed both to disarm him and to put him on his guard.
Even Jayda agrees that by rights he ought to be terrified of the caliph’s
anger and alarmed at the way his pigeons are flying the coop before
their feathers are plucked. He ought to be packing me off to the lepers
and gelding you for stealing Sayyid Ibo’s fiancée. …” The piper and
the tambourinist cut their eyes his way; steadfast Somebody did not
react. “And he is distressed by all these things,” Kuzia went on, “now
and then, for moments at a time. But then he sighs or smiles to him-
self; instead of cutting off my hands, he waves me away and talks to

382

Four Interludes

that camel or to his own beard, telling them the same old stories he
tells anyone who’ll listen. And his audience has never been smaller
than it looks to be tonight.” She made an artful pirouette and bow.
“That’s what we came to tell you, Sayyid Bey el-Loor.”
Somebody thanked her, earnestly, for having done her best on his
behalf at such considerable risk. He declared his hope and hunch that
whether or not he had advanced her position with Sindbad the Sailor,
he had at least not further distanced it. “It may be,” he acknowledged
finally, with a sigh, “that my brother really doesn’t have the thing I’m
after, after all. Even if he does, it’s so slender a straw that only a
drowning man would grasp at it. So: let’s eat and drink, as you sug-
gested, before we all go under.”
Entering the tapestried and incensed hall, they found Sindbad
seated as always before his smaller tub, blue-turbaned still and in deep
harangue with Ibn al-Hamra (on Cushion Two, as before, at the host’s
left hand, counting off vehement points on his fingers before the old
man’s beard while Sindbad shook his head). On Cushion One once
again sat the caliph’s vizier’s blank-faced messenger, looking about
him with pursed lips and twiddling his cup. As usual, at the low
board’s foot sat Sindbad’s daughter, djellabaed tonight in resplendent
ultramarine to match her father’s headgear. She was in earnest confer-
ence with her faithful standby on Cushion Three, Hajj Masud, who
looked to Somebody to be trying hard to swallow the unswallowable,
but upon our man’s entrance she turned and smiled, made as if to rise
and greet him, then reseated herself with a bona fide blush and merely
gestured instead toward Cushion Four, immediately on her left. But
as he bowed to the company and sat, to everyone’s startlement she
openly clasped his hand.
Thus were filled the table’s head, four corners, and foot. All six of
the remaining cushions were empty: not only Ali al-Yaman, Jafar the
merchant, and al-Fadl had absented themselves (as they had severally
declared or, by last night’s votes, implied their intention of doing),
but, it appeared, Sidi Numan as well, whose three votes had been two
ayes for “Bey el-Loor” against one cautionary nay. Had he, too, Some-
body wondered, had second thoughts concerning Serendib Limited?
Here and there around the walls stood Jayda, smug Salim, and now
the three entertainers, along with sundry serving-people, awaiting
their instructions.

383

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Yasmin released Somebody’s hand and observed brightly to her fa-
ther, “Our friend Sayyid Sidi appears to have been delayed.” So fresh
was her face, our man reflected, that one would have thought she had
slept as profoundly through the night as young Umar al-Yom was
reported to have done after a single cup of wine. Though the deep-sea
blue of her robe disquieted him — Caribbean, Serendibian blue, a
color to drown in — and could not much have pleased her hydropho-
bic father, either (whose own blue turban was safely out of its wearer’s
sight), Somebody believed he had never seen the woman more beau-
tiful, and that was saying much.
Red Ibn, who had reddened further at sight of that unprecedented
handclasp, gleefully seconded her: “In my opinion we ought not to
fast until Sidi’s arrival, or we’ll starve to death. But I suppose we must
vote on that, as on other issues.”
“Sovereign of my spittle,” Yasmin smoothly reminded him, “you
have forgotten my father’s ban last night on all such democracy. Shall
we begin?” This last was asked of Sindbad, who left off contemplating
her as raptly as our man had been doing and bade Kuzia Fakan, to her
large surprise and joy, to take the fifth place, alongside Haroun’s em-
issary. The sixth, across from her, he then assigned to Jayda, as expres-
sionless as ever. The two women exchanged a glance: Kuzia shrugged;
Jayda nodded. The seventh place, next to Hajj Masud, went now to
Fatmah Awad, who had to be coaxed by Yasmin and Kuzia to join the
entertained instead of entertaining. Likewise suddenly shy Nuzhat,
who when Sindbad ordered her to Cushion Eight (on Somebody’s
left) would no more put down her pipe than Fatmah unclutch her
tambourine.
“Be it understood,” Sindbad said to them, “that when Sidi Numan
or any others arrive, your places are theirs. Meanwhile, be still and be
silent.”
There remained the middle place on each side and, except for
anonymous kitchen folk, none but Salim left standing. Sindbad
winced; Jayda fixed her eyes on him sternly; Ibn grinned his redmost.
With a short gesture of his left hand Sindbad motioned the page to
Place Ten, beside his now beaming mother, and bade Yasmin pour the
wine. But “Why not over there,” Salim boldly complained, pointing
to Seat Nine, “where nobody is? Is Salim less to you than nobody?”

384

Four Interludes

Replied Sindbad, glowering, “That place is reserved for Kuzia
Fakan, who will give up her present seat to Sayyid Sidi when he ar-
rives. Is Salim less to me than my light-footed and lighter-fingered
Kuzia? We shall see.” As if the evident debacle of Serendib Limited
had perversely relieved him, with something like his earlier cheerful
authority he then commanded certain servants who were standing by
to bring in the final dinner guest from the courtyard. They bowed,
stepped out, and duly returned with the camel Mustafa and feed-
buckets full of straw and water, which they placed on the ninth cush-
ion, between Nuzhat and Kuzia Fakan. “Now our party is complete,”
Sindbad declared, challenging with his smile Salim and Ibn al-Hamra
especially. “Gentlemen and ladies: fill your bellies before my stranded
brother and I fill your ears.”
Mustafa had not waited for that invitation. His table-neighbors,
Nuzhat and Kuzia Fakan, shifted their cushions toward Somebody
and the messenger, respectively, to avoid the beast’s dribble. The oth-
ers more or less delicately fell to, attempting as well to make conver-
sation. Hajj Masud and Yasmin, in particular, strove to speak normally
of market prices and the weather. But quite apart from the camel’s
masticating presence, the dinner company was too uneasy an assort-
ment for easy talk, and what its number bespoke too ominous for
appetite. Before long, conversation trailed off, and eating, too, when
presently Mustafa saw fit to fart. By the second course (a couscous)
only Ibn al-Hamra and the camel still trenchered. The others one by
one gave over even toying with their food; they washed their fingers
and either sipped their wine or sat with hands lapped.
“Well,” Yasmin said to the room. “No doubt it’s better that men
should behave to animals as men than to men as animals. But enough
is enough.” All eyes followed her then to the table’s head, even indif-
ferent Mustafa’s. Did Somebody see her once-more-mesmerized fa-
ther silently mouth the name Marjanah? Five raps she rapped for
attention upon the Tub of Last Resort; one would have more than
served for all except Sindbad the Sailor, who however by Rap Three
was nodding in cadence with the count. Promptly upon Knock Five,
without preamble, he launched his tale:
“Among the outbound cargo of my fifth voyage were sixteen hard-
learned lessons — four from each of my previous times out — plus a

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

certain fresh prophetic caution from my Tub of Truth. But among the
new maxims I brought back, the first of tonight’s tale will be this:
Experience teaches us … to mistrust her lessons. See how well Sayyid
Ibn al-Hamra has learned it already: he now licks pigeon gravy from
the fingers with which he used so redly to inscribe these morals! And
this voyage’s second lesson will be: The foretellings of true prophets
necessarily come true, but in ways that not even they can foresee.
“For all the usual reasons plus some others, when I had dwelt
enough years here in the City of Peace to put even the horrors of
Voyage Four more or less behind me and to see my daughter cross the
threshold from girlhood to young-womanhood, I once again defied
both common sense and the teachings of experience and betook my-
self down to Basra, provisioned with my sixteen lessons and this dark
advice from soothsaying Jayda, which can stand as my tale’s third
moral, or Lesson Nineteen of the lot: He who finds himself ridden by
a hunger both ancient and unshakable can only feed that rider till he
falls of himself to earth.
“What did it mean? I refer you to the lesson immediately before it.
“My trusty Zahir being laid up for repairs and unsuited anyhow
to the voyage in prospect, I found me in Basra a vessel commodi-
ous enough for both my trading stock and the freight of my expe-
rience. For servants I took only the more expendable of my slaves;
for companion-passengers — perpend this, Son-in-law! — I chose a
handful of merchants willing both to take their chances with Sindbad
the Survivor and to pay their freight up front, in cash. And for ship’s
officers (my usual and regular being with Zahir) I chose men disposed
to heed the voice of my experience.
“So as not to waste time, then, once we were clear of the Gulf of
Persia and in open sea, I instructed the captain to put in at the first
uninhabited island we might happen upon, even if we needed neither
water nor food, and this he did. Why so, my companions demanded
to know, when except for fresh poultry our meat lockers were still
amply stocked, and where in the absence of inhabitants there was no
profit? ‘Trust my experience,’ I told them. ‘How shall we do that,’ they
then taunted, ‘when your experience tells you that this island is unin-
habited, whereas even from our anchorage we can see an alabaster
temple-dome in the woods just behind the beach?’

386

Four Interludes

“I, too, of course, had not only espied that same dome but recog-nized it at once as just another giant roc’s egg. This information I kept
to myself, even when the captain apologized for having thought the
island uninhabited and offered to go look for another. ‘This one will
do nicely,’ I said. A party of taunters then lightered ashore to do busi-
ness with the temple folk; I remained aboard and made ready my faith-
ful tub. Finding neither worshipers nor for that matter doors or
windows in their infidel temple, the disappointed merchants vented
their spite on it with stones. When eventually the great shell cracked
and a giant roc chick thrust forth its leg, they were at first frightened,
then fascinated, then fulsome in their praise of my perspicacity. How
canny my experience had made me, they marveled, not only to know
the island uninhabited despite appearances to the contrary, but to di-
rect them to the only larder item in short supply! They fell upon the
hatchling, reduced him to poultry parts, and boated back to boast of
their adventure and apologize for having doubted me.
“I accepted their apologies and — so as not to be washed up on
that same island after the disaster I knew to be winging our way —
bade the captain make sail at once and clear the harbor while those
merchants set about their guileless barbecue. Just as I anticipated, be-
fore the first great drumstick was half roasted on the afterdeck, the sun
disappeared behind double clouds, each of which was a vengeful roc
parent bearing in its talons a rock larger than the holy Ka’ba, and bent
on repaying in kind and with interest those who had cast the first
stones.
“‘Only two shots,’ I worried to myself, remembering the many
such missiles those one-eyed giants on Island One, Voyage Three, had
required to sink us. ‘May their aim be good.’ And so it was, inasmuch
as the giants had been hurling at us from the shore, at unaccustomed
range and without depth perception, whereas all birds are practiced at
hitting their targets from above. The first alone of those airborne
mountains would have done for us had not the captain taken masterful
evasive action. Even so, the splash all but swamped us, and it opened
such a moment’s hole in the ocean that I saw its deepest tenants gasp
for watery breath and crabs scuttle for cover across the naked floor.
Down then came the second, and by steadying with my long experi-
ence the helmsman’s frightened hand, I contrived to keep our vessel
in position to receive the full strike of it on that taffrail barbecue        — not to mention the rudder, the tiller, the poopdeck itself, the 

387

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

helmsman, and indeed the whole aft half of the ship. She went down like the stone that sank her, and for all intents and purposes — which is to say, my intents and purposes — I was once again the sole survivor.
“A pity, to be sure, but — perpend this, Son-in-law! — Fate is Fate
howsoever we diddle her. I had for example taken equal measures to
stay the steersman and to preserve my life-tub, but though the former
succeeded, the latter failed. That tub of mine, which I had come to
trust, depend upon, and even love, was lost and gone from me (the
one you see behind me is a replica: a Tub more of Verisimilitude than
of Truth, and of Next Resort more than Last), and I mourned it as
one might mourn … a lost child. In its place on Allah’s ocean was
but a single plank, to which was lashed a dead survivor, so to speak,
never mind his name: a fellow whose luck had proved unequal to his
foresight. I welcomed his companionship, inasmuch as experience had
taught me that the fare for my upcoming passage to Island Two must
be paid to the fish in toes and fingers. Better his than mine, which
were already in less than full supply.
“Thus, after the usual hard solo interisland crossing, I reached the
usual paradise and thanked Allah by giving my sharp-finned escorts a
handsome tip: the remaining remains of my late plankmate. I even
presumed to imagine that Jayda’s prophecy was safely thus fulfilled,
for that plank had indeed been beset by an appetite as ancient and
unshakable as any: the hunger of God’s creatures for one another,
which hunger I had escaped by gorging them rather than myself.
Starving, I now nibbled cautiously at the golden fruits everywhere
about me, among silver streams and jewel-like birds and flowers, tak-
ing care not to eat enough to make myself palatable. I lit no watchfires,
lest the island be a sleeping whale; I looked out for monocular ogres,
enormous serpents, wrathful rocs, gibbering apes, speechless canni-
bals, and other such of Paradise’s familiar hazards. Had I found evi-
dence of any, I would have taken routine precautions and settled down
to much-needed sleep, but finding none (nor any diamonds, either), I
was much perplexed and anxiously on my guard through that whole
first night on Island Two, Voyage Five.
“Only the next morning, when I ventured inland to a crystal pool
at the base of a waterfall and saw sitting therebeside a humanlike crea-
ture robed in stitched fig leaves, did I relax and tell myself that here at
last was the monstrosity I needed to get on with my story: Nemesis

388

Four Interludes

Overcome, King’s Favor Bestowed, then Rescue, New Fortune, and
Home. To my disappointment, however, a closer look revealed my
monster-designate to be just another castaway like myself, only
older — so like myself, indeed, that when he turned his sea-seasoned
face my way it was as if I looked into time’s mirror and saw either my
long-dead father or myself many voyages hence, wrapped head to toe
in Experience’s leafy lessons and grown so wise willy-nilly as to be
rendered mute.
“‘Venerable father!’ I saluted him, speaking figuratively. ‘What mis-
fortune has stranded you here with me?’ In truth, I had better asked
the opposite, for the misfortune turned out to be not the father’s but
the son’s. The ancient beckoned me nearer and in the soundless
tongue of hand-signs begged me to carry him across that mirror-pool
to feed upon certain fruits hanging near the falls. They had caught my
hungry sense as well: just ripened, sweet, tender, of a sort at once
familiar to my eye yet foreign to my tongue, which craved them all the
more for their being out of ready reach and for the flowers whose
perfume advertised their savor. ‘Aha,’ I said, respectfully teasing him.
‘Our limbs fail sooner than our lusts, and young legs are obliged to
carry old desires.’ Although my experience in voyages Three and Four
cautioned against strangers who hungered speechless, in this oldster’s
plight I could not but see myself some shipwrecks hence, and so it was
by way of being my future that like a dutiful son I shouldered toward
its heart’s desire. In that clear pool I saw me carrying myself ever
deeper, step by step, until the human Sindbad who speaks words like
these and behaves to man as man was all but submerged, and the blind
old craving on his back — ageless, tireless, wordless but alas not
toothless — had its way with that young vine.
“You all have heard what followed — how when presently I un-
pooled myself and bade the old chap alight so that I could proceed
uncumbered to my own, more temperate nourishing, he gripped my
head near to cracking between his thighs and gobbled on; how when
then in angry fright I tried to cast him off me, he choked me senseless
with one hand while still gorging with the other. I recovered to find
the sweet vine stripped of fruit and flower and leaf alike, my rider still
aboard and spurring me for more. All day he drove me like a beast of
burden through Paradise’s orchards, kicking my gut while stuffing his.
At nightfall he rode me insensible to earth, nor could I shake free of

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him even when he seemed to sleep, for his fig-leaf frailty masked a
stallion’s strength. Worse than a slave, worse than a donkey, I was but
his walking prop and privy, on which he voided the unspeakable
wastes of his appetite. So debased did I become after weeks of this
that between furtive scroungings to keep myself alive I prayed for the
Severer of Societies to take me out from under my foul rider — and
only then, in the formulation of that prayer, did I recognize the terms
of Jayda’s prophecy.
“But how unhorse by overgorging this ape of appetite, who so
crammed his maw through every waking hour that I soon became a
walking dunghill? A staggering one, I should say, for the burden of
his gluttony at length so weakened me that I could scarcely stand, and
down the road I saw the day when exhaustion must end my story.
Meanwhile (so cling we limpetlike to life even as we pray to die), as
my rider happened one afternoon to be ravishing a field of wild grape
and gourd, it occurred to me to postpone death for one paragraph
with wine. While the old one on my back was at his insensate gob-
bling and voiding, I surreptitiously juiced a quantity of those grapes
into one of those gourds, stoppered it with my next-to-last clean scrap
of turban, and left it to ferment in the sun. Sure enough, when some
days later I staggered with him that way again — on all fours now, my
last legs long gone, like the lower animal I had become — Allah had
worked His natural magic upon that juice, which then worked its own
on me. When I had drunk enough, my weightsome rider grew as light
as my head; I not only stood once more erect like the man I had
rebecome, but laughed aloud at what beshat me, and even danced
under my afflictions like the younger man I had once been. I shouted
God’s praises till the mountaintops replied, and when my ancient de-
mon pounded my skull for his portion, I passed up the gourd and
cried, ‘Yallah, foul fartsome father! Drink till your wicked old thirst is
drowned, and then piss me such a river as will raft me home!’
“Of this, to be sure, he comprehended not a syllable, but he needed
no instruction to guzzle God’s support for the insupportable — after
which he flung the empty gourd half a parasang across the glade, let
go a shriek of joy and both his sphincters, and slipped senseless from
my stinking shoulders like a shriven sin. All but levitating with relief,
I straddled him now and, still laughing like the drunken sailor I just

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Four Interludes

then was, relieved myself further till I seemed to float above him in an
antic dream. With the first rock that came to hand — smaller than the
ones that had undone our ship but larger than those that had undone
the egg of its undoing — I scrambled his skull as my wine had done
his brains. ‘No mercy on your filthy soul!’ I cried, my own soul even
lighter now than my body. Then, as we happened to have ended our
connection where it began, at that limpid pool, after weeping at what
it showed me of myself I bathed clean in it till its waters were fouled
past all reflection.
“As fatherless and free again as Adam, with a final scrap of sea-blue
turban as my fig leaf I ran to Mother Ocean’s edge and there fright-
ened speechless a party of fellow sailors come ashore from their an-
chored craft for fresh fruit and water. When presently we both
regained our Arabic, they said they had mistaken me for the much-
dreaded Old Man of the Sea, from the legendary grip of whose loins
no mariner, once seized, had ever freed himself. And I told them, in
more detail than they could doubt, how the very man whom they had
taken for that fell gripper had sprung that grip and unstrung those
treacherous loins forever.
“What matter who those seamen were, where bound and why and
in what vessel? It was enough that they were fellow men: young men
of the sea, to whom I clung fast till Paradise dropped safely astern.
Never mind that in the rest of Voyage Five I learned to turn pebbles
into coconuts and coconuts into pearls, and once again came back to
Baghdad richer than ever — and with the prospect, moreover, of a
princely bridegroom for my pearl of a daughter. Never mind either
that just as Allah’s right hand can turn sour grapes into sweet wine
and paupers into princes, His left as lightly unturns them: the turn of
Voyage Five, and of this tale and its teller, was turned unreturnably in
that paradisiacal moment of my back’s unmonkeying, when I laughed
heavenward through the shit, pissed on my pisser, and came back
clean and mother-naked to the sea’s salt bosom.
“Clean, I say — and in truth, comrades, I so laved myself back
there in Eden’s pool, diving under again and again and scrubbing till
my head was clear equally of wine and dung — that I felt washed clean
of Experience itself and all its tricky lessons. But if that bath soaked
nineteen such away, it also anointed me with traces of a twentieth,

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which I here pass on but will neither complete nor gloss: He who, to
cleanse himself, fouls the mirror that has showed him foul …
“Yasmin.”

But Sindbad’s daughter, as a rule the very spirit of replenishment, did
not promptly this time rise on her father’s cue to refloat the company’s
suspended doubt. Indeed, she appeared to still-stranded Somebody to
be on the verge of falling over in her place. Upon Sindbad’s meeting
the Old Man of the Sea she had closed her eyes, and had not reopened
them while that hard rider bestrode his mount. At his fall and death
she began to sway slowly on her cushion, as if in prayer; at the men-
tion of the pool befouled by cleansing she opened her eyes wide; and
the coupled syllables of her name would have felled her had not Hajj
Masud on one side and Somebody on the other steadied her between
them. But refill the cups drained by that narrative she could not. Again
her father spoke her name, more in piteous declaration than in com-
mand: “Yasmin.” On a signal from Jayda, Kuzia Fakan went around
to pour from the older woman’s jug. At the table’s foot they bent
together to whisper to Sindbad’s daughter; she shook her head, but
permitted her cup to be refilled with Allah’s Helper and then drank
it off.
Complained then Ibn al-Hamra across the table to Haroun’s vi-
zier’s messenger, “You may report to your master that our host’s travel
stories have turned into parables that honest businessfolk can make
neither heads nor tails of, and their morals into riddles instead of les-
sons.” Then down the table, laughing, he called, “Hold her, Hajj!
That is as near to Serendib as you’ll ever come, and nearer by a table’s
length than I. It’s we who have been ridden down the path, night after
night, by a certain pair of ancient mariners, and got our caftans fouled
with their fairy tales. I say let’s get ourselves out from under, as Sidi
Numan and the others have done, and go hammam ourselves clean of
these naughty dreams!” Still grinning, however, he took Kuzia’s pour-
ing hand as she filled his cup, and saw to it that wine spilled down the
front of his caftan. “Try this,” he advised the moon-faced messenger
with a wink. “It’s the only piece of their code I’ve cracked, and the tub
it leads to is one more of laundering sport than of laundered truth.”
At these radical pronouncements even the page Salim seemed star-
tled, if also mischievously pleased. Nuzhat and Fatmah Awad dared

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Four Interludes

not turn their heads from their laps, but they nonetheless cut their
eyes alertly here and there. Jayda and Kuzia Fakan stopped stock-still;
Yasmin hid her face in Hajj Masud’s shoulder. Sindbad the Sailor
turned our-manward in sober silent question, as if to say, “There we
have it, Brother: bluff called, gauntlet thrown, Allah’s sky about to
fall. What now?”
Only the camel Mustafa chewed on, indifferently.

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Somebody’s Fifth Voyage

“Truth,” I said, echoing Ibn al-Hamra. “Yes. That is what any shall
hear who’ll stay to hear me. Not that Sindbad the Sailor has spoken
falsely of his fifth voyage, but by his own acknowledgment there are
truths that must be approached as one approaches Serendib: by
indirection.”
My own fifth voyage, however, I went on, turned out to coincide
with Ms. Yasmin’s first, of which I meant to give now a plain and
literal account: how the ship Zahir, carrying bride to royal bride-
groom, fell prey to certain pirates not through disastrous mischance,
as though the island of Qeshm in the Hormuz Strait were some anti-
Serendib, but rather through deliberate, accurate, and malevolent
navigation into their waiting hands.
“Stop there, Brother,” Sindbad commanded me. “This is a story
that we will not hear.”
“Indeed not,” Hajj Masud agreed at once, with none of his usual
hem and haw. “In the name of Allah, tell some other!”
“Any other,” Jayda seconded, surprisingly: the first words I had
heard her speak aloud in general company. Even Kuzia Fakan shook

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her head in disapproval. But Ibn al-Hamra clasped his hands in car-
mine satisfaction and declared, “I think we shall hear this one! It’s the
first by this fellow that I’ve looked forward to!” And when I made a
small, ironic salaam of acknowledgment, he added, speaking to Sind-
bad, “Indeed, sir, I so anticipate this story that if we are denied it, I
don’t see how I can in good faith continue my engagement to your
stainless daughter and my support of your seventh voyage — not even
for thirty percent of the proceeds.”
Yasmin raised her sorrowed face from Hajj Masud’s shoulder to cry,
“Thirty percent!”; then she reclosed her eyes and returned her brow
to its comforter. Mustafa made a noncommittal camel-sound.
I affirmed that for the sake of its bearing upon that enterprise —
but even more for its bearing upon Sindbad’s daughter’s reputation —
my tale ought to be heard. Together with its sequel, I said, it was the
story that I had come back to this house to tell.
“Came back!” Ibn clapped his hands on his knees, grinned grimly at
Salim, and glared down-table. “Mark what he said, Hajj! I knew it!”
You know nothing, I said to him, yet. But while there is surely no
reason why the woman who will become my story’s main character
should not be excused from hearing her indignities rehearsed, so re-
solved am I to tell this tale that if I am forbidden to tell it here and
now, I will find some way to tell it to Haroun al-Rashid himself.
“You have found that way,” suddenly declared the caliph’s vizier’s
messenger, and he beamed around the room. “You clever gents may
think me camel-dumb, and in fact I am neither scholar nor poet nor
astronomer. This fellow’s stories, in particular” — he tipped his tur-
ban meward — “are all algebra and abracadabra to me. But like Bed-
ouin horses, we royal messengers are bred to our business, and we
pass down from father to son our peculiar talent for messengering.
Does the paper need to understand what’s written on it? It need only
take the ink without smear or smudge, and for faithful impression you
will look far to find my like in the City of Peace. Everything said in
my presence from the moment I arrived in this hospitable house to
the moment I leave it at dawn tomorrow will be repeated as faithfully
to Vizier Jafar al-Barmaki as if you gentlefolk had written it word-
for-word upon my skin, and then rerepeated to the caliph as may be
called for. Here, for example, is Sayyid Sindbad, just a moment ago:

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Stop there Brother this is a story that we will not hear. And Sayyid Whoeverheis: Truth yes that is what any shall hear who’ll stay to hear me.
And Mistress Kuzia last night, as read off by Mistress Yasmin: Unac-
customed as I am to public speaking I shall not speak publicly but rather
make my statement in my customary way, et cetera — as I shall make mine
to my master the vizier. Allah forfend, however,” he concluded with a
bow to Sindbad, “that the guest give orders to the host. If Sayyid for-
bids that this tale be told, I can report to the vizier only that Sayyid
forbids this tale to be told.”
“By God and so you shall,” Sindbad exclaimed, “for I will ink that
message on your skin in truth! Sayyid forbids this tale to be told!”
“And Sayyid’s daughter,” Yasmin now declared, “respectfully but
firmly entreats her father to change his mind.” She retook my right
hand in her left and in unwavering voice went on: “Not only did this
man witness at first hand everything that happened to me from the
hour we fell together into the pirates’ trap until the hour I was ran-
somed and he was not; he was also instrumental in preserving what is
called my honor, though he could do nothing to save my reputation.
If he may not tell that story tonight, in the presence of this company
and especially this unerring messenger, I will go myself to Jafar al-
Barmaki and petition him to let us tell it together to the Prince of
Believers.”
Sindbad seized his own beard and set down his wine cup hard.
“Here is the end of religion! Guest threatens host, and daughter fa-
ther! You!” he cried to still-standing Jayda and Kuzia Fakan. “Take
your places and give orders to your master, as every slave should! Then
let the camel drive his driver, and good night all!”
But despite his show of indignation and his no doubt real enough
concern, the old man seemed to me not a little pleased as well — with
his daughter, with the prospect of the tale (the gist of which I had
outlined to his disbelieving ears that first forenoon in the Tub of
Truth), and even with its prospective teller — as if things were pro-
ceeding after all per a certainly desperate and risky but just possibly
successful strategy of his own. I was not surprised, then, when after
further scowling and humphing at his empty cup he raised his eyes to
me and commanded, as if grudgingly, “Tell.”
Thank you.

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The next thing I knew, I was sorry to have to say last night, I knew nothing. And of what happened between that next thing and the next
thing I knew after it, I know little more.
“I knew it!” Ibn al-Hamra complained happily.
When Simon William Behler was a boy in East Dorset, Maryland,
in the American 1930s and ’40s, he rocked himself to sleep long past
the age for such childishness. The next thing I knew after I knew
nothing, I was rocking myself awake, remembering my baby twin, my
playmate and soul mate and first loss, and a certain boundary or
launching game I used to play we played. Then I understood myself
to be in a shipboard berth, full-grown, at sea, amid a muted babble of
tongues and the belowdecks smell of oiled wood, ship’s stores, and
sweat. I stopped still, opened my eyes, and reflexively focused on my
wristwatch, still marking patient time. I even reset its rotating bezel,
just as reflexively, back up to twelve, at the same moment remember-
ing that I had very nearly lost that watch and registering that my berth
was not the snug forward vee of our stout little Zahir. …
Then I all but drowned in memory: Captain Tim Severin’s Sohar
and our cutter Zahir becalmed on the glass-green Indian Ocean below
Sri Lanka; the sudden squall from nowhere while “J. Moore” was pho-
tographing us; my frantic and vain attempt to rescue her; my aban-
donment of that attempt and panicked effort to save myself instead.
The accidental unclasping of my watchband and my unreasoning last
effort not to lose that, too. The exhaustion. The going under.
With a groan I bolted up, went dizzy, was steadied by a brown-
skinned, turbaned and wuzaraed crewman who said “Tamoun,”
good — one of the few dozen words of Arabic I understood. With him
were others, all likewise browned and weathered and similarly cos-
tumed (as for that matter was I, more or less), mildly curious, and
apparently cordial. They smiled, nodded, said things I couldn’t make
out to one another and to me. Shifting with the ship’s motion, sun-
light filtered through overhead grates and hatchways; water rustled at
the planks. I had been rescued, then, after all, by Sohar’s crew, and was
back aboard that sturdy replica, under way.
Urgently I asked the man steadying me, “Where’s the lady with the
camera? Where’s Zahir?” I made the motion of shutter-clicking and
repeated the name Zahir. Pleased, the fellow nodded and said some-
thing to one of his comrades, who then leisurely moved off and up a

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companionway ladder. “Captain Severin?” I tried next, and then, “Any
English?” — for on my several visits belowdecks on Sohar I had always
seen a few Anglo faces among the mix of Omanis, Malaccans, Balu-
chistanis, and others. Here I saw none. I was given some calm, unin-
telligible reply and was asked questions in return, which I couldn’t
make out.
A trembling seized me: fatigue, sinking grief, and mounting ap-
prehension, together with the stifling heat and smell of the crew’s
quarters — even more cramped than I recalled Sohar’s far-from-
commodious hold as being. By the time that other crewman re-
turned — not with Captain Severin but rather with a white-bearded,
somewhat portly, and wise-appearing Arab whose good-humored ex-
pression and gently teasing manner reminded me of my late uncle
Josh — I was verging on nausea and panic. Sohar, I repeated, begin-
ning to fear that this was after all not Sohar. Zahir, the camera lady,
Captain Severin, Sindbad’s voyages resailed. …
At these cues they variously nodded, shook their heads, looked
questioningly at one another, and replied with questions and com-
ments that were unintelligible to me. The “Uncle Josh” fellow, in
particular, appeared to recognize my language problem and to sym-
pathize with my distress; he spoke slowly and patiently to me, articu-
lated his Arabic with care, repeated key phrases and embellished them
with gestures. At the name Zahir he smiled, nodded, and patted the
nearest ship-timber, as if to say “That’s right.” Sindbad fetched a nod
from him, too, together with a gesture that seemed to include the
vessel, its whole company, and himself, and then a finger pointed
astern and the word Basra. Sohar got another nod of recognition and
a finger-point forward. But Severin drew a blank, as did Sri Lanka,
Serendib … and Julia Moore.
My Julia! I stood too quickly, swayed, steadied myself, then pushed
through them to the companionway ladder and clambered up, fol-
lowed already by merry admonitions. One glance around the deck told
me that this was not Tim Severin’s Sohar but a larger vessel of the
same general sort: an Arab boom, her crew, officers, and passengers
evidently all “native.” In addition to the barefoot, bare-chested, tur-
baned and loinclothed sailors working on deck and below, I saw on
the boom’s high poop a dark and commanding figure, clean-caftaned
like “Uncle Josh.” With him, besides the helmsman, was a slender

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woman in a red djellaba, who despite her veil and hood appeared not
only to be listening attentively to what the smiling “officer” was say-
ing, but to be asking questions of him as well, pointing to this or that
item of the ship’s rig. It even seemed to me (as my heart surged) that
she was insisting on trying the great tiller herself, to the helmsman’s
large though respectful amusement and the officer’s mild but likewise
respectful disapproval.
“Julia!”
The hatch I had emerged from was well forward, a forecastle com-
panionway; “Uncle Josh” and the off-watch sailors were right behind
me up the ladder, talking busily among themselves but politely stand-
ing by to see what entertaining thing I might do next. At my aftward
cry and bolt, however, they and their comrades quickly restrained me.
I was scolded by many voices at once in excited Arabic; “Uncle Josh”
shook his head and waggled his finger sternly.
“Julia Moore!” I shouted again, for I could well imagine my
friend’s gritting her teeth and — once she had seen to it that I was in
good hands — taking the veil if necessary to satisfy local proprieties
and get done what it was quite like her to want to do: try steering the
ship herself. The deck officer called forward something sharp; the
young woman (not as tall as my Julia, I strickenly saw now, though
awfully like her in that determination to get her hands on the tiller)
glanced at me but then quickly took advantage of the officer’s distrac-
tion to brush the steersman’s hands away and manage the helm herself.
As I was taken below I saw her nodding at the officer’s expostulations
or instructions, steadying the massive tiller with both hands and one
shoulder while the regular helmsman stood by with folded arms and
a wide grin. The cowl of her djellaba had fallen partway back; her hair
was dark, not copper-red.
I was roundly rebuked by “Uncle Josh” and ordered unambigu-
ously to remain in the fo’c’s’le and commit no further such mad
breaches of discipline. Very pointedly, though still patiently, the old fel-
low signed to me that my next impropriety would get me a flogging.
In his harangue I heard often the names Sindbad, Zahir, Sohar …
and Yasmin.
Plainly then he demanded to know mine, and (not for the first
time), he expressed curiosity about my wristwatch, as did the crew-
men. They were fascinated by its sweep second hand, as if they had

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

never seen such a marvel before, and for all my near-vertiginous dis-
tress I noticed that neither this obviously senior fellow nor the ordi-
nary crewmen wore watches, whereas all but the poorest of Sohar’s
deckhands, though not given to measuring time by the minute, like
the Europeans aboard, had sported Japanese quartz-crystal jobs with
(I had reminded myself at the time) what were, after all, Arabic nu-
merals. Behler, I told him: Behler, Behler, Behler. I firmly refused to
open the clasp and remove the instrument for their closer inspection,
as they urged me to do and even tried with gentle insistence to do for
me, but I let them watch the red pointer go around until, overcome
by new despair, I fell back groaning into the berth assigned me, shut
my eyes tight, and — grasping my watch wrist as if my right hand
were a rescuer’s — rocked in black misery from side to side.

That misery’s details are beside our point. I did not die of it, though
it lives on with me. The red hand of my watch went around, and the
two white ones as well, against despair’s black face, until I “came to
myself,” as our language puts it. In time, with the help of my forbear-
ing shipmates and that firmly solicitous elder officer, I took up the
large work of piecing together my situation (while also doing ship’s
work with the crew), though the largest piece of it mercifully eluded
me for some while and thus preserved my sanity. Our dealings with
Muslim tradespeople in Malacca, Sabang, and Galle (How that our
cuts through me still!), along with our preparatory homework for
cruising through Arab waters and our visits aboard Sohar, had taught
J. Moore’s mate more than a few dozen words of Arabic after all, nau-
tical Arabic especially; and desperate necessity is an able language
coach. I learned that I had been fished unconscious … and alone …
from the sea by order of Mustafa mu-Allim (the “Uncle Josh” charac-
ter), who, though he was only the ship’s navigator, happened to be
the senior officer on deck when the lookout spotted me. With great
difficulty, owing to the dizzying coincidence of names, I got it even-
tually straight that the rescuing vessel was indeed not Captain Sever-
in’s Sohar, of which the crew knew nothing, but a larger clone of it
named, incredibly, Zahir, bound from Basra for — incredibly! — the
Omani port city of Sohar, the shipowner’s birthplace and the site of
his daughter’s upcoming wedding to one Prince Jabal. This was the
young lady I had glimpsed and rudely called to, the one at the mention

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of whose name the crewmen rolled their eyes, in admiration of her
beauty and in amusement at her willfulness. She and her chaperone
and entourage were billeted in the after cabins and were not supposed
to show themselves on deck, but this Yasmin was irrepressible; it
would not surprise good Mustafa to see her climb the mainmast itself.
“She may climb mine,” one sailor sighed, and he was chided by the
navigator.
In our communication the gaps were unavoidably large and many.
Such terms as replica and commemorative reenactment were leagues be-
yond my Arabic then. But I knew from Severin that descendants of
the medieval Arab boom and other fiber-sewn vessels were still to be
found here and there in Arab waters (though I had heard of none on
this scale). Moreover, and alternatively, the elegance of Zahir’s trap-
pings, the apparent absence of commercial cargo, the frequent occur-
rence of the name Sindbad, and the clearly celebratory aspect of the
voyage in progress gave me to imagine that this might be, if not some
all-Arab version of Severin’s project, then some other sort of program-
matic anachronism. My mentor Mustafa even used a kamal to measure
latitude.
I found it in me therefore to hope against all odds that since it was
not Sohar’s inflatable tender that had rescued me, perhaps it had man-
aged instead to reach and rescue Julia Moore. Somehow Severin’s ship
and this one had missed seeing each other in the squall; in that fast
outboard dinghy his crew might even have caught up with our runa-
way cutter and taken it in tow. But me they would by now have long
since given up for lost; they would return grieving Julia to the port of
Galle, with or without our boat, or arrange for her transfer to another
vessel, so she could make her way home and go on with her life —
though it would not surprise or displease me if that intrepid woman,
after notifying what remained of my family and collecting herself, de-
cided to go on with our voyage single-handed, as it were in my honor.
So ran my early reveries. Urgently, as best I could, I told Mustafa
what might just possibly have happened and asked him to have Zahir’s
radio operator try to raise Sohar or, failing that, get word to our fami-
lies of my rescue and of Julia’s undetermined status. By neither speech
nor hand-sign nor drawing could I make this request understood,
though not only Mustafa but the deckhands as well got the general
drift of my plight: my woman lost overside in a squall, myself almost

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

likewise in an unsuccessful rescue attempt, my ship either lost also or
lost track of. They seemed able to sort out even the confusing coinci-
dence of ship names and the remote possibility (remote since they had
seen no sign of other vessels when they picked me up) that Sohar had
retrieved the woman and sailed on. Women, they agreed unanimously,
were much comfort ashore but bad luck on shipboard; they would all
be relieved when this particular voyage was done and they could re-
turn to their usual, less decorous seafaring. Meanwhile, as several of
them had lost shipmates, too, and all had experienced Allah’s maritime
fury, they sympathized.
“Let me speak to the captain,” I next begged Mustafa, though he
assured me that he had already relayed my story to that sayyid, Abu
Hosayn. He also puzzled, as did I, over what appeared to be one vast
discrepancy in my account, as he understood it: had I not said that
this misfortune befell me in the great ocean south and east of Al Hind?
But we were nowhere near that ocean, nowhere near that land, both
of which Mustafa knew well from previous voyages. We were in no
ocean at all, only the Bahr Faris, the Gulf of Persia, which he could
navigate blindfolded. Impossible, I said, and I gave him Sohar’s ap-
proximate latitude and longitude at the time of the accident, just off
the southeast coast of “Serendib.” Those coordinates evidently meant
nothing to him, but for all I knew, “local” Arab navigators in 1980
might be ignorant of or indifferent to Greenwich meridians and par-
allels, just as Mustafa seemed to get along handily with neither sextant
nor chronometer nor — so far as I had so far seen — even a steering
compass.
This positional mystery got me what my unintelligible radio plea
had not: a brief interview with the captain and a look at what passed
for the ship’s navigational station. Abu Hosayn — that same dark,
long-nosed fellow, about my age, whom I had seen deferring uncom-
fortably to the young woman on the afterdeck — I found aloof, indif-
ferent, even impatient: as deaf to me in his way as my father had been
in his, but without Joseph Behler’s passive benevolence. Like Mustafa,
he could not be made to understand what I meant by such terms as
radio or wireless; unlike Mustafa, he could not be bothered with my
plight. Zahir had paused in its important delivery mission in order to
save my life, his whole manner said; I could best express my gratitude
by working out my passage and disturbing no further the ship’s offi-

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cers and passengers. In Sohar I would be put ashore to fend for myself
and look for someone who could understand my language. Mustafa
cued me to salaam and press no further.
As to the “nav station”: down an aft companionway, near what
looked to be the captain’s quarters, was a simple table above a chest in
which Mustafa kept charts, dividers, rulers, kamals and sandglasses of
various sizes, and other instruments whose use I couldn’t guess. The
charts were meticulously hand-drawn, gridded in a manner unfamiliar
to me, and absent any compass roses marked in degrees. The place-
names and annotations were in Arabic script, which I could not then
read. Whether local trading vessels still preferred such charts to mod-
ern hydrography, or whether Zahir’s “commemorative reenactment”
was simply being carried further than Tim Severin’s, I could not get
clear (Sohar had been equipped with radio, compass, sextant, chro-
nometer, and up-to-date Admiralty charts). I saw immediately, how-
ever, that while the overall landmasses on the larger-scale charts were
inaccurately shaped and imprecisely positioned — these were copies,
I supposed, of medieval originals — the smaller-scale coastal charts
were impressively detailed. I would presently learn that as a mu-allim,
or master navigator, Mustafa knew them all by heart, as he knew the
stars, and almost never consulted them except to show the ship’s po-
sition to others, as he now showed it to me.
It made no sense. We were not in the Indian Ocean, not in the Bay
of Bengal, not even in the Arabian Sea. According to Mustafa’s dead-
reckoning plot, we were in the lower portion of the Persian Gulf,
paralleling the coast of Iran, reaching east-southeast and about to bear
east and then north of east into the Strait of Hormuz! He showed me
Basra, Zahir’s home port, and Sohar, our destination, where the toe
of the Arabian peninsula is bathed by the Gulf of Oman. I showed
him, on his largest-scale chart, the (misshapen) subcontinent of India,
or “Al Hind”; Ceylon⁄Sri Lanka⁄“Serendib” was not drawn in, but I
put my finger on where it should have been and on the approximate
spot nearby where Julia Moore and S. W. Behler had gone separately
overside: fifteen hundred miles away!
Genies, Mustafa amiably supposed; magic carpets. It was clear to
me that he knew exactly where he was; he could name every feature
of the featureless coast that now and then hove into sight off our port

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beam, and could show each to me on his charts. It was clear to him that I knew approximately where I had been (I was able now to show
him what passed for Malaysia and Sumatra — “Kalah Bar” and “Al
Zabag” on his chart — and our Zahir’s route through the Malaccan
Strait and across to its rendezvous, though what exactly we had been
doing there he couldn’t comprehend). But how I had got from there
to here neither of us could imagine.
“Trouble yourself no more with that,” Mustafa recommended.
“Strange fish swim in Allah’s ocean, and strange things happen upon
its surface. Of your life before we found you, who knows or cares now
but God? You were born last week, full grown, in the Bahr Faris. You
are alive and healthy. The sun rises and sets, the fixed stars are in their
places, and you seem to know their names and how to read a chart.
Perhaps you can assist me; my eyesight is not what it used to be.”
Thus it came to pass that though no one could have been more lost
than I (who did not yet know just how lost I was, or I would have
gone screaming mad), I became Zahir’s assistant navigator. The young
man who had formerly held that position had, I gathered, been lost at
sea some while before I had been found; with my scanty Arabic, I
could not yet make out whether the accident had happened on this
voyage or some previous one, nor whether my predecessor had been
Mustafa’s son or one whom the old man had loved like a son. In either
case, I was the beneficiary of that misfortune. The stars were indeed
still in their places, like steadfast friends, and bore the same names for
me as for Mustafa: Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Mizar, Rigel and Regulus,
Deneb, and the rest. I knew the fundamentals of azimuth-sighting
with the kamal; once I had gotten some sense of Mustafa’s units of
measurement, with the aid of my watch I could make considerably
more accurate time⁄speed⁄distance calculations than he could; and
though his intuitive allowances for the effects of wind and current on
the ship’s course were incomparable, I was able to show him how to
plot these in vector diagrams. In a matter of hours he entrusted me
with taking bearings for triangulation of our distance offshore; within
a few days — after I had demonstrated such tricks as “doubling the
angle on the bow” with the sort-of-pelorus that he used in lieu of a
hand-bearing compass — he left the navigation of the ship in my
hands when he was off watch or had other duties to attend to.

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Although I was still in a condition of sustained psychological shock, the useful work of reckoning our position, together with Mustafa’s kindness and my special status as his assistant, was some balm to
my distress. Moreover, the same language difficulty that left uncertain
the circumstances of my predecessor’s fate delayed my realizing what
on some final level I cannot credit yet: where I was (and am), not in
charted space but in recorded time. Our charts, my own eyes and bear-
ings, and my mentor all agreed that we were approaching the Hormuz
Strait; quite aside from how I had got there, I wondered where the
oil rigs were, and the supertankers and other large shipping bound
into and out of the Persian Gulf. From time to time I would see a
lateen or settee sailing rig more or less like ours; where were the diesel
freighters, the motorized trawlers, the naval patrol craft? As best I
could then, I asked, but my best was not good enough to make my
questions or Mustafa’s responses understood.
On his tongue my name became the more or less Turkish⁄Tunisian
and viceregal “Bey el-Loor”; the ship’s company (excepting Captain
Abu Hosayn, an altogether preoccupied fellow, who ignored me)
seemed to find that name’s vague distinction appropriate to my gen-
eral foreignness. However, they were seafarers, not unaccustomed to
dealing with outlanders; once my nautical competence had been dem-
onstrated, they accorded me a standing somewhere between the offi-
cers and the deckhands. In the performance of my navigational duties
I was given free run of the vessel except for the captain’s cabin aft and
the passengers’ quarters, which occupied most of Zahir’s midsection.
Several times a day (and whenever I awoke off watch and found my-
self, impossibly, where I was) I would be seized with a panic despera-
tion, and feel tempted almost to throw myself back into the sea, in
hopes of reviving on the track I had somehow lost. Impossible, im-
possible — and I did not yet realize the worst of it. I would give my
head a violent shake; I would hear myself involuntarily groan aloud.
Then Mustafa’s calm hand, or some other shipmate’s, would steady
me, supposing it was only my lost woman that I grieved for, and not
my lost self as well.
To keep myself from dwelling upon those losses to the point of
vertigo, I did my best to concentrate on reckoning our course and
improving my Arabic. I tried to savor, rather than go dizzy at, the
absence of anything “modern” except my wristwatch and the contents

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of my head. And I counted the days between our present position and
our destination, where I hoped to be able at least to clarify my situa-
tion and get word of it to my daughter and to Julia Moore’s.
That same counting and course plotting revealed something amiss
in our progress and gave me incidentally a second, closer look at our
chief passenger. By my reckoning, confirmed by Mustafa, we had
cleared the little island of Forur and were bearing just a touch north
of east toward Ras Musandam, the very toenail of the Arabian boot,
about a hundred miles ahead. There we would turn south-southeast
for the run to Sohar, another hundred and fifty miles on. Zahir’s av-
erage speed in a fair breeze — which I measured in the literal knots of
an improvised string-and-woodchip taffrail log, with the aid of my
Seiko’s sweep second hand — was in the neighborhood of four knots,
meaning a daily run of between eighty and a hundred nautical miles
when the wind was steady. We were no more than two days, then,
from Ras Musandam, and another two, or three at most, from the
port of Sohar and “civilization.” But even allowing for periods of calm
or light or adverse wind, we were not making nearly the distance we
ought to be. On a night when we should have covered forty miles, we
covered fifteen; a leg that should have fetched us from the islet of
Tunb to within sight of Cape Musandam fetched us instead to the
island of Hengam, some twenty miles to the northwest, just below the
much larger island of Qeshm, which dominates the Hormuz Strait.
Upon noticing this latter oddity I went up on the afterdeck (Cap-
tain Hosayn being in conference below with Mustafa), took a few
relative bearings by a method I had devised, which involved sighting
across the rotatable bezel of my watch, checked with the helmsman —
and found him steering almost 45 degrees to the north of our plotted
course! Astonished, I pointed this out to him. Captain’s orders, he
told me: he had been steering that northeasterly course through his
whole trick at the helm and was to maintain it until we raised the little
island of Larak, on Qeshm’s far end.
Why so, I asked, when the Musandam cape lay southeast? Captain’s
orders.
As I made my puzzled way back toward the chart table to log our
new position, I heard a woman’s scolding voice amidships and an-
other, pleasanter, saluting me: “Sayyid Survivor! Helper of Mustafa!”
It was the young woman in the red djellaba, being hectored for her

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forwardness by an older woman in black. I salaamed, then approached
at her request. Her duenna said something dismayed in Allah’s direc-
tion, which sounded like my late aunt Rachel’s “Hwell!” Both women
were veiled, but now I saw close up the younger one’s luminous green
eyes and glowing dark-brown hair, and I scented as well the floral
perfume appropriate to her name. Bereft though I was, the surviving
male animal in me could not help registering that from the bridge of
her nose upward, at least, Prince Somebody’s bride-to-be was a strik-
ing beauty, and I found most winsome (and painfully reminiscent
of my Julia’s) the spiritedness that alarmed her chaperone and amused
the crew.
She wanted, it turned out, two things. First, to express her sym-
pathy for my having lost my ship and my wife (as the story went by
the time it reached the women’s quarters) and her gratification that
Allah had at least seen fit to spare myself; her family were celebrated
voyagers, she said, and she, too, had lost dear ones at sea. And second,
to see at first hand the curious navigational device that she had several
times observed me using, inasmuch as she was much interested in all
things nautical. Hoping I had understood her correctly, I thanked her
for her concern, apologized for my minimal and halting Arabic,
wished God’s blessing upon her upcoming marriage, and did my best
to demonstrate how one could use an ordinary analog wristwatch to
help estimate not only speed but distance run and relative bearings. I
found her a quick study indeed, this Yasmin, surprisingly familiar (for
a sequestered Muslim woman) with navigational matters, though even
more surprisingly unfamiliar with the watch’s basic function: measur-
ing time! In what dark, superconservative Islamic time warp did these
people live? Their names were Arabic, not Persian; Zahir’s home port
was Iraqi Basra, not Abadan in the regressive Iran of the Ayatollah
Khomeini. I supposed there must be enclaves of studied antimoder-
nity throughout Islam; for that matter, the language barrier, though
becoming daily more penetrable, might still be concealing from me
some important circumstance of this nuptial voyage: a systematic imi-
tation, perhaps, not only of medieval Arab seafaring but of the medi-
eval Arab mind-set and worldview?
She had to try the thing herself. As I held my arm athwartships to
align twelve o’clock on the dial with Zahir’s bow, she rotated the bezel
until its zero mark pointed at Hengam, just forward of our port beam

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now. The angle, I showed her, was twelve minutes on the watch face,
or forty-eight minutes counted clockwise; at six degrees per minute,
the island’s relative bearing could be expressed either as 288 degrees or
as 72 degrees off the port bow. She understood that with two such
bearings on different landmarks, we could fix Zahir’s position on the
chart; her brother (was it?) had once explained that procedure to her.
It delighted her now to be shown that with a second bearing on the
first landmark, taken after a carefully measured interval of time, we
could determine the ship’s speed as well.
To take that second bearing she pushed back her djellaba-hood and
pressed her veiled cheek to the back of my hand. I felt her breath there;
her fragrant auburn hair tumbled loose. The chaperone quietly wailed;
a nearby deckhand muttered something wry; there was tittering from
the companionway to the women’s quarters, where now I saw other
youthful veiled faces watching us. Yasmin turned her remarkable eyes
to one after another of them, silencing each in turn with frowning
dignity, then smiled those eyes at me and went back to her close
sighting.
“Twenty … minutes this way now,” she reported of Hengam Is-
land, “or forty that way, yes?”
Sharply behind me, from the quarterdeck, came Abu Hosayn’s re-
buking voice. Yasmin, facing me to sight aft again across the watch
dial, could see him as I could not. Unruffled, she called back without
raising her head, “I am learning where you’re taking us, Sayyid Cap-
tain!” Then to me: “Times six gives two hundred forty degrees, yes?
Or one hundred twenty off the port bow. This gentleman will be my
navigation teacher,” she declared smoothly to Mustafa, who had hur-
ried usward from Abu Hosayn. “He knows things that [a name I could
not catch: Omar?] never told me of.”
“If Sindbad’s daughter will not be discreet,” Mustafa reproved me
some while later, “then you must be all the more so. The captain is
not pleased.”
“What is this ‘Sindbad’s daughter’ business?” I asked him, in effect.
“What’s going on here? And why isn’t the captain sailing the courses
we lay out for him?”
The first of those questions I had asked before, but I had not been
able to follow Mustafa’s reply. In only the few intervening days, how-
ever, my constant language practice and closer bond with my mentor

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had improved our communication enough for me to make out now
that the young woman’s father and owner of our vessel was indeed a
wealthy Baghdad merchant trader of that name. (Many a modern-day
Greek, I reminded myself, is named Aristotle; why should not an Iraqi
oil and shipping magnate assume the name of his famous seagoing
forebear and carry out this elaborate charade on the occasion of his
daughter’s wedding? But that idea was not yet within my power to
express for Mustafa’s verification.) As I had seen, the woman was will-
ful, even wayward. Mustafa disapproved of her behavior, not only on
strict Muslim principle but also — so I learned when I gently teased
him on that score — because her waywardness had contributed to the
downfall of the young man whom she had spoken of as if he were her
brother, and whom Mustafa now spoke of, his eyes moistening, as if
he were a lost son. This was my unlucky predecessor; let his fate stand
as a lesson to me. Whatever it was that had happened — Mustafa
would speak no further of it — had been the end of the young man
and, I gathered, had cast some shadow upon the upcoming marriage
as well. In unacknowledged compensation, Yasmin’s dowry had been
made so unusually large that two ships were required to carry it to the
Sohari prince Jabal: Zahir was the first of these, and the bride’s father
would soon follow in the second.
It was easy enough to imagine, in a general way, what had likely
happened between the young people; to press Mustafa for details (had
there been an accidental pregnancy, or was it sufficient in “Sindbad’s”
Muslim fundamentalist household for the couple to have enjoyed an
illicit flirtation?) would have been tactless and ungrateful. The other
of my questions, concerning Zahir’s position, distressed him less,
though he was clearly unhappy about it. Our job as navigators, Mus-
tafa reminded me (as if to remind himself), was to apprise the captain
of the ship’s position and recommend the course to be steered for the
next way point toward our destination. If Abu Hosayn chose to steer
some other course or to reach the destination via other way points or
even to change our destination, that was not our concern, as naviga-
tors, so long as we were kept informed of such changes for position-
fixing purposes.
“But I have not been kept informed,” I complained to him, and I
showed him on our chart how my dead-reckoning tracks (more care-
fully plotted than his because my time⁄speed⁄distance estimates were

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better) had had to be wildly corrected when visual fixes had shown me
our actual position. Much impressed by the chart work, Mustafa nev-
ertheless reminded me that I was only the assistant navigator. I put
my hands on his shoulders. “My friend,” I told him, “I don’t know
where I am or how I got here, but I know that I owe my life and my
sanity to you. You have assisted me so much; how can I be your assis-
tant, if you keep from me what I need to know?”
He pondered this, stroking his beard and reexamining my DR
plots: their running fixes, lines of position, and neatly entered courses,
times, and distances run. “What you do with that instrument on your
arm is marvelous,” he said. “I myself am too old now to learn it, but
how I wish you could have taught it to Umar al-Yom!”
I registered my predecessor’s name and returned the compliment:
what Mustafa managed with the kamal, and by merely looking at the
stars, wave patterns, and shorelines, without aid of sextant, compass,
chronometer, or written calculations, was tantamount to magic. Had
this misfortunate Umar been his son, or the captain’s, or the ship-
owner’s?
Mustafa shook his head and, there being no pressing navigation
work for us just then, bade me come sit with him for some minutes
far forward in Zahir’s bow, on the pretext of reviewing our charts.
There he told me of the kindly old captain Allim al-Yom, from whom
he himself had learned the art of navigation, and who happened to
have rescued Sayyid Sindbad the Sailor from Peppercorn Island on
that celebrated adventurer’s fourth voyage. How that gentle old fel-
low, at his death, had left an orphan son, whom Mustafa had first
taken into his care and then arranged a better situation for in the
house of this same Sindbad, in whose service Mustafa, too, had
subsequently plied his nautical skills. How he and Sindbad and Cap-
tain Abu Hosayn and everyone else — Yasmin included, it would ap-
pear — had loved the young man, each in his or her way, until Umar’s
apparent loss in the wreck of Sindbad’s chartered auxiliary cargo vessel
in Voyage Five, which wreck Sindbad alone had once again survived.
Finally, how the pity of that loss had been given a bitter turn by un-
substantiated rumors in the household of a falling-out between foster
father and son just prior to or during that fatal voyage. Mustafa
claimed to know for a fact that Umar had aspired to marry Yasmin     — whose brother he had been raised as but to whom he was in fact 

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unrelated by blood or law, and who unquestionably had reciprocated his feelings — and that Sindbad had seemed at first to approve but then later opposed the match, evidently because his ambitions for his
daughter were more elevated. But a further ugly rumor — also unsub-
stantiated, mind, and denied within the household — had it that Yas-
min had given herself to Umar just prior to Voyage Five, and that
when that fact had come to light after the lad’s reported death, she
had not denied her duenna’s claim that the young man had forced
her. Hence Mustafa’s coolness toward the young woman, which he
granted might be unfair but which he could not help feeling, so had
he loved Umar al-Yom. And there was no doubt that Prince Jabal’s
vizier had been most unhappy at having to take the word of Yasmin’s
duenna, of all people, on the bride’s virginity, instead of corroborating
it in the customary fashion, with suitable inspectors from the prince’s
own retinue. Moreover —
“Wait a minute!” I pleaded, in effect, and ignoring the whole ro-
mance of star-crossed lovers, I tried once again to express my baffle-
ment at the way Mustafa spoke of this “Sindbad” and his serial
voyages and shipwrecks as if we were in Scheherazade country. He
had no idea what I meant. I pressed on in my stumbling Arabic, not
for more details of Umar Whatshisname or beautiful Yasmin and her
father but — tapping my wristwatch — what is this called in Arabic?
Not hourglass, surely! Have you truly never looked upon its like? How
is it we’ve seen no large motor vessels in all this time? No airplanes?
What year is this? Have you really never heard of the United States of
America?
It was very difficult to put such questions without a bilingual
dictionary. Mustafa seemed to think I was alluding to rocs and island-
sized whales (about both of which he was skeptical, despite his mas-
ter’s tales), to Champa and Al Sin and similarly exotic places beyond
even his far-ranging ken. Like the seasoned navigator he was, he
steered our talk back to where it had last been mutually comprehen-
sible. He, too, was uneasy about Captain Hosayn’s behavior: he had
sailed many times under that officer’s curt but competent command
and had been party to more than one bit of business that he himself
deplored and wished the boy Umar had not witnessed. In all such
cases, however, there had at least been no question of Sayyid Sindbad’s
approval, and never had there been cross-purposes between navigator

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and captain, or such discrepancy as existed now between courses plot-
ted and courses sailed. It was precisely that that had led Mustafa this
day to confront Abu Hosayn in his cabin, where the captain had in-
formed him brusquely that rather than sailing directly to Sohar from
Ras Musandam, as originally planned, Zahir would stand by off the
northeast tip of Qeshm, between the islands of Larak and Hormuz,
and rendezvous there with an armed vessel dispatched by Prince Jabal
to escort his bride and her dowry safely down the Gulf of Oman to
Sohar. When Mustafa had then pointed out that we would be linger-
ing at our peril in the very neighborhood that we ought to be pass-
ing through as quickly as possible — the pirate-troubled Strait of
Hormuz — and had wondered further just how and when this ill-
advised change of plans had come down from their master or up from
the prince, Abu Hosayn had instructed him to mind his own duties
or risk being relieved of them.
“And mind them I shall,” my mentor concluded, “as I hope you
will, too. But let us keep a weather eye on things, as navigators should,
for something here is not as it ought to be.”
Sure enough, all the next night and day, as I wrestled in wretched
vain with the questions of where I “really” was and how I had got
there, we sailed back and forth along a north-south line between that
pair of little islands while Abu Hosayn scanned the southern horizon
for another vessel. The whole crew grew uneasy; even the bride-to-be
(whom I regarded with mild new interest in the light of what I had
heard, finding it hard to imagine her falsely defaming a lover to protect
herself, so rich in character were those green eyes) demanded to know
why we were marking time in these notorious waters, like chickens
promenading between two fox-holes. The simile was hers and in-
volved a play on the captain’s name, to which Abu Hosayn did not
take kindly. But when with respectful apologies he commanded her
and her duenna to retire immediately to their quarters and remain
there until after our rendezvous with the prince’s escort vessel, she
insisted that he tell her when and by what means her father had
changed Zahir’s sailing orders without apprising her.
“Sail ho!” our lookout called just then. “Take her below, Mustafa,”
the captain ordered at once, and Mustafa nudged me to assist him.
But even as we salaamed before Yasmin’s defiant eyes and Mustafa
urged her sternly to heed advice given for her own safety, she 

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narrowed those eyes to westward, in the direction of Qeshm, and declared to him, “That is not the ship that my fiancé sailed to Basra in,
Mustafa. Prince Jabal’s Sohar had a single jib, cut low; that one has
double headsails. And it is not approaching from the Gulf of Oman.”
I saw the old fellow look astarboard, where she was looking, and
not like what he saw there any more than did she. “In Allah’s name,
get yourself below,” he urged her again, in a different tone. “Try to
calm the others, and pray for our safe deliverance.” This time she went,
without further protest, herself urging her already wailing duenna to
cease her racket and help her reassure the other women. The older
woman’s alarm had indeed spread quickly to the deckhands — all of
whom now watched a gaily festooned vessel about the size of ours
bear swiftly down upon us from the west — and also to the women’s
quarters, from where (though those therein could see nothing) came
already the first notes of what would soon become a frantic chorus.
But the captain, undismayed, ordered us not to bear off and run for
safety but to luff up, take in sail, and make ready to greet Prince Jabal’s
boarding party.
“This does not smell right,” Mustafa confided to me, and, boldly
for him, he went aft to confront Abu Hosayn. As our steersman
headed up and our crew dropped sail, I saw the sailors murmur to
one another and touch their knife handles, one of which thrust forth
from the sash of every man’s wuzara except mine. Mustafa, agitated,
pointed out to our captain this and that detail of the approaching
vessel, whose crew were already assembling in her bow and along the
nearer rail — some of them, it appeared to me, waving swords! Abu
Hosayn, though he seemed to me not altogether easy himself, re-
mained deaf to the navigator’s expostulations and finally ordered him
off the afterdeck. Now the other vessel began making her turn to
heave alongside. Like Zahir, she bore not a trace of the twentieth
century about her: no radio or radar antennae, no outboard engine on
her tender, not even a binnacle before the helmsman; no binoculars
among the deck officers, no T-shirts, jeans, or fisherman’s caps, only
turbans, wuzaras … and now scimitars everywhere!
Returning to my side, Mustafa muttered, “If that is Prince Jabal of
Sohar, then I am the Commander of the Faithful.” From his own belt
he drew a curved, horn-handled dagger and pressed it into my hand.
“I’m too old for them to bother with, Bey el-Loor,” he told me. “You

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are not.” He then urged me back toward the midships companionway
leading to the women’s quarters. “Do what you can for the green-eyed
one. Umar loved her, to his cost, and I loved Umar.”
By now, instead of breast lines being cordially passed from vessel
to vessel, grapnels had been thrown from the approacher and made
fast. Most of Zahir’s crew, uncertain of whether to assist or resist the
operation, stood by; a few discreetly withdrew to the opposite bul-
wark. Abu Hosayn and our first mate strode forward to greet the
overtaker’s chief deck officer — and no sooner reached the midships
rail than they were seized by half a dozen bearded roughnecks and
stripped of the weapons they had not drawn. The teller of this tale
had had, as it happens, the extraordinary good fortune (given the cata-
strophic decades through which he’d lived) never to have seen with
his own eyes a fellow human done mortal violence to. Now in an
instant I was shocked and sickened to see Zahir’s mate stuck through
with a scimitar from belly to back and dumped overside, spurting and
howling: the signal, it seemed, for the others to swarm aboard and
hack away at any deckhands who dared stand fast.
After the first few, none did, but those two or three bloody minutes
supplied me with a lifetime’s worth of what good luck had theretofore
spared me. Terrified myself, and nowise prepared to die defending
anyone on that ship except myself and maybe Mustafa, I retreated
with him as far as the midships companionway, the hatch of which
I found shut fast and bolted from inside when I tried to open it in
search of cover. There Mustafa’s grip recalled me to my purpose, but
I shall not say that I would have remained there in Yasmin’s defense —
what was “Sindbad’s daughter” to me, back then, when I was griev-
ing so for Julia Moore? — had not the situation at that point taken a
sudden turn.
“These are common pirates!” Mustafa exclaimed, to me and some
crewmen nearby. “If we’re all dead men, in Allah’s name let’s die like
living ones!” To shame and inspirit us then, he snatched the nearest
deckhand’s dagger (the fellow relinquished it readily) and charged at
an approaching, scimitar-wielding pirate. Frightened though I was, I
found myself hurrying after him; others of our crew, as well, moved
forward in a hesitant but desperate phalanx.
“Stop there, Mustafa!” Abu Hosayn called then, and having been
released by the men who had murdered our first mate, he interposed

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himself between the old navigator and the pirate who waited to
slaughter him — but who for some reason did not take that opportu-
nity to butcher our captain instead. Indeed, all the invaders now kept
their places, their blades at the ready, instead of swarming upon us,
and permitted Abu Hosayn to announce that in the face of over-
whelming superiority of arms, to prevent unnecessary loss of life he
was surrendering Zahir to the attackers who had deceived him under
guise of Jabal’s emissaries.
Behind him now, as we assimilated this announcement, stepped
(with a limp) a lean, clean-caftaned fellow from the other vessel, ob-
viously a chief officer, the lower half of whose face was covered by a
wrap of scarving like a Bedou horseman’s in a sandstorm. From be-
tween his fierce-appearing bodyguards he leaned forward to say some-
thing to Abu Hosayn, who then begged Allah’s forgiveness and ours
for his misjudgment and informed us that we were at the mercy of
Captain Sahim al-Layl of Qeshm, who knew of our mission and our
cargo. That that cargo was now that captain’s prize, together with our
passengers, may Allah preserve them, certain of whom Sahim in-
tended to hold for ransom. That any of us who were interested in
dying miserably for those passengers’ sake would be given that privi-
lege at once if we did not immediately drop our weapons and move
to the foredeck; otherwise, except for the two or three sailors needed
to replace recent casualties among the pirate crew, we and Zahir
would be released without further harm to return to Basra with Cap-
tain al-Layl’s ransom demands.
Dirks and daggers clattered to the deck — all except Mustafa’s,
with which he seemed ready to attack Abu Hosayn even as he stared,
as if transfixed, at the scarf-faced officer behind. A pirate raised his
scimitar. Having myself dropped my mentor’s knife readily along with
the others, I stayed the old navigator’s hand. He turned his eyes
dumbly to my grip on his forearm, then flung down his borrowed
dagger and stalked away, mumbling to himself. The scarf-faced officer
nodded. His guard put down the sword.
Thus we surrendered without real resistance to the pirates who had
allegedly duped our captain, and even in retrospect this seems to me
to have been a prudent move, though I suspected at once and would
soon learn for certain that Abu Hosayn was party to the plot. As things
stood, the mate and two of our seamen had been killed, presumably

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to demonstrate the pirates’ seriousness (but I suspect, too, that the
mate, like Mustafa and me, had guessed at our captain’s complicity);
and what subsequently happened to most of the women was atro-
cious. But Sahim al-Layl’s Shaitan was faster than Zahir and would
presently have overtaken us even if Abu Hosayn had in good faith fled
at the first sight of her; the pirates outnumbered us, and though to my
surprise they had no firearms, our knives were nonetheless no match
for their cutlasses and scimitars. In short, what happened to Zahir’s
women would have happened in any case once we had sailed into that
trap, while our men would have quickly died had they resisted, instead
of being spared along with Sindbad’s ship for the purpose of negoti-
ating his daughter’s ransom.
Those women’s fate, all except Yasmin’s, is quickly told and best
told quickly. After the shroud-faced pirate captain, in conference with
our shamefaced one, had impressed into his service the replacements
he needed to fill out his crew, all of our deckhands and officers —
Mustafa and Abu Hosayn included — were herded under guard into
Zahir’s forecastle. The companionway to the women’s quarters was
then forced, as were, soon after, most of the women themselves,
whom the pirates appropriated as their plunder along with the chests
filled with Yasmin’s dowry. In both cases the loot was first hauled
on deck and roughly inventoried: the rich chests of silks and jewels
were tallied up, reclosed, and dispatched into Shaitan’s hold; the
women — weeping, praying, clinging to one another for support —
were stripped of their veils and sorted by Sahim al-Layl into three
categories. The half dozen serving-maids were given to the crew, or
more exactly to a kind of bos’n or warrant officer in charge of the crew,
who forbade any laying-on of hands until the distribution was com-
pleted. The half dozen bridesmaids, distinguishable by their richer
costume as the daughters of well-to-do families, were rapidly scruti-
nized by the captain, who then gave one to each of his two lieutenants
and ordered the four others confined under close guard for ransoming
by their families — whose names he would determine and daughters’
ransoms fix before releasing Zahir on its new errand.
There remained the prize and her chaperone — whom I had heard
Mustafa refer to as Jayda the Egyptian. Heretofore I had seen this
black-robed personage do little more than wring her hands in operatic
despair at her charge’s forwardness, as if to make it clear that she had

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done all a duenna reasonably could and was not to be held further
responsible. In the face of this genuine threat, however, there was
nothing operatic about her response: her voice preceded her up the
companionway, threatening Yasmin’s handlers in language as strong
as any pirate’s. After her curses came not the curser but the cursed: the
first of those two lieutenants, whom the captain had assigned to bring
forth Sindbad’s daughter. His turban was in disarray, and he was
bleeding about the face and onto his linen blouse, which had been
ripped or slashed; in the hand that he gripped with both of his own
as he climbed on deck and pulled her up after him, Yasmin clutched
yet the knife she had cut him with. She herself, it almost seemed —
still kicking and biting at his arm through her disheveled white veil —
pulled up after her the second officer, whose task it was to keep her
other hand away from that knife while shielding himself from her
kicks. She fought like a wildcat, the cliché goes, common to those novels
called “bodice rippers.” I have never seen a wildcat fight, but on the
day when I see one go at her unlucky captors with hands, feet, teeth,
and utter disregard for consequences to herself, I will say that that
wildcat fought like Sindbad’s daughter.
And close after that hapless second officer came the shrill-cursing
Cairene, buffeting his head and shoulders not only with imprecations
but with a hammered-copper teapot and — once the three were more
or less on deck — kicking, too, at the groin he turned from Yasmin’s
kicks. The pirate crew were much amused by this spectacle, which
their captain quickly put an end to by assigning their bos’n and one
or two others to help subdue the chaperone, disarm both her and
Yasmin, and bind the latter’s wrists with a length of soft cord provided
by the captain himself. Taking care to avoid her flailing feet, one of
the lieutenants retrieved her knife from the deck and presented it to
Sahim al-Layl, who inspected its jeweled handle attentively. The other
made now as if to strip away the captive’s veil for his commander’s
benefit — and found the point of that knife pressed to his gullet. He
backed off a step, smiled, salaamed.
“Go to my cabin,” I heard the captain say then to Jayda, using the
plural imperative, and he gestured to his men to unhand both women.
The chaperone shrugged them away and drew herself up straight but
offered no further resistance; Yasmin, however, once unrestrained,
bolted. Sahim al-Layl himself adroitly caught her by the shoulder of

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her robe and said something to her that I could not hear; Jayda hur-
ried over and spoke into the white cowl of her ward’s djellaba, at the
same time putting straight its dishevelment. The captain pointed with
the jeweled knife to Shaitan’s aft companionway, toward which Sind-
bad’s defeated daughter, her wrists bound fast, now let herself be led
by her comforter and her limp-gaited captor, like an animal on a silken
leash. A wail rose from the four bridesmaids held for ransoming, and
another sort of cry from the pair assigned to other duty, as the two
lieutenants herded all six across the ships’ mated gunwales to their
separate fates. With the half dozen serving-women no such niceties
were observed. The instant their officers stepped from Zahir onto
Shaitan, the pirate sailors fell upon their shrieking victims and upon
one another as well, for order of possession. And the teller of this tale,
who through fifty years of a sordid century had managed never to
witness sexual violence, either, now beheld …
What I beheld, and what would be mere prurience to recount. Ask,
rather, How came it to be that I was there to behold it, and those
other matters just narrated, instead of locked in Zahir’s fo’c’s’le with
brooding Mustafa and my other shipmates? It was because Sahim al-
Layl had ordered Abu Hosayn to deliver over to him not only two
able-bodied seamen but a hand with navigational skills as well, to re-
place one lost in a recent accident. But not the oldster who had come
at him with a dagger; that one was clearly a troublemaker. “The tall
one yonder, then,” Abu Hosayn had offered, nodding meward with
some satisfaction. “The outlander. May you make good use of him.”
Thus did I pass from I knew not where (except on Mustafa’s hand-
drawn charts) to I knew not where, gratified to have been so far
spared, more anxious about my own fate than about that of Sindbad’s
daughter and her retinue, sorrowful indeed at my separation from
kindly Mustafa, my link to the strange world in which I found my-
self — and chagrined to the point of tears at this new diversion from
my reaching Sohar and “civilization.” For despite the mystery (still
unresolved) of my losing consciousness off Sri Lanka and regaining it
in the Persian Gulf, I had by no means yet accepted the greater —
indeed, the unacceptable — mystery of my transportation in time.
Though every passing day aboard Zahir and now aboard Shaitan
brought new evidence to the contrary, like a shipwrecked sailor to a
plank I clung to my belief (by now an ever more desperate hope) that

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I was in some technological backwater, one of those third-world pock-
ets where things are still done as they have been done for centuries.
Among those things, alas, is rape: not only the repeated sexual as-
sault before my eyes of Yasmin’s serving-women by the pirate crew,
but also the homosexual rape of the two young seamen pressed into
service from Zahir, as well as, one had to presume, other assaults in
progress belowdecks. This essential violation I was spared, at least for
the present, no doubt because though my body was lean and fit from
sailoring, my years made me fortunately less attractive than their other
victims to the pirates, men mostly in their twenties and thirties. Like-
wise spared, I learned presently, were the duenna Jayda and — for a
different reason, and at least for a while — those four of Yasmin’s
bridesmaids.
When the deckhands had taken their initial pleasure, on orders
from the two lieutenants (who had clearly had theirs as well), the
abused women were sent below — all but one, that is, who chose to
leap into the sea rather than endure more of the same — and the vio-
lated men put to work with their violators preparing to separate the
ships and get under way. Zahir’s officers (which is to say, Abu Hosayn,
Mustafa, and a bos’n, the first mate having been murdered earlier)
were released to hear the terms of ransom, which they were to carry
back to Baghdad and the hostages’ families: for the lives of the women-
servants, such-and-such an amount, to be delivered by Zahir, without
armed escort, to this same place of rendezvous not later than such-
and-such a date. For the life if each of the six bridesmaids, a specified
higher amount, and for the life of Sindbad’s daughter, a considerably
higher amount yet: the other half of her sumptuous dowry. For the
bridesmaids’ unviolated “honor” in addition to their lives, exactly
double that earlier figure — and here the ransom terms and their pro-
poser’s good faith, so to speak, turned equivocal, for this second figure
was applied to all six of the bridesmaids, two of whom had presum-
ably been forced already by the lieutenants who relayed these terms
from Sahim al-Layl’s cabin. In token of the kidnappers’ earnestness, if
not of their trustworthiness, they counted out to Abu Hosayn one at
a time the six veils torn from those bridesmaids’ faces, naming in turn
the family to which he must deliver each along with the ransom de-
mands. I saw the lieutenants smirk as they added the fifth and sixth
veils to the first four.

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And for Yasmin’s honor, inviolate? No one put the question, but at
this juncture one of the lieutenants stepped over to Shaitan’s aft com-
panionway, said something, was told something, and came back fol-
lowed by black-clad Jayda. “For Sindbad’s daughter’s honor preserved
along with her life,” the lieutenant announced, smiling that same un-
pleasant smile, “we demand the total value of her dowry over again;
whether it comes from her distinguished father or from her royal fi-
ancé is of no concern to Captain Sahim al-Layl. If they offer only half
again her total dowry, her life will be spared but she will be enjoyed
by every officer on this ship, in order of descending rank. If the ransom
is less than that, all the crew will take their turn as well before she        is released.” This said, he gestured to Jayda, who withdrew Yasmin’s
white veil from a fold of her caftan, presented it to Abu Hosayn, and,
as he took it, raised her own veil and spat in his face.
The two ships were then separated, as were I and my benefactor
Mustafa. I had no more chance to say a proper good-bye to him than
I had to Julia Moore, much less to try one last time to explain to him
where I had come from and how to get word of my fate to my family,
from Basra or Baghdad. We looked at each other from rail to rail
across the widening gap of water as the crews of both vessels made
sail. I raised my hand in some sort of farewell salute; Mustafa nodded,
deep in thought, it seemed to me, while clearly acknowledging that
he, too, had valued our association. Then I saw him being summoned
to Zahir’s afterdeck by Abu Hosayn, presumably to lay a course
homeward, back up the Bahr Faris. Concerned as I was for my own
welfare among the pirates, I was concerned for his as well, for he and
I knew almost for certain what the rest of Zahir’s company (except, it
now appeared from her behavior, the duenna Jayda) did not: Abu Ho-
sayn had betrayed his employer and prearranged his vessel’s intercep-
tion by the Qeshmi pirates. The old navigator might be indispensable
in guiding Zahir home, but as the ship neared Basra, would the cap-
tain not be obliged to buy Mustafa’s silence — not a likely pros-
pect! — with a share of the ransom proceeds that he had doubtless
been promised by Sahim al-Layl, or else ensure that silence by other
means?
From these therapeutic worries, which at least distracted me from
my own situation, I was recalled by one of the young lieutenants, who
as best as I could make out (his accent was different from Mustafa’s)

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ordered me aft to confer with the captain. It occurred to me to pretend
to understand even less of his language than I had learned — a strata-
gem remembered from some forgotten novel or movie — in hope that
my captors might speak unguardedly in my presence. At the same
time, I had to take care not to exasperate them. In as fellow-officerlike
a tone as I could manage, I replied first in English, then in deliberately
lame Arabic, that I knew more about the language of ocean navigation
than about the local speech, and I asked him to repeat what he had
said. He did, more loudly and with gestures, adding more or less to
himself that it was to be expected of that fox Abu Hosayn that he
would hand over his troublemakers and incompetents. He snatched
my sleeve, as if to drag me aft; counting on the respect that I had
learned Arab sailors accord to master navigators, I took the gamble of
scolding him sharply in English, pulling my sleeve free with as senior
a frown as I could muster, and striding ahead toward the captain’s
companionway instead of being led there.
The tactic seemed to work. But because it would soon enough be-
come apparent that I was no Mustafa mu-Allim, after pausing at the
companionway, permitting the lieutenant to announce “Sayyid Bey el-
Loor the Navigator,” and being summoned below, I took a different
line with the captain himself.
His face still scarfed, Sahim al-Layl sat at a table spread with charts,
kamals, and such in his small but comfortably appointed cabin, into
which light filtered from overhead gratings on the afterdeck. On a
couch across from him Jayda comforted Sindbad’s daughter, who —
though moist-eyed and unveiled now except by the cowl of her djel-
laba (with which Jayda stanched her charge’s tears and more or less
covered the lower half of her face) — did not appear to me to have
suffered any further indignity yet than being kidnapped and deprived
of her veil. Despite her tears (which were not copious), Yasmin’s ex-
pression and manner remained more defiant than self-sorrowing. Her
hands had been freed, and there was no evidence of a struggle in the
cabin; indeed, her hair and clothing were in better order now than
they had been after her tussle on Zahir’s deck. She brushed away Jay-
da’s ministrations, and when the captain courteously invited her to
reveil herself in my presence, she pushed back her cowl instead and
glared full-faced — and astonishingly beautiful — at the pair of us.

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After a moment the captain said quietly, “As you will.” In his curious voice — distorted either by the scarf or by some other impedi-
ment — he then suggested that Jayda draw the curtains that had been
rigged to screen their couch from the rest of the cabin (which included
a matching couch on the opposite side) if the women wished to have
some privacy while he and I discussed navigational matters. She made
to do so, but Yasmin stayed her, never moving those arresting green
eyes from Sahim al-Layl. Again the captain regarded her for some
moments before turning to me.
Among the items on the chart table was that jewel-handled knife
with which Yasmin had resisted the two lieutenants. The captain
turned it between his fingers and, through the interview that followed,
as often studied it as me.
“You were the assistant of that old troublemaker who navigates
Zahir.”
In the best Arabic I could manage, I acknowledged that I was and
went on to praise Mustafa mu-Allim as the gentlest, kindest, bravest
benefactor one could wish for, as well as a master among navigators.
The captain heard me out without comment, then in that same diffi-
cult voice asked, “How did you come to be the old devil’s assistant?
By your look and speech you are not of any Muslim nation, and you
are of an age to have assistants of your own.”
I nodded. “Mustafa had a young helper whom he prized like a son
but lost to the sea. Another sea washed me to him from another realm,
and he was merciful enough to rescue and teach me despite my age.
Not all sons are young, Sayyid Captain.”
This observation seemed not to displease him. He invited me to
tell my story briefly, and as briefly as I could I did, hoping to win his
sympathy for my limitations in the way of language and local naviga-
tional skills, perhaps to learn more yet of my own circumstances, and
maybe, even to appeal to him to assist in my repatriation. Pirate or no,
face-scarfed or no, by his words and manner Sahim al-Layl impressed
me as being potentially more approachable than Abu Hosayn. For all
her own unenviable situation, Yasmin, too, attended my story, which
she was hearing for the first time other than as ship’s gossip aboard
Zahir. She even supplied me from time to time with a word I lacked,
shrewdly guessing it from context. Each time she did so, the captain
regarded her over his scarf. So beautiful was she, and so selfless and
courageous and in every way appealing were her efforts on behalf of

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one who could be of no imaginable use to her, that it occurred to me
to worry that such forwardness might put her own best interests at
risk. Her duenna seemed to share this apprehension; at every helpful
intercession by Yasmin she twitched her disapproval and glanced ever
more fearfully at our captor. But Sindbad’s daughter would not be
deterred. At my recitation’s end, when I tried briefly to indicate my
desperate puzzlement at hearing such epithets as “Sindbad’s daughter”
and at seeing about me nothing in the way of aircraft, motor vessels,
radios, or even steering compasses and wristwatches, while she could
not supply Arabic names for those devices or even guess at what I
meant by them, she urged her kidnapper to trust in my sincerity. Her
father, she declared, had reported no less wondrous phenomena on
his five famous voyages — giant birds, fish the size of islands — and
just as he had brought home to Baghdad fist-sized gemstones to sup-
port his claims, so I had demonstrated for her that magical last-
mentioned instrument, with which she had seen me make navigational
calculations more accurate even than Mustafa’s.
As grateful as I was for her support, I regretted her mentioning
this item, which I had hidden in my wuzara upon the pirates’ boarding
Zahir, lest they steal it from me. There was nothing for it now but to
produce the watch and explain its functions. Sahim al-Layl set down
the knife to examine it; he attended my — and Yasmin’s — account of
its powers (clearly as novel to him as they had been to her and my
former shipmates), tried the bracelet on his wrist (which was too thin
to accommodate it, I was relieved to see), and then, as I’d feared,
placed the watch on the table before him instead of returning it to me.
Picking up the jeweled knife again, he told me that he, too, was a
competent navigator, if not quite a mu-allim like my former master.
He would be pleased to have Shaitan’s new assistant navigator dem-
onstrate the device’s workings in the weeks ahead, as we patrolled the
area and waited for Zahir’s return. On the mystery of my translation
to the Bahr Faris from wherever I had been before, he had no com-
ment, except to say that most people would doubtless choose life in a
strange place over death in a familiar one. The marvels I spoke of he
neither questioned nor took much interest in: though younger than
me by nearly twenty years, he had seen a few things in Allah’s ocean
and ashore as well that he himself could scarcely credit, much less ex-
pect others to believe. The fact was that neither he nor I nor Sindbad’s

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daughter — nor even Sindbad’s daughter’s chaperone, he presumed to
add, though she was reputed to have prophetic powers — a year ago
would have imagined himself or herself in the cabin of a Qeshmi pirate
ship, whether as captive, captor, or captain. But here we were and
would be for some time, during which he had other work for me in
addition to helping him with Shaitan’s navigation — work that my
age and circumstances and demeanor inclined him to entrust to me,
even though I was a stranger, rather than to his lieutenants.
This speech was by far the most extended I had heard from Sahim
al-Layl, who seemed in general to find speaking painful. The women,
too, I guessed, had not heard that much from him thitherto, or else
his words this time for some reason particularly disturbed them. Yas-
min’s expression became concerned, puzzled, frowning; as I bowed
acknowledgment of what I had little choice but to accept, I saw her
touch Jayda’s forearm and exchange a troubled glance with her.
The captain stood and gimped over to them, holding the jeweled
knife by its blade. Yasmin, her eyes showing her alarm, shifted back a
bit on the couch-cushion, closer to her protector. I considered retriev-
ing my watch, but remembering Sahim’s sudden threat to the lieuten-
ant who had offered to unveil Sindbad’s daughter, and the quickness
with which he had stopped her subsequent flight, I feared he might
pin my hand to the table with that knife. Speaking still to me, but
addressing his words sarcastically to Yasmin, he asked, “How can any-
one find it strange to hear men speak of Sindbad the Sailor, whose five
voyages are famous throughout Islam and even beyond? Or of his
daughter, the flower of Baghdad, as renowned for her intelligence and
character as for her beauty?”
Yasmin drew up her cowl and turned away, behind Jayda’s shoul-
der. I said nothing but felt and shared her apprehension — at the same
time wondering, ever more despairingly, why they spoke of this Sind-
bad exactly as if he were the legendary original. And why — a much
smaller matter — five voyages instead of the celebrated seven?
Speaking now directly to Yasmin and holding the knife out by its
point, the captain asked, “Where did you get this?”
Almost in a whisper, Sindbad’s daughter answered, “A beloved
friend gave it to me, years ago.”
“For what purpose?”

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 ‘To defend my … self with,” Yasmin said, hesitating over the ob-
ject, “should such self-defense become necessary.”
“Allah forfend!” cried Jayda.
The captain ignored her. “And did she show you how to use it, this
friend?” he pressed Yasmin. “I believe she must have, judging from
your work on Mudyi al-Din. Answer me promptly.”
Still speaking into Jayda’s shoulder, Yasmin replied, “My friend was
not a she. It was … my brother, whom I loved greatly, and who
taught me many things not usually taught to girls.”
“Your brother. Where is this greatly beloved brother now, when
you most need his protection?”
Her duenna, embracing her, answered scoldingly (but with a pe-
culiar emphasis), “The poor boy was lost at sea on Sayyid Sindbad’s
fifth voyage, while assisting Mustafa mu-Allim, and was never heard
from again. Have pity on this child, in Allah’s name!”
The captain here took his own, more formidable dagger from his
belt and, to my considerable surprise, handed it to me. “Two strokes
of this,” he declared, “can relieve a man of his zabb and his tongue
and leave him mute at both ends. It can also cut an old woman’s lying
throat if she does not move now to that other couch and sit there
quietly under your guard.”
“Ai yi!” Jayda wailed, and she hugged Yasmin more tightly. “Here
is what I feared!”
A flick of Saturn’s left hand ordered me to my work. “Forgive me,
lady,” I said to the duenna. “I have no choice.”
“Nor I nor she!” the woman cried. “Allah have mercy!” But she let
go her embrace and shuffled cross-cabin, with myself following reluc-
tantly. One glance I had of Yasmin — wide-eyed, grim-mouthed,
clutching her djellaba at her throat and at her pressed-together knees —
and of the captain proffering the jeweled knife.
“Defend your self as your brother taught you,” I heard him com-
mand her, “for I intend to find out now whether Prince Jabal’s bride
is the virgin she claims to be.”
“The end of religion!” Jayda wailed, pressing her clasped hands to
her veil and rocking back and forth. “The end of the world!”
I stood over her with Sahim’s dagger as instructed, neither daring
to watch nor wishing to see the struggle that I now heard behind me

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— and that my prisoner alternately closed her eyes to and followed with sharp attention, shifting her position as necessary to get a better view. From Yasmin came not a sound except quick breaths and sudden steps and lunges; the same from her threatener as the pair evidently feinted, dodged, and jockeyed for advantage, except that from time    to time I heard from Sahim an ironic “Yallah!” or “Shabash!” as, presumably, Yasmin thrust. It occurred to me that she might turn     the dagger on herself, or try to. But when I hazarded one look
over-shoulder I saw her half-crouched between couch and table like a
seasoned knife-fighter, her left hand up and open to parry her attack-
er’s grabs, her knife poised underhanded out of reach, close to her
chest, her cowl flung back again, her eyes positively blazing. Sahim,
barehanded, lunged. I believe I saw Yasmin thrust, but Jayda’s accom-
panying howl recalled me to my duty. Behind me then I heard an
urgent, grunting scuffle; the combat was obviously joined. The chart
table got bumped hard. I heard the strugglers battle our way, then
back, and then fall grunting upon their couch. Now, surely, I could
back up a few steps and retrieve my watch. …
But then Sindbad’s daughter screamed, and screamed again, joined
this second time by Jayda. My blood prickling, I turned in fearful
expectation of seeing either the rape-in-progress of a brave woman
who had been kind to me or else the worse evil — no denying it — of
her having managed after all to find her target, thereby leaving both
of us in the vengeful hands of Shaitan’s lieutenants and crew. What-
ever I hoped for her, what I saw was Yasmin sitting again on the
couch-edge, rumpled but far from raped, screaming yet again and
turning her face from her assailant, who once again stood before her.
He, too, was disheveled, his scarf and turban both having been
knocked loose. With his back toward us, he held Yasmin’s knife-hand
high and firmly by the wrist with his own right hand; his left, with
which he would cover his face, she clutched just as firmly with her left.
He being larger and stronger, his arm movement raised her to her feet;
they turned a cross-armed quarter turn before she dropped the knife
and they released each other. Yasmin fled to the waiting Jayda and
buried her face in the duenna’s lap. Sahim al-Layl, straightening his
turban, turned usward what was still unscarfed: a nose and mouth
shockingly misshapen by the scar of one long cut grotesquely healed,

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Somebody’s Fifth Voyage

disfiguring an otherwise handsome face. He bent with difficulty to retrieve the jeweled knife and, carrying it again by the blade, limped
as far as the chart table and reoffered it with a frightful semblance of
a smile.
“You learned your lessons well, little sister. Keep this, in case your
protector needs protection.”
As he rescarfed his disfigurement, Sindbad’s daughter flung herself
weeping at his knees. But the name she cried (more as if for pardon
than for another sort of mercy) was not “Sahim!” but — incredu-
lously, hysterically — “Umar! Umar! Umar!”

There ends, almost, the fifth voyage of Somebody the Still-Stranded,
who only in the next weeks began truly to comprehend the awful
magnitude of his stranding. I was appointed Yasmin’s warden and
guardian as well as Shaitan’s second navigator; assisting the captain in
both capacities, I came to know more of both my beautiful, distressful
fellow captive and our extraordinary captor, of whom I shall say this
much here:
The young sailor who, under the name Sahim al-Layl, had quickly
risen through the ranks of local pirates to become the captain of Shai-
tan and the scourge of the Hormuz Strait was the very fellow who,
under the name Umar al-Yom, had been raised as Sindbad the Sailor’s
foster son, Yasmin’s much-beloved brother, and the protégé of both
Mustafa mu-Allim and Sindbad’s captain, Abu Hosayn. With them, in
his young-manhood, he had made a number of brief trading voyages
in the Persian Gulf before setting out in a party of two ships on Sind-
bad’s longer, ill-fated fifth voyage. In the course thereof he had indeed
been lost at, but not to, the sea; like Sindbad, but unknown to Sind-
bad, he had managed to survive, though not unscathed. Just as his
foster father had paid a survival tax to Allah of sundry digit joints and
half a buttock, so the once handsome and gentle Umar, whether in his
struggle to survive among the Hormuz pirates and eventually to gain
ascendancy over them or in some other fashion, had suffered not only
the disfiguring face wound whose scar we had seen but another, pri-
vate, elsewhere, known not even to his lieutenants, and yet a third,
nonphysical, which had inspired his new name, his ferocious piracy,
and a craving for revenge against the house of which he had once been
the favorite son: the house of Sindbad the Sailor.

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

They were a sharklike lot, Shaitan’s crew and officers — violent, rapacious, and not to be trusted — and Sahim maintained his author-
ity over them by frequent demonstrations of his own ferocity and cun-
ning. Fights among the crew were common, even before the captive
women inflamed them further, and were typically settled with knives,
often by the lieutenants or the captain himself. Just such squabbles,
and not storms or disease or ship-to-ship combat, had accounted for
the losses made good by myself and other members of Zahir’s crew.
The lot of the serving-maids was unspeakable; that of the bridesmaids
merely somewhat less so, for not only did the two lieutenants eventu-
ally avail themselves of the four whose “honor” was supposedly being
preserved for higher ransom, but while they were doing so one
drunken night, the bos’n and another crewman made free with the
lieutenants’ designated concubines, and the ensuing bloody free-for-
all had to be put down with masterful sword-and-knife-work by Sa-
him himself. But one of those lieutenants in particular seemed eager
to play the same trick on his captain that the bos’n had played on him,
and so whenever Sahim was elsewhere on the ship, Jayda and I had to
watch constantly lest that fellow slip into the aft cabin and try to force
Sindbad’s daughter. …
Who they all assumed, of course (as did most of Baghdad when
Zahir brought home the ransom news), was faring no better at the
captain’s hands than were her bridesmaids at the hands of his lieuten-
ants; and for at least three reasons Sahim was at pains to give credence
to this fiction. In the first place, knowing his lieutenants, he reasoned
that a Yasmin believed to be already much violated by himself would
be somewhat less of a prize for them than one whose “honor” was
being carefully preserved (though they still would covet on principle
the captain’s sexual property, as the crew had coveted theirs). Second,
it was a matter of piratical pride among them to indignity the women
whose virtue was officially being ransomed, and in this, as in knife
wielding, a captain who failed to set an example for the others would
suffer serious loss of face, so to speak. On this point Sahim al-Layl
was especially sensitive owing to the nature of his second physical
wound, about which his lieutenants knew only that it had left him
with a slight limp but no loss of agility in close-quarters combat. Of
this I shall say no more here than that he could not have deflowered
the flower of Baghdad even had he wanted to — at least not in the
way customary among men who behave as men to women.

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Somebody’s Fifth Voyage

But for a third reason — related to that third, nonphysical scar that
he carried from the fifth voyage of Sindbad the Sailor — Sahim⁄Umar
did not wish to rape his foster father’s daughter, with whom he had
been raised as if he were her twin or slightly older brother. He wished
only to ravish and despoil her “good name,” as (he insisted) she had
despoiled his, and to find out why and on whose behalf she had done
that incomprehensibly vicious, altogether uncharacteristic thing. The
details of all this I would not learn fully until my own sixth voyage, as
you shall hear them on that voyage’s retelling tomorrow night. Suffice
it here to say that though there came to be heard from Sahim al-Layl’s
cabin — day after day and night after night, beginning with those first
sounds of struggle and screams of recognition just narrated — the
same female entreaties and cries of pain and shame that issued in
greater number from the lieutenants’ quarters and greater yet from
where the serving-maids were confined, in fact these were a sore half
masquerade. Yasmin’s entreaties were not for the captain’s mercy but
for his forgiveness, if not his forbearance; the pain was for what Umar
al-Yom had suffered in becoming Sahim al-Layl; the shame was Yas-
min’s overwhelming remorse for having contributed, however unin-
tentionally, to that suffering. But far from laying rapacious hands on
her himself, he saw to it that the left thumb of one who would (that
sly lieutenant) and the zabb of another (the bos’n) were fed to the fish
between Hengam and Tunb. Thanks to his sword, my borrowed dag-
ger, and Yasmin’s own feisty blade, when we finally rerendezvoused
weeks later with Zahir, collected the ransom, and released the hos-
tages, although the others had been raped repeatedly and several were
pregnant, Sindbad’s daughter reboarded her father’s ship no less “vir-
ginal” (if considerably less innocent) than she had left it.
Of that transfer I shall speak tomorrow, for it began my sixth voy-
age, not ended yet. In my manifold capacities as Yasmin’s warden⁄
guardian and Sahim’s assistant navigator and trusted deputy, I came
to know and respect both captive and captor and to serve as the link
between them in ways that even Jayda, who had raised them both as
children, could not. They trusted me, perforce, in their differing fash-
ions and with different things, and I strove not to betray their trust.
About them both and their past connection I learned some, but not
yet all, for each was possessed of a fierce self-respect and sense of pri-
vacy. My young captain’s trust in me I was obliged in one important

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

matter to reciprocate (as in another, in time to come, I would Yas-
min’s): knowing how beyond all reason I prized my wristwatch — all
the more as I began to understand my real situation — Sahim seques-
tered it as a final insurance that I would do neither more nor less than
his bidding. For my navigational chores, in which he took a lively
interest, he lent it back to me but then promptly reclaimed it and (as
it was too large for his wrist, and his crew were a pack of thieves) hid
it elsewhere on his person. He would return it to me without fail, he
promised, when my work for him was done.
As it turned out, repatriating Sindbad’s daughter and her abused
companions was not the last of that work. Indeed, inasmuch as Sahim
al-Layl was very much a man of his word and I have not got back that
watch to this hour, I conclude that my work for him remains even now
somehow incomplete. But among the several innocences lost aboard
Shaitan was this final one of mine: in my frequent conversations with
Sahim concerning that watch and related matters, and my occasional
like ones with Sindbad’s daughter through our joint captivity in Shai-
tan’s aft cabin, I began to comprehend at last (if scarcely to accept)
that off “Serendib” I had lost not only my beloved Julia Moore and all
my former selves but the very world in which they and I had lived,
together with my daughter, my grandchild-in-the-womb, my brother,
my town and time and native tongue — my whole world. The time
came when Sindbad’s daughter, contrite but unconfessing, defamed
but not “deflowered,” was ransomed and released. Her erstwhile cap-
tor, by no means gloating over his revenge, gimped and bittered
among his sacks of gold and hatched febrile further schemes. But her
sometime warden, sometime protector, sometime confidant and more,
whoever that sometime somebody was, remained … still stranded.

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Three Interludes

1.

“… still stranded,” the caliph’s vizier’s messenger echoed, as if to him-
self, and to himself nodded that Somebody’s tale was now faithfully
registered. Sindbad, in turn — disconcerted though he seemed by the
narrative — appeared to register this registration. Slowly, then, for
best effect, he turned from his right-hand neighbor to his left- and
drew himself up to direct at Ibn al-Hamra a glare of triumphant
inquiry.
“Very well,” that fellow grumbled — and on cheeks and brow so
already red, how to detect a blush? “Thirty percent was a trifle over.
Twenty, shall we say, and no questions asked?” But his prospective
father-in-law had already turned away to watch Kuzia Fakan as she
rose from her place.
“Fifteen, in the name of Allah!” Ibn urged. “My original and final
offer: fifteen percent, your daughter’s maiden self, and no further
story-criticism! Perhaps I can talk Sidi Numan and al-Fadl into rejoin-
ing us. …”
But already Fatmah Awad was sizzling her tambourine. Kuzia
stepped onto the low table as if to dance, with her own wine cup in

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

one hand and in the other, from the place to the right of her, the camel
Mustafa’s, unsipped-from. To Fatmah’s tap tata tap-tap she crossed
before her approving master and emptied both upon Ibn’s head,
completing what he himself had initiated pages past. Then, however,
she curtsied before him, set down the cups, took both his hands to
raise him up, and said, “Off we go, my friend, to the Tub of Truth-
Too-Late.”
Nuzhat piped up to join them, beckoning under the camel’s
knobby legs for Haroun’s vizier’s messenger to come along. Right
readily that fellow excused himself to do so; he salaamed to the com-
pany, bade all good night and good-bye (as he would be leaving first
thing in the morning to make his report), and let Nuzhat tweet him
off, chanting over her minor melody the opening words of Some-
body’s fifth voyage: “Truth yes that is what any shall hear who’ll stay to
hear me. …”
“Twelve and a half?” Ibn al-Hamra inquired of Sindbad’s indiffer-
ent sea-blue turban. As the four moved off, rhythmic Fatmah rose to
go with them but looked lingeringly down at her left-hand dinner
companion, Hajj Masud, whom through the evening’s voyage-tales
she had been admiring less and less furtively. Will you not come, too?
her tambourine asked for her. The rug merchant stirred and stood,
blank-faced, as if to do so, but he then called after the caliph’s vizier’s
messenger to halt and hear what Hajj Masud had to say.
“And what does Hajj Masud have to say?” he demanded of the
company and himself. Crossing behind Yasmin, he put his right hand
on her left shoulder, his left on Somebody’s right. “Hajj Masud,” he
began — and then he picked up their joined hands in both of his,
kissed those hands, and declared to that four-hand clasp that in the
judgment of Hajj Masud, purveyor of fine carpets, more questions
about these two fifth voyages remained unanswered than there were
seats at Sayyid Sindbad’s ever-gracious table, plus original investors in
Serendib Limited, plus voyages of Sindbad and Somebody combined.
If he, Hajj Masud, carpeteer designate to the caliphate of Serendib,
had happened instead to be Haroun al-Rashid, Commander of the
Faithful, he would be passing curious to know, for example, just how
that dear lad Umar al-Yom (whom the speaker himself fondly remem-
bered) came to become the dreadsome and disfigured Sahim al-Layl,
and what exactly his grievance was against the house in which he had

432

Three Interludes

grown up like a graceful date palm. How came it to pass that Abu
Hosayn foxed his foxy master, and that the so-canny Jayda, with her
formidable and hard-proved prescience, failed to foresee this conniv-
ance and thereby protect her ward from those piratical conspirators,
not to mention from whatever had earlier beclouded this admirable
young woman’s name and fame? He, Hajj Masud, had more than once
wondered about that. How had good Mustafa mu-Allim, with his
dangerous knowledge of Zahir’s betrayal, fared upon that vessel’s re-
turn to Basra and its rereturn to the Hormuz Strait? Why was he not
here with us now to tell his own tale, in the place of this imperfectly
silent beast who bore his name?
“To conclude,” he declared, “Hajj Masud respectfully declares in
the presence of Jafar al-Barmaki’s messenger that these twin tales, their
tellers, and their principal characters all want steeping in the Tub of
Truth: not to launder out indelicacies but to scrub away false cosmet-
ics and true discrepancies until their veritable complexions are
revealed.
“Such tubbings, however, are not the business of Hajj Masud, old
friend of and supplier of carpets to this house. What shines clearly to
him through all these questions and contradictions, like a light across
dark waters, is the spirit and beauty of his host’s daughter, together
with the worth of her stranded companion-in-distress — whose testi-
mony in the matter of Mistress Yasmin’s intactness Hajj Masud elects
not to question further. Allah bless and preserve you both and give you
good-night, as does Hajj Masud.”
Yasmin kissed his hand as he had kissed hers and another’s. Fatmah
Awad then led him off, or made happily to do so, but he paused near
the table’s head to salaam before the host. Sindbad, however, had gone
back to stroking and stroking his beard, as he had done through
Somebody’s tale. All but oblivious of Hajj Masud, he looked now at
that tale’s teller, now at his daughter, now at Jayda. More than at any
of these, though, he fixed his gaze upon some middle distance, as if
his table’s centerpiece were some vision of Serendib. When at length
Hajj fell in behind the pleased tambourinist, the camel Mustafa fell in
behind both, stirred perhaps by some recollection of caravanseries past.
Salim, nudged by his mother, reluctantly detoured the animal out into
the sandy court. Jayda herself, however, stolidly remained in her place
even when Yasmin now rose from hers, still holding Somebody’s

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

hand, and led him straightforwardly from the hall with neither expla-
nation nor good-night. Glancing back, he saw the old man turn from
his reverie to watch them go; saw Jayda watch Sindbad watch, and (as
more than once aboard Captain Sahim al-Layl’s Shaitan) heard her
grunt in real or feigned dismay the Arabic equivalent of his late aunt
Rachel’s “Hwell!”

No sex in this interlude. Under the dark shadow of our evening’s tales,
how go at it, who had been so programmatically gone at?
Besides (Yasmin reported, once we were bedroomed and restlessly
secure in each other’s arms), “Simon’s” lover’s menses had come on her
that morning, just at early prayer call. All day, until dinnertime, she
had suffered from cramps and nausea, to which for some reason
she had been prone every second month since Jayda had terminated
her accidental pregnancy years ago, during her father’s fifth voyage.
Now the discomfort had largely passed, if not her wistful half regret
that she was not once more pregnant, this time by her comrade Si-
mon, her Bey el-Loor. Nor had her rueful conviction passed that Al-
lah’s will was for her never again to conceive, a fate that she accepted
as deserved, but sadly.
“There is no God …,” her friend began.
“Allah forgive me,” she affirmed. “I believe that.”
And so we made love by merely holding each other skin to skin
through this Arabian night — one of us, at least, reliving through
those skins as though in a sustained and vivid dream what we had
been obliged by “Sahim al-Layl” time after time to do before his eyes
(and the wailing-but-ever-watchful Jayda’s) in the after cabin of Shai-
tan. So much had Umar al-Yom loved this Yasmin, so much did he
love her still despite his anger and bafflement, that he had cut short
her pleading for his forgiveness back on that day of his first unscarfing,
had rescarfed himself and thickly, through that veil, declared, “As Al-
lah and this stranger are my witnesses, Yasmin, I loved you!”
“As they are mine,” she had cried, still shocked, “I loved you, poor
brother! What cruel thing happened to your dear face?”
“What happened happened,” he replied, “thanks to you and your
father. And not only to my face. What cruel thing happened to your
heart and soul,” he then demanded in return, “to make you say I
forced you in Sindbad’s courtyard?”

434

Three Interludes

 “I never said that!” Yasmin protested, and she snatched up her knife
from the chart table. “No man will ever force me!” Her duenna heat-
edly seconded her denial, adding that when the secret could be kept
no longer and Umar was thought sunk and drowned, her charge had
only with the greatest reluctance acknowledged that on the night be-
fore Sindbad’s fifth voyage, she and her “brother” —
“Allah smite me if we did!” Shaitan’s captain cried — convincingly,
so it seemed to his navigator. “Much as we both desired it!”
Sindbad’s daughter’s eyes filled up; her knife-hand faltered. On her
behalf, Jayda scolded, “One glass of wine, Umar, and you were too
drunk to know what you were doing? What with all her heart but
against her better judgment this child let you do, before you sailed off
to Allah knows where? Double shame! — for that’s a gift no woman
can give twice, in the ordinary way. And when you plucked her flower,
you sowed your seed, which then for shame’s sake we weeded out
when we learned its sower was lost at sea. What a curse is wine, which
the Prophet wisely forbids His believers to enjoy, though we do so
nonetheless.”
“Shaitanas!” Our captor was obliged to steady himself against the
chart table. “Devils and liars, your whole house! Acknowledge before
Allah and this stranger that I never touched you in that way!” Ap-
proaching Sindbad’s daughter then, in a steadier voice he declared,
“Jayda is Jayda, who says what she says. Your father is your father,
who does what he does and did what he did. But who is Yasmin,
whom I thought I knew as I know myself? For whose sake did you
sacrifice Umar al-Yom?”
Her reply was a movement so swift that had Sahim’s not been
swifter (as if he had anticipated hers) she would, I quite believe, have
put that knife into her breast. Quickly and efficiently this time, Sahim
disarmed her, while the duenna duly shrieked and the astonished other
witness to this melodrama looked on appalled. Umar⁄Sahim now held
the knife and Yasmin’s arm as well. She pressed her face into his chest
and implored him to take his revenge on her if he would not permit
her to take it on herself. Instead of doing so at once, he demanded
again to know who among her several Baghdad suitors could have
been so much dearer to her than himself, when he had imagined that
he had no serious rivals at all.

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

“One glass of wine!” Jayda wailed — almost as if to cue her charge.
It was Yasmin, released, who now steadied herself against the chart
table, shrugging off Jayda’s words and ministrations. As evenly as she
could, she declared that for having permitted her most precious friend
to bear that blame (though at first she had hoped that their impending
marriage might cover her shame, and later had thought him lost at
sea, and never had supposed that he would suffer her father’s wrath),
she would never forgive herself and was remorseful unto death —
might it come soon, and at his hands! Believing him dead, she had
mourned him, had accepted her father’s anger at herself, and had per-
mitted Sindbad and Jayda to redirect her life anyhow they pleased, for
she herself had taken little further interest in it. That said (she said),
she would say no more — nor need he threaten Jayda for information,
for that lady knew nothing more on this subject than the outlander
Sayyid Bey el-Loor.
“But you know!” had cried bescarfed Sahim al-Layl. “You and one
other, unless you deflowered yourself and blamed Umar!” He bran-
dished the jewel-handled knife. “Tell me!”
To this threat Yasmin responded by boldly opening the neck of her
djellaba and baring her throat and chest to the blade.
“She was forced, Umar!” Jayda protested. “What could the
poor child do? And yourself so gone in wine that you remembered
nothing!”
Ignoring her, Sahim said to Yasmin, “Your cruelty has made me
cruel, little sister, and you no longer have your brother’s knife to de-
fend your self with. Tell Sahim al-Layl who it was that you loved so
much more than Umar, or you shall be forced indeed.”
“The end of religion!” Jayda wailed. But Sindbad’s daughter’s lips
remained as firmly sealed as her eyes remained fixed upon her threat-
ener, who now ordered alarmingly (in what in time we would come
to call his “Sahim voice”), “Off with her djellaba, Bey el-Loor. The
rest as well.”
“The end of the world!” Jayda cried. Yasmin’s eyes filled, but there
was in them also now that willfulness that had been apparent in several
other situations. To Sahim’s navigator’s immense relief, before he was
obliged to proceed with his captain’s orders their subject carried them
out herself, deliberately and unhurriedly, assisted by her fretting but
ever-ready duenna. Her djellaba and underthings removed (all of the

436

Three Interludes

same sea-blue she had worn this evening, as if in commemoration),
she stood unnervingly before us in the moving squares of light from
overhead, apprehensive but regal, her chin high, her arms crossed un-
der her perfect breasts; and now it was Sahim al-Layl whose tears ran.
“Tell me, Bey el-Loor: wine or no wine, could any man look upon
this and forget it? Will you ever, though you live another half hundred
years?”
In simple truth I shook my head: no evading that pronoun now,
because though what followed I did perforce, it was I who did it,
under whatever name.
“Walk around her!” Sahim ordered me. Then “Turn for us, Shai-
tana!” he ordered her. “Show us what Umar al-Yom is supposed to
have seen in his cups in Sindbad’s courtyard and quite forgotten!”
“You never could hold your wine,” Jayda reproved him, fussing
with her charge’s hair even as — dutifully, sorrowfully, yet defiantly —
Yasmin turned.
“And not only to have seen” — Sahim almost wept — “but to
have touched, as you shall now unless she tells us who touched her
that other time! Touch her, Navigator, and say whether your hands
will forget her even on your deathbed!”
To those flashing eyes, when she would not speak, I murmured,
“Allah pardon me, young lady; I have no choice.”
“For pity’s sake, Umar,” Jayda scolded, “do the thing yourself, as a
pirate should! Keep our shame in the family!”
Sahim made an angry sound. Yasmin said nothing. Never removing
her eyes from our captor, she flinched at but did not flee from my
reluctant touch. By way of indirect reply to Jayda’s exhortation, then,
he commanded me, “Do exactly now as I say, Sayyid Survivor, or you
will lose your zabb, too. …”
At this least equivocal remark thus far upon his second wound,
Yasmin made a stricken moan, her duenna a louder one. Bend her
forward over that chart table, I was ordered next: facing his way, so
that (if she would not speak immediately and truly) he could watch
those beautiful but perfidious eyes while I —
“No, Umar, in the name of Allah!” Jayda protested. “She is reflow-
ered for Prince Jabal, who need know nothing of what happened be-
tween you two in Baghdad!”

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

 “Reflowered!” Tears ran freely into Sahim’s scarf. Most bitterly,
then, his voice regained, he declared that not for a king’s ransom,
much less a princess’s, would he have the prince know what had hap-
pened that night in the City of Peace between Sindbad’s daughter and
his foster son: namely, an impassioned but chaste farewell and a loving
pledge of faith until Umar’s return from Sindbad’s fifth voyage, when
they hoped to marry with his consent! Not for the world would Sahim
al-Layl or his navigator redo what Umar al-Yom had never done; he
would yield that privilege to the prince — if, after his fiancée’s ran-
soming, Jabal still wanted it. Instead (unless she spoke at once) …
She did not. Literally before her eyes upon that chart table then he
laid the little knife that he had presented to her (he reminded her
now, as if for my information) that same fateful night, in token of
their vow, as he escorted her back toward the harem from the house’s
courtyard — in his blindness imagining her distress to be over their
impending separation, and her desire to be for himself, not for
a scapegoat for her shame. She had even challenged him to lend her
his other blade, of which this one was the emblem! Now (unless she
spoke as ordered) she would have neither the one nor the other, but
instead …
Yasmin closed her eyes, and Sahim al-Layl gruffly gave me my next,
very specific orders.
Through what followed, and what followed what followed, that
knife was never out of Sindbad’s daughter’s reach, and (once his first
commands had been carried out) Sahim, as if daring her, no longer
kept his hand upon it. At any time Yasmin could have chosen to cut
short her degradation by cutting short her life, or in an access of hu-
miliation could have assaulted with it either the engineer of her sham-
ing or its reluctant agent. But after that second disarming, despite her
tormented tormentor’s demands, threats, taunts, and dares, she ap-
peared to be no longer tempted to it, any more than to confession.
That knife lay like a weight upon those charts over which at his com-
mand she silently bent herself to be … not redeflowered, exactly
(Jayda, at his order, disconcertingly reported to him from her position
of vantage beside me what precisely was taking place, all the while
wailing to Allah, soothing her ward, and complaining that pirates
were no longer what they had once been), and not by the man held to

438

Three Interludes

have been her original deflorator. At his later command (and to my
enormous alarm) she even held that knife in her right hand while
kneeling before me on the cabin floor to carry out yet other of his
punishing orders. The jeweled handle itself she was more than once
obliged, supine, to touch herself with just so until a certain result was
achieved (and echoed by her duenna). And at the deepest, hardest,
most hurtful of my obligatory penetrations, to my horror she snatched
the blade up — but only to bite down upon the flat of it to keep her-
self from crying out. Jayda did so in her stead, just as I, in Sahim al-
Layl’s. …
These things and others like them took place nearly every day and
night of our weeks aboard Shaitan as we prowled the strait and sailed
up the Persian Gulf as far as the islets of Forur and Sirri to reintercept
Zahir, whose foxy captain Sahim did not trust to return directly to
our intended place of rendezvous. “I am profoundly sorry,” I would
declare to Yasmin each time our master set us once more to his shame-
ful work, “to have to do this, under these circumstances.” “You are
doing it on pain of death,” Sahim would interject. “Why apologize?
One cup of wine, we’re told, and you’ll quite forget all this.” Presently
he commanded me to cease my apologizing, but I could not lay hands
upon that lovely person without murmuring, in my still-awkward Ara-
bic, “Forgive me.” To which Sindbad’s tight-lipped daughter made no
reply except with her extraordinary eyes, which she fixed (in whatever
spirit) upon the man who could neither kill nor forgive her.
Lay hands upon her I did, and more, and she likewise me, at our
tyrannical director’s joyless direction: this way, that way, every way
but one, the main and basic between women and men. It was there-
fore quite literally the case — when at last Zahir reappeared and the
huge ransom was paid over and the much-abused hostages were re-
patriated and the other things that happened happened — that if
Sindbad’s daughter had been a virgin at her kidnapping, she would
have been one, in the technical sense, upon her release. For that, we
suppose, Allah be praised — but we shall let some other praise Him.
Now along the man’s whole length the sleeping woman stirred. “Si-
mon” realized that he, too, had lightly dozed. But though his Shaitan
recollections were no dream — what had happened had happened —
he cannot say for certain that what happened next this night between

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

us did not take place in one of those way stations between awakeness
and oblivion. We were who and where we were: Simon and Yasmin,
in his dark bed in her dark house. Directly into his near ear she seemed
to whisper Must we have that watch? and to answer, before he could,
We must, and will. He knows that what happened next truly happened,
not long after: we were waked, or rewaked — he was, at least — by
Jayda’s not-quite-noiseless entry. We heard the familiar black rustle of
her skirts as she crossed usward, and felt her sit on Yasmin’s side of
our low bed. Simon then heard the two women exchange three quiet
sentences in their private language: to him, Jayda’s first had the sound
of a short and neutral declarative statement, and his darling’s, next,
that of an even shorter question, to which Jayda’s reply was not much
more than a word. Did the duenna then rise and go, and Yasmin slip
lightly from his arms to follow? He believes so but cannot thereto
swear, for like Sindbad among the sea grapes of Island One, Voyage
Two, our weary narrator just here drowned in sleep.

2.

Till age thirteen I thought it was a hose.
Devil take it!
No other use for it could I suppose,
Devil take it!
I pissed on fires and flowers; I spanned
Such liquid lengths, my scores still stand.
I peed my full name in the sand!
The Devil take it.
So sang Sindbad from his Tub of Truth, Somebody wrote that after-
noon, this forenoon, when I went unsummoned to our usual tête-à-tête.
He had awakened stranded still (Simon William Behler-Baylor,
Bey el-Loor, B-Bibi-Bill, ’Simmon-Simon-Somebody) and, finding
himself alone, had assumed that his current lover, saddened by last
evening’s reminders of Shaitan and her misfortunate “brother,” Umar
al-Yom, had returned with Jayda sometime before dawn to nurse her
sorrows in her own apartment of the harem. He reslept; redreamed
with painful clarity the world he had drowned from; rewoke to the

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Three Interludes

impossible one whereof and wherein he writes these words. As best as
he could judge in his watchlessness, the hour when Salim or Kuzia
Fakan usually came with Sindbad’s summons had passed. Presently
therefore he made his own, now-familiar way to the arid courtyard,
where, not far from the great tub, he found a fresh-caftaned Kuzia
feeding straw to Mustafa the camel and chatting in Bedou dialect with
that animal.
To the approacher she cheerfully complained, “I had thought my
camel-tending days behind me!” Cupping one hand beside her mouth
then to make sure her voice carried to the tub, she added that no
working musician ought to be up and about before midmorning in
any case, and that playing laundress again to Ibo’s wine-stains should
have entitled her to sleep till noon, along with Nuzhat and Fatmah
Awad. However, having found herself second-winded by her labors in
the Tub of Truth-Too-Late, she had made her way in the smallest
hours to the Tub of Truth, thinking that perhaps her standing with
Sindbad was restored (as it certainly was with Ibn al-Hamra) and that
he might fancy her company in the last interval before the caliph’s
vizier’s messenger left to deliver his fateful message. In fact, she went
on (still delivering her own message tubward in a raised voice, though
our narrator was beside her now), she had come as the hopeful bearer
of not-bad news: Yasmin’s fiancé was half persuaded now that his in-
tended, against all odds, might be actually virginal after all, and that if
that unlikelihood proved to be the case, then her father’s projected
seventh voyage might just possibly be no fiction, either. Despite the
wholesale defections now being reported to the caliph, Ibn himself
shrewdly hoped to buy his way back into Serendib Limited even for
as small a share of its take as seven percent, and Kuzia had fed these
hopes of his in her own hope of raising her stock with her master. She
had wanted to report all that, she now loudly reported, along with her
belief that she was in a better position than Jayda, for example, to act
as go-between in Yasmin’s dowry negotiations.
“But before I got as close to that tub as you and I are now,” she
called to the man standing next to her, “I heard sounds of manly joy
from inside it such as Ibo himself had not been moved to. And be-
tween them,” she added in a voice meant for Somebody’s ears alone,
“certain womanly yips and yelps that I recognized as Jayda’s famous

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

imitation of the late lamented Mrs. Sindbad. Devil take it, I said to
myself: the old witch has managed somehow to out-Marjanah me! So
roll the dice of Allah,” she declared (in her louder voice again) that she
had declared to herself at the time. “I left milord to his lusty pleasures
and hauled back sleepless to the harem. Then, just after prayer call, I
heard certain camel distress cries that only we Bedouin can hear, the
way they say a mother hears her baby’s breathing from the next room:
it was this fellow Mustafa here, complaining that Salim and his break-
fast were nowhere in sight. Well, my friend: that’s a sound no desert
girl can turn her back on, and so once again I said good night to sleep
and did what Allah and His creature will thank me for, if no one else.
Not a sign of Salim, and Haroun’s vizier’s messenger has no doubt
gone off with a message that you would think might scare the drawers
off Sayyid Sindbad. But when his loyal concubine, dancing girl, dowry
negotiator, wine-stain laundress, and camel groom peeked into that
tub a few minutes ago — just to make sure nothing was amiss, it was
so quiet in there compared with before — I found that sly old survivor
snoring away, all by his lonesome!”
“Mm hm,” Somebody said.
“He snores no longer,” Sindbad’s voice called from the tub. “Nor
sleeps, either, with such a muezzin to call him awake.” The old man’s
head, deep-indigo-turbaned, appeared now at the tub’s edge, smiling
broadly. So vigorously then did he shake himself awake that his silver
beard hung over the wooden rim. “But what a sleep, dear Kuzia and
Brother Sindbad! I haven’t drowned so in that element since my sea-
grape grove of Island One, Voyage Two. Come inspect my back,
friends, and see whether it’s not overgrown with rocks and trees from
so sound a sleep, like Whale Island on my maiden voyage! But now
I’m awake, so at least it seems to me, and ready to ride out tonight’s
shipwreck in my Tub of Last Resort. Where is that moon-mugged
messenger, did you say?”
“Long gone with his tattling of mass defection,” Kuzia replied, and
she gave Mustafa a smart snout-smack when he made to schmoozle
his gratitude.
“Good riddance. And Salim the Slippery?”
“Gone with him, I don’t doubt,” the dancer said, “to chatter like a
parrot to Jafar al-Barmaki.”

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Three Interludes

 “Better news yet! Let the pair of them sing two-part inventions
from all the minarets of Baghdad. Hand up my sand-pot, Kuzia.”
The dancer did so, and as he made his splashless water thereinto,
her master exclaimed again (out of view), “By Allah, what a sleep!
Now, as the mountain came to Mohammed, let shipwreck come to
Sindbad, who is too old to go to it.” Finding himself still urinating,
he sang then those verses aforequoted.
“You seem ready enough to ride that shipwreck out,” Somebody
commented from the court. Finally finished, Sindbad sighed with sat-
isfaction, handed back the wet-sand vessel, thanked Kuzia Fakan for
her morning news report and her loyal ministrations (which he prom-
ised would not go unrewarded, particularly if she now fetched tea),
and to our man responded — bidding him into Truth’s dry tub —
that since the very first island of his very first voyage he had always
been ready for the worst.
“But come, Brother Bey el-Loor,” he said when Kuzia had gone
off with the sand-pot and the two men were seated as usual. “Now
that all Baghdad has heard your farfetched stories, perhaps you have
lost interest in their much-compromised current heroine and are ready
for some new game?”
Surprised, Somebody could reply only, “Not at all, Sayyid.”
“For if you have,” Sindbad went right on, “now is the time to get
out from under, so to speak. I didn’t need Kuzia Fakan to tell me that
for one reason or another your rival has chosen to incline to believe
your story and has all but apologized for his dishonorable presump-
tion; he is more eager than ever to have Yasmin, even at less than a
ten-percent share of Serendib. Indeed, when the story of your fifth
voyage gets about, it may be that many a rat will want to reboard our
sinking ship despite the caliph’s vizier’s messenger’s message.”
Somebody cocked his head. “Then your troubles are over, are they
not? Ibn marries Yasmin, and off you sail to Serendib with your fellow
merchants and the caliph’s blessing, while I rejoin my fellow beggars
at your gate.”
In mock dismay Sindbad raised his hands. “What gratitude would
that be to the man who turned our fortune’s tide? It’s time for me to
thank you, Brother, and to discuss seriously those proposals that you
surprised me with this time yesterday. Where’s our tea?” He pulled

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

himself up to look for Kuzia’s return and, whether or not he saw her,
was moved to sing a second stanza across the courtyard:
At age fourteen I found its second use,
 Devil take it,
And reveled three full years in self-abuse,
 Devil take it!
At risk of going blind or mad
I whacked away like every lad
And circle-jerked right round Baghdad.
 The Devil take it!
“As I gather boys did where you hail from as well, eh? We thank you,
Kuzia,” he said over the tub’s edge, and he handed down a tea tray.    “I thank you; my brother thanks you; Mustafa thanks you. Leave us now, please, with our thanks.”
“Pouf,” Somebody heard the dancer reply.
“The long and the short of it,” Sindbad said, chuckling — as he
reseated himself carefully on his cushion-and-a-half and gestured for
our man to pour — “is that we accept, we accept, we accept! Ibn al-
Hamra may go and sing for his supper; Yasmin is yours to marry, with
my blessing. The fact is, I’ve dispatched the vizier’s messenger back to
his master with word that you and your colleague Mustafa mu-Allim,
if that old fellow is still alive and willing, will build and sail a special
craft, based on your personal knowledge of Serendib and its peculiar
waters, for the purpose of delivering the caliph’s gift to the king of
that island and establishing trade relations there. In return for under-
writing the cost of this trial voyage, the original investors in Serendib
Limited will hold exclusive trading rights between that caliphate and
this, to their certain enrichment and Haroun’s as well. You and Yasmin
may honeymoon in Basra at my expense while your ship’s a-building;
I myself would happily join you there were it not for the circumstance
that that city is a seaport and ipso facto within sight of the sea. When
you and Mustafa set sail, Yasmin will rejoin her family here to await
your safe return, and on that happy day this house will become hers
and yours. With the caliph’s blessing I’ll retire with Jayda or some
other to the wâhât of my dreams, somewhere in the empty reaches of
the Sahra al Hijarah, and there end my travels and my days. Agreed?”

444

Three Interludes

Our man salaamed. “May all that my brother envisions come to
pass. But he omits two details. If your stranded namesake is to become
your son-in-law and your surrogate in Serendib, then my bride must
sail there with me. And you must return to me the amulet you took
somehow from Sahim al-Layl, who took it from me. Without my
watch, I can’t navigate to Hormuz, much less to Serendib.”
Right through this double demand Sindbad shook his head; at its
end he declared, “If those are the conditions of our success, Brother,
then we are, as the sailors’ saying goes, frittered in the fo’c’s’le. As to
that latter item: I can’t give you what I’ve told you repeatedly I do not
have. From Sahim al-Layl of accursed memory I took nothing, alas —
not even his life, which another robbed me of robbing him of. And
as to the former, how can you speak of sailing off with my daughter,
after what the sea has done to her already? By your own account a
drowned lover was your ticket from Serendib to the City of Peace. If
you need another for the return fare, for God’s sake take Nuzhat or
Fatmah Awad! Take my Kuzia, even, who is obviously pleased with
you — but Yasmin, never!” He shifted his seat. “Let’s speak openly.
My daughter has been yours already and nightly in my house. She
shall be yours night and day in Basra until the hour you sail, and yours
again in your house — this one — when you return, until the De-
stroyer of Delights and Severer of Societies has his way with one or
both of you. But go to sea with you she shall not. And I have no
watch!”
Somebody set down his teacup and regarded his host eye to eye.
“As between the perils of Serendib and those of this house, your
daughter can make her own decision. But if there is no watch, sir,
there can be no seventh voyage.”
“I have not got it, have not got it, have not got it!” Sindbad re-
peated, as if by the Muslim rule of three. “Not it nor any other amulet,
often though I’ve wished for one in recent years. As the poet sings
memorably of his zabb in the third stanza:
At seventeen it came into its prime,
    Devil take it!
 	I humped my father’s maids and concubines,
    Devil take them!

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

It rose and fell and stood and stood
Through years of love’s apprenticehood
With women good and not so good —
    The Devil take it!
“After which, in his fourth, much to my point, he declares:
Three decades of virility ensued,
Devil take them!
Through which I wooed and wed and sailed and screwed,
Devil take it!
Lover, husband, sire, and stud,
As I sailed on to widowerhood
My purse enlarged — but not my pud,
   The Devil take it!
“Which, needless to add, in time he did,” Sindbad concluded,
“amulet or no amulet. If you haven’t yet discovered what I speak of,
one day you will.”
Taking care not to hide his annoyance altogether, Somebody now
said, “As it offends my ear to hear you play so lightly on the name
Shaitan, so it offends my sense of courtesy to say you’re lying in this
matter, as in the matter of Serendib. But I confess my suspicion that
in marrying me to your daughter and then packing me off with Mus- tafa on the caliph’s errand, you hope to do more than save Yasmin’s
face and the rest of your own backside. By withholding my watch, you
guarantee the failure of a voyage that at best has little enough chance
of success. Mustafa and I will be lost at sea, as Umar al-Yom was
supposed to have been. Yasmin will achieve the honorable estate of
young-widowhood and continue to grace her father’s table. Serendib
then becomes a dead issue, and Sindbad the Former Sailor retires in
peace and honor to the bosom of his family. No, Sayyid! No watch,
no seventh voyage.”
Sindbad likewise then duly permitted his face to redden, his eyes
to flash. “So be it, then, by Allah: no Yasmin and no Voyage Seven!”
He waggled a finger from the hand with fewer than five. “Too many
times I have sat patiently in this tub while you’ve insinuated what now
you’ve declared outright. I have long since acknowledged to you pri-

446

Three Interludes

vately that what I call Serendib was in fact my voyage of revenge
against those who played me false, and that if there exists any literal
island of that name, I have yet to be washed up on its shores. But
however figurative my accounts may be of voyages Five and Six, I
support my fictions with souvenirs of substantial fact, whereas your
fantastical tales have no more to support them than the words of their
telling. Who and what are you, if not a clever and lucky drifter from
Allah knows where, who talked himself into Mustafa’s confidence
aboard Zahir and into Sahim al-Layl’s and my daughter’s aboard Shai-
tan — Devil take it! — just as you later talked your way into mine?”
He moderated his voice. “For your services to Yasmin during her
captivity I am not ungrateful. She herself has well rewarded them,
right under my nose, and I have not only overlooked that affront to
my honor but offered to reward you further with my consent to your
marriage. But it does not follow that I believe your stories, Brother;
or even if I did, that I imagine you to have the slightest chance of
getting back to where you claim you came from; or even if you had,
that I would permit my only true child to take that chance with you.
In my time I have acted monstrously now and then for survival’s sake,
but I am no monster: for all I know, you’ll sail off with my daughter
to whatever infidel port you actually hail from and there sell her into
concubinage in exchange for another trinket like the one you lost.
Which, then, is Sindbad the Swindler: myself or you?”
Summoning all his resolution, Somebody said, “You, Brother, if
you believe those unpleasant suppositions and deny that you have my
watch in the calfskin pouch you wear between your legs.”
Was the old fellow’s surprise feigned? His amusement seemed real
enough when now he declared, “It’s not a swindler but a fool who
believes whatever he hears from the women of this house.” Easing up
his right buttock, with a quick movement under his caftan he pro-
duced and held forth a fawn-colored sack the size and shape of an
actual human scrotum. “This legendary pouch came from no calf but
from a treacherous pup who carried his natural male eggs in it till
Prince Jabal relieved him of that burden.” In a more confidential tone
he added, “Around it, believe it or not, like a silver purse string, he
wore that magical ticking device that you call a watch, the like of which
no Mussulman had ever seen before, fastened by its cunning bracelet.

447

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Once Jabal had fed those puppy eggs and their owner to the sharks,
he cured their pouch to carry that odd instrument: a double souvenir
of his revenge on Sahim al-Layl. When then not long afterward I had
mine on him, Jabal bargained for his life by offering me that amulet,
whose potency he had supposed from where he found it. He lost that
bargain as he’d lost Yasmin, and after my return from Voyage Six I
wore this souvenir — not because I put much faith in magic charms
but because for all I knew it might have some power despite my skep-
ticism. As the poet explains in his fifth stanza:
By my fifties and my sixties, its poor power
 (Devil take it!)
Had declined to once a week from once an hour.
 Devil take it!
The toothless wolf still drools at sight
Of frisking lambs, but cannot bite —
Nor any amulet cure his plight:
   The Devil take it!
“And take it he did, Brother, the thing you’re after, just last night.
Or more exactly, I presented it to him, for the following reason:”
After the story of Somebody’s fifth voyage, Sindbad went on, he’d
had cause to suspect that between last night’s good-nights and this
morning’s prayer call a second attempt would be made — whether by
Kuzia Fakan again or by some other — to steal from him that souvenir
of his own sixth, whereof he meant to tell the tale tonight. As it hap-
pened (and as Somebody had perhaps observed), Jayda had lingered
behind when the company dispersed, and though Sindbad no longer
trusted her or anyone as he once had done, he had not refused her
request to sleep beside him in the Tub of Truth. To test his suspicions,
then, when the time was ripe he had feigned a spell of madness — one
of those “Marjanah fits” that had served him well on certain past oc-
casions — and sure enough, his old mistress and her shaitan of a son
had done precisely what he’d anticipated, Salim materializing from the
nearest dark corner as was his wont. What they sought, however,
Sindbad had already that evening delivered secretly for safekeeping to
Haroun’s vizier’s messenger, to be presented to his master’s master by
way of surety for Voyage Seven: a token from its Serendibian skipper,
Sindbad’s new prospective son-in-law! All the robbers had got for

448

Three Interludes

their pains was that token’s bracelet, which Sindbad had detached and
left in the pouch to lure them on. Their victim, on the other hand (by
a means that he would not divulge but that “Bey el-Loor” could sur-
mise from Jayda’s nocturnal narratives), had gained from this transac-
tion a prophecy of things to come, which was so to his liking that he
forgave the prophet her transgression as he had earlier forgiven Ku-
zia’s. At the foiled Salim he had merely laughed.
“As for that clever bracelet,” he concluded cheerfully, “if it should
find its way into your hands, as would not surprise me, I make you a
gift of it, Brother, and of this pupskin pouch to put it in, which now
holds only those extra links that Jabal found on Sahim al-Layl, and
that Kuzia stole for you once before, and that you kindly returned to
me. Take them and my daughter to boot! May you have better use of
them all than I ever had, and a merry wedding and a bon voyage —
but not with Yasmin. For anything further in the way of navigational
aids, you must apply to the Commander of the Faithful and to Allah
Almighty.”
He concluded his conclusion: “As for yours truly, the fact of the
matter is, this so-called amulet never worked, even with its original
contents in place. Who could mistake Time, the great depotentia-
tor, for an aphrodisiac? On the contrary: Sindbad the Sometime Sea-
Stallion has been all but impotent since Voyage Five, and is as ready
now to retire from boarding women as he is from boarding ships.
The only wâhât I crave is the literal sort, out yonder in the dear dry
desert — whereto, as aforedeclared, I shall withdraw on the day after
you set sail for Serendib. For the poet concludes truly, does he not:
Another well-shaped breast and soft round rump?
    Devil take them.
Old Zabb won’t blink at what once made him jump,
    Devil take him.
He can but write, no longer stand,
And writes in short-, not in longhand.
One final S pissed on the sand —
   Then the Devil take it!
“And so good morning, Brother,” he said finally (Somebody wrote).
“Regarding Yasmin and my conditions, kindly give us your answer
before this evening. She has already given me hers.”

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

3.

Naming the container for the thing once upon a time contained,
Somebody wrote: Poor Sahim’s balls — Umar’s! — if these were those.
He had checked his impulse to fling at its giver that atrocious gift
and instead had pocketed it back to his quarters to see whether in
fact … and in fact found it to appear to be the grisly thing Sindbad
had said it was, and its present contents to be as advertised: on his
writing table now lay the three links that Sahim had one day obliged
his navigator to remove from the watchband, to size it down to his
own smaller wrist. How that fellow had ever worn it around his
scrotal sac was another, more pathetic question: until Sindbad’s sec-
ondhand account confirmed that Salim had actually done so, “Bey
el-Loor” had thought that claim to be another of his captor-friend’s
bitter jokes during Somebody’s sixth voyage.
Those links retrieved, what to do with their horrid purse? When
the time came, he decided, he would recycle it to the sea, which had
received already the rest of its first owner’s mortal body — at the
hands of Prince Jabal of Oman, it now seemed, though the story was
less than clear.
World-girdling solvent (Somebody mused, and wrote), in which the
antecedent of myself, like old Ulysses on his final cruise, will doubtless one
day find solution.
With or without Yasmin? Sindbad had said that she’d already given
her answer even before still-stranded Somebody, there in the Tub of
Truth, had promptly repeated his: with Julia Moore surely dead, him-
self lost who knows how, marry Sindbad’s daughter he would, with
joy and gratitude, at any time and by any rite, and count himself
among Earth’s favored. But unlike Ibn al-Hamra’s, his dowry terms
were nonnegotiable: on the day when Mustafa mu-Allim should de-
clare him and his new craft ready, he would set out for “Serendib”      (a code word for him as it had been for Sindbad the Sailor, but with a
less grim reference), sans armed escort or any other crew than his able
bride, if she would go with him. If she would not, or if Haroun al-
Rashid would not return to him the instrument that was, however
insufficient in itself, nonetheless indispensable to that voyage attempt,
he would abandon his last, farfetched hope of reachieving the world
and time he had fallen from; he would abide with Yasmin wherever

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Three Interludes

she chose — Baghdad, Basra, or the bottom of the sea — even if he
did no more with the years remaining to him than scribble out the
story of his love and of the six voyages that had led him to her. The
latest whereof (he presumed and wrote), my prospective father-in-law and
I will tonight each tell a tale of, if only to Allah, the other, and the courtyard
camel.
And therewith, inconclusively, their forenoon interview had ended.
“By all indications,” Kuzia Fakan now interrupted him to report,
“your audience will be half of Baghdad.” Somebody’s blood had
surged with hope that the approaching footsteps were Yasmin’s; so as
not to distress her with further reminders of Shaitan, he had quickly
hidden the awful amulet pouch under the bedcovers. But having
skirled in with sleep-eyed Nuzhat and Fatmah Awad, the dancer con-
firmed Sindbad’s prediction that last evening’s new story of Yasmin’s
hostagehood and ransoming had gotten around; it was widely sus-
pected that its teller really was from Serendib, if not from somewhere
even more wondrous, and that Bey el-Loor’s and Sindbad’s joint
strategy all along had been to shake out the doubters from Serendib
Limited in order to minimize the division of the profits. The original
investors all now wanted to buy back in, Kuzia understood, as did
many others who had been skeptical before. They believed that inas-
much as Sindbad was not fleeing for his life to the Sahra al Hijarah,
the caliph must have sent secret word of his approval — or else, more
likely, Haroun had been party to Sindbad’s plan from Page One, with
Sayyid Bey el-Loor as his agent.
“Which is all very well for you clever chaps,” she granted. “But
what’s to become of us simple, hardworking sex-slaves and entertain-
ers, I’d like to know, now that Sayyid Sindbad has given away his
amulet and told his zabb in six stanzas to rest in peace?”
“I suspect,” Somebody replied, “that there may be yet a seventh
stanza to that ode, just as I know for sure there’s many a card yet to
be played in the game of Sindbad’s seventh voyage.” Merely to tally
the unresolved mysteries in and discrepancies between the accounts of
his and Sindbad’s fifth voyages, he declared, as well as certain events
therebefore and thereafter, would require more fingers and toes than
remained to Yasmin’s father. Be it understood, however, he assured
her, that though except for Yasmin’s love he himself was as wealth-
less a beggar as he had been upon his arrival in Baghdad, he and his

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

presumable fiancée would never turn their backs on Kuzia Fakan,
should her master turn his.
Tambourinist and piper applauded this pledge with their respective
instruments. The dancer nodded, pressing her veil between her lips,
then said, “To think I once turned my bum to you! If I ever do that
again, my friend, it’s yours.” Her black eyebrows smiled. “But you
won’t be needing it.”
Our man then asked, “Where is Yasmin? Why hasn’t she told me
what she told her father? Why has she kept herself to herself all day?”
Nothing unusual in that latter matter, Kuzia ventured: women had
other things to do besides wait on men. “As to those earlier questions,
I could say that your girlfriend is the sort whose monthlies sweep
down like a sandstorm that brings the whole caravan to a halt. But I
suspect that she’s getting herself together for your engagement party
tonight, while honoring the old custom of keeping herself from your
view until that party begins.”
An old custom (Somebody noted after his visitors left to make their
own preparations) that I suspect our Kuzia of improvising on the spot.
Her news report and accompanying forecast, however, proved ac-
curate enough. Through an oddly solitary rest-of-the-afternoon our
man made sentences until his muse grew weary; then he exercised his
body, logy from days of relative inaction; then, restless, he prowled
the premises and found the house staff (all but still-missing Salim)
even busier than usual making ready the evening’s feast. Elaborate
decorations were being hung in courtyard and banquet hall, food was
being prepared, dancer and accompanists were in rehearsal and not to
be bothered — but there was no sign of Yasmin, Jayda, or Sindbad,
and two smiling but absolute guards denied access to the women’s
quarters. Next, then, for the first time since he had interrupted his
host’s end-of-Ramadan banquet, he felt an urge to venture out into
the city, fabulous and squalid, whose streets and alleys he had learned
the hard way: a Baghdad not out of The Arabian Nights but in it.
Through the closed courtyard gate, however, he was hailed by such a
press of beggars and gentry alike (“Yo there, Sindbad the Shusher!”
called one of the former, whom our man recognized as the porter who
had rented him the burden for his masquerade; and among the latter,
was that not venerable Hasib Ali, the first to defect?) that he retreated
to his quarters, where presently he washed himself, dressed in the best

452

Three Interludes

and cleanest caftan from the wardrobe-chest early provided him, and
waited.
As in the forenoon, so now again, unusually, no summons came,
though from courtyard and feast hall he heard ever-growing sounds
of sociality. When his stomach and the fall of light outside indicated
what, watchless, he could only suppose — that the hour for dining in
Sindbad’s house had come — with an inward frown he went out and
down alone.
The sandy court was as festive with lanterns and guests as if a cara-
van had just arrived. Between the Tub of Truth, near which browsed
the camel Mustafa, and the feast-hall door, where merry Sindbad
stood forth in an indigo caftan to match his turban, a considerable
company was foregathered. As if in reunion they salaamed and em-
braced one another and their host; among them moved house-servants
with large trays of small delicacies, while from the throng outside the
gate new arrivals were admitted by the page Salim, himself returned
not only to the household but, it surprisingly appeared, to his former
standing. Within the gathering Somebody recognized one after an-
other of the original investors in Serendib Limited: not only old
Hasib Ali, but Sidi Numan, Jafar, al-Fadl, Talib ibn Sahl — even timid
Abu Shamat, along with steadfast Hajj Masud and undiscourageable
Ibn al-Hamra. They clapped one another’s shoulders; they confided;
they exclaimed. There they all were, and there were Kuzia Fakan, Fat-
mah Awad, Nuzhat — but where was Yasmin? Where Jayda? And
what exactly was going on?
Now Fatmah caught sight of our man’s approach, tapped Nuzhat’s
elbow with her tambourine, and rattled for general attention while the
piper fanfared and the dancer hurried to notify the host. Somebody
found himself their focus: all turned himward, and way was made for
portly Sindbad to stride forth with arms extended, saluting as well as
announcing, “My son-in-law!”
There were salaams from right and left, even from the likes of Talib
ibn Sahl, the next to defect after Hasib Ali. Only the beet-faced Ibn
al-Hamra hung back. Somebody returned the salutes uneasily and per-
mitted Sindbad’s embrace, but to that deep-purple turban muttered,
“Where’s Yasmin? What about my conditions?” Sindbad raised a brief
forefinger, then turned to the assembled, ended the fanfare with a ges-
ture of his maimed left hand, and bade all please to follow him now

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

into the dining hall, and there kindly to await their place-assignment
according to the custom of his house.
“Permit me to review that custom,” he said when the company had
entered and were standing about the main and side tables, all bright-
lanterned and beflowered (Somebody noted that Hasib and Ibn gravi-
tated toward Sindbad’s end of the main table, Hajj Masud toward
what customarily was Yasmin’s, al-Fadl and Abu Shamat toward their
former positions halfway between). “Old friends and new, partners
major and minor; the steadfast, the wavering, the reconverted — in
my house all shall be fed.” Sindbad smiled. “Clearly, however, not all
of us can sit on the same cushion, any more than every suitor can win
the fair maiden or all parties to a shipwreck emerge the sole survivor.”
He waited for the duly appreciative murmur to subside, and the
knowing nods and wry smiles. “As you are aware,” he then went on,
“mine is a table with no foot, but rather with a head at each end and
its tail amidships, so to speak, like the sort of beast one might expect
to find on Island Two of any major voyage. Tonight, however, that
second and fairer head, together with her intended, are by way of
being our guests of honor and shall sit at my right and left hand —
Yasmin at my right, when she appears, for the reason that (as all of
you have seen) since my return from Voyage Six my daughter has been
my right hand. At my left, it goes without saying, shall sit her new
prospective bridegroom, my namesake and erstwhile brother, now to
be my son-in-law and the intrepid captain of a voyage such as not even
Sindbad the Sailor ever purposely undertook: the man we have come
to know as Sayyid Bey el-Loor and may now call Sindbad the Soon-
Unstranded!”
He raised his short-fingered hand to still the general applause, from
which only Ibn al-Hamra abstained. “And in Yasmin’s customary place
at our table’s other head shall preside tonight, as so often in years past,
my longtime companion and adviser, sometime soothsayer, and the
virtual mother of my daughter, the peerless Cairene Jayda. Will these
most-honored persons please assume their places.”
As of the three only our narrator was present, with considerable
misgivings he permitted himself to be salaamed on every side and es-
corted to his place by winking Salim. Indeed, it was those knowing
winks, together with Sindbad’s late imperturbability and the general
air of certain people’s being in the know, that persuaded Somebody to

454

Three Interludes

contain for the present his urge to halt the proceedings until he and
Yasmin and her father could confer and agree in detail upon what
exactly was taking place, and on what terms. His strong sense was that
the latter two of these had already done so.
His lips pursed, bowing with dignity, Hasib Ali shifted discreetly
down-table on one side, and Ibn al-Hamra on the other. At the same
time they sized up the next-ranked places, at what tonight would be
Jayda’s right and left hand, as if debating whether to move obviously
into position there or wait to be next-named. The other guests quietly
reshuffled themselves correspondingly.
“As is well known,” Sindbad resumed, “our seating now proceeds
according to an order of distinguished contribution and loyalty to our
enterprise. In the third place, therefore” — already Hasib Ali was
nodding in acknowledgment — “who more deserves to sit, for his un-
shakable fidelity to this house and to the project of Voyage Seven, than
Sayyid Hajj Masud?”
“Hajj Masud, did he say?” exclaimed Hajj Masud, pointing to his
own chest and looking about as if astonished. “Hajj Masud the rug
merchant, is it? But Allah is all-knowing!” And he seated himself on
his assigned cushion, behind which he had been standing all along,
and waved a salute up-table to still-stranded Somebody, who was
pleased to return it. Again Hasib Ali nodded, perhaps less vigorously
but no less courteously, and, raising his eyebrows at Ibn al-Hamra,
this time moved unambiguously toward the next place, opposite Hajj
Masud. But florid Ibn was already there and would not budge, though
his salaam to the older man could not be faulted.
“The fourth place, at Jayda’s cunning left hand,” Sindbad de-
clared — and here his announcement-in-progress was for the first time
underscored by Fatmah’s tambourine, as Hasib and Ibn discreetly
pressed shoulder to shoulder — “shall be graced this evening by one
whose investment in our enterprise, of its own kind, can scarcely be
said to have its equal. I refer of course to that most light-footed and
-fingered flower of the desert, Kuzia Fakan.”
“Hear, hear!” Somebody cheered in Arabic, himself cheered to see
that if this ritual had been as carefully prearranged as he now sus-
pected, here was a bit of its choreography that was unanticipated by
the dancer, if not by her associates. Blushing, protesting, apologiz-
ing to the men who wonderingly made way for her, Kuzia was half

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

ushered, half forced to her seat by grinning Nuzhat and Fatmah Awad.
Hajj Masud generously saluted her with his wine cup.
“See here, Sayyid Sindbad!” Hasib Ali called up-hall. “It seems
your purpose is to chastise those of us who, not without reason, came
to lose confidence in your next voyage and to withdraw our support
from it. …”
Ibn al-Hamra interrupted him to observe, “Not all who lost confi-
dence withdrew their support, even when they lost much else as well.”
He then nudged closer to Cushion Five, up next to Yasmin’s desig-
nated place.
“Be that as may,” Hasib continued, “my purpose is to apologize
publicly to you and this company for having doubted Serendib Lim-
ited and for leading others to share my doubt. We accept our chastise-
ment and reaffirm our support of Voyage Seven.”
A chorus of fellow ex-defectors seconded this declaration. Sindbad
nodded at them severally, repeated his earlier welcome, and pledged
again that all would be seated and fed. Hasib moved confidently to
where Ibn already was now poised, and made a curt salaam of invita-
tion to him to give way. But the younger man stood fast.
“To the fifth place,” serene Sindbad said, “I invite nimble Kuzia’s
steadfast associate. …”
“And he accepts your invitation!” cried beaming Ibn, displaying to
Kuzia Fakan and to Sindbad his spotless caftan-front, ready for win-
ing. “What laundry she and I have done together!” But as he stepped
in front of Hasib Ali to seat himself, Sindbad finished: “Fatmah
Awad.”
She had been rattling a fanfare; rattled herself by this unexpected
distinction, she lost her beat. Giggling, Nuzhat pushed her to her
place, then froze in midgiggle when Sindbad quickly added, “And her
indispensable accompanist, our delightful Nuzhat, shall sit sixth.”
“We have the idea,” said Ibn al-Hamra. Himself forcing a chuckle
now, he escorted the embarrassed piper around behind Sindbad to her
place on Somebody’s left, then beckoned to the page Salim. “This way,
Sayyid Salim! Let me usher you to Hajj Masud’s right hand! It is last
night all over again,” he informed Hasib Ali and the others, “as you
would recognize had you not deserted us.”
Salim readily appeared from somewhere to accept the privilege, but
Sindbad stayed him with one waggled forefinger and nodded to Kuzia

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Three Interludes

Fakan, who, crosslegged on Cushion Four, made a megaphone of her
cupped hands and let go a strange high call that startled all the room.
In from the courtyard promptly trotted Mustafa the camel, looking
about for his summoner. With Bedou chirrups, clicks, and clucks, Ku-
zia directed him to Cushion Seven, next to an astonished-looking Hajj
Masud.
More gravely now, “Very well, sir,” Ibn said. “Let us follow your
principle to the last detail, so as not to lose the interest. Take the
eighth place, Salim, and I’ll sit below you in the ninth.”
“You shall not,” Sindbad declared, “nor Salim, either.”
“Salim ninth, then, Devil take it! Myself tenth and last!”
Sindbad shook his head. “No, my friend. Salim saw fit to abandon
our ship last night; he must work his way back aboard as best he can,
with the others who did likewise before him. You yourself, on the
other hand, though you did your redfaced best to scuttle Serendib
Limited, never quite left it; and while your presumptions regarding
my daughter do you no credit, nevertheless you bargained for her
when no other gentleman would. Have her you shall not, but at my
table you’ll always have a place, if scarcely the highest. Be seated where
you are, sir, and not a seat lower.”
“Well!” Looking at once complimented and reprimanded, Ibn
seated himself on Cushion Eight, nodded greetings to the other seated
guests, and smacked his lips at Kuzia Fakan, on his right.
With difficult dignity, Hasib Ali now speculated aloud that the re-
maining two places must be reserved for representatives of those who,
like himself, had turned their backs on Sindbad’s seventh voyage and
now repented that turning: Abu Shamat, perhaps, in the ninth place,
who though he had been the last to join the original company and the
smallest investor therein, had also been the last to leave it? The stand-
ees greeted this suggestion merrily, clapping the little man on his
flustered shoulders.
“And I myself, it seems,” Hasib went on, “must humbly take the
lowest place, as the first to abandon the enterprise that I was the first
and largest supporter of — which support, I might add, I not only
reoffer but am prepared to increase. May I presume your assent, Say-
yid?” he all but demanded of the host. “Or am I to yield my place to
your page and go round with the wine?”

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Before Sindbad could reply, Nuzhat the piper (looking courtward from her place) piped; across from her, Fatmah Awad at once took up
and sizzled her tambourine. The host turned to the doorway, through
which now entered black-caftaned, black-veiled Jayda. The room
went silent. Once inside, the duenna turned and stepped back to let
Yasmin pass before her. In forget-me-not-colored djellaba and white
veil, Sindbad’s daughter did so; whether by prearrangement or by
prophecy, she moved directly and wordlessly to Cushion One, and
Jayda then to her assigned place at the table’s far end. To both, Sind-
bad salaamed. Jayda responded with a nod; Yasmin made no acknowl-
edgment, but kept her eyes fixed upon her declared fiancé, and he his,
questioningly, upon her.
To Hasib Ali then Sindbad once again affirmed that in his house
none went unfed. “You shall dine with us, Sayyid Hasib; likewise you,
Talib ibn Sahl, and Ali al-Yaman, Sidi Numan, Jafar, al-Fadl, Abu Sha-
mat, even slippery Salim. Welcome back to my house, sirs, all of
you — but not to my table.”
A touch more loudly, over ground-sounds of abashment, he went
on: “Five nights ago I seated here a nameless beggar, whom now I
embrace as my son-in-law, my namesake indeed, and captain of my
seventh voyage. Tonight I will seat two more such before any of you.
Let Salim fetch in the first brace of hungry wretches he finds at my
gate to take these last two places. The rest of you may seat yourselves
if and as you will at these side tables, where I wish you good appetite.”
Amid the murmursome smiles and frowns of the seated and the
unseated (even Mustafa gave his head a shake, as if in wonderment),
Salim presently led in two cowled and skulking fellows in ragged djel-
labas, one of them lean, the other not. As if ashamed to show their
faces in such high company, they drew their hoods close; they sa-
laamed abjectly to Sindbad, to the more or less amused other guests,
to the page who ushered them, even to the heedless camel. Between
them then ensued a little dumb-show over which would sit where,
each deferring elaborately to the other. Finally the leaner of the pair
accepted Cushion Nine; the plumper salaamed even to him (Some-
body caught a glimpse of two dark-bearded, sooty faces, but their eyes
were not the red and weary eyes of derelicts) and all but groveled
around the table-head toward the tenth place. Between Fatmah Awad
and Yasmin, however, he paused and fumbled in the tatters of his robe

458

Three Interludes

(“Scratch your lice elsewhere, fellow!” Hajj Masud scolded from down-table, to general laughter); therefrom he drew a dirty knotted rag    and presented it to Sindbad’s daughter. Yasmin neither flinched
from him, as did the tambourinist, nor acknowledged the gift, which,
however, she permitted him to place before her. Still-stranded Some-
body, speaking as one who had himself been poor and worse than
poor, thanked the fellow on behalf of his fiancée and himself.
Bowing and scraping, the beggar scuttled on around to his place.
Nuzhat wrinkled her face and shifted away. Salim made a mock salaam
as he seated him. Mustafa turned his muzzle disdainfully toward his
other neighbor, Hajj Masud. But it was the plump beggar himself,
surprisingly, who, once settled in his place, clapped his soiled hands
with satisfaction and in a clear voice called to Sindbad the Sailor: “Let
the feast begin!”
“By Allah,” said Ibn al-Hamra more or less across the table to Hajj
Masud. “Here is a beggar even more presumptuous than the one who
interrupted us five nights past.”
“Indeed, Ahmad,” the lean other beggar, on Ibn’s left, agreed, “we
must remember our place among these gentlefolk. It is not for us
to give commands — especially before we’ve toasted the bride-and-
groom-to-be.”
“Your pardon, Aslan,” the plump one begged, “and yours, sayyids
all.” But then he presumed further by raising his cup and declaring
up-table, “To the young lady arid her lean and lusty gentleman! She is
a filly fit for an emir, and her rider looks like one who won’t lose his
seat at the first jump.”
Protested Hajj Masud, “You go too far, sir!” But Sindbad, with no
more than a nod, raised his own cup to join the salute, and the others
followed, including Yasmin and even, with a sigh, Ibn al-Hamra. Still-
stranded Somebody was the last to drink, so many were his unan-
swered questions yet. But Yasmin’s eyes would not be denied; he
raised his cup to them and to hers. Never moving those eyes from
his, she lifted her veil enough to sip with him, and he understood
that whatever its destination or fate, his next voyage was already un-
der way.
Without rebuking the beggars, Sindbad then signaled the servants
to their work, and the feast proceeded, with toasts to the engaged
(proposed most often by plump Ahmad and lean Aslan) between 

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

every course. At the two side tables, once the investors had accepted both their penance and their absolution, the conversation grew mer-
rier with each cup of wine. At the main table, however, except for
strained banter between Ibn al-Hamra and Hajj Masud and discerning
compliments from the two beggars on the quality of the food, the
diners seemed busy with their private thoughts. When at last Salim
went around with sweets and small cups of strong mint tea, the side-
table diners turned expectantly in their host’s direction. But it was the
lean beggar Aslan who spoke, much in the manner of Somebody five
nights since:
“Gracious Sindbad,” he saluted, “whom men call the Sailor! You
have invited us all-but-nameless beggars into your house and seated
us among your family, giving us pride of place even over your former
and newly dedicated friends! You have fed us like sultans, not least
with the sight of your celebrated daughter and her fortunate fiancé —
may Allah grace their marriage bed! We whose profession is begging
beg you now one further aim: regale us with the full story of those
wondrous half dozen voyages that brought you to your present estate,
and that the very birds of Baghdad rehearse to one another in the
trees! Then we shall count ourselves rich beggars indeed!”
To which plump Ahmad added, “Let us hear as well the fantastical
voyages of your son-in-law-designate and successor to your helm, in
particular his accounts of Serendib: a round dozen stories to round
out this feast!”
Remarked Ibn al-Hamra to Hajj Masud, “Here is a test of dedica-
tion indeed.” And to the returned defectors he called ironically, “Wel-
come back, brothers!”
Sindbad, however, shook his head. “We have resailed those waters
enough, my friends, each voyage more amazing and harrowing than
the ones before. Let my namesake (whom I now trust to carry on my
name) tell as he will; for my part, I shall recount only my sixth and
recentest voyage, the one to what we’re calling Serendib. And my tell-
ing will be brief, for this is a night of celebration, and the sixth voyage
of Sindbad the Sailor was so grim that like my fifth, it must be glanced
at sidewise and told edge-on if it is to be borne at all.”
Though he had the house’s attention, he rapped solemnly six times
on the Tub of Last Resort before proceeding. An additional low pfft
from Kuzia Fakan turned even the camel’s head tale-tellerward.

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“Those who know me,” Sindbad then declared to the brace of beggars, “— the people of my household and the old friends and new
partners who fasted with me through Ramadan and, in ever-diminish-
ing number, feasted with me through the week since — have heard
this story already in its figured form. In that form only will I represent
it now, together with a sample key for its unlocking.
“The tale begins thus: always before, what sooner or later drove
me from the pleasures of Baghdad to the perils of the sea was boredom
with the rich fruits of my voyaging — a devilish itch once more to
trade sharply with exotic customers, to lose my way and my fortune
and then regain both by Allah’s grace, my wits, and the resourceful
application of the lessons of my previous voyages. Of these lessons, by
the time I tell of, I had come to accumulate no fewer than twenty
(though three of the four from Voyage Four were the same, and Les-
son Four of Voyage Five was incomplete) — enough wisdom, one
would imagine, to guide a man unerringly to his final port and more
than satisfy those who, like Sayyid Ibn al-Hamra, demand a moral for
every story. Indeed, so adept had I become at drawing instruction
from my adventures that Lesson One of Voyage Six may be said to
have been taught and learned even before I went down for the half-
dozenth time to the port of Basra. Perpend it, shipmates: He who
goes to sea merely in order to go to sea shall find himself … at sea.
“But consider: when men speak of themselves as being ‘at sea,’ we
understand them to mean at sixes and sevens, do we not? Their way
lost? Thus ‘finding oneself at sea’ actually signifies losing oneself in that
element. With that key as our polestar, so to speak, we can embark
upon our story as I embarked upon Voyage Six — not because I was
once again weary of the City of Peace but rather because I so loved it,
and was so altogether weary of the sea, that the sight one day of a
group of merchants joyously arriving home from a trading voyage
overwhelmed me with the desire to know that joy again: the joy of
return to terra firma, for which the prerequisite goes without saying.
“What further proof could one ask that I had indeed, as I remarked
last night, been washed clean of Experience itself (figuratively speak-
ing) on Voyage Five? In any case, fired by this novel motive, I caused
my trusty old Zahir (which, to tell the truth, had lost her charm for
me between voyages Five and Six) to be refitted for her new mission:
the speedy accomplishment of self-loss in order to rereach my starting
place. With shrewd Abu Hosayn at the helm, wise Mustafa mu-Allim

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

at the kamal, and for company a few diehard fellow merchants who
little suspected my true purpose, I set forth down the Gulf of Persia,
not for any place marked on Mustafa’s charts of Allah’s seven seas, but
for that elusive goal aforegiven.
“How to attain it? I let my captain scratch his wily turban league
after league over that question, until all familiar landmarks had long
since disappeared astern. Finally, in proper nautical frustration, he tore
that silken wrapper from his head and for very despair flung it over-
side, declaring us lost. Yasmin.”
At this familiar summons, Sindbad’s daughter for the first time
turned her face from Somebody’s, not to her father but down-table,
to Jayda, who rose at once and went around with Kuzia Fakan to
replenish all the cups except our man’s, which Yasmin, taking Kuzia’s
flagon, herself reached across her father’s place to fill. Sindbad then
proceeded:
“Had Abu Hosayn attended as had I the lessons of our prior voy-
ages together, he would have understood the peculiar utility of tur-
bans for venturers into the unknown: I refer of course to Lesson Two,
Voyage Two. As well throw your head to the scaly ones, comrades, as
the scarf that covers it! I affected to share his marine dismay but was
in my secret heart much pleased, for in the dramaturgy of voyaging, if
I may so put it, he had without knowing it importantly advanced the
action. Seafaring and storytelling alike teach us that certain linkages,
once established, may become reversible as to cause and effect. Does
not Lesson One, Voyage Three, instruct us not only that where dia-
monds abound one must watch for serpents, but vice versa? In the
same way, so often had I seen one captain after another tear turban in
the teeth of tempest that, though the sea was dish-calm and the sky
cloudless when Abu Hosayn deep-sixed his, I quickly climbed into my
Tub of Last Resort and awaited the narrative consequences.
“None too soon! For the skipper’s silk had scarcely scarfed the sur-
face when, in lightninglike succession, there appeared off to starboard
a sheer mountainous island and off to port a veritable typhoon, the
latter whereof promptly dashed Zahir against the former. As we are
speaking in figures, I shall call the mount that wrecked us Adam’s
Peak. Those of us who survived collision with it did so by dint of
clinging to its lowermost crags until the tempest spent its fury —
whereupon we dog-paddled to the nearest beach and fell dog-weary

462

Three Interludes

on it, little suspecting (all save myself, that is, and just possibly Mus-
tafa) that we were stranded on the shore of Serendib!
“Now, my friends: who who has heard my sea tales has not long
since learned that once a castaway has been duly cast, his first concern
must be in the matter of swallowing and being swallowed, and his
second (inseparable from the first) with minding the distinction be-
tween things spoken, things unspoken, things unspeaking, and things
unspeakable? Yet not a few of my costrandees, in the teeth of experi-
ence, so to speak, finding themselves on a beach so bestrewn with the
cargo of shipwrecks past that it more resembled a Baghdad souk than
a desert isle, fell upon this windfall wealth like the merchants they
were, divided it among themselves against the day of their rescue, and,
having judged from the number of wrecked vessels that nautical traffic
in our neighborhood must be heavy, did not bother to ration what
food and drink we had salvaged from Zahir, but gorged as if in cele-
bration of our imminent retrieval. Yasmin.”
This time Sindbad’s daughter merely lifted her cup to her lover,
and he his to his, while Jayda and Kuzia made their rounds.
“Needless to say,” Sindbad went on, “starvation reached them be-
fore rescue, for though indeed another ship or two sailed by in the
weeks that followed, and those of us with turbans duly waved for
pickup, the new arrivals foundered as had we on that tricky coast and
only increased our hungry number. Moreover, a fearsome colic soon
hastened the effects of malnourishment and taught the surviving sur-
vivors Lesson Two of this sixth voyage, to wit: What battens in Bagh-
dad may kill in Calicut, or Al Zabag, or Serendib.
“I speak in figures, but their deaths were literal and daily. To spare
myself the spectacle, while they buried one another and reapportioned
to no purpose the spoils of the departed, I set about as usual to recon-
noiter and assemble materials for raft or tub as the occasion might
warrant. I also hid my share of Zahir’s provisions well out of view,
sipped and nibbled only enough to keep myself alive, and wasted no
energy in squabbling over merchandise for which there was no cus-
tomer except the Destroyer of Delights. Though my explorations
turned up no monsters other than that ever-present one, I discovered
a remarkable river whose current ran counter to all others of my ex-
perience — that is to say (speaking figuratively), from mouth to head
rather than vice versa. Inasmuch as out there beyond the mouth lay

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

only shipwreck, castaway’s colic, and starvation, my experience sug-
gested that this riverine anomaly might prove to be of more value to
the advancement of my story than would the gemstones and precious
metals that happened to cover the streambed.
“All the same, having learned on Voyage Five the capital lesson
that Experience teaches us not to swallow her instruction before well
chewing it, I kept my own counsel, bided my time, and helped bury
my erstwhile companions one by one, beginning with the turbanless
Abu Hosayn, until none remained save myself and faithful Mustafa. A
man as sea-wise and experience-fraught as I, my old navigator had
each morning since our stranding wandered off alone down the beach
in one direction as soon as I wandered off in the other. No more than
I had he deigned to scrabble like the others for distressed merchandise;
nor did I ever see him eat or drink. Like me, he was thus spared the
fatal colic, and so I did not doubt that he, too, had stashed his rations
for the long haul. For all I knew, he had perhaps discovered a reverse
estuary of his own, the counterpart of mine; in any case, like me
he was keeping himself to himself, returning only at afternoon’s end
from his reconnoitering, as I from mine, to help inhume the day’s
dead. The morning after we laid the last of our shipmates to rest, we
salaamed to each other as usual, praised Allah in unison for the won-
drous obscurity of His blessings, bade each other good day, and wan-
dered off in our respective directions. I went to my back-flushing
riverside, he no doubt to his; perhaps like me he ate the final morsel
of his secret store and laid the final plank of his raft of last resort (for
carrying river freight, no tub can match a raft). Unlike me, however,
he did not return that evening to our common strand; nor when I
went down-beach to look for him could I find any trace of his cache
of food, his raft, his river, or Mustafa himself.
“My friends: to lose one’s way is one thing; to lose the unerring
finder of one’s way, another. I was no stranger to being lost, but had
I this time lost my navigator, or he me? Although Mustafa and I had
come to steer contrary courses, always till now they had ultimately
reconverged. Not in all my strandings had I ever felt so desolate! I
went so far as to dig my own seaside grave, lay myself in it, curse all
twenty-two lessons of my five and a half voyages for having led me to
this pass, and close my eyes to die, trusting Allah’s trade winds to cover
my body as in time past they had covered my business losses. Yasmin.

464

Three Interludes

 “Instead,” Sindbad went right on, “I slept like a newborn and woke
ditto, snugly blanketed in windblown beach-sand up to my chin but
not yet to my turban and fired with new purpose by Lesson Twenty-
three, which had come to me like a missive from Allah Himself just
prior to my waking: Sole-survivorship, it reads, is finally a one-man job.
Instead of despair at Mustafa’s absence, I felt a grand relief at being
once more the only comber of the beach. Without further ado I
freighted my raft with as many bales of fine jetsam and baskets of
snake-free river-gems as it could safely carry and poled myself out
upon that in-flowing current. Rivers no less than stories, I said to
myself, have their beginnings, their middles, and their ends. Of this
river and this voyage-tale I knew and was quite done with the begin-
ning; now as I approached their middle (figuratively speaking, a great
dark cavern at the foot of Adam’s Peak, into which both stream and
story now swept me willy-nilly), I commended my soul to Allah and
recited that wise poet who wrote:
Nothing not yet written shall surprise you.
Every story has been told.
You’ve heard them all; their plots are old —
Yet of your own, no poet can apprise you.
“And that other, no less wise, who proposed:
If from Nowhere Island’s shore you can’t depart,
Voyage inward, to its isolated heart.
Your own is no less lorn: It may be bound
Out by sailing in, the long way round.
“Soon enough, in those black onrushing depths, I wished myself
back in my sunny beachfront grave. But I had made my irreversible
narrative move, and having made so many such before, instead of tear-
ing my turban in suspense I belted myself securely with it to the raft
of dramatical profluence and refell into a sleep that this time seemed
to me to last a thousand nights and a night. Yasmin.”
To everyone’s surprise — not least her father’s, so it seemed to
Somebody the Still-Stranded, but who could tell when that tricky
teller was truly caught off guard? — Sindbad’s daughter this time
promptly and clearly responded, not with wine but with the following
declaration to the company:

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

 “Friends and other guests: my father’s figured fable has it that from
this indeterminate slumber he wakes to find himself and his raft
moored peacefully in a quiet inland meadow-pond surrounded by
friendly Indians and Abyssinians. He believes himself to be dream-
ing — and who can doubt that he is? — for they address him sweetly
in dreamlike tongues of which he comprehends not a word. Experi-
ence has taught him, however, to be vigilant even in his dreams, es-
pecially in the presence of incomprehensible discourse, and so though
they beckon with seductive hospitality, he stays put on his figurative
raft with his figurative freight in this figurative meadow-pond until
someone salutes him in perfect though figurative Arabic and explains
across the little space between them that they have rescued and
moored him but, so as not to frighten him, have let him sleep on.
‘Better a man wake himself,’ this fellow declares — as if offering Les-
son Twenty-four (which, figuratively, he is) — ‘than be waked by
strangers.’
“Figuratively awake now, my father lets them take him to their
caliph, who in effect explains to him that this figurative island is
known as Serendib and that the office of King’s Favorite is currently
vacant. My ever-resourceful sire straightway applies for it by gifting
the caliph with half a raftload of shoreside and streambed booty. Im-
pressed though he is by this munificence, the caliph lets him know
that the decision will be a close one, inasmuch as the other front-
running candidate has made him a much smaller but rather more im-
pressive application gift, which moreover touchingly comprised the
fellow’s total wealth except for loincloth and turban, both badly
soiled: a magical bracelet this gift is, which, if worn on the wrist,
merely measures time and assists in navigation (arts of no particular
interest to Serendibians), but if worn on or near a man’s eggs, alleg-
edly promotes the sportive function of his zabb. ‘Aha!’ my father says
he says upon hearing this. ‘My rival for the post of Your Favorite can
be none other than my faithful old sidekick Mustafa mu-Allim, to
whom I loaned that amulet (for future navigational purposes only)
shortly after our shipwreck, when I found it among the general jetsam
on your shore. So delighted am I to learn that my comrade remains
among the living that I shall happily share my office with him.’
“And so it comes to pass, the story goes, that the two old shipmates
are reunited and share almost equally the caliph’s favor. By some

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Three Interludes

means that he will no more divulge than will my father his, but that
are doubtless no less figurative, Mustafa has navigated his submontane
way to the heart of Serendib, carrying with him nothing but that re-
markable gadget figuratively found upon that island’s shore. I say al-
most equally because though there is no Muslim of more exemplary
character than Mustafa mu-Allim, he is a man of few words, and those
invariably literal, whereas my father is one of many and figurative. Not
surprisingly, therefore, Sayyid Sindbad’s tales of maritime adventure
and of the urban splendors of Baghdad endear him to the caliph, who
has scarcely imagined that Allah’s world extends beyond Adam’s Peak.
“I speak figuratively.
“Being Sindbad the Sailor, my father soon divines that his narrative
prospects lie less in the tales of his five and a half voyages than in
panegyrics on the City of Peace and the sundry excellencies of its ca-
liph, the very Prince of Believers, Haroun al-Rashid. These he sings
to the end of the chapter, figuratively speaking, until the caliph of
Serendib declares his resolve to send a goodwill emissary to this most
sagacious and powerful fellow king and assigns my father that mission.
Ever mindful of his comrades’ welfare, so this story has it, my father
insists that Mustafa accompany him, adding, moreover, that he will be
obliged to borrow back that magical timepiece-amulet-gift to reach
his destination. After due consideration the caliph not only restores to
his new ambassador, by way of advance salary, a king’s ransom’s worth
of the riverine jewels my father had rafted in from the coast, but as-
sembles a ship’s cargo of three times that value as a gift to the Com-
mander of the Faithful, plus the usual flawless virgin sex-slave and, to
abet her defloration as well as guarantee the embassy’s success, the
magic thingamabob — and here we are.”
Muttered Sindbad the Sailor, “Yasmin.” But his daughter’s forth-
right and efficient conclusion of his tale was applauded, most heartily
by the beggars Ahmad and Aslan. Yasmin now rose from her place,
moved behind her frowning father, silenced the applause with six
smart raps (tap tata tap-tap, tap) upon his Tub of Last Resort, then
stood between him and it, with her hands firmly upon his shoulders,
and said on:
“Of this particular version of this particular tale of this particular
voyage, one might well ask, for example, ‘How did the caliph’s favor-
ites contrive to build a seagoing vessel in that inland capital and drive

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

it under that mountain against that black onrushing current to that
colicky though opulent coast and thence to Basra and home?’ Such
questions, I submit, are of a literal character inappropriate to a figu-
rative story. Adverting to the pond-side wisdom of Lesson Twenty-
four, however — ‘Better a man wake himself,’ et cetera — I would
add this corollary: If a man decline to wake himself, better that his
loved ones wake him than that he slumber on to his hurt or be rudely
roused by some extrafamiliar. Permit me now therefore to speak
literally.”
“Yasmin,” her father repeated, without looking up. “No.”
“Yes!” the two beggars surprisingly cried as one, and the company
at large took up their cry, especially Ibn al-Hamra, the page Salim,
and the investors at the two side tables. Mustafa the camel appeared
to nod as well, though his movement may have been a mere shift of
cud; likewise, gravely, our new narrator’s new fiancé. Yasmin regis-
tered with an emerald glance this last nod only, drew a deep breath
through her perfect nostrils, and declared:
“Of my three several engagement-and-dowry negotiations, only
this latest, to my friend Sayyid Simon-the-Not-Yet-Unstranded, may
be said to have been cloud-free — though even over it there hangs the
unresolved question of that time machine you have just heard tell of:
its present whereabouts and the contingency upon it of our honey-
moon seventh voyage. My next-prior affiancement, to Sayyid Beetface
Camel-Driver, was most marvelously shadowed, as all Islam knows,
by the equivocal circumstances of my hostagehood and my exorbitant
ransoming therefrom: a tale our household heard afresh last night and
the rest of Baghdad, we may assume, no later than noon today.
“But even my original betrothal, to the handsome, wealthy, and
doubtless virile young Prince Jabal of Oman, was blemished by a gen-
tlemen’s disagreement between my father and the prince’s vizier con-
cerning the attestation of my maidenhood — a disagreement not
without consequences in the sequel. To put it briefly and literally, Ja-
bal’s vizier insisted that my virginity be ascertained by female inspec-
tors from the prince’s staff, as is the custom among civilized royalty
before a dowry contract is drawn. My father, however, distempered
by the trials of Voyage Five, refused the on-site inspection of my in-
tactness by any except my lifelong chaperone, Jayda, out of his private
conviction that on the very eve of his fifth embarkation I had given

468

Three Interludes

‘myself’ (by which the whole world means my maidenhead) to my
childhood companion Umar al-Yom — whom in very truth I loved in
those bygone days and wished to wed.”
She looked down for some moments at her father’s indigo turban
before continuing, her eyes agleam with tears. “Umar: what shall I
say? When we were children together, I loved him not only as my
brother but as my surrogate, free to do a hundred boyish things that
I longed to do as well but was forbidden to by custom. I loved him
also as my accomplice, who in secret taught me how to ride a horse
and use a knife, throw a ball and tie useful knots and do half a hundred
other of those hundred boyish things. So close were we in this that I
half regretted it when with the passing of our childhood I saw Umar’s
love for me change character, and mine for him — though I had been
warned by Jayda how nature works on young men and women, and I
understood that Umar was even less a blood relative of mine than
Salim, my opposite: a boy whom nature meant to be a girl.
“Need I add, to this company, that Umar’s till-then-brotherly affec-
tion was all the more important to a motherless girlhood beclouded
by the several long absences of the man whom I admired most in the
world: my father? And beclouded yet further by the intermittency of
that father’s love for me, owing to the shock of my mother’s childbed
death and the other shocks his flesh proved heir to? With Jayda’s help
I came not only to understand his troubled feelings but to love him all
the more for them and to do my utmost to secure his love for me —
and in this I often succeeded. In particular I used to hang upon the
tales of his voyages, wrecks, and rescues, which I could not hear retold
too often. I would have given anything to sail with him, not as an idle
passenger but as a working deckhand. Indeed, it was my enthusiasm
in this quarter that inspired Umar’s; he became a sailor because I
could not. Yet compared to my salty father that lad was a landlubbing
cherub, a roebuck fawn, while the other men I knew were less than
that. My half-brother, Salim? A wily urchin, all whine and skulk. Mus- tafa mu-Allim? A gentle old gelding, kind but neuter. Abu Hosayn?
More weasel than fox; him I mistrusted even before he surrendered
Zahir without a fight, and despised thereafter even before I learned
that he was Sahim al-Layl’s accomplice. Even Prince Jabal, when the
time came, seemed to me but a self-smitten peacock like my other
official suitors, neither as handsome-sweet as dear Umar had been nor

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

as resourceful and commanding as Sindbad the Sailor: the best I could
say for the Prince of Oman was that for an arrogant young cock, he
was not unacceptable, and that on balance, under the then circum-
stances, I looked forward to our marriage — not least because it in-
volved a sea voyage, such as I had longed for all my life.
“As for women, I might as well add, the two whom I most admired
in my girlish years I never knew: my mother, Marjanah, because she
had so altogether possessed my father’s heart; and young Jayda, whose
earlier life had been as adventureful as mine was secluded. To these
now I would add a third, whom, too, I know only by hearsay: my new
fiancé’s lost friend ‘Jay-Moor,’ in whose world at least some women
have the freedom that none has in ours.
“All this is by way of suggesting who it was who did what she did
on the eve of my father’s fifth voyage; who it was who later sailed off
down the Persian Gulf to marry Prince Jabal and fell instead into the
clutches of the Qeshmi pirates. To return to that famous fifth, which
was to be my friend Umar’s first of any consequence: what would I
not have given to trade places with him? For I regarded myself as his
equal in resourcefulness and courage and his superior in shrewdness,
quite able to manage both my father’s ever more erratic behavior
(since Voyage Four) and the hazards of the sea. On the fateful night
in question, when, long after the bon-voyage banquet, Jayda was sum-
moned to the Tub of Truth, I secretly followed after, as I had vowed
to do, in case she needed protection from one of her master’s lament-
able and all but unpredictable mad rages, which came over him willy-
nilly like typhoons. When I reached the courtyard, however, and
approached the notorious tub, what I heard instead (for the first time
in my life) were the unmistakable sounds of ardent coupling, which —
as I have vowed to speak not only literally but candidly — much
stirred my bosom with warm thoughts of Umar al-Yom, for I was no
longer a child.
“I made wistfully to leave my dear nurse and even dearer sire to
their last such pleasures until his return. But as I withdrew toward the
harem I was alarmed to hear after all the flare of my father’s anger,
directed not at Jayda but, in the sudden onset of one of his seizures,
at the ‘Marjanah’ who he was given to fancy had come back to him
from the grave. There followed the whip-snaps of his turban, a cruel
application he had learned for that versatile garment along with its

470

Three Interludes

many lifesaving ones, and across the moonlit court I saw my poor
chaperone scramble for safety. Gathering my courage, I interposed
myself as I had vowed to do, braved that silken whip, and literally
wrestled my mad father back into the tub, using certain holds … that
Umar had taught me. Soon enough his fit passed; he nodded off like
a troubled babe, and I kissed his brow as an exhausted mother would
her tempestuous child’s and then left him to his prevoyage slumber.
“A short while later, recovering my composure before returning to
my own interrupted sleep, I was surprised under the courtyard palms
by Umar himself, who had been obliged to retire early from our fare-
well banquet by reason of his incapacity in regard to wine, a standing
joke in our house: a single bon-voyage toast had been enough to undo
him. Now, however, though still a touch groggy, he was hurrying at
Jayda’s summons either to rescue me from some unspecified danger in
the courtyard or to awaken my father for their predawn departure for
Basra; he himself was not quite sure which. I assured him that I was
in no peril, as he could see for himself — only somewhat shaken …
by an evil dream that had spoiled my sleep. And I teased him about
his susceptibility to wine: I myself had drunk several such toasts to his
maritime safety, I said, with no worse effect than warm thoughts of
his dear person and even warmer wishes that I could be his shipmate
on Voyage Five.
“At this my beloved friend quite came to himself, so I thought, and
our farewells grew unexpectedly tender. Alone in that moon-washed
space, we tearfully embraced, kissed each other good-bye, and pledged
marriage upon his safe return: a match that we imagined (despite Jay-
da’s apprehensions to the contrary) my father would rejoice in, though
we had not yet spoken of it to him. In token of this pledge, I here
acknowledge, we would then and there have exchanged that intimate
gift which no lovers can give twice, had not Umar been unmanned by
virtue if no longer by wine, and had not I been … what I then was.
Instead we sealed our troth with more ordinary blood, drawn with a
more ordinary gift: a beautiful little jewel-handled knife that Umar
then gave me to defend my honor with for him, if necessary, until he
returned to defend it forever after.
“As much as I loved my friend and admired that little knife (as keen
of edge and handy as it was handsome), I asked him with what he
meant to defend his own honor, in extremis: with his blade of love,

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

perhaps, of which I took this to be the emblem (and which I was quite
confident would not fail us once we were wed)? Let him leave me it
for my comfort and protection in this harmless house, I fretted, and
keep its symbol for his own out there in the parlous world. Better yet,
let him stay behind in Baghdad, I went so far as to propose, and lend
me the zabb of which this blade was the jeweled sign, so that I myself
might daringly ship out with Sindbad the Sailor!
“Patient Umar soothed me with more embraces and promises that
we two would one day sail together as husband and wife. Over my
objections, then, he escorted me safely back to the harem (what need
had I of escort, I pouted, when I had his blade and his lessons in its
use to guarantee my safety?). At its entryway we kissed good morning,
for it was by then nearly prayer-call time — and that was the last I ever
saw of my dear honest Umar, who when I saw him next was neither
Umar nor dear nor mine, though unshakably honest still. One way or
another, Umar al-Yom was lost on Voyage Five, from which my un-
sinkable father returned with a princely fiancé for his daughter, among
his other hard-won riches — and there followed the verification prob-
lem of which I have spoken.
“In the event, so considerably did Prince Jabal desire Sindbad’s
daughter to be his bride that he overrode his vizier’s objections and
accepted Jayda’s word for my pristinity, requiring only that for his
reputation’s sake, my dowry be doubled. What will a loving sire not
do for his only daughter? Mine, whose marine experience had made
him a master of the arts of not-swallowing and not-being-swallowed,
swallowed hard, agreed to the prince’s escalated terms, assembled my
dowry in two ships, and freighted the first moiety down the gulf —
along with myself, Jayda, and my bridesmaids and attendants —
aboard his trusty Zahir, under his trusted captain Abu Hosayn. The
second installment was to follow in another vessel, along with my fa-
ther, as soon as word reached him of my safe arrival in the port of
Sohar, his own birthplace and the prince’s capital. As everybody
knows, however, that voyage was forestalled by Zahir’s ‘interception’
off the island of Qeshm and its distressing consequences, which my
current fiancé rehearsed both eloquently and diplomatically last eve-
ning for those with ears to hear.
“For those without, the long and short of it is that my hijacker, the
fearsome pirate Sahim al-Layl, proved to be none other than the lost

472

Three Interludes

Umar al-Yom, very much the worse for his several mishaps on Voyage
Five. These he charged as much to my account as to my father’s, for
my having let him be falsely named (when word reached Baghdad of
his loss at sea) as my deflorator on the eve of that voyage. By way of
revenge on the pair of us, Umar⁄Sahim had conspired with Captain
Hosayn to steer the bride-ship into his clutches, to the end of ruining
my father with a staggering ransom for what men call my honor, and
of ruining me by ravishing not my person directly but my reputation.
“This latter objective, despite my best initial efforts with the knife
that he himself had given me, he accomplished through the helpless
instrumentality of my fellow prisoner, to whom here and now I sol-
emnly pledge my troth.”
“Hear, hear,” affirmed again Aslan and Ahmad, followed, amid
much murmuring, by the others. Sindbad himself nodded sober, im-
passive assent. Having smiled magnificently upon her incumbent fi-
ancé, Yasmin then went on:
“There remain two things for me to tell concerning Zahir’s inter-
ception by the Qeshmi pirates. The first is that Jayda’s stories of her
own remarkable young-womanhood, which I heard almost from my
own babyhood, had prepared me (insofar as any woman can be pre-
pared) for that particular category of misfortune. Though I naturally
feared the pain and shame of being savaged, as she had been, by a
series of rough, foul-smelling brutes, I was determined from the hour
we left Basra to use my wits and my knife as might be necessary and —
like her and like my father — above all to survive. Hence my fury
when Abu Hosayn surrendered Zahir without a proper fight, and
hence also my limited sympathy for those of my handmaidens who
did likewise to their ravishers or who on the contrary chose suicide
before dishonor — as if it were dishonorable of them to be overpow-
ered and victimized! That is one reason why, through my long and
grievous ordeal in Shaitan’s captain’s cabin, I did not after my initial
impulse use Umar’s jeweled knife upon myself. Why, on the other
hand, after my first disarming by ‘Sahim al-Layl,’ I chose not to try it
further upon him (when in fact it lay never far from hand throughout
my indignifying) is another story, to be read perhaps between the lines
of this.
“The second thing that has not yet been literally said is that Prince
Jabal’s thwarted vizier played a role in all of this. When my desperate

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

father quite reasonably asked the prince to contribute to my ransom
(which, remember, was half again my escalated dowry for my life
alone, and double that amount for my equivocal virtue’s being at
least technically preserved), on his vizier’s shrewd advice Jabal not
only declined but insisted that if our nuptials were to proceed, my
ransomed virginity must be reattested, this time by his own Inspec-
tress of Maidenheads.
“Needless to say, my father indignantly rejected this affront to his
honor and mine (as would I have, had he not). Some while later,
moreover, we came to learn that Abu Hosayn and the prince’s vizier
had further plotted, upon Zahir’s delivering that sky-high ransom, to
double-cross Sahim al-Layl, divide the treasure between themselves,
and ferry me and my bridesmaids not home to Baghdad but on to
Sohar, to be bound over into the ranks of Jabal’s concubines!”
Here Yasmin moved from behind her nodding father to stand be-
hind Somebody the Still-Stranded. Placing her hands upon his shoul-
ders as she had upon Sindbad’s, she concluded, “How that plot was
scotched, and what followed its scotching, is the literal story of Voy-
age Six — not only the sixth voyage of Sindbad the Sailor but that as
well of my most dear friend and ex-fellow captive: my unwilling past
assailant, my more than willing present lover, and my future husband
if he be willing. …”
She bent to kiss that fellow’s lucky crown half a dozen times and as
if to it chanted, more softly but still clearly, for all to hear, “Simon,
Simon, Simon. Simon. Simon. Simon!”

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Somebody’s Sixth Voyage

“Her future husband, if she be willing,” I repeated after Yasmin, and
placing my hands upon hers where they still rested on my shoulders,
I pledged before all gods from Allah to Zoroaster my love and troth
to Sindbad’s daughter and my hope to sail with her for Serendib on
the caliph’s errand and our own.
This declaration was received with general approval — except,
surprisingly, from the pair of beggars at midtable. Aslan, the leaner,
appeared to reckon carefully upon his fingertips, as Ibn al-Hamra
had done when tallying the lessons of Sindbad’s early voyages. His
plump companion studied him while the others toasted my heartfelt
profession.
From down-table, Hajj Masud observed ironically, “Something
troubles our distinguished new guests.”
“By Allah, it does,” Aslan acknowledged, “grateful though we are
to sit in this handsome house, and fervently though we wish God’s
blessing upon our host’s long-suffering and altogether desirable
daughter. Among these several stories there are discrepancies that even

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

an undeserving beggar finds it hard to swallow. Is that not so, Brother
Ahmad?”
“It is, in truth,” his fellow sternly agreed, and then he inquired,
“What are they, Brother Aslan?”
“Oh, well, to take but a single example: Sayyid Sindbad’s daugh-
ter — whom may Allah bless and fructify! — has acknowledged that
on the eve of her distinguished father’s fifth voyage she volunteered
her maidenhead to her longtime friend and childhood companion,
Umar Whatshisname, or in any case would not have withheld it from
that worthy but wine-sensitive fellow, whom her duenna later charged
with having forcibly snatched it. Yet both Mistress Yasmin and her
strapping new fiancé have reported that that lucky first possessor of
her person (if such he was, as it now appears he was not) later not
only denied his extraordinary good fortune but elaborately revenged
himself upon her for her having named him as its recipient! Wine or
no wine, Sayyid Ahmad, I find that troubling.”
“No less do I,” the other beggar affirmed. “And yet no more so
than its sequel, wouldn’t you agree? I mean that mysterious story-
between-the-lines, which, if we were to hear it, might explain why that
wretched pirate’s delicious victim, once she had recognized her captor,
first begged his pardon, then turned her knife upon her toothsome
self, and thereafter submitted without further struggle to her alleged
indignification at his hands, via the lucky fellow who now pledges her
his troth. One is tempted impudently to observe that she accepted his
punishment of her as if it were merited!”
“Succinctly put, Ahmad!” Aslan commended. “Nor is that the end
of it, alas —”
But here Hajj Masud broke in to exclaim, “By Allah, that is the end
of it, or may Hajj Masud never sell another carpet in this life!” He
rose to his point. “At Sindbad’s table all shall be fed, so our host has
declared and more than demonstrated. But must every beggarly ap-
petite there be catered to? Hajj Masud says let there be no further
public discussion of Mistress Yasmin’s past misfortunes, on this happy
night of her third engagement! Or fourth, if we count young Sayyid
Umar al-Yom as her first.”
Across-table from him, amid the dutiful approbation of this senti-
ment, Ibn al-Hamra grinned at his neighbor Kuzia Fakan and held up
all ten of his fingers, evidently proposing to reraise his percentage. The

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dancer playfully but firmly interlaced her fingers with his and drew
their clasped hands to her lap. The beggar Aslan, however, unde-
terred, pointed out to the company that he and his companion were
but digesting aloud, so to speak, what Yasmin herself had forthrightly
served up.
“Allah in His wisdom has assigned us the role of beggars,” he con-
cluded, “and thereby spared us the necessity of worrying about
whether to invest our fortunes in Sayyid Sindbad’s seventh voyage
(whoever skippers it) when so much remains obscure concerning his
sixth and even his fifth.”
At the side tables, especially, this observation caused some stir; Ibn
al-Hamra now flashed to Hajj Masud first those original ten fingers
and then two more. At the same moment Yasmin squeezed this nar-
rator’s shoulders from behind, and her father looked meward, as if for
reply.
“The tale of my sixth voyage,” I therefore announced, “may cast
some light upon those obscurities, though I cannot say it will resolve
the questions that trouble our new guests. On the contrary, it may
highlight those and even show forth others. But as the woman whom
I admired and came to love on that same sixth voyage has chosen to
speak at once literally and discreetly of her tribulations in the course
of it, so shall I, of hers and mine alike.”
I then reminded those present who had not been so last night that
my own fifth voyage had begun in the fo’c’s’le of the now-notorious
Zahir, where I seemed to have revived into this improbable world after
drowning in my scarcely more probable own; it had ended in the cap-
tain’s cabin of the infamous Shaitan, in the unwilling embraces (I now
made clear) of my now willing fiancée, under the vengeful orders
of Sahim al-Layl and the helpless but ever-watchful eyes of Cairene
Jayda.
“A lucky fate, our beggar guests have called it, and Allah knows
there are worse fates — Yasmin’s, for one, and Sahim al-Layl’s, for
another — but few more complex, I think, than mine there.” I had
lost my life’s uncertain first half century and those I had shared it with.
I could nowise account (cannot yet: the thing is unaccountable) for
where I found myself or who quite the self was that I found there,
doing what I was obliged to do with the multiply tormented daughter
of … Sindbad the Sailor! So I was supposed to believe and could

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finally neither doubt nor assimilate: as if I had been reborn, full-grown
and middle-aged, between two random pages of The Thousand and
One Nights! I was at sea both literally and figuratively, plotting Shai-
tan’s position with the aid of my borrowed-back wristwatch while
desperately searching for clues to my own position. Still shocked by
the loss of Julia Moore, I had been freshly shocked by the several
atrocities I had witnessed and was now party to. Inclined to sympathy
for (and scarcely in a position to blame) the plucky young woman who
had befriended me and whom now I had no choice but to abuse, I
was not without sympathy as well for her abuser and mine when I saw
what pain his vengeance cost him and began to comprehend its
motive.
Most of all, however (I now confessed), I reserved my sympathy
for myself — the sometime Simon William Behler of East Dorset,
Maryland, now become “Bey el-Loor” of “Serendib” — and resolved
to survive by whatever means among these exotic folk until I could
redetermine who and where I was and find my way back to where my
life had strayed off the charts. To this end I did (as gently as possible)
what I was obliged to do, navigated to the best of my ability, stayed
clear of Shaitan’s barbarous crew, and endeavored to win the confi-
dence both of “Sindbad’s daughter” (and her watchful duenna) and of
Captain Sahim al-Layl.
In the former enterprise, as might be expected, I had small success.
Though when opportunity permitted I made it clear to both women
that I would much prefer to be back in “Serendib,” in the company of
my lost friend, than here in God knew where, required to maltreat a
splendid young woman for whom I felt mainly compassion, it was
scarcely to be hoped that she and her chaperone would welcome my
company in the intervals between its being forced more or less ob-
scenely upon them. Indeed, Jayda was once even moved to scold
me — in midnevermindwhat, before the weeping eyes of our taskmas-
ter — for wishing myself out of a position that Prince Jabal of Oman
and many another would kill to replace me in, and, furthermore, for
doing the indecent thing I was in obligatory process of doing to her
poor darling without compensating for my victim’s discomfort by si-
multaneously doing at least thus-and-so — as her own very first pirate-
rapists had thoughtfully done long ago in Geziret Zabargad. …

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With Sahim, on the other hand, I was more successful. As we pa-troled the Hormuz Strait and up the gulf halfway to Basra on the
lookout for Zahir’s return with our hostages’ ransom, there was not a
great deal to occupy us beyond managing and maintaining our ship,
violating our prisoners per assignment, and guarding them vigilantly
against abuse by other than their designated violators. He and I there-
fore found ample time to converse. Inasmuch as my Arabic was ever
improving, and Sahim’s other shipmates were so brutish a lot, and he
was as curious about the world I had floated in from with my magical
navigation tool (which presently he adjusted to his wrist and kept
jealously on his person except when I required it for my work) as was
I about him and the misfortunes that had transformed Umar al-Yom
into Sahim al-Layl, we came as close to being friends as two can when
one has absolute power over the other.
Thus I verified that my ex-protector and mentor aboard Zahir,
Mustafa mu-Allim, had been Umar’s as well in years past, and before
that his father’s navigator. And that when that kindly captain (Allim
al-Yom) died, Mustafa himself had brought the orphan boy into the
house of the wealthy merchant-trader Sindbad, who had been taught
by Umar’s late father that men should behave to men as men. I learned
further of that childhood friendship we have all since heard of, be-
tween the orphan lad and his foster sister, which had then ripened
into another kind of feeling as the young people themselves ripened
out of childhood. Umar himself had recognized this emotional sea-
change (Sahim told me) only when his virtual “mother,” Jayda,
brought the subject up and warned him to dismiss it from his heart,
inasmuch as his “father,” Sindbad, would not be pleased to learn of it.
Yasmin, he discovered presently, had been likewise informed and in-
structed by her guardian, whose wisdom in such matters the young
people accepted and virtuously agreed to be guided by, despite their
private opinion that Sindbad (between his occasional mad fits, at least)
would more likely delight in the prospect of their eventual marriage.
The young woman permitted herself dutifully to receive the formal
attentions of sundry other suitors; the young man strove to concen-
trate upon seafaring. But the more Umar was separated from his long-
time playmate and dearest friend — by brief but frequent voyages
with his foster father and his “uncles,” Mustafa and Captain Abu
Hosayn — the more his love for Yasmin grew, until at last he resolved
to broach with Sindbad the subject of marriage, as tactfully as he

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could, sometime during the upcoming long trading voyage for which
the household was making ready: Sindbad’s fifth such, Umar’s first
beyond the familiar Bahr Faris.
On the eve of that voyage (or more exactly, the evening before
Sindbad and Umar went down from Baghdad to Basra to board their
hired vessel), there had taken place the now notorious bon-voyage
feast in this very hall, during which, by his own acknowledgment,
Umar drank off a single cup of red wine — ostensibly to the voyage’s
success, privately to the success of his planned marriage proposal —
and was characteristically so undone thereby that, to the household’s
general amusement, the servants were obliged to carry him off to bed.
The next thing he knew, he declared to me, he was being roused from
a deep sleep by Jayda, who bade him hurry to the courtyard tub and
waken Sindbad for the early start they two had agreed upon. Though
the stars over Baghdad told his sailor’s eye that morning prayer call
was still hours off, he groggily collected himself and set about to do
as bidden, unsure by that time whether Jayda had actually appeared
and said what she’d said or whether he had dreamed himself awake —
and unable to ask because by then the woman had disappeared.
Making his way to the Tub of Truth, he found his benefactor
peacefully asleep in it, murmuring Yasmin’s mother’s name. By this
time convinced that the hour was premature and that Jayda’s visitation
had been the last effects of that cup of wine, he recrossed the court
toward his quarters and to his astonishment found Yasmin herself sit-
ting quietly under a date palm, wiping her eyes with the cowl of her
djellaba.
Gentlemen and ladies: my fiancée (my muse as well) has authorized
me to repeat Sahim al-Layl’s version of what ensued, inasmuch as
Umar al-Yom can never again speak for himself. Imagining that she
was distressed by their impending separation (that version has it),
the young man hurried to comfort her. “Lend me that jewel-handled
knife you’ve taught me the uses of,” Sahim told me Yasmin begged
Umar. “There is one thing or another I must do with it before dawn.”
She would not say what or why, but as he knew her to be no trifler,
with deep misgivings he fetched forth that knife, wondering darkly
whether some manservant of the house (the page Salim, perhaps,
whom Umar had never quite understood or trusted, or one of her
official suitors) had offered to molest her. In full possession of his

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faculties now, as her hand closed on the dagger handle he suddenly
feared her intention, though he could not imagine her reason, and
seized the blade. His right hand cut and bleeding, he then wrestled
the knife from her (not easily, Sahim told me aboard Shaitan; as I had
seen, she was a savvy scrapper, and he recalled his wound’s smearing
blood on his friend’s djellaba). Their urgent grappling, to his surprise,
turned into a no less urgent embrace, in the struggling course of which
she made clear her desire that he himself impale her — not this time
in the heart — upon his blade-not-made-of-steel (which had never yet
been unsheathed for its manly purpose), if he was so determined to
deny her the other.
But again he denied her, so Sahim al-Layl swore to me — both
because he truly wished to deflower his bride per custom on their
wedding night and proudly display love’s crimson banner to the
morning household, and because his dismay at her earlier gesture had
altogether unmanned him. There followed the exchange already nar-
rated by my fiancée, quite as reported to me by Captain Sahim: her
keeping the literal blade as an emblem of the figurative (after pledging
never to use it except in self-defense); her distractedly challenging him
to lend her both, to fare forth with on Voyage Five in his stead if she
could not sail at his side; and their final tender farewells at the harem
gate — during which, it must be added, she is said to have declared to
him repeatedly and tearfully, “I love you, sweet Umar, but you have
failed me tonight.” And when he assured her that he would never
touch wine again, and that they would surely marry upon his return,
she replied without confidence, “May that come to pass.”
Much moved by his friend’s distraught behavior, Umar then went
back to the Tub of Truth to wake his “father” (since by now it was
almost muezzin time) and found him already awakened by Salim and
out of sorts. All the way to Basra, this story has it, Sindbad scolded
Umar for oversleeping on that important morning; because the young
man dared not acknowledge what he had been busy with and was
never an able liar, he accepted that false blame. Far from being ap-
peased, however, Sindbad seemed to Umar to grow ever more testy as
their hired vessel made its way from Basra to Persian Siraf, there to
rendezvous with the recommissioned Zahir. It became evident to the
young man that something more than his tardy appearance at the Tub
of Truth (which in fact, Sahim said, had not been tardy at all; the

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page’s had been early) was troubling his benefactor — something in-
volving Umar himself and Yasmin. He feared that Sindbad might
somehow have overheard and misinterpreted their courtyard scuffle,
but lest he needlessly incriminate them both, he was afraid to bring
the subject up, much less express his wish to marry the girl whose
brother he had been raised as but was not.
In Siraf, to his bitter disappointment, Sindbad assigned him to the
escort ship, ostensibly to spare him the shipwreck that was so often
his own fate but actually (Sahim believed) as a further discipline for
some still-unspecified offense. In despair Umar consulted Mustafa mu-
Allim, confessed the whole story, and begged for the old man’s help.
His “uncle” sagely advised him to keep both his feelings for Yasmin
and his marriage plans in his seabag until the voyage’s homeward leg,
if for no other reason than that given Sindbad’s parlous record, there
was always the possibility that on this fifth adventure his luck would
run out and no fatherly permission would be required.
“Allah forfend!” Umar had cried, horrified. Straightway then, just
before the two ships left Siraf, he gathered his courage and against
Mustafa’s advice (and Jayda’s earlier warning) declared frankly to his
foster father his love for Yasmin, his conviction that it was reciprocal,
and his hope for Sindbad’s blessing upon their marriage at the voy-
age’s end. He did this (so Sahim reported to me) precisely lest Allah
not see fit to spare Sindbad the Sailor yet once again, but his benefac-
tor, far from being pleased, forbade him ever to speak thenceforth of
such virtual incest, a crime against Allah, and brusquely ordered him
back to Zahir.
Umar was heartsick, Sahim said. Mustafa counseled patience.
At Kulam Mali, however, at the lower extremity of the subconti-
nent of Al Hind, just before the little convoy set out for the fabled
regions of Al Zabag and Kalah Bar, Sindbad surprisingly reversed his
order and bade Umar join him incognito on the larger, slower hired
vessel. He was to represent himself as a rich young merchant, new to
the business; the disguise would permit Sindbad to teach his foster
son the ins and outs of sharp trading while at the same time giving the
pair of them the advantage of appearing to compete with each other
and their fellow merchants even as they secretly collaborated on the
most profitable deals. They might also discuss further the matter that

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Umar had mentioned in Siraf, which Sindbad allowed he had perhaps
condemned too precipitately.
This proposal troubled Mustafa and was by no means altogether
clear to Umar, but so overjoyed was the young man at Sindbad’s
apparent change of heart that he changed ships at once, reciting to
himself the sixteen lessons of his benefactor’s first four voyages and
resolving to lose no opportunity to show his prospective father-in-law
(now mine) how thoroughly he had learned them:
Voyage One, Lesson One: Some shores may be less solid than the sea.
1:2: A dream long dreamed may grow a real geography, unsuspected
by the dreamer, etc.
1:3: The castaway who would become King’s Favorite must not only
abandon hope but feed a portion of himself to his ultimate devourers.
1:4: He who would regain his lost goods does well to become registrar of
cargoes.
Voyage Two, Lesson One: Sleep is a soporific with respect to salvation;
in Paradise, do not doze off.
2:2: God gave men heads not only for wearing turbans on, and
conversely.
2:3: Where diamonds abound, so surely shall serpents.
2:4: What goes down may come up.
Voyage Three, Lesson One: Where no diamonds are, there may be
serpents nonetheless.
3:2: Be not the plumpest chicken in the coop, etc.
3:3: Discourse that makes no sense may not be nonsense, etc.
3:4: Better to speak the unswallowable and swallow the unspeakable
than be swallowed by either.
Voyage Four, Lesson One: Among those who think without speaking,
mind what you swallow, lest you become food for their thought.
4:2: Men should behave to men as men.
4:3: Men should behave to men as men.
4:4: Men should behave to men as men.
There followed Voyage Five proper: in the figured version, Sind-
bad’s encounter with the Old Man of the Sea. But as Sahim al-Layl
reported it to Shaitan’s new navigator, what happened literally was
this: after a storm had separated the merchant vessel from its escort
and fetched it to that voyage’s Island One, Umar at first wondered

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why Sindbad didn’t warn the reckless merchants not to vandalize the
alabaster dome that Umar himself had quickly recognized, from his
guardian’s stories, to be a roc’s egg. On the contrary, he saw Sindbad
slip away from the landing party without a word and row himself
alone back to the moored ship in one of the two boats they had come
ashore in. After due reflection he decided that so great was his “fath-
er’s” confidence in him after all that Sindbad was depending on him
to urge the merchants to bring about their own destruction: a prereq-
uisite for his and Sindbad’s moving on together to Island Two. He
therefore steeled himself and not only cast the first stone but insisted
to his companions — when they became alarmed at the giant chick’s
stirring in its broken shell — that they not retreat posthaste but
slaughter the roc child for the ship’s larder. Reluctantly they agreed,
and to give the roc parents time to discover and revenge their loss,
Umar drew out the process of butchering and of ferrying chick parts
and shipmates, a few at a time, back to their vessel. When only himself,
one fellow merchant, and one roc drumstick remained on the beach,
he saw the mother ship making sail and weighing anchor, even as the
mother roc blackened the sky to westward; only by dint of the most
furious rowing was he able to overtake the vessel before it sailed off
to certain destruction without him!
For this adroit bit of applied vicarious experience he rather ex-
pected Sindbad’s compliments. But he found his mentor already se-
cured on the foredeck in the Tub of Last Resort, busily pretending to
bathe himself and all but ignoring his ward’s urgent request to join
him. Umar could not deny, however, the sagacity of Sindbad’s grum-
bled observation that such a move would arouse suspicions of one sort
or another; he therefore stationed himself near a spare spar in the
vessel’s waist while the rocs accomplished their boulderment of ship,
crew, and passengers, destroying every one and even the theretofore
unsinkable tub, until no one remained both afloat and alive except
himself (by that time turbaned to his spar) and his erstwhile benefac-
tor, injured and barely conscious — which benefactor’s past kind-
nesses the young man was gratified now to be able to repay by lashing
Sindbad to the spar in his place and clinging alongside as best he could
through the several days and nights customarily required to float from
first to second islands.

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It was an interval all the more arduous, Sahim al-Layl recalled,     for the delirium brought on by Sindbad’s injuries (one of his legs   appeared to be sprained, if not broken, and he was conscious only intermittently) — a delirium in which he uttered shocking things about
his daughter and his foster son. Excusable though Umar found these
slanders to be in Sindbad’s fevered state, he was much relieved to drift
ashore at last on the paradisiacal Island Two, where he secured his
nearly comatose spar partner on the palm-shaded beach and foraged
inland for food and water to revive them both. No alabaster domes
this time — nor monsters, either, so far as could be seen — but among
the wild orchids and bird-of-paradise blossoms he discovered a crystal
spring ringed with unfamiliar but appetizing fruits. Pressing though
his own needs were in that line, he would sample neither until reas-
sured by Sindbad that they were safe. To that end he hurried back to
the beach, fetched the older man up onto his shoulders, and carried
him dazed and raving to that orchard pool, even wading chin-high
into it so that his passenger could reach and gobble the tenderest fruit.
This Sindbad did, ravenously, and he guzzled the pristine water in
cupped-handfuls, whereupon Umar permitted himself a few lifesaving
sips and nibbles as well. To his dismay, however, when he offered to
lay the old man down to rest at poolside, Sindbad clamped his injured
legs tight about his porter’s neck, pounded his head, and not only
cursed him more vilely than ever (with scurrilous reference to Yasmin)
but, as the water and fruit ran through him, befouled Umar literally
as well as verbally. Nor would he release his grip even when night fell,
but rode the young man to earth and snored and gripped and farted
relentlessly till dawn, when he cursed the poor fellow awake, pissed
down his neck, and pounded him back to his portering.
Thus passed an obscene interval of which Umar himself lost mea-
sure but which he endured for his beloved’s sake as well as her feverish
father’s and his own. Messy trial and error taught him presently a trick
to ease his ordeal: in empty gourds he fermented wild grapes to make
a crude wine, which, though it grievously loosened his rider’s sphinc-
ters, loosened his cruel grip, too, if supplied in quantity after sunset.
Then Umar could lay his taskmaster gently down to sleep, wash him-
self in the no-longer-crystalline pool, stretch his weary muscles, and —
with no need of wine to aid him or any wish for that treacherous elixir
after his bon-voyage experience — sleep soundly until Sindbad re-
climbed him and hammered him awake.

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At no time, Sahim al-Layl told me, did Umar imagine Yasmin’s
father’s hard treatment of him to be anything but the effect of fever,
though Sindbad’s legs appeared to give him pain no longer, and
the nature of his curses — that “brother” and “sister” had shame-
lessly gone at it right under their father’s nose; or that Umar had
incestuously forced Yasmin, whose plundered honor would not go
unavenged — cast a troubling retrospective light upon Sindbad’s be-
havior back on Island One. Umar bore his burden stoically, kept him-
self alive as best he could, fermented a steady supply of the wine that
indirectly afforded him his only respite, and even commenced work
on a larger replica of the lost Tub of Last Resort, though his cooper-
age was much impeded by Sindbad’s fists and bowels.
A late afternoon came when Umar saw a ship approaching the is-
land and joyfully recognized it as Zahir. Per Lesson Two, Voyage
Two, he waved his turban, but his signal went either unseen or un-
heeded. As well as he could with his difficult burden, he scrabbled
after driftwood for a bonfire, upbraiding himself for not having done
so earlier. The day was fast fading, and even with his half-completed
tub thrown in for good measure, he feared Zahir would sail out of
view before he got a proper blaze going. His only chance, he decided,
was to get out from under by the usual means and thus free himself to
feed and fan the fire; so deranged was his terrible rider, however (Sa-
him said), that he stubbornly refused this time to take the proffered
gourd, declaring his belief that Umar had poisoned the wine to rid
himself of the only obstacle between his zabb and his sister’s wâhât.
Such were his terms, and since Zahir bade to disappear with the twi-
light, there was nothing for it but that Umar drink some of the wine
himself, despite his pledge to Yasmin, to demonstrate its harmlessness.
“More!” his rider insisted. “A man could sip cobra venom in that pid-
dling amount and suffer no worse than a headache.”
And so he drank more, and the next thing he knew (said Sahim al-
Layl), it was the middle of the next morning, and Umar al-Yom’s head
ached indeed, and his face and crotch, too. Coming painfully to his
senses, he found himself no longer on the beach but almost buried in
a pile of forest litter beside that once-pure woodland spring. He ven-
tured to touch his throbbing groin and to his horror discovered that
he had been crudely bandaged there with his own turban, more
stained with blood by far than Yasmin’s djellaba after their courtyard

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scuffle. And under that bandage, though what hereabouts are called
his eggs remained to him, what hereabouts is called his zabb did not.
With a howl he dragged himself to the pool and, washing his
nether wound therein, was further horrified by the reflection of a face
that he could scarcely recognize from the nose down, so mutilated was
it: as if whoever had taken his manhood had made to take his tongue
as well, and had abandoned the attempt only after much hack and
slash. When his nausea and general shock permitted, he made his way
beachward and there found the ashes of his signal fire, with many
footprints round about, but no sign of Sindbad or Zahir.
Umar’s first thought (Sahim swore) was that that vessel had been
commandeered by some of those pirates with whom, between voyages
Four and Five, his foster father had regrettably established an increas-
ing commerce; that in the manner of such desperadoes they had seen
but ignored his daytime rescue signal and instead sent a night raiding
party ashore to see what booty they might claim. Finding no prize
beyond the helpless owner of their stolen ship, they had either mur-
dered him or taken him hostage, then done their wanton knife-work
on his wine-drugged companion as on a hapless roc chick and left him
for dead. Despite his dreadful injuries, as soon as he was able he
combed the island, wine-gourd in hand, calling in vain for Sindbad.
Finding no trace of him, he flung into the sea that veritable poison
which had unmanned him before any pirate’s knife and left him unable
to defend either himself or his fevered foster father.
How many despairing weeks or months went by before another
ship passed and rescued Umar al-Yom, Sahim al-Layl could by no
means guess. His wounds healed; their scars remained; thinking mis-
erably of Yasmin, he scarcely cared whether he lived or died. From his
rescuers, for his own sake, he concealed his emasculation, and for their
sake veiled his facial disfigurement with a turban-scarf. Painfully he
retrained his damaged mouth and tongue to speak; for his other loss
there was no remedy. En route back up the Persian Gulf, off the island
of Qeshm, the ship was taken by the same sort of pirates he imagined
to have taken Zahir. In his general fury Umar fought them so bravely
that after they had dispatched every one of his shipmates they offered
to spare his life if he joined their crew — and only then (said Sahim
al-Layl) did he truly realize that regardless of Sindbad’s fate there was
nothing left for Umar al-Yom in the City of Peace, to which out of

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habit he had been making his way. Better that his beloved think him
dead than see him as he now was! And so he not only joined the
pirates but (in part to conceal and compensate for his emasculation)
by dint of his reckless ferocity quickly earned their respect and worked
his way up through their lawless ranks.
All the same, he remained concerned about Yasmin’s welfare and
Sindbad’s fate — about the latter more particularly when he gathered
from the pirate leaders that Zahir was once again operating out of
Basra under the command of Abu Hosayn, who was reestablishing
connections with a rival band of pirates from Qatar! “Sahim” (as
Umar had taken to calling himself, to protect the memory of the man
Yasmin had loved) volunteered to win that profitable business for his
new comrades if they would put him in the way of this Abu Hosayn,
whose favorite apprentice he declared himself once to have been. To
this end they set him ashore by night near Basra — as the teller of this
tale will subsequently be set by Sahim al-Layl himself, when the nar-
rative returns to its narrator — agreeing to retrieve him there after
two weeks.
His actual intentions (Sahim told me) were to put behind him the
practice of piracy, which had soon disgusted him, and, after learning
what had happened to his feverish foster father and whether Yasmin
and Jayda were in financial need, perhaps to join his “uncle” Mustafa
aboard Zahir and live out his blighted years incognito as an ordinary
sailor. Finding the old navigator not aboard, however, and judging it
best (for the first time in his life) to approach wiliness wilily, he ap-
plied to Abu Hosayn and stated his business as one who, before he
had become a pirate himself with the up-and-coming Qeshmis, had
suffered at the hands of whoever those other pirates or mutineers were
who had seized control of Zahir during the fifth voyage of Sindbad
the Sailor and perhaps kidnapped that famous fellow himself, under
the pretext of rescuing him, after the shipwreck of his hired vessel.
How had Abu Hosayn managed to regain command, “Sahim” asked
respectfully, and what had been Sayyid Sindbad’s fate?
Puzzled and wary, Abu Hosayn assured the scarfed stranger that at
no time during Sindbad’s fifth voyage had Zahir been under any other
command than her present captain’s. That by prior arrangement, after
the two ships were separated by foul weather Zahir had sailed from
shore to desert shore on the lookout for waving turbans, and by 

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Allah’s grace had thus managed once again to rescue her owner, in rea-
sonable health and spirits despite his latest harrowing maroonment.
But that Sindbad had been, also once again, the sole survivor of his
hired ship’s roc-rock wreck, in which, alas, his adopted son had per-
ished along with all other hands. The lad had been duly mourned by
Zahir’s captain and navigator as well as by her owner and, Abu Ho-
sayn presumed, her owner’s family — though he himself had not been
up to Baghdad since their after-all-profitable return from Voyage Five.
Now, as to the proposed little side business with the pirates of Qeshm
rather than those of Qatar: not impossibly something might be ar-
ranged, if the terms were irresistible. …
Hurrying next in great confusion to Mustafa mu-Allim, whom he
found in the old man’s marsh-side hut, Sahim first got confirmation
of Hosayn’s startling report and then revealed himself (and his facial
wounds only, out of some final pride) to this oldest and closest of his
mentors. After weeping for joy at Umar’s survival and in shocked pity
for his disfigurement, Mustafa told him a more alarming story yet:
though he could not attest the thing firsthand, he had heard rumors
from the page Salim of an ugly turmoil in Sindbad’s house, where all
mourning for Umar al-Yom had been cut short for the reason that
that young man, before sailing off on Voyage Five and being lost in
the roc wreck, had betrayed the family’s trust by seducing, perhaps
even forcing, Sindbad’s daughter! The matter was being hushed up
and was not, Mustafa acknowledged, altogether clear: one rumor had
it that Jayda had been obliged to correct an accidental consequence of
Yasmin’s defloration by her foster brother; yet another maintained on
the contrary that the young woman’s new fiancé, Prince Jabal of
Oman, was entirely satisfied that she was virginal and had concluded
arrangements for their marriage. Mustafa’s stern present advice was
that whatever had or had not happened, Umar should steer clear
of Sindbad’s household and its ever more erratic master. Even the
Qeshmi pirates, in his opinion, were safer shipmates.
At this report (Sahim reported), day turned to night before Umar’s
eyes — an experience he would remember when he came to choose
his full new name. Base and baseless though the rumored charges
against him were, however (he insisted), if Sindbad had got wind of
them in Basra just before embarking for Siraf, it would cast some light
upon his subsequent behavior toward the young man whom he had

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once taken such pride in: Sindbad must have yearned to disbelieve the
page’s insinuations (or whoever’s) and yet — knowing Umar’s feelings
for Yasmin — feared they might be true, and thus, in his feverish con-
dition on Island Two, had savagely avenged his honor and Yasmin’s.
But that that splendid young woman could make such slanderous
charges against anyone, least of all himself, or permit others to, was
quite unthinkable, and so against Mustafa’s urging Umar went up to
Baghdad after all to find out the truth for himself. Disguised as a
crippled beggar (not much acting was required, as his wounds had left
him lame), he hung about this neighborhood in hopes of waylaying
and interrogating the page Salim. Instead, he was able one afternoon
to accost Jayda herself in an alleyway between this house and the mar-
ketplace and reveal himself to her. That ordinarily imperturbable
woman fell faint to the ground; fortunately she was without the atten-
dants who usually helped her with such chores, and so Umar was able
to calm her alarm without attracting undue notice and to tell her
quickly all that had happened to him, as well as at whose hands (he
was now nearly certain) and for what probable though utterly false
cause.
“Dear boy!” Sahim told me Jayda had then cried to him. “Leave this
city as quickly as you can and never come back, or your life will go the
way of your luckless zabb!” She quite understood and in large measure
forgave what had happened between him and his foster sister, she
declared: young people will go at it. She even held Sindbad himself
somewhat responsible, for not heeding earlier the same warnings she
had given Umar and Yasmin and taking more care to separate spark
from tinder, so to speak. But all that was water down the Tigris
now, and had better be left so. She and Yasmin had truly mourned
Umar’s reported loss at sea, as (for appearance’ sake) had Sindbad;
better he had been lost, Jayda felt obliged to say, than suffer what he
had suffered and then come back to reopen, to no purpose, those
barely closed wounds! His and Yasmin’s lapse had been successfully
kept from public knowledge; the girl was in strict seclusion while
preparations were completed for her brilliant marriage. Though Sind-
bad’s wrath had been more or less assuaged by a new young Bedou
mistress whom Jayda herself had procured to distract him, her own
status in the house was unfairly much diminished by the episode, 

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as witness her having to go to market without assistance. What could
possibly be gained by Umar’s turning up now, alive but far from in-
tact, just when a fragile peace had been restored to the household?
If he needed money to get back to Basra and the open sea, Jayda
was confident that she could secretly convey to him any reasonable
amount. …
“Shaitana!” Sahim told me Umar had found himself cursing her,
to his own dismay; but at the same moment he realized that Jayda
must only be repeating what Yasmin — inexplicably! — had told her.
Weeping, he apologized, then reported in detail everything that had
happened between him and Yasmin in the courtyard on that fateful
night, and insisted that Jayda take him at once to Sindbad’s daughter;
or better yet, to father and daughter together, so that he might con-
front his erstwhile beloved and, though nothing could restore his
manhood, at least restore his reputation and perhaps learn on whose
behalf he had been falsely accused by the unlikeliest of false accusers.
Impossible, Jayda insisted in turn (quickly recovering her compo-
sure, Sahim remarked): for one thing, Sindbad was so anxious to get
his daughter’s marriage safely consummated before Prince Jabal’s vi-
zier could invent further conditions that he would be mortally furious
at Umar’s disruptive reappearance. Everyone would suffer, and no one
benefit — for what good was a clear reputation to a dead man? More-
over, while she did not doubt that Umar honestly believed himself
innocent of “Yasmin’s” charges, Jayda said (which, be it noted, the girl
had made or at least had acquiesced to most reluctantly and tearfully,
under great stress, and only when the evidence of her fall could no
longer be concealed), she, Jayda, was less certain that he was actually
so. As Umar himself had acknowledged, Sindbad’s daughter was the
last person in Islam to besmirch another’s character, least of all her
dearest friend’s; and he could not deny that wine had always played
the Devil with him. …
This observation so enraged him (Sahim said) that once again day
turned to night before his eyes. With the greatest difficulty he re-
strained himself from striking the woman who had raised him from
babyhood, and whose determination, once her mind was made up, he
was well acquainted with. Much as she loved and pitied him, Jayda
declared, and painful though it was for a mother to choose among her

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own children, so to speak, she felt her first responsibility to be to his
foster sister, whose story, true or not, Jayda had no choice but finally
to accept.
“Then let me at least hear that story from her own lips!” Umar was
reduced to pleading. The old woman considered, then acknowledged
that on her ward’s behalf she had not only attested Yasmin’s virginity
for Prince Jabal but was in the process of restoring it, both physically
and spiritually, in time for Yasmin’s bridal voyage to Oman aboard
Zahir at the year’s end. That was a process both arduous and delicate
(as well as secret), which Umar’s reappearance would spoil irremedi-
ably. Whatever the facts of the case, however, she did pity his condi-
tion. If Umar would vow to her not to reveal his presence in Baghdad
or even the fact of his having survived Voyage Five, she would arrange
for him to hear Yasmin herself affirm her account of that voyage’s
eve — but only if he pledged further to go his poor zabbless way
thereafter and leave Sindbad’s household in whatever peace Jayda
could contrive for it.
As this was the best bargain he could strike, Umar agreed (Sahim
said), though he could no more imagine not confronting Yasmin with
the cruel falsity of her charges than he could imagine her actually mak-
ing them. At Jayda’s direction, therefore, he followed her to the shop
of Sayyid Hajj Masud, the distinguished rug merchant and trading
partner of Sindbad’s, who was to deliver a number of his finest carpets
to Basra for loading aboard Zahir as part of Yasmin’s dowry as soon
as the bride-to-be had completed her selection. While Jayda distracted
the proprietor’s attention, Umar rolled himself up in one particular
wine-dark Bokhara in a small roomful of carpets set aside for Yasmin’s
final inspection — which, he then heard Jayda promise Hajj Masud,
would take place as arranged … the following forenoon.
All that evening, that night, and next morning, then, he was
obliged to hold both his peace and his water in that most strait and
stifling hiding place. As the teller of this tale can attest from firsthand
later experience, he could scarcely breathe there, much less move his
limbs, particularly when, at Jayda’s instruction, several other rolled
carpets were laid atop his, no doubt to ensure his concealment. Unable
to tell night from day, he could not reckon how often he dozed off or
for how long, his muscles ever more cramped, his head ever dizzier for
want of fresh air and proper blood circulation, his mind spinning dark

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ruminations: Yasmin had entertained other, tentatively official suitors
after Jayda’s insistence that “brother” and “sister” be separated; to
hide the depth of their abiding love, they had made some dutiful show
of other interests and had had less opportunity than before to confide
in each other. Moreover, he had been off voyaging from time to
time. … But notwithstanding her unusual behavior on the eve of
Voyage Five, she was Yasmin, Yasmin, Yasmin!
The hour came at last when through his misery he heard Hajj Ma-
sud welcome Jayda back to his premises along with “the blushing
bride,” whom he affectionately scolded for having lately so hidden
herself from her old friends. Umar’s nerve ends leapt at hearing then
the voice he treasured above all other human voices quietly thank her
father’s partner for his concern and kindness. At Jayda’s insistence,
Hajj Masud left the two women alone to review their list of carpets to
be shipped down to Captain Abu Hosayn. With much womanly ca-
maraderie (on Jayda’s part in particular) they speculated as to whether
the young Omani prince would prefer for his bride’s boudoir this
beautiful little specimen from Al Sin, with its delicate floral pattern on
a cool blue field, or this large Heriz, with its warmer earth tones. For
their initial lovemaking, of course, Jabal would require a white silk
sheet for postcoital display — and once again Jayda assured her charge
that she need have no concern in that quarter if she followed those
few simple precautions they had so often rehearsed. But for subse-
quent bedroom sport Yasmin would need to balance the softer nap of
the Chinese carpet against the superior stain-concealing qualities of
the Persian.
“I have had my fill of concealing stains,” Umar heard his once-
beloved reply, wearily. “If Jabal still wants me after our wedding night,
let him soil every rug in Sohar with our juices. These carpets are his,
not mine, and the same is true of my body. Choose whatever pleases
your eye, Jayda.”
“Just listen to you!” the older woman chided — and she plunked
herself down on the rolled Bokhara in which she knew Umar to be
hidden. In a more subdued voice then she declared, “If Umar had kept
his hands in his own pockets instead of yours, there would be no need
for all this legerdemain. But instead of thanking me for repairing the
damage, your father blames me for leaving the two of you alone that
night in the courtyard to make your good-byes. And you behave as if

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you’re going to the executioner instead of to a lusty young bride-
groom as handsome as he’s rich. Allah help us all!”
“Where was Allah’s help when my poor brother drowned?” Yasmin
inquired, and Umar’s heart leapt as he himself could not. But Jayda
then scolded her in a pointed whisper, “If you must go against your
father’s orders and speak of that boy at all, why do you insist on still
calling him your brother? That makes his forcing you a crime against
nature instead of just a young man’s drunken rashness.”
“No man will ever force me!” Yasmin cried — no doubt to her
duenna’s satisfaction. “Not Umar nor Jabal nor any other! I would
put this blade in his heart or my own before I allowed such a thing!
Nothing happened to me in that courtyard that night without my consent.”
“And you seem determined to announce it to all Baghdad!” Jayda
reproved her. Then in a lighter tone, while moving from carpet to
carpet, she added, “Very well: you took advantage of the poor boy’s
drunkenness to make free with his dear little zabb — not so little by
that time, I daresay. May you have as much sport with Prince Jabal!
What about this Tabriz over here, which Hajj Masud is so proud of?”
As if repeating a lesson, Yasmin said, “My brother and I were drunk
that night on nothing but each other’s kisses. What happened hap-
pened, what did not did not, and for each of us there followed what
followed, by Allah’s will and my father’s. I shall go to my husband
with no regrets except for Umar’s death — and take with me that Ta-
briz, that Heriz, and that blue Chinese as well, along with all the ones
we chose before. Enough of this.”
Hearing these declarations from Yasmin’s own lips, Sahim al-Layl
told me, Umar al-Yom would for the third time have seen day turn to
night had his position allowed sight of daylight at all. Whether from
the shock of her words (despite the fondness of their tone) or from
want of air, he literally knew no more until he found himself in the
captain’s cabin of Zahir, at quayside in Basra. The longshoremen had
found him unconscious in one of the rugs they were loading into the
ship’s hold and brought him to Abu Hosayn as a would-be stowaway;
the captain had recognized the enterprising young Qeshmi pirate
and (saying nothing to Mustafa mu-Allim) revived him to learn what
was what.
The end of this chapter of Sahim’s story, up to the beginning of
ours together, is quickly told. Yasmin’s unwitting confession worked

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changes on the young man’s heart and mind as considerable as those
that Sindbad (he was now certain) had worked upon his body on
Island Two, Voyage Five. Confident now that Yasmin, against his
whole sense of her, had so wished to conceal an infidelity with some-
one else (but whom? All candidates seemed equally out of the ques-
tion) that she had falsely implicated the once-beloved whom she
thought lost at sea and unable to defend himself, he determined to
revenge himself upon the household. To begin with, he repeated the
Qeshmis’ business proposal to Abu Hosayn, adding that its terms
would be even more favorable if the transactions could be kept hidden
from Sindbad. “That might be managed,” Abu Hosayn allowed. Sa-
him then hinted that having just completed some secret reconnoiter-
ing in Sindbad’s house on behalf of Prince Jabal’s vizier, he hoped
soon to approach Zahir’s captain with an audacious but far more lu-
crative proposition, the nature of which he was not yet at liberty to
disclose.
“Airy talk from a man of no authority,” Abu Hosayn replied. “Send
your captain to me, if he means business.” “That I shall,” Sahim
promised; “meanwhile, let my proposals be strictly between you and
me.” “You have made me no proposals yet, young fellow,” Abu Ho-
sayn observed; “you have only proposed to do so. Get along with
you, now.”
Going then to Mustafa’s hut, Sahim embraced him and declared,
without explanation, “You have not seen Umar al-Yom, Uncle, and
you never shall again. Umar did not return from Voyage Five, because
he was lost before that voyage began. Say nothing of this meeting.”
“As Allah wills,” agreed Mustafa, shaking his head.
At the end of his allotted fortnight, then, Sahim kept his rendez-
vous with the Qeshmi pirates, changed his surname from al-Yom to
al-Layl to mark the three occasions when day had turned for him into
night, and boldly proposed to his captain that instead of doing busi-
ness with Sindbad the Sailor, they intercept the bride-ship Zahir for
plunder, rape, and ransom. When that fellow demurred — on the
grounds of Sindbad’s growing reputation as the most dangerous man
in the Persian Gulf — Sahim al-Layl promptly organized a mutiny of
his shipmates, sharked the captain, took command of the vessel (which
he renamed Shaitan) himself, redemonstrated his ferocity in a number
of bloody raids upon the rival pirates of Qatar, established a secret

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connection with Abu Hosayn at great profit to that crafty fellow, and
(seeing to it that their plan was hidden from Mustafa as well as from
Sindbad) arranged for Zahir, its cargo, and its passengers to fall afoul
of Shaitan off Qeshm.
There we sailed now, back and forth across the Hormuz Strait, ever
on the lookout for Zahir’s return, while in bits and pieces I heard the
above story from my captor-commander and, in the narrative pauses,
apologetically did everything he required of me in this “first island,”
as he called it, of his revenge. Why did he not trust Abu Hosayn to
bring the ransom directly to Qeshm? Because, Sahim told me, he had
learned not only that mentor’s lessons but his character. It would not
surprise him if Sindbad sent Zahir ahead as a decoy and then am-
bushed Shaitan with an armed convoy; nor would he be surprised if
Abu Hosayn attempted to double-cross both parties to the hostage
transaction by sailing off with the ransom to Al Dibajat or Serendib.
And sure enough, when the evening came on which our lookout es-
pied what Sahim and I agreed must be Zahir on the southeast hori-
zon, she was standing full sail past Qeshm for Ras Musandam. By
morning, I calculated, she would have rounded that cape into the Gulf
of Oman, headed for who knew where, were it not that Shaitan was
better sailed and (thanks in part to my watch, whose dial glowed in
the dark) better navigated.
Unlike the first, this second interception was authentic, though as
soon as we drew close enough in the failing light for Abu Hosayn to
recognize us, he ordered Zahir’s sails struck, saluted Sahim al-Layl as
one might a younger brother, and blamed his vessel’s equivocal posi-
tion on its navigator. That old fellow, he smoothly confided — one
Mustafa — had become altogether undependable at his trade, though
he was less of a danger in other ways than his captain had expected.
Lest the old man report to Sindbad the truth about Zahir’s original
“capture,” Abu Hosayn had duly threatened him with death and at
the same time promised him a certain share of the profit, and to both
Mustafa had been indifferent: the navigator’s job, he had stubbornly
insisted, had to do with where, not why. He had not even stepped
ashore in Basra when Zahir arrived with its dreadful news, much less
gone tattling off to Sindbad; nor had he objected in the least to navi-
gating the ransom back to Qeshm — but clearly his skills were not
what they had been when he had earned the proud tide of mu-Allim.

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Sahim said nothing, but as he looked about for armed escort vessels
I saw his right eyelid twitch in a way that I had learned meant anger.
Quickly then Abu Hosayn proposed that instead of returning the hos-
tages to Baghdad, we sail both vessels right on down to the Omani
port of Sohar, where Prince Jabal’s vizier — with whom Hosayn, too,
had been in touch, inspired by Sahim’s remark at their second tête-à-
tête in Basra — would give them half of the enormous ransom if they
delivered Yasmin and her bridesmaids to the prince’s concubinery.
Who but a fool would refuse such an opportunity?
“Neither of us is a fool, I daresay,” Sahim replied. “But we Qeshmi
pirates pride ourselves on giving value for money. The sort of thing
you propose is bad for repeat business, and I am not done yet with
Sayyid Sindbad the Sailor, though I have quite had my fill of his
daughter.” In an unmistakable tone then he bade Zahir’s captain take
tea with Shaitan’s first mate on the afterdeck while he and I had a
private word with that undependable old navigator. Abu objected; the
mate’s hand drifted to his dagger. Sensing his position and no doubt
playing for time to assess it, Zahir’s captain salaamed and permitted
himself to be led aft.
Sahim then ordered me to lock his cabin for Yasmin’s protection,
and with a bodyguard of our less untrustworthy shipmates, together
we warily boarded Zahir and sought out Mustafa mu-Allim. We
found the old man working by lamplight at his charts, updating Za-
hir’s plotted position by a convenient method that I myself had taught
him in return for the many things he had taught me. There followed
a reunion among the three of us of such warmth as I need not here
describe: if Mustafa was pleased to see me again, in no worse shape
than before, he was overjoyed to reembrace Sahim al-Layl, whom at
our previous maritime encounter he had scarcely dared believe to be
the same misfortunate Umar al-Yom who had declared himself lost
“before Voyage Five began.” And my own heart was the more full for
returning to the vessel and the man who, for better or worse, had
fished me into the world wherein I speak these words.
To us both, then, when he had regained his voice, Mustafa con-
firmed that Abu Hosayn had once again ignored his navigator’s in-
structions and this time steered Zahir for the Musandam cape rather
than for Qeshm — the opposite of what he had done before, but with
a like objective.

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 “I am more saddened than surprised to learn that,” Sahim said, “for
he, too, was my teacher. But so was Sayyid Sindbad, whom I think of
now as the Grand Shaitan himself.”
“May you have savored your revenge,” said Mustafa, without con-
viction. “Losing his fortune to a pirate instead of to a shipwreck
pained Sindbad as much as losing his daughter’s marriage prospects.”
Sahim replied that as I could attest (and I here do), he had savored
nothing of what nevertheless he had exquisitely exacted and meant
now to exact yet further, in the “second island” of his revenge.
We three then went on deck and together recrossed to Shaitan,
where by the garish light of oil torches Sahim assembled the officers
and crew of both vessels and, bidding them bear communal witness
that the Qeshmi pirates were as good as their word, proceeded with
the formalities of exchange. To begin with, he flabbergasted Abu
Hosayn (surprised already to see us on such cordial terms with Zahir’s
“incompetent navigator”) by announcing publicly that before the
house of “Sindbad the Satan” had turned bright day into dark night,
Sahim al-Layl had borne the name Umar al-Yom.
“Allah forgive me!” Zahir’s captain cried. “If I had known that —”
“You would have steered the very course you steered,” Sahim re-
sponded, “as you would steer it yet if I let you sail off with our ran-
somed hostages. For that you should be sharked — or, worse, sent
back to suffer Sindbad’s wrath for having twice betrayed him. But as
you were once my instructor in seamanship, you shall now serve as my
apprentice in leniency — and as my lieutenant.” He then appointed
Mustafa to be Zahir’s captain and directed him in that capacity to
produce first the ransom for Yasmin’s womenservants, while Shaitan’s
bos’n fetched up from the fo’c’s’le those much-abused folk themselves.
Bedraggled and wild-eyed, some weeping, others stony-faced, one or
two laughing and kissing their captors good-bye, they were one by
one released as the proper sum was counted out. Next came payment
for the lives only of the six bridesmaids, who were led forth from the
midships cabin in their now soiled djellabas and, after showing their
faces to Captain Mustafa for identification (and to Jayda as well,
fetched up for that purpose from Shaitan’s locked after-cabin), per-
mitted to reveil themselves. As to the additional ransom for their vir-
ginity, Sahim collected it peremptorily for the four who had been kept
under more or less scrupulous guard. In the other two cases (those of

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his lieutenants’ unwilling concubines), he transferred the money to the
women themselves and gave each her choice: to return with that sum
to her family, acknowledging her defloration, or to submit to private
inspection by Jayda and make whatever arrangement she saw fit with
her inspector. One, wailing for shame, chose the former course, the
other the latter: in whispered conference she and Jayda went down
briefly into Shaitar’s midships cabin; when they emerged a few min-
utes later, the cowled young woman was led off to her companions on
Zahir while Jayda, to the sailors’ amusement, presented the ransom
bag to Sahim, raised her eyes solemnly to heaven, and announced to
all hands that Tufhah was every bit as virginal as the Christian Mary.
The officer whose property she had been protested this insult to his
virility; Sahim placated him with what remained of Tufhah’s hymen-
price.
Next came the penultimate ransom, for Yasmin’s life. When the
leathern sacks of coin and caskets of jewels had been assembled on
Zahir’s gunwales at Mustafa’s direction and counted over at Sahim al-
Layl’s by his grudging new lieutenant, Abu Hosayn, I was ordered to
fetch the hostage and her duenna and escort them back to the erst-
while bride-ship. But upon my unbolting the aft-cabin companion-
way, Yasmin stepped forth at once in the same spotless white djellaba
and veil she had worn at her capture. The sailors, still merry at the
verification of Tufhah’s honor, fell silent and made respectful way for
her when, ignoring us all, she strode directly to Mustafa, threw back
her cowl, and removed her veil. The old man averted his eyes and
declared quietly, “The daughter of Sindbad the Sailor has been re-
turned alive into her father’s keeping.”
“Allah be praised!” Jayda cried, and she hurried to her side while
at Sahim’s orders I went to help Shaitan’s officers transfer the ransom
from Zahir’s gunwale to ours. For a long moment Yasmin turned her
face — still unveiled, uncowled, uncowed — to her scarfed and pen-
sive captor’s; for a moment less long he returned her unblinking stare,
then averted his eyes like Mustafa.
“Dear dead Umar,” his victim said, perhaps too softly for him to
hear. “Because you stayed her hand that night in the courtyard, your
Yasmin killed herself in a different way. Now Sahim al-Layl has killed
my Umar, and I can mourn him all over again. May Allah forgive both
of us.”

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 “Veil yourself!” Jayda fretted, and she made to do the job for her.
But it was I upon whom Yasmin now fixed her extraordinary gaze for
some terrible seconds; I at whose feet she flung her veil when for the
thousandth time I said, “I’m sorry,” and for the thousand-and-first,
“I’m sorry!”
Then only did she raise her cowl and withdraw belowdecks to comfort her sisters-in-misery. Jayda, however, who started to go with her, was called back by a clearly shaken Sahim al-Layl and publicly authorized to relay to her ward the same options he had given those two bridesmaids, as proof that the former Umar al-Yom, unlike certain of his teachers and certain of his victims, was as good as his word:        if Yasmin wished to maintain that she had brought her maidenhead
aboard Shaitan and was departing now without it, let Jayda attest the
loss and return that specific portion of her ransom to Sayyid Sindbad.
If, on the other hand, for the sake of her regrettably delayed wedding
plans or her future prospects, she wished her duenna to swear other-
wise, she was at liberty to forfeit the ransom and do so.
“I am sorry to have to say this,” the honorable Mustafa put in here,
“but it’s only fair to report what Abu Hosayn knows very well: as soon
as they heard of Zahir’s hijacking, Prince Jabal and his vizier in effect
canceled the wedding by making impossible stipulations, and they re-
fused to contribute to Sindbad’s daughter’s ransom on the grounds
that she could not imaginably now still possess the thing required of
a royal bride. Yasmin ought to reckon that circumstance into her
decision.”
“I told you the old fool was not to be relied upon,” Abu Hosayn
muttered to Sahim al-Layl. “There goes a nice bonus back to Bagh-
dad.” But without even consulting Yasmin, Jayda proclaimed indig-
nantly to all hands that that piddling princelet of a Jabal and his
eunuch vizier could presume and stipulate and cancel and disengage
to their wretched hearts’ content. She herself had examined Sindbad’s
daughter’s virtue at the time of her affiancement and pronounced it
unsullied: as fresh and untried a wâhât as had ever awaited princely
penetration. Throughout their entire sojourn aboard Shaitan, more-
over, Yasmin had not been out of her duenna’s sight for an eye-blink’s
time, and as Allah was her witness — not to mention Sayyid Bey        el-Loor the Navigator — not a zabb had pierced that pearly portal. 

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Barring some further misfortune between here and home, Sindbad’s
daughter would return to Baghdad no less virginal than she had left it.
This proclamation was greeted with hoots and catcalls by Shaitan’s
crew especially, every man of whom had heard issuing from their cap-
tain’s cabin over the days and weeks past the proclaimer’s exclamations
of woe and vain appeals for Sahim to have mercy on Yasmin — not
knowing that it was I who implemented his punishing orders and that
those orders scrupulously spared the orifice in question, at cost to
every other. To reinforce their mistaken impression, Sahim ostenta-
tiously salaamed to Jayda, fished a handful of coins from the final
ransom bag, and presented them to the duenna with ironical thanks
for her having so responsibly safeguarded her charge’s wâhât from
piratical violation. He further presented her with that little jewel-
handled dagger, to be returned to its owner for her self-defense lest
some other try what Captain Sahim al-Layl had refrained from. The
balance of the maidenhead ransom, he declared, we would keep — as
we had kept the balance of Tufhah’s after disbursement of fees and
commissions.
Embracing Mustafa but speaking for all to hear, he concluded,
“Tell Sayyid Sindbad the Sometime Sailor that Umar al-Yom has had
his pleasure and his revenge.”
“Poor boy!” I heard the old man reply, not for general hearing.
“When did revenge ever fail to breed revenge, so long as men behave
to men as men?”
The two ships then unrafted and went their separate ways — which
for a time, as shall be seen, were quite the same way. But if by insuring
that Yasmin’s reputation had been forever besmirched, Sahim had
achieved the joyless “second island” of his revenge, his navigator (the
still-stranded speaker of these words) was far from approaching any
comparable station of his sixth voyage. I repeat: for Sindbad’s beauti-
ful daughter through her ordeal I had felt considerable sympathy,
however equivocal remained the events of “Tub Night” (as Sahim and
I came to call the eve of Sindbad’s fifth voyage). For Sahim as well —
he who had paid so dearly for a deed of which he still swore himself
to be innocent and for which he had inflicted such unsatisfying venge-
ance in return — I continued to feel a large measure of pity admixed
with my puzzlement and appall. But at no time had I ceased to wonder

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what in Allah’s name (so to speak) had happened to Simon William
Behler, once of East Dorset, Maryland, in the fiftieth-or-so year of his
life and the nineteen-hundred-eighty-first of the Christian Era, evi-
dently to strand him not only in medieval Islam but in one of the
crown jewels of its literature? And to my redoubtable Julia Moore,
and to my daughter, Juliette (perhaps by now delivered of her child),
and for that matter to such sometime players in my life story as my
stolid brother, my former wife, my several friends and professional
colleagues? In all the time since my reviving in Zahir’s fo’c’s’le, remem-
ber, I had set foot neither literally nor figuratively on solid ground.
My last, ever-fainter hope of orientation if not of “rescue” was to get
myself to some island of historical certainty — a city, for example, un-
equivocally Basra, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi, Abadan — and there either
refind at last the world I had lost (complete with U.S. consulate,          I hoped) or find undeniably that it and I had lost each other.
For this reason I was at first as gratified as Abu Hosayn was uneasy
at Sahim’s decision to “shadow” Zahir’s homeward voyage despite the
danger of our falling into some trap set by Sindbad or our pirate rivals
from Qatar, perhaps in concert. It was to protect Yasmin and her com-
panions from further piracy that we all but escorted our former hos-
tages home; but Abu Hosayn so feared an ambush that as best as his
compromised position allowed, he argued for our running to Oman
and dividing “our” ransom with Prince Jabal in return for that prince’s
granting us piratical privileges in the Hormuz Strait. Sahim ignored
him, in a way that told me, if not Abu Hosayn, that his lieutenancy
was more precarious than he supposed.
On the other hand, our captain denied my respectful request to be
relieved of my post and put ashore at Basra in hopes of finding what I
sought. “In the first place,” Sahim said, “you won’t find what you’re
after in that town, which I know as intimately as you now know our
friend Yasmin. What you’ll find there instead is a painful death at the
hands of Sindbad’s people for doing what you did to his lying daugh-
ter, even though you did it at my order. In the second place, your
absence would leave me no one to talk to except myself, and no navi-
gator except Uncle Abu the Fox, whom I wouldn’t trust to navigate
me to the chamberpot. Why don’t we sail for Serendib instead?”

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He was serious, more than not. Sometime the next day, by my reckoning, Zahir would reach Basra with the hostages. Shortly there-
after (by Sahim’s reckoning), Yasmin’s formidable father could be ex-
pected to embark upon a voyage of revenge, just as Mustafa had
predicted. Having exacted his own revenge — and seen its victim
safely home — Sahim had no further interest in that quarter, nor any
relish, either, for returning to Qeshm and routine piracy to increase
his now enormous fortune. Truth to tell, he told me, he had lost in-
terest in being Sahim al-Layl. As he could no more return to being
Umar al-Yom than I could return to being whoever it was that I had
once been, it had occurred to him to sail with me to the place I called
Serendib, which every sailor had heard legends of but which none he
knew had ever visited. Perhaps my magical instrument could navigate
us there?
Sahim’s inclination toward this project was not intense; he simply
had nothing more diverting to do with what remained of himself and
his life. For me, on the other hand, his startling suggestion opened
promising possibilities, quite apart from whatever we might find upon
a literal landfall at the port of Galle in Sri Lanka, whence “my” Zahir
had set out in the company of Captain Tim Severin’s Sohar to retrace
“Sindbad’s” voyages. So long a journey could not be undertaken with-
out periodic stops for reprovisioning; with Sahim’s new wealth, once
we were clear of the Hormuz Strait we would be welcomed in any
port. Somewhere along that way, surely — perhaps in the busy strait
itself, which I had several times approached but not yet actually
traversed — I would see what I’d been disappointed not to see thus
far in the Bahr Faris, or Persian Gulf: some unmistakable sign of my
century.
Thus my ever more desperate rationalizing as we retraced our
course down the whole length of the now familiar gulf without my
seeing so much as an outboard engine, a T-shirted fisherman, or a pair
of sunglasses, not to mention oil-drilling rigs, supertankers, and over-
flying aircraft. As day after day of southeasting passed and we re-
approached the neighborhood of Qeshm and Ras Musandam, Abu
Hosayn increasingly turned his attention to me, whom he had scarcely
deigned to notice theretofore. Speaking always out of Sahim’s hearing
and feeling his way carefully, he first complimented my navigational
skills and praised the seamanship and general cunning of our captain,

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whose nautical education he felt privileged to have overseen on Sind-
bad’s behalf in the years before Umar’s misplaced passion for Yasmin
had turned foster father and foster son against each other.
I shrugged my eyebrows and busied myself with chart-work.
What trouble women were, Hosayn continued in our next such
one-way conversation, especially aboard ship! If he remembered cor-
rectly, on the occasion when he had rescued me from the sea, I had
lost my woman and my vessel together; in his opinion they ought
always to be kept apart. Look now what had become of the formidable
Sahim al-Layl, so lately the terror of the Bahr Faris, whose revenge
upon Sindbad’s daughter had been as clever a piece of business as he,
Abu Hosayn, had ever arranged — though he had not at the time
guessed its true motive any more than he had guessed the up-and-
coming young pirate’s true identity. Would he imaginably have tried
to outfox his favorite protégé?
I went on with my kamal-work.
Very well, he acknowledged next: that misjudgment had cost him
his share of the hostage-ransom and led to his present humiliation —
the master overmastered by the student! Yet contrary to God’s order
though his position was, it troubled him less than the mortal risk at
which we all were being put by Sahim⁄Umar’s obvious loss of mental
balance. Having satisfied his vengeful lust upon Sindbad’s daughter
(whether justly or unjustly, Abu would not presume to say) and ru-
ined her father into the bargain, the man had come within an isba of
getting us all killed by following Zahir back to Basra! And now he
meant to carry us out into Allah’s ocean, not with any sensible aim
such as trade, piracy, or even further revenge, but in mere whimsical
pursuit of that sailors’ mirage called Serendib — of whose particulars
the many fo’c’s’le fantasies agreed on but one: it could never be
reached by plotting a course directly for it, but only by sailing in good
faith for elsewhere and losing one’s bearings. In Abu Hosayn’s opin-
ion, Umar⁄Sahim had quite lost his. Did I not agree?
If that was so, I replied, then perhaps we were on course after all
for Serendib.
Though he must have seen that he was getting nowhere with me,
as we rounded the Musandam cape his agitation so grew that he ap-
proached me once again and proposed outright that if only for the
sake of Sahim al-Layl, of whom I was obviously as fond as he himself

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had long been of Umar al-Yom, he and I should divert Shaitan from
its present southeasterly course and sail due south toward Sohar. Un-
der certain little islands just past the cape, he happened to know,
Prince Jabal’s vizier had stationed a vessel to receive Sindbad’s ransom
money, his daughter, or both — whichever Abu Hosayn was able to
deliver, either alone or in league with Sahim al-Layl. The deliverers’
reward would be half the ransom, plus a fair slave-price for Jabal’s new
concubine if she was part of the package, plus exclusive piracy rights
in the Hormuz Strait. Though we were considerably behind schedule
and lacking the woman, so great was Jabal’s desire for Yasmin’s wâhât
and his vizier’s for her ransom that Abu Hosayn thought it likely the
vessel would still be on station; if not, we could sail directly to Sohar
and complete the business there. We would divide our reward three
ways, guarding our friend Sahim’s share for him until the best physi-
cians in Oman had cured his madness. Or if I agreed that his case was
past curing, we could help ourselves to his share as well. …
I pretended enough interest to ask how he meant to take Shaitan
south when our intended course down the Gulf of Oman was south-
east, as far from Jabal’s navy as we could steer. Did he suppose that
our unhappy colleague had so lost his bearings as not to know which
way his ship was bound?
His expression more wolf’s than fox’s, Abu Hosayn replied, “A
clever navigator can accomplish much when his captain is belowdecks.
And my sense of our shipmates is that they would not be entirely
displeased if you and I were to confine him there — for his own good,
as Allah is our witness! — and save them from this fool’s errand. Their
pleasures are in Qeshm and the Bahr Faris, not the open ocean.”
I pointed out to him that only in the open ocean, out of sight of
landmarks, was such a navigational deception as he proposed likely to
succeed, whether practiced by the navigator upon the captain or vice
versa — as witness how quickly Mustafa mu-Allim had recognized
that Zahir was off course. All fox now, Hosayn responded that one
day’s southing would do the job if we moved promptly, before Shaitan
was well out into the Gulf of Oman. In keeping with his surname and
his disposition, Sahim was on deck mostly at night, leaving the day-
time watches to his junior officers; if we ran south from dawn to dusk
tomorrow, we ought to raise Jabal’s vizier’s island station. Or we could
simply bolt the aft companionway and assume command of the ship.

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As it was clear to me that I was in far greater danger from Hosayn
than from al-Layl, I temporized by suggesting that we attempt the
deception first and resort to mutiny only when it failed, as sooner or
later it was bound to. Meanwhile, he could discreetly sound further
the sentiments of the crew, and I could plot the required false bearings
on our charts. But it was to be understood, I insisted (in order to
make my assent more credible) that Sahim’s life would be spared, as
he had spared mine, and his share of our reward held in trust for his
recovery.
“Done, as Allah is my witness,” vowed Abu Hosayn. “For though
he has made a target of his archery teacher, I love him still.”
That evening, as soon as I could safely do so, I reported these
conversations to Sahim, who received them with neither surprise nor
anger, only a listless sigh. “He was indeed my teacher,” he acknowl-
edged, “as was Sindbad. It saddens me that he failed to learn his lesson
when I forgave his first attempt to fox me.” He instructed me then not
only to consent to the ruse but to alter our course for the proposed
rendezvous at once, as soon as Abu Hosayn went off watch, and (with
the aid of my luminescent instrument) to sail it all through that night
rather than next day. He would attend to the rest, with no more joy
but a good deal less pain than he had settled scores with Sindbad’s
daughter.
And so it came to pass before morning that the old lieutenant, not
the young captain, found himself seized, bound, gagged with his tur-
ban, and placed under guard in Sahim’s cabin, where he was presently
visited by the ship’s barber-surgeon while the captain announced —
to my dismay and the crew’s delight — that our Serendib plan had
been merely a test of their loyalty, which they had passed but their
lieutenant had failed. After a certain little business at certain little is-
lands just ahead, we would return to Qeshm, distribute the crew’s
share of our booty, and sign on whoever wished to sail for our next
destination. Very much the cunning pirate captain again, Sahim then
gave them instructions greatly to their liking for the upcoming rendez-
vous, should it actually take place.
It did, and what ensued must please those who believe that men
ought to do to men as they have been, rather than as they would be,
done to. By extraordinary fortune we found Jabal’s vizier’s pilot boat
not only on station in the expected neighborhood but carrying a high

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deputy of the vizier himself, sent up from Sohar to review the situa-
tion and decide whether to recall the vessel or dispatch it to Qeshm to
learn how the ransoming had gone and perhaps negotiate a deal with
Sahim al-Layl concerning passage rights through the Hormuz Strait.
Sahim welcomed this deputy and his bodyguards aboard, entertained
them on deck, and reported that while his senior colleague, Zahir’s
former captain, was unfortunately indisposed due to recent surgery,
he was pleased to send news to Prince Jabal that Shaitan had made off
with both the ransom and the principal hostage. We were prepared to
pay half the former for exclusive piracy privileges between Ras Musan-
dam and Qeshm, and to make Jabal a goodwill gift of the latter —
admittedly somewhat the worse for wear, but still a worthy addition
to the prince’s harem.
The deputy could scarcely believe his ears; he would have done well
not to. Overjoyed, he asked to see for himself the money and the cele-
brated young woman — whom his master the vizier had given him to
understand had been of questionable purity even before her hijacking.
“You shall not only see both for yourself,” Sahim promised, “but
count out the ransom with your own hands and examine the woman
likewise, however you please and for as long as you like. Both are in
my cabin, under the protection of a eunuch.” Bidding me accompany
them, he then led the excited deputy aft. When the guards made to go
with us, however, Sahim whispered something in the deputy’s ear, to
which that flush-faced fellow responded by indignantly ordering them
to remain on deck, so as not to anger their prince by witnessing the
examination that he alone had been deputized to carry out. (“The
woman is bound and blindfolded,” Sahim later told me he had whis-
pered. “Whatever you do to her she will blame on me, and Jabal need
never know otherwise.”)
All the same, en route with us down the companionway ladder the
deputy worried, “Where is that eunuch guard you spoke of?”
“He awaits your pleasure,” Sahim replied, drawing his knife.
“Close our hatch, Bey el-Loor, and our guest will open Sayyid Abu
Hosayn’s.”
I take no satisfaction in narrating what followed: how, at the signal
of the closed aft hatchway, the deck crew drew their cutlasses and
obliged the deputy’s bodyguards to stand by in the pilot boat’s tender.
How Prince Jabal’s indignant but terrified representative, on pain of

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castration, was made to perpetrate upon the helpless and already egg-
less Abu Hosayn, whose wound was bandaged but would never heal,
the same outrage that I had been obliged to perpetrate upon an earlier
sufferer of Sahim’s justice, similarly bent forward over Shaitan’s chart
table. How when this “inspection of our gift to Prince Jabal” had
taken place, inspector and inspected were delivered together to the
bodyguards’ boat, to the considerable amusement of our crew. “An-
other eunuch to watch over the prince’s harem,” Sahim declared to
them. “Let’s get ourselves back to Qeshm and then on to Serendib.”
But how, even as we weighed anchor and before our guests’ tender
had reached its mother ship, we saw Abu Hosayn, his arms and mouth
still bound, dumped unceremoniously overside by the deputy’s guards.
So much for him, as they say in The Thousand and One Nights at such
narrative moments. For this narrator’s part, I had become sickened by
all these plots and passions; sickened, too, by the unswallowability of
what every passing day told me must be my position, without ever
explaining how it had come to be so. Whoever I was, I was sick of
being that person here, in these fantastic and volatile but helpless cir-
cumstances. Turning away from the spectacle of Abu Hosayn’s drown-
ing — which the crew cheered merrily and Sahim al-Layl watched
with rueful satisfaction — I could almost have wished that my own
had not been interrupted (if that is what happened) so long …
Ago, I was about to say, out of an unshakable habit of mind,
though if I was where I appeared to be, the term had lost its meaning.
Of such vertiginous logic or illogic I was also sick; that evening, more
determined than ever to find some irrefutable confirmation of my cir-
cumstances, I once again begged Sahim either to set out promptly for
“Serendib” or to put me ashore in any major port city whose name I
knew, so that I could attempt reconnection with what I am obliged to
call my past.
By this time he and I had exchanged enough amiable night-sailing
conversation for him to understand (as well as anyone in his position
could) what I was referring to. For some while he did not respond; I
had studied his moods enough to imagine that he was reflecting upon
his own situation and next move as well as upon mine, and not with-
out sympathy. Instead of replying directly to my appeal, he presently
asked me what was done in Serendib with a man who had lost his
manhood to the knife, or whose face had been chopped into such a

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hash that he must veil it like a woman’s? Were such nonmen set to
guard other men’s harems, or buggered and dumped into the sea like
Abu Hosayn?
As his question was clearly half rhetorical, I went into no detail
about genital prostheses, hormone therapy, and cosmetic surgery, but
gave him simply to understand that the medical arts where I came
from could work virtual miracles in cases like his for those who could
afford them. Sahim reached under his wuzara, fetched out my watch,
and contemplated its faithfully glowing face. “Have you ever seen me
drunk with wine, Bey el-Loor?”
“I have not seen you so much as taste it. The Prophet himself was
no more abstemious.”
“And yet more than once, in days gone by, Umar al-Yom was drunk
as a Christian after a single cup, just as Jayda and Yasmin attested. No
doubt he said and did things of which he was no more aware the next
day than of an unremembered dream.”
Seeing his line of thought, I pointed out that the problem with
“Tub Night” was not that he remembered nothing, but that he dis-
tinctly and in detail remembered otherwise than Sindbad’s daughter.
“That is well observed. And yet unlike Jayda, who is what she is
and says what she says, our friend Yasmin has never to my knowledge
spoken less than truthfully on any serious matter, whatever the con-
sequences to herself. Whom on earth can she have been protecting at
my expense when she thought me dead, and be protecting so daunt-
lessly yet, despite all? Honesty has always been a passion with her.”
Aware of the voltage on his every utterance of her name, I kept
to myself the reflection that Sindbad’s daughter had seemed ready
enough to deceive Prince Jabal in the matter of her virginity. Perhaps
that subject had lost its seriousness for her for having been made so
much of by everyone else.
“How I loved that woman, Bey el-Loor!” Sahim exclaimed quietly.
In hopes of returning him to my subject, I said nothing, but it was
clear to me that he had his verb tense wrong. “Tell me truly,” he then
demanded. “Have you ever had connection with one more beautiful?”
“Never,” I said, truthfully, and presumed to add, “Nor ever enjoyed
the connection less.”
Sahim nodded, then presently said, “You shall have your wish of a
while ago, my friend — though I warn you that unless some genie has

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changed the world since I left it, what you seek is neither in Basra nor
in Baghdad.”
He went on to affirm (though it was obvious enough) that he
could not get Sindbad’s daughter off his mind. It was easier for him
to accept what her father had done to him — the old fellow being
known to be dangerously erratic since his fourth voyage — than what
Yasmin had done, even though she had believed him dead when she
did it. The woman had in effect acknowledged her guilt by begging
his forgiveness; she had attempted to take her own life — if not in the
courtyard long ago (when he had thought her despairing at their sepa-
ration!), then unequivocally in Shaitan’s cabin — and afterward had
maddeningly suffered his obscene punishment as no more than her
due. The mystery was driving him to distraction. Before we set out
for parts unknown, therefore, he felt compelled to risk yet another
voyage up the Bahr Faris, under the excuse of determining how his
revenge on the house of Sindbad was working out and what else
might be afoot there.
More specifically, he recalled from his youth that Sindbad’s house-
hold customarily spent the month of Rajab (just now ending) in a
pleasant seat on the Shatt al Arab below Basra, dealing with shipfitters
and maritime agents of various sorts, before returning to Baghdad for
Sha’ban and the holy month of Ramadan. Sahim proposed to put me
ashore there as a castaway, keeping my wristwatch as surety against
my return. For the whole month of Sha’ban, while reconnoitering the
household on his behalf to see how Yasmin and her father fared after
her ransoming, I would be free to investigate both the port and the
capital city for some means of communicating with the world I had
lost. He, meanwhile, would lay up in Qeshm to give his crew shore
leave, reprovision Shaitan, and recruit volunteers for an extended
ocean voyage. In the dark of the moon before Ramadan he would
return to Basra at risk of interception by the caliph’s coast guard and
stand for a week off the place where I had been put ashore. If I ap-
peared and reported to him, my watch would be mine again, and I
would be free either to return ashore with it or to sail with him for
Serendib. If I did not (for whatever reason), he would make his way
there, or wherever, without me — much missing my company and
conversation. Agreed?
“Agreed,” I said at once. 

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 “There is one difficulty,” Sahim said then, and though his mouth
was scarfed, his eyes smiled. “For your own safety I want you to ap-
proach Sindbad’s household as a half-drowned castaway, narrowly es-
caped from the despicable pirate Sahim al-Layl. But you have no talent
for dissembling. Let’s see how far you can swim.”
Over the next days, to the crew’s amusement and over my protests
(the Persian Gulf being almost as rich in sharks as the Red Sea), we
found out. Measuring time and distance with my watch, as I had
taught him to do, Sahim would order me overside whenever the wind
was gentle and oblige me to swim in Shaitan’s wake to the point of
exhaustion, while oarsmen rowed a tender alongside to watch for
sharks and to retrieve me when my strength was gone. Additionally,
he halved my rations to trim me to my role, though my long season
at sea had already made me as brown and lean as sun-dried beef.
“Why not kill me outright,” I complained from the water, “and go
ashore yourself, as you did once before?” I was not so ingenuous,
however, as to let myself truly reach the point of exhaustion before
feigning that condition, especially since the oarsmen’s orders were to
“let me drown a bit” at the end of each exercise before rescuing me.
“If Sindbad should catch you in any condition better than half
dead,” Sahim explained from the taffrail, “he’ll know I sent you.” And
he added, cryptically, “You have done my office already with our
friend Yasmin; it may be that you’ll need to do it again. Swim, swim.”
And as if he knew very well that I had been reserving a bit of my
strength, when the dark night came for Shaitan to heave to off the
Shatt al Arab, Sahim accompanied the four oarsmen who rowed me
well up into that broad waterway. Though I could see next to nothing,
he steered us confidently along a featureless marshy shore, then far out
into the channel and yet farther upstream, carefully measuring the dis-
tance with my watch. At a certain point he bade the crew ship their
oars and asked whether I could see a tiny light low on the northeast
shore, like a fallen star of faint magnitude.
“No.”
“It is there. Swim to it, Bey el-Loor, and return our friend’s veil to
her.” That small white garment (which I had retrieved from Zahir’s
deck and Sahim had morosely claimed as a souvenir) he now tied
around my left wrist in the dark. “I’ll look for you here one month
from tonight.”

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“I see no light.”
“Upstream at sea level, just under Algol the Demon Star: as bright
and steady as Yasmin’s heart. Navigate by it, my friend, and Allah help
you. Swim!”
I swam — and swam. The water was mercifully calm and warm,
the waterway empty. My heart had sunk earlier at the absence of in-
dustrial shipping in this very artery of Iraq; it sank now at the absence
of any sign of shore, of anything. A dozen strokes and I lost Shaitan’s
tender; turning to look for it, I lost my bearings and could only guess
which way I had been directed. No light was yet visible to me on
shore. I could see the point of Sahim’s bitter joke about Yasmin’s con-
stancy, if he was making one (Algol, in the constellation Perseus, is an
eclipsing binary), but not the point of his drowning me — unless his
own tormented heart had come to begrudge me what he himself had
ordered me to do to Sindbad’s daughter. Nor could I find Algol,
though intermittently through the clouds I made out one or another
of the Perseid constellations or the Dippers and corrected my course
as best I could northeastward. I swam, rested, swam, swam, farther
than I ever had behind Shaitan, and only as I approached the limit of
my strength did I begin to see, or think I saw, a tiny light, low and
impossibly distant on the water ahead. I swam and floated, changed
strokes to use different muscles, grew chilled despite my exertions and
the mild water, lost sight of that light and refound it, never brighter.
Swam.
I speak these words, and so must have managed once again not
quite to drown. Mindless from exhaustion, I came at very long last
indeed to muddy shallows and mucked myself lightward belly-down
across odorous flats like the first amphibian. There was no next thing
I knew; I knew I had not lost consciousness this time, only come per-
ilously near the end of it. I knew I was not crawling back into “my”
world from the world of Sindbad the Sailor, only — but never more
welcomely — from sea onto land for the first time since Julia Moore
and I had set sail from “Serendib.” I knew (or at least supposed) that
Sahim al-Layl had after all not meant to drown me, only to make
convincing my castaway’s credentials, for though I could no longer
see the light that he had known was there to guide me, I came to the
stucco walls of the isolated shoreside house that it must have shone

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from. Aching, shivering, faint, I hauled myself to its massive wooden
gate; I rapped and pleaded in Allah’s name, rap tata tap-tap, and, when
that deity did not respond, with the last of my last strength called out,
“Yasmin!”
She was asleep (I would learn later), her duenna not — or else that
name, spoken by a male voice, waked and alarmed her. Instead of
sending to learn who spoke it, she trudged herself to the gate’s inside
and asked. I recognized her raspish voice and, scarcely believing my
luck, cried, “Good Jayda, for God’s sake help me! I’m the navigator
Bey el-Loor, escaped from Shaitan, half drowned and freezing!”
Full of suspicion, she obliged me to repeat my name several times
through a small grilled window in the gate; also the name of the ship
I had jumped, its captain, that captain’s name before he had been a
captain, how I came to be where I was, and what I wanted from her
at that black hour.
“A dry corner to sleep in,” I begged, “and a crust of bread in the
morning, as Allah lives!”
She supposed I had come with my band of brigands to kidnap and
abuse them all again while Sayyid Sindbad was off a-voyaging to Ser-
endib. I perpended that datum — at once concerned for Sahim’s sake
and wondering why I should care in the least what happened to
him — and swore I was alone, harmless, helpless, suffering from ex-
haustion and exposure, at her mercy. Not so, Jayda suggested: my
cohorts were hiding in the marsh nearby, ready to rush the gate as
soon as she unbolted it and rape and pillage the household. So our
dialogue went until, my teeth chattering, I could do no more than
moan and fist the door. Unknown to me, Jayda had drawn out her
interrogation in order to rouse the one servant at her disposal (her
son, the page Salim, whose office it was to mind the gate but who had
slept soundly through my first calls) and dispatch him to fetch rope
and a lantern. These she passed through the inward-opening grille and
obliged me first to show her my face in the lamplight, then to show
that I was alone and weaponless, then to sit on the ground outside
and tie my ankles together with one end of the rope, and finally to
pass the free end back inside through the reclosed grille for her to
secure before her two scimitared eunuch guards (so she swore) opened
the gate just far enough for me to thrust my hands inside for tying.

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Only then, when the gate was refastened behind me, would she un-
bind me and give me bread and water and a dry rug to sleep on; but
come morning I must begone.
These elaborate precautions I excused on the grounds of Jayda’s
Shaitan experience and her master’s absence. Not without misgivings,
but fearing hypothermia if I remained any longer outside, I did all she
required. When my hands were duly bound, however (by whom, I
could not see), and I was at last permitted to shuffle on bare knees
through the partly opened gate, I found no armed guards, only the
black-veiled duenna and a wary young manservant holding the lamp
that I had returned upon their first opening the gate a hand’s width.
He slammed and rebolted it; she fell upon me like a vengeful ifritah,
cuffing, clawing, kicking me to the ground, and crowing, “Now we’ll
see who does what to whom! Wake your sister, Salim! Tell her to come
look at the fine coney we’ve caught for her!”
As I did not know then who “Salim” was, I was too far gone in
dismay and pain to register the phrase your sister and relate it to Sind-
bad’s daughter. I know now that after her first alarmed surprise at
learning who and in what state I was, resourceful Jayda had quickly
seen an opportunity to improve her standing in Sindbad’s household,
much diminished (as was her master’s estate) since Yasmin’s ransom-
ing. He blamed her for not having foreseen and forewarned him of
Zahir’s hijacking — “As if it’s the well’s job to carry water to the
bucket!” I would later hear her complain. Even the young Bedou
dancing girl she had procured for him had not assuaged Sindbad’s
disgruntlement; Jayda and Yasmin were virtually exiled from the
Baghdad establishment while he prepared grimly for Voyage Six, amid
dark hints that if he did not both recoup his lost fortune and exact his
revenge, they would suffer worse. Hence Jayda’s joy at the prospect
of delivering to him upon his return, for the most exquisite retribu-
tion, the very instrument of his daughter’s humiliation and his own.
“What times we’ll have!” she exulted, pummeling and spitting on me
while I did my best to shield my face and crotch. “Sharp knives and
boiling oil! A red-hot sword down your gullet and another up your
fundament!”
I had thought I would never reach shore; now I wished I had not.
But stronger than fear, pain, dismay, stronger even than despair was

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merciful exhaustion, which came to my rescue before “Salim’s sister”
could.
Rescue me she did, however, unknown to me and much against
the inclination of her chagrined, exasperated, but finally subservient
duenna. Sore consciousness returned to me on a proper couch in a
comfortably appointed room, my arms and legs unbound, my body
cleaned of mud and spittle, my wet wuzara replaced by soft coverlets,
my worst contusions soothed with compresses, my reviving moni-
tored indifferently by Sayyid Salim, who some while after daybreak
said, “He’s awake now.”
“Leave us, then,” replied a voice I knew, in a tone more restorative
than ten compresses for its absence of malice. “But tell Jayda please to
wait at the door in case I need her.”
There was warm bread, warm tea, warm sunshine in the win-
dow — and a familiar jewel-handled knife on the tea tray, within its
owner’s ready reach. There was Yasmin, cowled and veiled and wary,
her green eyes large with pained wonder but clear of wrath, not to
mention vengefulness. “Ignore Jayda’s threats,” she advised me — and
now I saw that in her hands she held the veil I had swum with on my
wrist. “You did nothing to me that you were not obliged to do, except
apologize.” The recollection filled her eyes with tears, which she
stanched with that second veil. “When you can talk,” she went on
presently, when she could, “tell me truthfully why you came here with
this. Did you really escape from poor Umar, or did he send you?”
“Both,” I said at once, and as soon as I was able, I told her the full
story: Umar’s version of “Tub Night” and of her father’s fifth voyage,
wherein Sindbad himself had been the monstrous Old Man of the Sea;
Umar⁄Sahim’s ongoing love and bafflement and rage; his mutilation
and transformation; his eavesdropping at that rug merchant’s shop
with Jayda’s connivance; his collusion with Abu Hosayn and Hosayn’s
with Prince Jabal’s vizier; his revenge upon that pair — and the frus-
trate desperation that had led him back virtually to the doorstep of his
tormentor and victim and had dispatched me across that doorstep on
his business as well as my own.
“I’m supposed to report to him how badly your reputation has
been damaged,” I said, “and whether you’ve told your father that
Umar al-Yom was innocent. But I half suspect that what he really

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wants to believe is Jayda’s version of that night. Then he could
feel guilty twice over, return the ransom, beg your forgiveness and
your father’s, too, and accept his condition as deserved. As is, he’s
miserable.”
Instead of registering dismay at any of this, Yasmin regarded her
lap. “What do you think happened, Sayyid Bey el-Loor?”
“Why should I care?” I almost wept. “I’m fifty years old. I’ve lost
everything I value, including a daughter your age. I don’t know where
I am or how I got here. All I want is to find an American embassy to
get me back home.”
The young woman nodded, then raised her beautiful eyes to me in
a serious new way. “What will you do there, without your woman-
friend? But that’s not for me to wonder.” All bright purpose now, she
tucked away her knife (wrapped in the veil I’d brought her) and de-
clared, “Here is what I think, Bey el-Loor: we go to Baghdad tomor-
row, and you shall come with us. If my father were there, he would
kill you on principle, but he and Mustafa and Zahir have gone to sea
again and will not be back soon. You have all of Sha’ban to do your
business and Umar’s before Shaitan returns for you, and I’ll help you
with both if you’ll ask me nothing further ever about what you and
Umar call Tub Night — though I can tell you now that nowhere in
the City of Peace have I ever seen or heard of such things as that
navigation machine you used to wear on your wrist. But you shall
observe that for yourself, as you shall observe me and my situation to
your heart’s content. At the month’s end you may swim back to Shai-
tan, if you have not already swum back to where you came from, and
report what you wish to my poor lost brother.”
Inspired by her plan, she pulled off her other veil, asking herself,
“Why do I wear this in your presence, when you’ve so often seen much
more than my face? Look at me, Bey el-Loor! You and I shall be
friends, as Umar and I once were. I’ll show you my world and my
strange place in it while you tell me about yours. But never speak to
me of what happened between us aboard Shaitan or ask me questions
I don’t wish to answer.”
Those were promises easily made and kept. If I was distressed at
Yasmin’s confirmation that her Baghdad was not after all the modern
capital of Iraq, I was overjoyed by her offer of assistance and friend-
ship, much moved by her lack of vindictiveness, and — though still

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rich in questions and reservations — struck afresh by her beauty. By
her enterprise, too, and her resourcefulness. Calling in Jayda (who
affected consternation at seeing her unveiled), Yasmin candidly an-
nounced her plan: to smuggle me not only into her father’s principal
house but into her private apartment in its harem, from which I could
safely observe both her life in the household, on Umar’s behalf, and
the city round about, on my own. But the page Salim must know
nothing of the matter, she declared, or all Baghdad would hear of it.
“What madness is this?” Jayda protested. “How can such a thing
be done?”
“By the same clever means that you employed to carry poor Umar
to Basra from Hajj Masud’s rug shop,” Sindbad’s daughter replied
pointedly, “without bothering to tell me how you had tricked both
him and me.”
“Allah forgive me,” Jayda said with a shrug. “The knife was at my
throat.”
“As it was at our friend’s here when he did what he did,” Yasmin
reminded her, and she smiled at me warmly through fresh tears. “For
which reason I forgive him, as I forgive you but not myself. Tell Salim
I’ve sent our visitor back into the marsh he crawled from, and let’s be
off to Baghdad.”
To Baghdad I went, not on a flying carpet but inside a tightly rolled
one, by upstream barge and donkey-back, over what uncomfortable
period of time I could not measure, to the house in which I speak
these words and to the strangest, sweetest lunar month of my half
century, which I here compress into a few pages:
My rescuer happened, at the time just narrated, to be on the verge
of menstruation. To this circumstance she would attribute, when I
came to know her better, both her ready tears in the scene forego-
ing — as if the matters spoken of were not cause enough for tears! —
and the fact that except for that brief unveiling I scarcely saw her
(though I spoke with her often) during my first few days in Baghdad.
Having been rugged into her rooms — evidently by night and by
three or four grunting women, who complained, “What’s in here,
Jayda?” — I was unrugged at last, in total darkness, by Yasmin herself
and alone, though Jayda (she let me know) stood by always either just
outside or just inside the door. I was of course never to speak above a
whisper; a strange male voice would bring the harem down on our

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heads. For my discomfort in transit she apologized; such of my needs
as food and drink, wash-water and clean linens and chamberpot, she
and Jayda would minister to, and supply whatever else I required or
requested. For the first few days, until she could make proper arrange-
ments, I would have to forgo physical exercise beyond quiet calisthen-
ics there in the room. As soon as possible she would find a way for me
to make surreptitious excursions into the city in pursuit of my per-
sonal business; meanwhile, she would inquire of her father’s associates
whether Baghdad contained such a thing as an embassy from the is-
land of America. As for Umar⁄Sahim’s business: through a grilled win-
dow overlooking the central courtyard I would be able to observe by
daylight and evening lantern-light the house’s routine and her current
role in it, which each night, when the household had retired and she
could visit me unnoticed, she would also provide me with a full ac-
count of and answer my questions about. Given the nature of the
situation, she could not (she said levelly) provide me as well with one
of the slave women to attend to my physical gratification, as her hos-
pitable father would do if I were his official houseguest; and needless
to say, my least gesture of that kind toward her would be met with the
jewel-handled knife and a general alarm. But if there was anything
further I required …
“Pen and paper,” I surprised her by replying at once, “and a copy
of Kitab Alf Laylah Wah Laylah.” With herself as my Scheherazade, I
explained, I wanted to hear on location, as it were, in the language
that I had learned pretty well to speak but could not yet read, the
famous tales of Sindbad the Sailor and what Yasmin might have to say
about them. And because in my other life I had been not exactly a
teller of tales but a successful reporter of my own adventures (none of
which compared with what had happened to me since my rescue by
the bride-ship Zahir), it had occurred to me that if I was going to be
in more or less solitary confinement for a while, here was my first
opportunity to rebegin the journal I had lost with my own Zahir off
“Serendib.” Although I would likely be articulating my predicament
for no reader except myself, it would give me some comfort to resume
the professional habit of registering my experience in written words.
There was, clearly, something queer in all of this — in Yasmin’s elab-
orate combination of restrictions, precautions, and risk-taking solici-
tousness, and in my more than patient acquiescence to a confining and

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potentially dangerous arrangement. “Umar’s business” (which I had
thought would anger her) she could readily have dealt with in a single
conversation back in Basra; there was no need for her to show me her
compromised position in the household since her ransoming. And my
own concerns she could better have addressed by bidding me good-
bye and turning me loose in the city, to confirm for myself what world
and time I was astray in. Her fascination with my two requests was
genuine: though she had not heard of The Book of the Thousand and
One Nights (and she was a well-educated woman, versed in both the
Koran and secular literature), she knew a number of the stories from
it, not the Sindbad tales (“How can there be tales of my father’s seven
voyages,” she asked, “when he’s only now making his sixth?”) and not
the story of Scheherazade herself and King Shahryar, which moved
her to tears of admiration when I recounted it for her, but the beast-
fables and other older items in Scheherazade’s repertoire, some of
which were to be found in the book she brought me instead, an Arabic
translation of the eleventh-century Sanskrit Katha Sarit Sagara, or
Ocean of Story. As for my own authorhood, although she had only
my word for it (and though “Baylor’s” fame “back there” had been
less than immense), it gave me a considerable new status in her eyes.
Raised as she had been in a culture in which autobiography was all
but unknown, she found the idea of publishing one’s rather ordinary
adventures and misadventures (even of the more intimate sort), as if
they were exemplary, for the entertainment of strangers, not self-
evidently admirable; with only a little prompting, however, Yasmin
came to see in it the possibility of experience’s imaginative redemption
(into art, I presumed to say), and thereby, perhaps, of its vindication.
So far, so good: she was genuinely intrigued by all of this, and she
drew me out, as far as our time and circumstances permitted, on the
outlines of what I have since called my several “voyages.” I in turn was
intrigued to hear from her (and to see through my window grille)
more of the house and history of her formidable father: the tales he —
and Jayda — had told her of his fabulous first three voyages, his trau-
matic and life-changing fourth, his allegorical, equivocal fifth; also her
own constrained girlhood under Jayda’s tutelage and her thwarted
wish to hazard forth like her father and her “brother.” Unobserved,
I observed for myself the uneasy relations among Sindbad’s new favorite, Kuzia Fakan, her predecessor Jayda, and Yasmin — who, 

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to placate her father’s creditors, presided over his ever-hospitable table in his present absence. I saw, as well as heard from her, how they all
treated her respectfully, sympathetically, even admiringly … as irrepa-
rably soiled merchandise of unusually high quality. On that basis, she
gave me uncomplainingly to understand, she would be auctioned off,
one way or another, upon her father’s return from “Serendib,” to
whoever would marry her after her presumable but unmentionable
rape by the Qeshmi pirates. All this I saw and heard, along with the
abundantly flowing fountains, strutting peafowl, and elaborate gar-
dens of Sindbad’s house, the eloquent performances of his dancers and
musicians (who rehearsed daily in that Gulistan of a courtyard, where
I could watch them), and his celebrated Tub of Truth. I learned which
of the dinner guests was the obliging rug merchant Hajj Masud,
which the wealthy and cautious elder Hasib Ali, which the aggressive
parvenu Ibn al-Hamra. Yasmin in turn learned sketchily of tidewater
Maryland, of “Baylor’s” profitable misadventures in North Africa and
southern Spain, of the further attrition of his innocence in the Virgin
Islands, and rather more of his subsequent, ultimate loss, between his
Zahir and hers, of all that had then to him mattered — and there
we were.
There we were, conversing in murmurs hour after hour, night after
night, through a darkness that would have been total if not for the
slowly waxing moon of Sha’ban. Respectful of Yasmin’s ground rules,
neither by gesture nor by inquiry did I trespass, stirred though I was
in my singular loneliness by the gracious sight of her moving daily
about the courtyard, balancing the uneasy tensions among herself,
Jayda, and Kuzia Fakan, dealing deferentially yet spiritedly with her
father’s associates — and then slipping silently into “my” room when
all were abed to sit over by the grilled window, her face and caftan
filigreed by moon-shadow, to hear what I had written that day, and
speak and listen, ask and answer. Scheherazades both, I told her we
were, yarning till just before early prayer call, but to our narratives
rather drawn than compelled; in a certain danger but under no par-
ticular threat; by turns teller and told.
“And Jayda is our Dunyazade,” Yasmin said, laughing for the first
time in our conversation, “hearing and seeing everything from the
foot of the bed. You’re supposed to beg for more, my sister!”

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Almost invisible by the door, Jayda sniffed and said nothing.        To myself, as the moon waxed nightly brighter upon my beautiful visitant, I reflected that there was yet another difference between Scheherazade’s situation and ours. To speak of it would have been      to transgress the bounds I had agreed to, but just as the moonlight defined the window grille by illuminating what was not it, so our nightly narratives, exchanged in ever growing confidence and trust, by scrupulous avoidance defined two subjects much on our minds, and they in turn implied a third. The first of these — and the least among my own concerns, for it concerned me least — remains a mystery yet to
the “present” speaker of these words (though not to their later writer):
what exactly had happened between Yasmin and Umar al-Yom out in
that courtyard back on “Tub Night”? Whom had she later protected
from her father’s anger by permitting Umar to be blamed, when she
thought him lost at sea? And why had she not since her ransoming
confronted Sindbad with his crime against his evidently innocent fos-
ter son, if indeed (as appearances argued) she had not?
The second subject more and more possessed my reflections as I
watched, listened to, and whispered with the young woman who sat
by then so easily an arm’s length from me in our moonlit tête-à-tête:
how I had, after all — though under duress, against both our wills —
repeatedly, by moonlight, lamplight, daylight, in the captain’s cabin of
Shaitan, seen what I’d seen, done what I’d done … and, human ani-
mal, felt what I’d felt. I had been invariably as gentle as Sahim al-Layl
would permit me to be: apologetic, appalled, in no way “responsible,”
as I knew she knew. How did she feel about me now, I wondered,
concerning that? (This was the third subject.) She had “rescued” and
spared me in the Basra marshes; she had gone and was going the extra
parasang to accommodate my “business” (though neither of us, for
the present, pressed the matter of her turning me loose in Baghdad to
search for the U.S. embassy). Along with her expectable and well-
justified shock at that interlude, as along with mine on her behalf,
could it be that, now that we knew each other better and so obviously
trusted, respected each other … ?
Midway through the second week of my sequestration, as she recounted mutedly her girlhood disappointment at being obliged to stay behind with Jayda in Baghdad while Umar went down for the first
time to Basra to go to sea with her father, without thinking I sympa-
thetically touched Yasmin’s bare forearm. She recoiled as if from a burn.

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Jayda hissed warning. But when I apologized at once, Yasmin
apologized in turn and, remarkably, went so far as to take the offend-
ing hand in her own before resuming her story — to which I could
scarcely then attend, so distracted was I by our skins’ reunion. The
night after that, as I happened to be explaining (as delicately as I could
manage) how “Crazy Daisy” Moore had come to call me by the nick-
name Persimmon, or merely ’Simmon, Yasmin again caught up my
hands in hers, first one and then the other. At once smiling and         (to my astonishment) weeping moonlit tears that had little to do with my story, she pressed our hands to her cheeks and echoed, “Simon.        Simon.” Again, from somewhere behind me, Jayda sibilated.
But as if her new name for me had turned some key, Yasmin not
only kept my hands clasped tight but regarded me through her tears
in a different way and made as if to draw me to her. In the event, as I
was the heavier and surprised into immobility, it was herself she drew,
from her cushion onto me and mine, repeating, “Simon! Simon!” Be-
fore I could embrace I was embraced, kissed before I could kiss —
Jayda already bewailing, from her station, the imminent undoing of
her artful reconstruction-work. Fearful still of my position, respectful
of my young friend’s feelings, and not a little overwhelmed, I gladly
yielded her the initiative until Yasmin made it wordlessly clear that
Jayda’s minatory presence notwithstanding, I was to take it — take …
what Sahim, though demanding so much else, had forbidden.
And so I took; Yasmin likewise. And we gave, the pair of us —
Yasmin as if releasing something long reserved, though not likely for
its present recipient. Then we rested and (myself hardly believing)
regave, retook, as I for one had not since who could measure when —
until, near moonset, one or both of us gave forth such a cry of pleasure
that to cover it, Jayda howled over us from the dark doorway like a
moonstruck hound. Her baying roused the courtyard peacock, who
returned a raucous trumpeting that roused the roosters round about,
and they their farther neighbors, until all Baghdad resounded with
our joy.
Well. Fifty then, no younger now, I had and have done, been, and
known what and whom et cetera; was neither innocent nor cynic;
remained no less lost for being so extraordinarily found. Though certain subjects were still taboo to speech (and upon the others,     from that night forward, fewer words were spent), from our bodies’ 

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dialogue all curbs were raised. So fluently did they converse as Sha’ban
waxed resplendent that whatever Yasmin’s feelings and despite the un-
healed wound of my losing Julia Moore, for the fourth time in my five
decades I found myself in love.
Which circumstance posed a problem even as our moon, contrary
to our passion, began noticeably to wane. Never mind, for the present,
I said to Yasmin, the United States embassy (in my heart I knew there
was none in this Baghdad), the world I had fallen out of, my concerns
and griefs and problematical identity therein, the metaphysics of my
fall. Whoever and wherever I was, here I was, in my life’s early au-
tumn, in love with Sindbad the Sailor’s daughter. Of what concern to
me was her equivocal past, for which she had paid dearly enough?
With her consent, I went so far one night as to declare, I meant to put
my case — our case — to her father man to man upon his return, and
with or without his blessing to go on somehow with our story.
Once more that peacock’s sleep was rent as Yasmin, not this time
in delight, joined her cry to Jayda’s. Simplest of Simons, invincibly
naive, incorrigibly romantic! To Tub Night and Shaitan days was
forthwith added a third taboo, much more difficult to abide: no fur-
ther mention of Sindbad’s “blessing” — Allah spare us! — or of her-
and-my “future” beyond her father’s return from Voyage Six or the
onset of Ramadan, whichever came first. Deservedly or not, she had
been through much, as had I. Although a fair part of her ordeal had
been at my involuntary hands, she had respected and admired me be-
fore, after, and even in course of that ordeal, which, one way and
another, had brought her during our recent intimacy to feel … what
she now felt for me. But this present idyll, two-thirds run, was all our
future; seize the night, she bade me, and waste not another of its
precious minutes in foolish talk of her father’s “blessing”!
In this matter she was unrelenting; in every other so altogether
winsome that my remaining days under her roof were all-but-unen-
durable anticipations of our nights. If I wrote at all, it was of but one
subject. If from my inkwell a genie had sprung to offer me transpor-
tation home, I’d have accepted on one condition only, absent which I
would have bidden him, “Back to your well, sir: if my Julia is no more,
I have no home but Sindbad’s daughter.” To spend yet more time with
me, in Sha’ban’s last week Yasmin feigned illness — specifically, pre-
menstrual malaise of such bed-confining severity that Jayda alone of

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

the household was permitted access to her. Our last three days like
one long night, we loved and slept, played, and talked wide-openly of
everything … except the main things.

The sixth voyage of Sindbad the Sailor was by far his shortest. In
midembrace on a certain afternoon we heard across the courtyard the
page Salim announce sardonically to Kuzia Fakan and the others that
the master of the house had already rereached Basra, once again
wealthy, once again shipless, once again his voyage’s sole survivor,
except perhaps (it was uncertainly reported) for Mustafa mu-Allim.
Yasmin closed her eyes, covered my ears, and bade me carry on with
our story, not just then of the verbal kind. Simon William Behler made
a decision, of which he did not speak. Yasmin likewise; or rather, she
bade Jayda in their private language to act upon the decision that she
had made some days, perhaps weeks, before. Moments later she was
overtaken in unequivocal fact by what she had been feigning, and by
its attendant discomforts.
The sixth voyage of still-stranded Somebody was likewise his brief-
est, however long its story; would seem so to its sailor and recounter,
at any rate, even had it lasted ten thousand nights and a night. In fact
it ended on this last one, last of Sha’ban. Silenced by Salim’s news and
Yasmin’s menses, we took time out from our wordless narrative for
tacit tea, fetched in as usual by expressionless Jayda. Into my glass
whereof, as I cannot say I hadn’t half expected …
Still to be told is what Mustafa mu-Allim, though sworn to silence,
confided to “Bey el-Loor” of Sindbad’s sixth voyage, in bits and
pieces through the hungry month of Ramadan, while once more fol-
lowing Captain Allim al-Yom’s cardinal rule of human conduct by fish-
chowdering me back to wretched consciousness:
How the redoubtable Zahir, refitted for corsairing and crewed
largely by out-of-work pirates from Qatar, serendipitously came upon
Shaitan between Kharg and Qeshm (a sluggish, ill-sailed Shaitan, it
seemed to Mustafa) and, per program, made ready to feign surrender,
though in truth she was massively armed and ready. How, to their
surprise, the Qeshmis fled — not for their home base but down-gulf,
toward the Hormuz Strait — and were not only quickly overtaken but
as quickly overwhelmed by Sindbad’s Qataris, who were eager to settle
scores with their competitors. How, however, they discovered their

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Somebody’s Sixth Voyage

victims to be not Sahim al-Layl and company but none other than
Prince Jabal and his vizier, commanding a prize crew from the prince’s
navy. Outraged by Sahim’s outraging of his vizier’s deputy, Jabal had
led a large Omani task force to clear the strait of pirates and had suc-
cessfully destroyed the Qeshmis, their base, their formidable but un-
expectedly listless captain, and all their ships except Shaitan, onto
which trophy they had loaded the entire confiscated pirate treasury,
including Yasmin’s dowry and double ransom. So rich was the haul
that prince and vizier had transferred themselves to the prize-ship to
oversee its delivery to Sohar; but only the night before Zahir’s arrival
on the scene, a terrific squall had separated the overburdened Shaitan
from her escorts, leaving her alone just long enough for lucky Sindbad
to complete his revenge and make his getaway.
How Yasmin’s former fiancé had bargained vainly for his life in
exchange for a certain potency-amulet that he had taken from the late
Sahim al-Layl, together with the testicles that that already-dezabbed
pirate had girded with it. No deal, had said Sindbad — all the more
readily when Mustafa recognized that amulet as one whose demon-
strable potency was of a different character. How then (the luckless
Omanis planked and sharked), at risk of being overtaken at any mo-
ment by Jabal’s navy, Sindbad had insisted against Mustafa’s advice
that three quarters of the booty be then and there transferred to Zahir;
he could neither abide, he said, to step aboard the vessel of his daugh-
ter’s ruination nor on the other hand trust any except himself and
Mustafa to steer his treasure home. The remaining quarter — a for-
tune in itself — he had generously awarded to the Qataris among his
crew, together with the ship Shaitan and (as if the boon were his to
dispense) full piracy rights in the Hormuz Strait, which he himself
had no intention ever again of traversing. Not bothering to tell them
what only he and Mustafa had learned from shit-frightened Prince
Jabal — that the Omani task force was regrouping just over the south-
ern horizon — he salaamed them off in that direction and himself ran
north with Mustafa and Zahir’s skeleton crew of three Persians from
Siraf.
How Shaitan has not been heard from since, nor is likely ever to be.
How that trio of Sirafis, alas, almost within sight of Basra and
their journey’s end, had together succumbed to “a mysterious sea- distemper,” leaving old Sindbad not only the sad responsibility 

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

(munificently discharged since) of consoling their families with the sailors’ back wages plus a handsome bonus, but also the quite impossible job of bringing Zahir into harbor, by night, under full sail in a strong following breeze, single-handed except for his even older navigator. Unable between them to manage tiller, sails, and anchor tackle on so sizable a vessel, they could wait for neither daylight, calmer air, nor assistance; it required the pair of them simply to steady the helm against broach and capsize. As it was infeasible for them to lower sail or reverse course, they had either to charge full-tilt into the harbor
and ram the first convenient breakwater, wharf, or moored vessel, or
else run Zahir hard aground somewhere in the marshes near the port.
“Aground, aground,” Sindbad had ordered, inasmuch as the har-
bor proper was deep enough to sink in. “If I could run her straight
into the Sahra al Hijarah, I would do it.” Who else but Mustafa mu-
Allim, however, could have picked out in that black waterway a certain
faint low longshore gleam and plowed Zahir neatly into a mud flat
at the virtual front door of her owner’s marsh-side establishment?
Though the impact brought down the ship’s mainmast and sprang half
her bottom seams, it left her high and almost dry and doubtless sal-
vageable had not Sindbad resolved to let her rot right where she rested
(once her cargo was off-loaded), a memorial to his six voyages and an
admonition against any seventh.
How her navigator, unnecessarily sworn to silence and offered any
emolument he wished (up to twenty-five percent of the voyage’s net
profit after the reimbursement of Sindbad’s ransom-creditors), had
asked for two things only: his master’s leave to retire from navigation
to the life of a hermit salt-marsh fisherman, and that minuscule odd
amulet-machine that poor “Sahim al-Layl” had taken from a nameless
outlander (who claimed to have fetched it from “Serendib”), Jabal
from Sahim, Sindbad from Jabal — so that he, Mustafa, might spend
his last years studying its construction and true operation. “No,” had
replied Sindbad, whom one might almost suspect of coveting auto-
matically anything desired by those he respects. “That amulet I intend
as a gift to the Commander of the Faithful.” “As Allah wills,” said
Mustafa, shrugging, and uninterested in other compensation, he set
off for his solitary hut not far up-marsh.
How Sindbad the Sailor then returned in lonely triumph to the
City of Peace with his splendid treasure and his no less splendid

526

Somebody’s Sixth Voyage

(though figurative) story of the voyage to Serendib, his adventures in
that magic isle, and the magnificent gift — of jewels, robes, rare un-
guents, inlays, ivories — entrusted to him by its caliph for Caliph Ha-
roun al-Rashid. In the face of such munificence, who would incline to
credit niggling rumors from Oman, Siraf, Qatar?
How, however, that gift did not include, nor Sindbad’s story so
much as mention, a certain exotic thingamabob, allegedly an amulet,
believed in some quarters to recharge declining male sexual potency.
How then its new possessor, restored to his household just in time
for Ramadan, drained his ponds and fountains, sanded his gardens,
throttled his peafowl, cactused and cameled his courtyard, plowed his
Bedou mistress till he tired of her and began once more to lust for his
long-late wife Marjanah, and opened negotiations for the marriage of
his daughter to the redoubtable, crimson-visaged entrepreneur Ibn al-
Hamra. To whom also he confided a tremendous new investment op-
portunity: Voyage Seven, back to Serendib on what would almost
certainly be the caliph’s orders despite Sindbad’s own inclination, for
the purpose of establishing diplomatic and trade relations between
Baghdad and that fabulous, elusive land. …
No: the somebody whose “hows” those are to narrate in firsthand
detail is our host (and his retired navigator), not he whose lover
named him Simon, Simon, Simon; who, from mint tea handed him
by her, revived stark naked in a tidal marsh, on an unrolled carpet on
a spot of dry beach ensconced by cattails and spartina and lapped by
the olive shallows of a wide, sun-bright estuary on which nothing
moved but wavelets. No people, buoys, boats in that sparkling, sharp-
focused scape; it could have been East Dorset or Iraq, the Chaptico
or China, in any century since the last ice age. My head’s inside was
similarly, almost preternaturally (and precariously) clear; likewise, for
some moments, cueless. Then all came back and down.
“Bhang,” opined gentle Mustafa. “A skillfully measured potion, in
your tea. Try this instead.” Yasmin’s wine-dark Bokhara — our “magic
carpet” — was now on the mud floor of his hut beside the Shatt al
Arab, this narrator still on that carpet, my senior ex-colleague beside
me with mullet soup in lieu of Ramadan harira. “Allah understands,”
he assured me, with respect as much to our bending the dietary rules
as to what had befallen myself, Umar⁄Sahim, and the worthiest master
navigator who ever behaved to humans humanly. Over the next weeks,

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

while I regathered strength, purpose, and even some composure by
assisting him with his nets, we exchanged our stories. Mustafa showed
me the grounded wreck of Zahir, already stripped of every usable bit
of gear by the Basra fishermen. I showed him the spot not far away
where I had crawled ashore on miserable Umar⁄Sahim’s errand and
been carpeted off to Paradise, whose serpent I neither knew nor much
cared about except for that poor dead fellow’s sake, and truth’s.
“It’s time I met Sayyid Sindbad the Sailor,” I told Mustafa. “He
and I have business.”
“Wrap yourself in this mullet net instead,” my benefactor wryly
recommended, “and let me fling you directly into the gulf to drown.
It will save you another trip up and down the Tigris.”
Yet up that ancient waterway I went and, six evenings and voyage-
tales ago, reached this house’s gate with nothing to my name besides
love, despair, and one of Mustafa’s fileting knives to defend my “self”
with. I sang my lament. Was paged. Was plied.
Here I am.

528

Two Interludes

1.

By all the diners at Sindbad’s side tables and most of those at his main,
“Bey el-Loor’s” latest story was received with watchful whispers or
watchful silence: watchful of the latter table’s “two heads,” Sindbad
and Jayda, regarding each other level-gazed and expressionless in the
face of “Simon’s” surely damning disclosures; watchful of Yasmin,
who had literally and proudly stood behind her lover through his tale,
her hands upon his shoulders, and who at his final “Here I am” (when
also he leaned his head back against her forget-me-not djellaba and
again took her hands in his) embraced him unabashedly from behind
and laid her cheek upon his hair. Mustafa the camel perhaps had nod-
ded off in place; not so the two beggar guests, though time and again
in the course of Somebody’s sixth voyage they had nodded meaningly
at each other. Indeed, it was plump Ahmad (between the sleeping
beast and Nuzhat the piper) who broke the restive silence:
“Before I say anything further —”
“Before you say anything further,” Hajj Masud interrupted him
from down-table, “Hajj Masud advises you to say nothing further.
Otherwise he himself — purveyor-designate of carpets to the Caliph

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

of Serendib by order of Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, on whom be
peace! — Hajj Masud himself will carpet the pair of you back to the
alleyway you crawled from!”
“Foolish man, be silent!” lean Aslan commanded, to everyone’s sur-
prise, while Ahmad rose from his cushion as red with wrath as Ibn al-
Hamra was with wine. Their suddenly imperious manner stirred the
room. Ahmad now began unwinding his filthy turban; by when Aslan
had hurried around the table to assist him, all could see a fine purple
silk one underneath, secured with a flashing jewel. Fatmah Awad
could not stifle a discreet tambourine-sizzle of admiring awe, at which
Aslan nodded approval while removing his own soiled topknot to re-
veal a gleaming saffron one under it. Handing both rags to Salim
(who stepped to take them as if cued), with Fatmah’s tambourine ac-
companiment Aslan then assisted his companion out of his raveled
robe — under which Ahmad wore one fit for an emir at least — and
permitted Salim to help him off with his own, discovering one scarcely
less resplendent. Off then, with a flourish of Nuzhat’s pipe atop Fat-
mah’s fanfare, came the plump beggar’s unbarbered and doubtless
louseful beard, and Aslan’s as well, to reveal glistening, short-trimmed
black ones: the beards and imposing visages of …
“Caliph Haroun al-Rashid and his grand vizier, Jafar al-Barmaki!”
Yasmin whispered to still-stranded Somebody, and then she joined the
astonished room (Hajj Masud most especially) in general salaam.
Though he lacked the reflexes of servility, her fiancé more or less pros-
trated himself with the others; but he risked a peek in time to see the
vizier make a sign to Salim just as the caliph bade the company resume
their places — even Sindbad and Jayda, who tried vainly to exchange
theirs with their unexpectedly distinguished guests, and the two mu-
sicians, who were unable to reseat themselves beside such eminence
until reinstructed.
“Do kindly remove that one, however,” Aslan⁄Jafar commanded of
no one in particular, with a nod at the now snoring camel. Kuzia
Fakan promptly snapped the beast awake with claps of her finger-
cymbals and, herself unmoving, with Bedouin pssts and tongue-clicks
talked him out of the hall as she had earlier talked him in. The mo-
mentarily vanished page now reappeared from the kitchen bearing
two pairs of bejeweled slippers and a water basin; with triumphant

530

Two Interludes

side glances at Jayda and Sindbad he set about washing the bare feet
of caliph and vizier.
“Hear me, Commander of the Faithful!” Sindbad began. But the
caliph promptly cut him off:
“Call us rather the Dispenser of Denouements,” he advised in the
royal plural. “We have listened and heard enough: our messenger’s full
and faithful message this morning; this page’s confidential embellish-
ments of that text this forenoon; and the mattersome, intriguing, and
entertaining, though lengthy, stories told tonight — whose several
discrepancies we are now prepared to resolve and their several tellers
judge. Are we not, Jafar?”
Resettling himself across-table from the caliph, the vizier replied,
“We are, sire, once the peerless daughter of our ever generous host
refills our cups and we hear the testimony of two final witnesses to
that catenation of events conveniently labeled Tub Night by our visi-
tor from Serendib.” He nodded Somebodyward.
“Well, then,” the caliph said.
“I hear and obey,” said Sindbad’s daughter, and with Jayda’s assis-
tance she went around with the wine in her customary fashion, except
that (eyes lowered) she filled first the caliph’s cup, next his vizier’s,
next her fiancé’s, and only then served her father and completed the
usual order. Haroun, our narrator observed, followed her movements
with a connoisseur’s appraising admiration, of which Yasmin seemed
not unaware. To Salim then, who was standing behind the camel’s
vacant cushion as if tempted to seat himself at the caliph’s left hand,
Jafar said curtly, “First witness: speak, boy.”
The page swallowed. “I …” Yasmin just then reached his place (the
last in her rotation but for that of expectant Ibn al-Hamra) and
paused. Hajj Masud obligingly handed Salim the camel’s cup, which
the page held forth in two hands. Yasmin poured, her eyes as steady
upon him as his hands were not upon that cup.
“I,” he said again, and as if encouraged by the sound of that pro-
noun, he thumped his chest with one hand and repeated it to the
room: “I! I, Salim — under protection of the Prince of Believers On-
whombepeace — I, here, declare …” He drew breath. “That I despise
every member of this household, without exception! Beginning with
you!” He pointed to his father. “And you and you!” indicating his

531

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

mother and his half-sister, now back at their places. “But not excepting
all you others who’ve treated me like camel-flop under your slippers
every day of my life! Shaitan take all of you, including that mangy
Mustafa!”
Haroun, who had not once glanced at the page, here raised his
eyebrows at Jafar, who said to Salim, “The Prince of Darkness will
take you first, surely, for presuming to speak so to your own parents
though they be devils themselves. Tell us of Tub Night now, or be
silent.”
Salim’s hand shook wine over the cup’s edge. He swallowed air.
“That one, too, I hated: Umar the Yum-Yum!” At impassive Sindbad
he railed, “You should have taken me to Basra with you that morning!”
“Enough, by Allah,” Haroun commanded. “Call the other witness,
Jafar.”
But the vizier once more warned Salim sternly: “Your next word
off the subject will be your last to this assembly, fellow. Tub Night!”
The page gripped his cup and, as if to it, said shakily, “That night,
sayyids, after the household had celebrated his leaving for his fifth
voyage and taking Umar the Peacock with him instead of me, and
Umar the Peacock had been carried off drunk after one cup of wine,
and Sindbad the Stonehorse had taken my mother into that hideaway
of his to do their tricks together —”
The caliph rumbled. His vizier raised a warning forefinger.
“That night,” Salim resumed, less agitatedly, “standing watch in the
courtyard as I always do, out of sight, the better to see sneakers and
snoopers before they can see me —”
Haroun cleared his throat.
“— I saw him,” the page said, pointing to Sindbad, “in one of his
famous fits, driving her” — pointing to Jayda — “from that famous
tub with snaps of his famous turban, snap snap snap —”
“Which famous tub?” Jafar interrupted him to ask. “This one here
looks scarcely big enough for two people and a turban.”
“No, Sayyid: I mean that great one out in the courtyard, from
which she came scrambling out just as she” — he pointed to Yasmin —
“came running from the shadows to put herself between him and her.
She caught hold of his snapping turban and said something I couldn’t
hear and led him back up and into the tub while she ran off calling for
Umar Yum-Yum, who must have been dead asleep from his sip of

532

Two Interludes

wine, for he was a long time coming to anybody’s rescue, and by the
time he got himself down to the courtyard, the trouble was over: he” — Sindbad — “was snoring away like a camel inside his tub, and she” — Yasmin — “was cooling her heels under the date palm beside the
central fountain, which had running water in it in those days, which
is why I couldn’t hear what she’d said to him earlier. Now along comes
Yum-Yum rubbing his eyes and scratching his crotch and looking up
at the sky, and he all but stumbles over her, as she’s no doubt waiting
for him to come out and count stars with her, and I saw the pair of
them then talking and touching and frisking under that date palm,
and when they went off at last toward the harem together I ran to
wake him to show him what his pets were up to, right under his nose.
But by the time I’d shaken him awake enough to listen, here comes
Umar the Peacock, claiming he’d come to waken him and go off
voyaging. …”	
“Zabb?” asked the vizier sharply. “Wâhât?”
“Your pardon, Sayyid Vizier?”
“You saw you saw you saw,” Jafar pressed, “but what did you see?
Were those two young people wrestling over a jewel-handled knife, or
did they come down to zabbs and wâhâts? And if the latter, did he
force her gate, or did she welcome him in? The penalty for lying to
the caliph is slow disembowelment.”
Salim’s cup trembled, but his voice did not. “I saw what I saw,” he
insisted.
“Then you saw nothing useful to this inquiry,” Haroun himself
declared, speaking as if to Jafar. “Go mind that camel, and see to it
that you’re here at noon tomorrow to see your reward for so much
seeing. Call the other witness, Jafar, and see to it that he’s more di-
verting and less of a diversion than this one was.”
“She, sire,” the vizier amended him, and as Salim exited with sniffs
of satisfaction at his father’s and half-sister’s backs, Jafar asked for and
received the caliph’s permission to interrogate the next witness rather
than invite another such impertinent spiel.
“It has not escaped the Commander of the Faithful,” he then ob-
served to the company, “that Yasmin’s duenna played a more than
minor part in the events of the night in question, not to mention in
many events leading up to and following that night. It appears to the
caliph that it was Jayda the Cairene, for example, who first put into

533

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

her charges’ heads the idea that they might be in love with each other,
and then reported her fears in that quarter to her master, at a time
when she was jealous of the boy Umar’s preference over her own son.
Jayda it was (the caliph notes) who by everybody’s testimony did alif
ba ta and tha jim ha and the rest of her alphabet of thises and thats,
about one or two of which the caliph would hear more.” Turning then
to Jayda, the vizier said, “Slow disembowelment, woman, without re-
spect for age or sex, if you do not now tell the caliph truly and simply
where you ran to from the so-called Tub of Truth on the night in
question, when Sindbad’s daughter bravely interposed herself to save
you from her father’s turban-snaps.”
Closing her eyes and rocking on her cushion, Jayda cried, “As Allah
is my witness, sayyids, I ran to fetch Umar to rescue my rescuer, just
as Salim said! Ai, the lot of us poor women, to be disemboweled with-
out respect —”
“Sayyid Simon Bey el-Loor,” Jafar quickly put in, “has reported
that the pirate Sahim al-Layl maintained that under his former aspect
as Umar al-Yom, he was awoken that night by your instructing him
merely to go waken Sayyid Sindbad for the journey down to Basra,
without mentioning the trouble in progress or any other urgency.”
“Let Umar dare say that to my face!” Jayda cried. “I, who raised
him as if he were my own!”
“We shall not wait for his testimony,” the vizier said dryly. “Why
did you not go with him back to the courtyard, to see Yasmin safely
to the harem once she had been rescued from her fitful father?”
This question was received with due nod and murmur from the
company. But Jayda replied promptly and proudly, “Because, masters,
what Sayyid Sindbad and myself had been about earlier in that same
tub was prophecy, a business of which the uninitiated know nothing
whatever. Before his Marjanah-fit (as we call his unhappy seizures
since Voyage Four) came on him, my master and I had done what was
required to show me the future, and in that prevision I had seen that
my darling Yasmin was in no danger from her father’s cruel turban,
and that she could manage the situation without assistance — as in
fact she did.”
Haroun himself, nodding as if impressed, nevertheless inquired via
his vizier, “If that is what you foresaw, madam, why did you run off
calling for Umar to come rescue Sindbad’s daughter?”

534

Two Interludes

Jafar bowed in salute to the question’s pertinence. But Jayda un-
hesitatingly responded, “Why else, sire, except that it was foreseen
that I would do so? But Allah knows all! Just as it was foreseen that
Umar would find his sister weeping under that date palm because
she’d not been blessed with a zabb and eggs so that she could go to
sea with him! Oh, she was a tomboy, that one, Allah bless her! I well
recall —”
“Madam Duenna,” Jafar interposed, “where did you go, then, after
waking young Sayyid Umar for either one thing or the other?”
“Back to the harem, to be sure,” Jayda said, “as I had foreseen I
would, to await my girl’s return. And there I waited, sayyids, and
waited more, until at last I dozed off — as who would not have, so
long did it take Umar to rescue Yasmin and Yasmin to be rescued! My
thought was that the boy’s cup of wine had passed through him at
last, and that brother and sister were comforting each other with fond
farewells and innocent whatnot under that date palm. But a duenna is
a duenna, sirs, asleep or awake! When my dear one came back to her
room at last, I could read in the book of her sighs and sniffles that she
was now a woman, if you take my meaning. ‘Were you forced?’ I asked
her, knowing very well she had not been, despite her bloody djellaba-
lap. ‘Forced!’ cries she, and she shows me Umar’s jewel-handled knife:
‘I would cut the eggs off any man who tried to force me!’ And she
could likely do it, too, masters, for Umar had taught her well. ‘Only
look at you!’ I said. ‘We’ll tell your father you were forced.’ For I had
foreseen, sirs, that her roll in the hay with Umar was not to be the end
of their story. ‘Is my father so easily fooled, Jayda?’ she asks me —
laughing, mind you, though not a bit happily. ‘All men are,’ I tell her,
and she bids me speak no more of forcing and fooling, inasmuch as
whatever had happened had happened and was done with.
“So off go Sindbad and his pet on their famous fifth voyage, while
my Salim and we womenfolk stay home and make the best of our
unprivileged lot. Sure enough, my darling misses her next two month-
lies and begins to swell. ‘What now, young lady?’ I ask her, and she
tells me she’s of half a mind to sail away by herself to some desert
island and bear the child and raise it herself as she wishes she’d been
raised: a free spirit, whether girl or boy. But she knew such a thing
was impossible in her circumstances, and so she gave me leave to do
whatever I saw fit; she no longer cared.

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 “And so Jayda did and did, good sirs, just as Jayda has ever done
and done: I did this and I did that, said alif ba ta and tha jim ha to
keep this house together. I cured Yasmin’s morning sickness and
found my old master a frisky new tubmate fresh from the desert to
appease his temper at what I confessed to him that Umar had done,
and at the same time I grieved as much as any at that poor boy’s loss
at sea, even though he had taken my Salim’s place. And then I saved
him from certain death when it turned out that only a certain part of
him was lost at sea and the rest come back to Baghdad; and I played
peacemaker between Kuzia Fakan and Yasmin, who declared that she
was jealous of Kuzia on my account; and I played matchmaker with
young Prince Jabal and persuaded Yasmin to let me put her in the way
of as good a maidenhead as the one she’d lost, and then when things
went amiss in the Bahr Faris I did my best to comfort my darling girl
while Sayyid Simon Bey el-Loor did what he had to do at the naughty
orders of Sayyid Sahim al-Layl, who was poor Umar in disguise. And
after that I helped Yasmin smuggle that same Sayyid Simon into the
harem for the month of Sha’ban and back out again for Ramadan; and
after that I helped Sayyid Sindbad make arrangements for her with
Sayyid Ibn al-Hamra —”
“Jafar!” Haroun here broke in. “This bawd so sets our teeth on
edge that we would choose slow disembowelment for ourself and for
you as well over hearing any more of her story!”
“Allah forfend we should hear another syllable from her,” the vizier
said smoothly. “Be seated, woman, while we turn our interrogation to
your master.”
But the caliph declared, “There will be no further interrogation, at
least not tonight, in our presence. Disembowel this jade of a Jayda
with perfect slowness if she does not appear tomorrow at noon to hear
from us the end of her story. As for our host,” he went on, still ad-
dressing Jafar, “whose generosity toward us after each of his several
voyages has been surpassed only by his generosity toward himself, we
would eagerly suffer impalement before sitting through another of his
fanciful sea yarns. What we require at this late hour is not interroga-
tion but music, to accompany our dispensation of denouements.”
“Who shall gainsay the King of the Ages?” Jafar asked rhetorically,
and he whispered into the right ear of Fatmah Awad, seated at his left.

536

Two Interludes

With a pleased nod Fatmah relayed his instructions across-table to
Nuzhat in the language of tambourines, and Nuzhat piped the mes-
sage diagonally down-table to Kuzia Fakan. “We hear and obey!” cried
Kuzia. Already vibrant of hip and belly as she rose from Cushion
Four, she stepped onto the table in front of Jayda, doffed her outer-
most robe, and salaamed before Haroun al-Rashid, her finger-cymbals
accenting Fatmah’s rhythm. In her most articulate body-Bedouin
then, accompanied ardently by her colleagues and encouraged by ap-
proving nods from caliph and vizier, she danced out Haroun’s not-
uncomplicated first pronouncement, as murmured by the caliph and
given strong voice by Jafar al-Barmaki:
“By the authority vested in him by fate and by Allah to bid and forbid between man and man,” this pronouncement ran, “Caliph Haroun al-Rashid now dispenses as follows: the extraordinarily green-eyed, steadfast, prevailingly high-principled, eloquent, much-mishandled but nonetheless uncommonly desirable daughter of Sindbad the Sailor, though she would grace the caliph’s own harem like a jewel from Island Two, Voyage Two, he herewith gives in marriage, if she be still willing, to the worthy Sayyid Simon Whatshisname from the Blessed Isle of Serendib, if he be still willing — their union to be consummated or reconsummated, as may be, this very night, and preparations for their joint embassy to Serendib on the caliph’s behalf to be launched tomorrow or at the latest the day after, when other denouements shall have been dispensed by the Prince of Believers in this gracious hall. Be you both still willing, the caliph inquires, now that you and we have heard all that we have heard? We see that you are and here pronounce you husband and wife, et cetera et cetera. May Allah bless and fructify your union.”
So defiant earlier in the evening, Yasmin at the caliph’s question
appeared to consult her father with those aforecited eyes, just as her
bridegroom consulted her with his. Sindbad closed his own eyes and
nodded assent to the pronouncement. His daughter returned her gaze
to her husband, and Haroun’s vizier spoke on:
“The caliph further declares the issue of Mrs. Simon Somebody’s
maidenhood, its history and present state, to have been, though tire-
some, so central to the complex and discrepancy-fraught narrative now
approaching its climax and resolution that in lieu of further testimony

537

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

upon the question (which the caliph is persuaded will lead only to
additional contradictions, digressions, and culs-de-sac), he himself, in
the awful majesty of his person and his entire distrust of the bawd
Jayda, will upon the close of this pronouncement adjudge the hymenal
state of Sindbad’s daughter — a judgment whereof there shall be no
appeal by any party and whereof the merest questioning shall be re-
warded with leisurely immersion in boiling palm oil.”
Somebody frowned at this, and his new father-in-law likewise, and
Jayda pulled her black cowl close about her face. Hajj Masud gave his
beard an apprehensive tug, picked up by Kuzia Fakan and amplified
in her dance. Salim and Ibn al-Hamra smiled and smiled. But Yasmin
changed neither her expression nor the focus of her gaze.
“On the other hand,” Jafar continued, “the caliph cordially invites
wagers before the fact as to his finding in this delicate matter and
appoints his vizier, Jafar al-Barmaki, to hold in trust all sums so wa-
gered for appropriate disbursement after the caliph’s determination.
We now pause briefly in middispensation to accept and record such
wagers.”
This by no means simple article of Haroun’s pronouncement Kuzia
danced out directly in front of Ibn al-Hamra, with such perspiring
eloquence that that plum-phizzed fellow was moved to cry, “My
whole investment in Serendib Limited says that Sindbad’s daughter is
no more virginal than myself!”
From the courtyard doorway Salim laughed and jeered, “After
what we’ve heard from the bride and groom themselves, who’ll bet
against you?”
“Who else but the bride’s father?” Ibn replied triumphantly. “Didn’t
he pay two fortunes to his Qeshmi friends for preservation of the very
item in question, and then dangle it before me like a sugar-tit before
a suckling all through our dowry negotiations? Let Sindbad match my
wager with a thirty-percent share of Serendib Limited!”
Fatmah tambourined a pensive pause as vizier and caliph nodded
to each other and turned to Sindbad. But from the table’s other head,
from Jayda’s cowl, there now came strange, crowlike cries in what
sounded to our narrator like the language spoken between his new
bride and her duenna: “Oppabroppa! Koppadoppabroppa!” Not even
Kuzia Fakan’s polyglot midsection could translate, but Sindbad nod-
ded and declared to Jafar al-Barmaki, “What you hear is the very

538

Two Interludes

tongue of prophecy. I accept the terms of Sayyid Ibn al-Hamra’s
wager.”
“Done,” the vizier affirmed, “and gallantly. The caliph presumes
that there are no further bets?”
There appeared to be none, unsurprisingly, from either the main
or the side tables. But having danced Haroun’s presumption (which
required but two accented twitches of left buttock and right breast),
Kuzia Fakan was inspired to a remarkable unaccompanied solo burst,
directed principally toward Haroun and Jafar but with gestures as well
toward Ibn al-Hamra (his caftan-bib in particular), Yasmin, Sindbad,
and even the bridegroom, to whom it seemed almost as if she were
spelling out with her supple body the letters of his name. Nuzhat
giggled into her pipe. Fatmah Awad applauded tambourinely.
“What did she say?” Haroun demanded of Jafar. As Fatmah whis-
pered in the vizier’s ear, Kuzia salaamed down-table and seated herself,
smiling, not back on Cushion Four but directly facing Ibn al-Hamra —
in fact, upon his empty dessert plate.
“Kuzia Fakan,” Jafar reported, “of the noble and restless Bedouin,
seconds her master’s wager upon his daughter’s virginity and begs the
caliph to marry her to the merchant Ibn al-Hamra if she and her mas-
ter win that bet.”
“Done.” Haroun approved. “And if she loses?”
Without turning her head or torso, Kuzia followed a quick tattoo
of her finger-cymbals with a thrust of her dessert-plated rump. Fatmah
whispered; Jafar nodded and declared, “If she loses her wager, Kuzia
Fakan will either launder Sayyid Ibn’s caftans till the end of the story
or do whatever else it may please the Dispenser of Denouements to
command of her. Well proposed, say I.”
“And done,” said the caliph, already rising from his place and beck-
oning to both Yasmin and her husband. Observed Jafar, “There are
things that one can prove possession of only by losing them. The
Commander of the Faithful now bids that more wine be served while
he retires with the bride and groom to make his adjudication.” He
himself then — as Yasmin promptly stood to go and her troubled hus-
band uncertainly rose to follow — moved behind Fatmah Awad to
retrieve from Sindbad’s daughter’s cushion the knotted rag that “As-
lan” and “Ahmad” had presented to her upon their arrival in the hall.
“The wedding gift,” he said, re-presenting it with a bow not to the

539

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

newlyweds but to his master the caliph, whom then he followed as
Haroun al-Rashid followed us — unlikely foursome! — led by bride
leading groom by the hand from dining hall to bridal chamber.
At its threshold, Jafar (who had moved ahead of us en route, as if
he knew the way) halted and bowed again. Yasmin stepped unhesi-
tantly inside. Hesitant indeed, her husband nevertheless presumed to
move ahead of the caliph, wondering whether some Arabian Nights
variety of le droit du seigneur was in the offing and whether the pen-
alty for resistance would be slow disembowelment or palm-oil par-
boiling, and was gratified not to find himself seized and hauled from
the room. His bride stood quietly at his lamp-lit writing desk.
“Sit,” the caliph said kindly — to both of us, it seemed — and with
a small grunt and less small sigh seated himself plumply on one corner
of our memoryful Bokhara. When we had taken our places at the two
opposite corners, and Jafar his station, at Haroun’s direction, at the
fourth, the caliph handed the husband of us that knotted rag.
“Our congratulations upon your marriage. Open and inspect,
please.”
Scarcely daring to hope … yet there it was, bandless but still tick-
ing, faithfully registering the hour as either 0220 or 1420 on some
wed 27. At the sight of it, tears sprang to our bridegroom’s eyes;
likewise and more so to our bride’s when he offered it for her inspec-
tion and she kissed its familiar crystaled face.
“May it steer you both safely to Serendib,” the caliph wished us
when we had much thanked him, and Jafar added, “Kindly bring us
back several such navigation amulets when you return.”
“Now, then,” Haroun harrumphed, looking first to his vizier and
then, severely, to Yasmin.
“Indeed,” murmured Jafar al-Barmaki.
Yasmin’s eyes flashed. She tucked her legs under her a touch more
tightly; then, a little, untucked them; then, with only the briefest
proud side glance at her husband (to whom it occurred, bizarrely: But
she’s menstruating!), untucked them quite, as if to bid Haroun al-
Rashid as he had bidden us: Open and Inspect.
The Commander of the Faithful immediately smiled his satisfac-
tion, shook his head, and sighed again, saying to both of us, “Such
customs are regrettable, but the people are the people. Jafar al-
Barmaki will duly proclaim to all Baghdad that Sindbad’s daughter,

540

Two Interludes

by our personal certification, came to her bridal bed a virgin. We now
leave to the pair of you what really matters: seeing to it that she’s not
one still by morning prayer call.”
“Thy will be done!” my wife whispered gratefully, and she turned
to her husband, radiant. That much-but-not-entirely-relieved chap
concurred, “We hear and obey.” Caliph and vizier nodded and rose to
leave us. But then it occurred to Haroun to ask, “Was there not a
bracelet of some sort for that amulet? We should like to see it.”
The bracelet, I explained, was missing, except for two or three
spare links — whose present location and container I now suddenly
remembered with appall.
“It is missing no longer,” Yasmin declared, reaching into the bosom
of her djellaba. “It was to be my wedding gift to my husband.” She
fetched it forth but at the sight of it — a simple band of stainless-steel
links — could not not sob. I hurried to embrace her and was gratified
to be permitted to.
“What is the trouble?” the caliph wondered. His vizier supposed
discreetly that the price of that bracelet’s retrieval had perhaps been
high. Moving doorward, he wished us white nights and golden days
until the Destroyer of Delights and Desolater of Dwelling Places col-
lected from us the debt all creatures owe their maker.
“No more tears!” Haroun commanded, joining him. “If the goods
are good, then the price is the price. See to it that those missing links
are in place by tomorrow noon and that bracelet clasped as you must
clasp each other now, and Devil take the price! It’s paid, we presume,
and we bid you good night, and there’s the end of it.”

But it was not, though caliph and vizier left us then to make their
proclamation to the company. Still tearful, Yasmin moved from carpet-
corner to bed-edge to fit the bracelet onto the watch — very possibly
sitting, it pained her husband to note, directly upon the awful link
pouch that he had thrust out of sight there when Kuzia Fakan had
visited him that afternoon. It was the memory of Umar al-Yom, he
presumed — and Sahim al-Layl, and Shaitan — together with the
strain of the evening’s narratives, that now overburdened her.
When he made again to comfort her, she managed to say, “Wear
this and nothing else, husband, while you deflower your virgin bride.”

541

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

The thing would not clasp, I was obliged to tell (and show) her, without the links removed by our late friend Umar⁄Sahim. “And we
have those links,” I decided to acknowledge, “but it’s better not to ask
where they came from and where they are.”
“As you wish,” Yasmin replied. “Don’t ask your wife then how she
came by the bracelet, either. That way neither of us will be deflowered,
and tomorrow the caliph can annul our marriage.”
Her meaning, please? Stroking thoughtfully her startled husband’s
unclasped watchband, she said, “Yasmin and Simon are one person
now. Should that person keep secrets from himself?”
To myself I reflected that dark ones indeed were still being kept
from me. All the same, sitting beside her on the bed and making soft
love to her neck-nape with one thumb and two fingers as she did like-
wise to my open bracelet clasp, Simon told Yasmin the full story of
those missing links: how, Sahim al-Layl’s wrist having been less thick
than Bey el-Loor’s, he had bidden me remove them, and to assure my
service had thereafter kept the watch always on his person except
when I was actually navigating. How I had thought it but another of
his bitter jokes when he had speculated on its possible potency and
had pretended (so I’d supposed) to consider wearing it where it might
regenerate his corporal losses.
“Umar …” My bride could say no more.
How, then, this very afternoon her father had told me of his pre-
monition yesterday that a second attempt would be made last night to
steal his “amulet”; how he had forestalled that theft by sending the
watch, belatedly, to Haroun al-Rashid via the caliph’s vizier’s messen-
ger and then had tricked the would-be thief — not Kuzia Fakan this
time, he’d reported, but Jayda, assisted by Salim — by substituting the
bracelet for the watch in that atrocious pouch he wore between his
legs. How, finally, so pleased had he been by whatever it was that
Jayda had prophesied in the course of his feigned “Marjanah-fit” —
“Feigned?” Yasmin all but screamed at me.
— that he had excused the theft, sung to me a six-stanza ode to
impotence, declared his retirement from sexuality, and made me a
mocking gift of Umar⁄Sahim’s pouch — empty now but for those
spare links overlooked by the thieves. I would prefer not to show her
it, I said.

542

Two Interludes

Yasmin pressed her fingernails into my wrist. “Show me it!”
Most reluctantly, I did.
“Empty it,” she whispered.
Gingerly indeed, I loosened its silk drawstring and shook three
links onto my palm. She held out hers — for those links, I assumed,
and I offered them, making to put their revolting container out of view.
“Not them!” Indifferent to those bits of metal, she snatched up the
empty, fawn-soft scrotal sac of the manifoldly maltreated Umar al-
Yom, also Sahim al-Layl, and pressed it repeatedly to her lips, kissing
it as if it were, after all, a sacred amulet.
“Poor innocent!”
I thought she meant him. But now she kissed me, almost violently,
and pushed and pulled us down onto the bed, and kept her mouth
pressed against mine while her hands — both hands, I noted, and I
praised Allah that she had let fall that pouch — groped under my
caftan and her own djellaba. Very well: I groped, too — and bolted
upright at what I felt, and turned into serious contest what in my
innocence I had taken for nuptial foreplay. I forced her knife-hand
away and downward, dislodging en route the soft pad of folded cot-
ton that Yasmin used by way of “sanitary napkin.” She managed a
wrist-twist sufficient to scratch herself inside one thigh; whether she
had counted on my stopping her there I might subsequently wonder
but would never ask. When I threw a leg over hers to help immobilize
her, I, too, felt the blade. But I had her pinioned now, and I kissed
and kissed her face as she had kissed that other thing.
In and from that strained embrace there followed my own latest
“defloration”: my wife’s half-muttered, half-whispered account of how
young Umar al-Yom had never been her lover — not first, not ever —
nor had any other of her young suitors. How not Jayda’s and Sind-
bad’s son but Sindbad’s daughter (with Jayda’s full assistance) had, by
false prophecy and drastic other means, attempted last night to steal
or bribe from her father the necessary though insufficient instrument
of my rereaching home — and had got only its bracelet for her pains.
By story’s end its teller’s grip had eased; its shaken hearer’s, too,
once I had secured that jewel-handled blade. Yasmin now opened her
djellaba and pointed imperiously to her heart, much as she had done
aboard Shaitan. I kissed her breast instead; put the knife, the watch,

543

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

the spare links, the pouch, the story, all out of harm’s (and harming’s) way, over on my writing table; stanched our lightly bleeding scratches
with the bedsheet. Almost defiantly, her entire person asked, What
next? To which my whole though still-stunned self responded: Love.

2.

Love we made, as awkwardly and tenderly as two virgins. Then sank
into deep but uneasy sleep, down almost to the Boundary. Then found
ourselves just before daylight coupling again, this time with more ar-
dor than tenderness and not awkwardly at all. Exactly where one
might have expected a muezzin cry, siren blast, or peacock call, in
through our doorway mumbled … Jayda! One of us sprang from love
to naked anger, and from the bed; the other stayed him.
“She’s my Jayda still, Simon. I was never innocent.”
“Her doing!” I protested. “And your crazy father’s!”
Jayda stood by. Yasmin shrugged her whole splendid body as she
sat up, saying, “Even if his fits were feigned, who took advantage of
whom? He’s Sindbad the Sailor, Simon, and Jayda is Jayda, and Yas-
min is Yasmin. The only innocent in this house was Umar, and I loved
him to death. Now there’s you.”
Announced Jayda, “They want to see the sheet.”
“Show it.” The two of them stripped it from the bed, in the gray
light admiring together the magnitude and splendor of its stains. Such
a bride! Such a bridegroom! The most wine-spoiled of Ibn al-Hamra’s
caftans, they agreed, paled before our bridal sheet, which Jayda prom-
ised to display in the courtyard like a victory flag.
“Won’t your father be pleased!” she thrilled; then she clucked her
tongue. “And isn’t he the sly one, pretending to feign his fits!” With a
nod to her ward’s near-speechless spouse, she exited with the trophy.
Opined Yasmin (down Turk-fashion on our rug again now, adroitly
refitting the three “missing links” to their bracelet), “If Jafar al-Barmaki
were to ask her, Jayda would swear to Allah she brought Kuzia Fakan
into this house to keep my father away from me, because whether he
knew it or not, she knew what he’d be wanting in return for that
ransom.” By dint of considerable effort, I said nothing. My bride con-
tinued, “Nobody loves and hates Sindbad the Sailor as much as Jayda
does, except maybe me, and we both knew that I was her best link to

544

Two Interludes

him because of my link to Marjanah. Who doesn’t play double games,
Simon? Even with himself?”
Her husband tapped his chest.
“Yes, well, maybe,” Yasmin granted. “But your old friend Day-zee
did, for certain. Now, then, speaking of links …” As confident as that
lovely clerk had been in the Marrakesh watch shop somewhere near
Dronningen’s Gade in Charlotte Amalie, she closed the bracelet clasp
around my wrist: a perfect fit. Crossing her forearms then under her
breasts, she cocked her head to inspect, to approve, and to ask, “Is it
Serendib for Sindbad’s daughter, or the Sahra al Hijarah?”
To which her husband replied that she was her father’s daughter
no longer. She was her husband’s wife, and I her husband.
Her glance flicked away, then returned steadfast. “Husband me,
then, my friend, whether to Serendib or to the Destroyer of Delights.
And I will wife you to your famous Boundary and beyond.”

Called the caliph’s vizier’s moon-faced messenger late that forenoon
from Sindbad’s courtyard: “Resolutions here! By order of Caliph Haroun
al-Rashid, Prince of Believers and Dispenser of Denouements, all surviving
principals in the several voyage-tales of Sindbad the Sailor and Still-
Stranded Simon Bey el-Loor shall now assemble to hear their endings, happy
and otherwise!”
And at local noon exactly — which was to say, as exactly as the
venerable Mustafa mu-Allim could determine with instruments older
than the Seiko Quartz Sports 100 that our narrator there recalibrated
to his former mentor’s “Mark!” — the caliph, in his own person,
spoke.
Over the courtyard gate our “bridal banner” hung, remarked and
admired by various of the household and pointed out by the street-
side crowd as they said things to one another behind their hands. At
Yasmin’s insistence, she and I came from our rooms dressed in trium-
phant red, she in the djellaba she had worn at Ramadan’s end, I in
matching caftan. Before the gate, beneath the validated banner, semi-
circled by prayer rugs and standing people, the great Tub of Truth
had, we saw, been inverted into a dais, upon which the smaller Tub of
Last Resort, fetched from the banquet hall and similarly inverted,
made a backless throne. There in full robes of state sat Haroun al-

545

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Rashid. His vizier’s familiar messenger stood behind him, the vizier
himself down on his right. Two other figures attended the dais: just
before the caliph, brandishing an enormous polished and jewel-studded
scimitar, a heavy-muscled, fierce-mustachioed fellow whom Yasmin
identified to her husband as Haroun’s celebrated sword-bearer and
bodyguard, Masrur; and cross-legged on the ground at the caliph’s
left, a disheveled, red-eyed, swag-bellied scamp whom I presumed to
be Haroun’s other legendary sidekick, the poet-jester Abu Nuwas.
Round about stood the summoned principals of these stories (those
still living and on this side of the Boundary, in Sindbadland), together
with all investors past and present in Serendib Limited. In their center,
facing Masrur, black-turbaned Sindbad bent his head and stroked and
stroked his beard, and black-cowled Jayda kept her own counsel. The
sight of them dizzied our narrator: the man had pretended to feign his
mad incestuous attacks? But then I caught sight of old Mustafa catch-
ing dim-eyed sight of me and beaming from the courtyard margin as
if he had achieved a tricky landfall exactly per plot. I hurried to him;
we embraced; he even put by his grudge against Yasmin, seeing our
happiness, and permitted her to embrace him as well. The vizier’s mes-
senger had expressed him up from Basra, Mustafa said, and he had
much to tell us. We too him, said we; there would be time.
“Be seated all,” that messenger bade the company. “At local noon
exactly, as determined by the peerless Mustafa mu-Allim together with
Sayyid Simon Bey el-Loor, captain of the caliph’s new expedition to
Serendib, the Commander of the Faithful will address this company
in his aspect of Dispenser of Denouements.”
All sat upon the prayer rugs except Mustafa and me (my ex-mentor
already explaining to me, sotto voce, how we would proceed with the
business at hand) and Abu Nuwas, who, having sat while the others
stood, now perversely struggled to his feet as the rest did contrariwise.
On the dais, in a square of sunlight at the caliph’s feet, Mustafa set up
a small contraption of ancient design (lately modified by himself, he
would tell me later): half sundial and half pelorus, by the look of it.
He aligned it thus-and-so, sighting on a minaret here, a sun-shadow
there; he adjusted the angle of its gnomon, rotated some sort of scale
until this matched that, then held up one bony forefinger as the
needle-thin shadow crept toward a certain …

546

Two Interludes

“Mark!” he bade me crisply, as by sunlight, moonlight, and star-light he had done a hundred times before on Zahir’s deck. But this
time, instead of logging with my watch the precise moment of his
celestial sight, I clicked into motion the hands that I had preset to
12:00:00. We reembraced. Led by Yasmin, the bystanders applauded.
The caliph spoke: “It is the custom of this house, as demonstrated
last evening to all here, for its master and host to seat his guests at
table in an order corresponding —”
“Devil take it, most high and excellent Excellency!” Abu Nuwas
broke in, at the same time stifling a belch and pointing across the
courtyard. “There is an infidel who dares to stand and stare like a
camel while the caliph speaks!”
Haroun’s face flashed his anger, as much at the interrupter as at the
cause of his interruption. Masrur shifted his awful scimitar and turned
menacingly to the poet while we others looked where that poet was
pointing: at the camel Mustafa, idly browsing oleander beside the dry
central fountain. Remarked the vizier Jafar al-Barmaki (himself now
seated on the dais at Haroun’s right hand), “There are two such. With
the caliph’s leave I’ll instruct the Bedou dancer to deal with that camel
and Masrur to deal with this one” — pointing to the poet.
“Done,” said Haroun al-Rashid. Kuzia Fakan, without even turn-
ing toward the courtyard, gave two shrill whistles and three sharp
clucks, and the camel settled to his knees. Abu Nuwas made a side-
show of doing likewise, salaaming abjectly before the great body-
guard’s upraised sword. “Enough,” Haroun said. But the irrepressible
poet, seating himself now comfortably on the ground with the in-
verted Truth-Tub for a backrest, presumed to improvise:
Before her desert songs
As before her dunes and hollows —
Sahl, Sahra, Sarir, Wâdi, Wâhât! —
Man and beast alike must squat,
In hope that whatso follows
Will be that wherefor he longs.
“But Allah is merciful,” he added.
“So this time shall we be,” Haroun allowed, “but perhaps not next.
Be warned.” To the amused company then he resumed: “Today,
however, Sindbad the Sailor cannot perform his customary office, nor
ever henceforth in this house, alas, for the reason that his manifold

547

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

offenses — against his delectable daughter and others, not excluding
ourself — oblige us to declare all his property forfeit, together with
his life. Both are to be considered in escrow against their disposition
later in the denouement-luncheon to which we here invite you all. You
shall take your places in the banquet hall as we now assign them, along
with preliminary judgments where appropriate. Those not singled out
for mention may dispose themselves as they wish at the side tables —
excepting the camel Mustafa, who shall dine where he now sits, in
company with the prince of poets, Sayyid Abu Nuwas. As for the
main table, proceeding from the lowest cushion to the highest, we
pronounce as follows …”
He leaned toward his vizier, who whispered into his ear while con-
sulting a paper withdrawn from his robe. At Haroun’s beckon the
messenger bent to listen, too, and then announced on the caliph’s be-
half, “Sindbad the Sailor we find guilty of certain offenses too heinous
to speak of and of others atrocious but speakable, not least among
them lying allegorically to the caliph regarding his voyage to Serendib
and sequestering for his own lascivious use the extraordinary souvenir
of that place that he was duty-bound to present to the Commander of
the Faithful. Also deceiving the caliph and sundry other investors into
supporting his fraudulent projected seventh voyage. Also jealously un-
zabbing and otherwise disfiguring his then-innocent and evidently
admirable foster son, Umar al-Yom. Also shamefully neglecting his
illegitimate and unlovable but nonetheless natural son, Salim, who,
though certainly no prize, deserved better from his father. Also very
possibly even conspiring with the late unlamented Captain Abu Ho-
sayn to have his own daughter kidnapped by the late pirate Sahim al-
Layl in order to divert from the late Prince Jabal of Oman that virgin
bride’s munificent dowry and the young woman herself, both of which
said Sindbad begrudged him and coveted.”
Abu Nuwas whistled appreciatively. From behind us, Mustafa mu-
Allim muttered, “That was what I had in mind to tell you, when the
coast was clear. No matter now, I suppose.”
“Of this last offense,” the messenger proclaimed on, “nothing fur-
ther shall be said unless the caliph chooses to say it. On the strength
of the others alone, however, we here condemn Sindbad the Sailor to
Cushion Ten at his own table and, after lunch, to death, by whichever
means and at whatever place and hour his aggrieved daughter shall

548

Two Interludes

elect. We recommend to her attention slow flaying with dull knives,
leisurely impalement, gradual immersion in hot palm oil, and consign-
ment into the Tigris in a sack containing a live cock and a disgruntled
ape, but the choice shall be hers alone. To your place, sir.”
“I should say so,” Abu Nuwas commented, tsking his tongue.
“Allah knows all,” Sindbad said, and he obediently rose to go. Ig-
noring me, he fixed his eyes briefly and neutrally upon Yasmin’s as he
passed us. She met them no less neutrally. Behind him trudged Jayda,
murmuring to herself, until Masrur interposed his sword between
them like a railway-crossing gate. Declared the caliph then to her (hav-
ing attended his vizier and nodded to the messenger, who spoke for
him), “As for you, Jayda the Cairene: your loyalty to your master is at
once your offense and its mitigation. In the name of it, in ways that
shall not here be spoken of, you have played bawd with the girl en-
trusted to your care. And in more other ways than the caliph has fin-
gers to count them on, not to mention your master, you have lied and
tricked and cheated and mixed false prophecy with true to the ends
of maintaining your place in Sindbad’s esteem and advancing the
interests of your whelp of a son. Inasmuch as you did all of this, how-
ever — including the deception of your master himself — out of a per-
verted fidelity of a sort that, unperverted, is approved by both Allah
and the caliph, your punishment shall be your reward for that devo-
tion, and vice versa: whatever the fate elected by Sindbad’s daughter
for her father, you shall share it equally. Meanwhile, we cheerfully
condemn you to Cushion Nine, above and across from him.”
Haroun nodded. Abu Nuwas shook his head admiringly at the
catalogue of Jayda’s offenses. Masrur lifted his formidable crossing
gate. Still murmuring, the duenna trudged on. But now the messenger
said, “Wait.” The gate came down. There was a conference on the dais,
after which the messenger announced further to Jayda, “Your miser-
able son, the page Salim — whether rendered miserable in your womb
by God’s design, or subsequently by his father’s despisement — shall
have as his sole reward for a lifetime of sneak and snoop and skulk and
scurry, but rarely of any real harm to anyone, the satisfaction of sitting
one place above his putative father at the celebratory luncheon follow-
ing and completing this preliminary dispensation. To your place on
Cushion Nine, wretched boy, to queen it over your naughty sire; and
your mother to Cushion Eight.”

549

The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

Queening indeed, Salim went, with a particular buttock-flick at
Abu Nuwas when that poet saluted him in street-hustler’s Arabic. But
Jayda, who had lingered behind to hear this pronouncement, made
bold to plead — speaking to Abu Nuwas, of all people, as if not dar-
ing to address herself higher — that on this special occasion her son
be given precedence for once over both of his parents. The poet turned
his palms up to Masrur, who in turn shrugged his scimitar at Jafar al-
Barmaki, who raised his eyebrows at Haroun al-Rashid, who consid-
ered for no more than a moment before instructing the messenger to
proclaim to Jayda, “Let perversity be disciplined perversely. It shall be
part of your punishment to be seated as aforeassigned, one place above
your son and two above your lord, on Cushion Eight. Go.”
She went (Salim had preceded her already); and now it was Ha-
roun who spoke to Jafar, and Jafar to his messenger, who announced,
“We are weary already of this slow-moving denouement and have
seven places yet to assign! Let there be music.”
Having consulted the paper in his left hand, Jafar spoke to Masrur,
who cantilevered his scimitar in the direction of Fatmah Awad. In-
stantly that tambourinist tambourined: first a tentative fanfare as she
looked about for her colleagues, then a tremolo of alarm when Ha-
roun himself beckoned her to rise and come forward, at the same time
messaging the messenger.
“Fatmah Awad,” that fellow duly declared, “whose rhythms are as
true and unfaltering as the stars in their courses or the hands of Cap-
tain Bey el-Loor’s magical watch: as of this hour you are Sindbad’s
tambourine-slave no longer. We assign you instead to the rhythmic
service of one whose loyalty to this house has been as steadfast as your
instrument.”
“Not Jayda!” Fatmah could not help protesting.
“Certainly not,” the caliph assured her through his vizier’s messen-
ger, who then said, “Sayyid Hajj Masud: we invite you to escort your
new servant to Cushion Seven of our main table and to take your own
well-merited place beside her on your usual Cushion Three. We invite
you further to marry this rhythmical young woman, with our blessing
and an appropriate caliphly gift to serve as her dowry, but we do not
insist upon your doing so if you have sufficient wives already or prefer
to enjoy her rhythms otherwise. In either case, as your loyalty to Sind-

550
Two Interludes

bad was ever on his daughter’s behalf and did ourself no injury, we
here reaffirm your purveyorship of carpets to the caliphate of Serendib.”
“Hajj Masud?” that fellow asked, incredulous. Clutching the neck
of his caftan, he half rose and looked about, as if for confirmation that
he was himself. “Hajj Masud, by order of the caliph?”
He could say no more, nor stand nor sit, until Abu Nuwas took it
upon himself to grasp Fatmah Awad’s elbow and, shaking her tambou-
rine hand in step, lead her ceremoniously to her new master and bid
her march him to their places. As she did so — happily indeed, but
with wistful glances at Nuzhat and Kuzia Fakan — the poet boldly
observed to Jafar al-Barmaki that for so accomplished a musician to
be thus separated from her band was as much punishment as reward.
The vizier straightway consulted the caliph, who replied through his
spokesman, “Before this denouement is done, that band’s bond shall
be rebound. Music!”
Merrily then Fatmah danced Hajj Masud tableward, her tambou-
rine accompanied now by Nuzhat’s flute and Kuzia Fakan’s finger-
cymbals. That was more like it, the caliph made known, and now he
bade Kuzia dance out her own reward for services well rendered in
Sindbad’s household and bets shrewdly placed last night. “On that
occasion,” his messenger said for him as she salaamed her way to the
dais, “we pronounced our pronouncements in Arabic and you trans-
lated us into the Bedouin of your body. Please you now to speak your
wishes with that body, and Jafar al-Barmaki will render you into
Arabic.”
Replied Kuzia’s hips and cymbals, “We hear and obey!” The vizier
raised his eyes to Allah. Vigorously and expressively then the dancer
danced from our blood-stained bedsheet to its red-robed stainers; then
from the caliph on his tub-throne to crimson-faced Ibn al-Hamra, be-
fore whom she mimed the pouring of wine on head and caftan-front,
its intimate laundering, and percentage figures ranging from a low of
five to a high of thirty. Her performance concluded with a shrill of
Nuzhat’s pipe, a bravura flurry of buttocks and finger-cymbals, and
the dancer’s artful collapse into Ibn’s plump lap. Throughout, Jafar
watched and whispered to Haroun, who now nodded to the messenger.
“We here proclaim this supple Bedou a free woman and the hands-
down winner of her wager with Sayyid Ibn al-Hamra,” that last

551
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

announced, “as the banner behind us unequivocally attests. With an
appropriate caliphly gift by way of dowry, we here wed Kuzia Fakan
to that same sayyid, who, if he has a wife already, now has two, and if
he has none, now has the equivalent of the Muslim’s lawful four. We
pronounce you husband and wife and bid you take your places on
cushions Six and Five, respectively.”
Danced frowning Kuzia: Respectively? Whether, like Jayda, not
presuming to address herself directly to the dais, or else trusting Abu
Nuwas to read her movements more accurately than the vizier, she
elaborated her question bodily before that poet. “Run that last line by
me again,” he demanded with a lip-lick, and when she had done so he
conveyed to Jafar her wish not to be set above her new husband: let
him take the higher cushion, herself the lower. Ibn beamed. Haroun
nodded but then consulted his vizier’s paper and himself gave voice to
his anticipation of sitting on Cushion One between two beauties: on
his right hand Kuzia Fakan and on his left, at the table’s head, Sind-
bad’s daughter, now Sayyid Simon Bey el-Loor’s wife. Let the dancer
therefore lead her husband to the lower place as instructed, for today’s
denouement purposes only, and thereafter defer to him as Allah or-
daineth proper.
“There remains Cushion Four,” the messenger went on on Haroun’s
behalf, “across from Sayyid Hajj Masud at the table’s Second Head —
where our distinguished emissary from Serendib shall of course pre-
side as the South Pole of our hospitality to his bride’s most attractive
North. On that fourth cushion, at his left hand, shall sit his rescuer
and mentor, Mustafa mu-Allim, whom we here appoint to advise
upon and oversee the construction at our expense of whatever vessel
Captain Bey el-Loor requires for his upcoming voyage.”
As this proclamation was duly applauded, Jafar conferred further
with Haroun, who bade the messenger add, “To said Mustafa, for his
decades of accurate navigation and of behaving to men as men, we
further award a delightful young mate to pipe him through his voy-
age’s final leg: the melodious Nuzhat.”
She coughed in midcadenza. “Sayyids!” protested Mustafa; humbly
thanking then the caliph, the vizier, the suddenly much-distraught
messenger, Masrur the sword-bearer, Abu Nuwas, and the piper her-
self, he begged to be excused, this late in his travels, from the respon-
sibility of behaving as a man to so young a woman, or for that matter

552
Two Interludes

to any other. By his reckoning, he was not so much on his voyage’s
final leg as on his own last legs; having contrived to reach safe harbor
after so many and perilous passages, he declared, he was content now
to cast his net for nothing more frisky than marsh minnows.
“Your wisdom extends beyond pilotage,” Haroun said approvingly,
and he bade his relieved messenger bid Nuzhat pipe the good man to
his place, without further obligation.
“By Allah, master!” cried Abu Nuwas. “Award her to me, and she’ll
have manly words to fit her womanly music!” As she passed he made
an impudent grab at her, which Nuzhat adroitly dodged and smartly
parried with a flute-crack on his knuckles. “You go too far, Abu!” the
messenger scolded him, speaking this time for himself. Nuzhat paused
in her piping to curtsy and favor him with such a smile of appreciation
that the vizier whispered to the caliph, who whispered to the messen-
ger, whose moon-face reddened with pleasure like Ibn al-Hamra’s as,
between clearings of his throat, he announced it to be the caliph’s
wish, if it be Nuzhat’s wish, as it was most certainly his own most
ardent wish …
“I do,” piped the piper, and with a new lilt to her music, she fluted
Mustafa into the banquet hall.
Whereinto now Haroun al-Rashid himself escorted Yasmin, and
conferred with her gravely as they went; and Jafar al-Barmaki ushered
the bridegroom, whose eyes remained ever on his bride while he at-
tended and nodded at the vizier’s confidences. After us came mighty
Masrur and tiptoeing Abu Nuwas (who pretended to sneak in behind
the sword-bearer, against the caliph’s orders), and after them Haroun’s
vizier’s messenger, already conning the hall for his new companion.
From one of the several smaller tables beside the famous main one,
she piped a greeting his way, and there he joined her, as did the sword-
bearer and the still-clowning poet. Those not already in their places
then assumed them, per the caliph’s vizier’s seating plan: at the main
table’s head, radiant Yasmin, and at its other pole her husband; at
Yasmin’s right, the Commander of the Faithful; at her left, his grand
vizier. At our narrator’s right, steadfast Hajj Masud, still thumping his
chest in happy incredulity; at my left, Mustafa (whom I myself would
have assigned to Hajj’s place even at the cost of separating the rug man
from his rhythmical friend). From the fifth place, at the caliph’s right,
Kuzia Fakan devoured with grinning eyes her flush-faced spouse

553
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

across from her at the vizier’s left, on Cushion Six. Blissful Fatmah
Awad marked time in the seventh place, beside her new master. Across
from her, at Mustafa’s left on Cushion Eight, disapproving Jayda reso-
lutely shook her cowl while Salim, beside her in the ninth position,
gloated openly cross-table to where sat — with scowling dignity after
all, in the last place at his own board — black-turbaned Sindbad the
Sailor.
Evidently the caliph’s kitchen staff had descended earlier upon the
house, for as soon as we were all seated Haroun nodded at Yasmin,
who mildly said, “If my husband pleases, I shall order our first course
served.”
“Wine, too!” called Abu Nuwas, who then shushed the vizier’s
messenger as if the call had been his.
“So be it,” I said. “Inshallah — though I see in the doorway one
diner yet to be seated.”
It was the other Mustafa, come to join the party. “There shall he
stay,” declared Haroun, “with an impudent poet to block the thresh-
old that neither of them may cross. See to that, Masrur. And let there
be wine now.”
Once the poet had been repositioned in the doorway and the wine
and seven kinds of dates served around by handsome servers from the
caliph’s retinue, Haroun proposed a surprising first toast: not to us
but “To the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, who, though he has been
a liar, a fraud, a betrayer of trust, an abuser of those whom he ought
most to have protected and nurtured, a murderer, and worse, has also
been beyond question an intrepid voyager, a sharp trader, an inge-
nious and resourceful survivor, a fetcher of six several fortunes into
the economy of our caliphate, a perennially hospitable and lavish host,
and a tireless teller of his voyage-tales, both literal and figurative.”
“We’ll drink to that,” Abu Nuwas affirmed from the threshold, and
(as the caliph looked from face to face around the table) all did, in-
cluding Sindbad himself and even I, when I saw Yasmin unhesitatingly
set our example. “Hear, hear!” applauded Hajj Masud, and he was
echoed by Hasib Ali and other erstwhile investors in Serendib Lim-
ited. But no sooner had we put down our cups than Haroun said
next, “That same Sindbad shall now hear the particulars of his death
sentence.”

554
Two Interludes

Except for a single pleased whimper from Cushion Nine, the room went silent. Almost brow to brow, my wife conferred with Jafar al-Barmaki, who then left his place to cross behind her and whisper to
the caliph. Haroun frowned, reconsulted Yasmin, then shrugged and
nodded to his vizier, who, returning to his place but still standing,
announced, “Surpassing her steadfastness, beauty, and intelligence is
the condemned man’s daughter’s mercy. The caliph has sentenced her
father to death, and the caliph’s sentence may not be unsentenced. But
it is the discretionary judgment of the wife of Captain Bey el-Loor
that that sentence be executed as follows: Sindbad the Sailor shall die
of old age in the desert fastness of the Sahra al Hijarah, whereto we
order him fetched forthwith. More particularly, he shall sit in his wa-
terless Tub of Last Resort with a certain empty amulet pouch ever
before his eyes to remind him of his iniquities, the aforecited tub itself
to be placed inside the so-called Tub of Truth and transported to the
centralmost wâhât of the aforecited desert. There in strict banishment
from this caliphate the condemned shall live out his days with no com-
pany beyond his natural son, Salim, the bawd Jayda, and the camel
Mustafa, and to their wishes defer in every matter large and small, on
pain of simultaneous slow impalement and disemboweling if he show
his turban ever again in Baghdad or Basra while he lives.”
“So be it,” affirmed Haroun, “for while it is a more merciful fate
than I had in mind, it cannot but be sore punishment for a sinful old
sailor to end his days so far from the sea. Said sentence shall com-
mence between the final course of this luncheon and the initial of this
evening’s dinner.”
“Ungrateful girl!” Jayda scolded, straight-faced beneath her cowl.
Salim, on the other hand, evidently as ignorant as the caliph of what
had for some time been his father’s professed retirement-wish, all but
crowed his joy. Yasmin’s eyes smiled at mine. Sindbad himself only
nodded his turban and observed, as if resignedly, that there is no god
but God and that Mohammed is His prophet.
“On whom be peace,” the caliph duly added. “What further, Jafar?”
The vizier leaned over to reconfirm something with my wife, then
declared, “The culprit’s voyage-tales, on the other hand — which we
regard as the only part of him worth preserving — we request Sayyid
Captain Bey el-Loor to inscribe at his leisure for the caliph’s archives,
and to carry them to Serendib as well, should he and his bride achieve
that happy landfall.”

555
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

“Done,” I readily agreed.
“And your own six voyages, too,” Yasmin added, “if you would
please your bride.”
Before I could reply, Haroun asked, “Shall there be soup?”
Yasmin smiled my way. “My husband willing.”
Said I, “Let there be soup.”
“And more wine, Brother!” Abu Nuwas called from the doorway.
“Also wine.”
When the most delicious harira in Islam had been served and eaten,
and more wine poured, and more conferring accomplished at the table’s
head, Jafar al-Barmaki announced from his cushion, “The caliph next
decrees that all the wealth and property of Sindbad the Sailor —
excepting the aforedispensed bastard, bawd, camel, and tub-within-
tub — now belong to his daughter, in partial recompense for the
here-unnamed abuses that she has suffered more or less voluntarily at
his hands from time to time. Into the casuistry of those abuses, not to
mention the fact itself, we will neither inquire further nor brook fur-
ther inquiry by others. What happened happened; what did not did
not. To mitigate the taint thereof, however, the caliph here decrees
that Yasmin is not Sindbad’s daughter, nor Sindbad Yasmin’s father,
this decree to be retroactive to the moment of her conception.” To
Yasmin herself then he said, “This house and all its contents are yours.
The house near Basra and its contents are yours. The remains of the
ship Zahir and whatever goods your former father has laid up in vaults
and warehouses here and there — all are yours.”
“And what is mine is my husband’s,” Yasmin replied. “We accept
the caliph’s gift with thanks.”
“Enjoy it with Allah’s blessing and ours,” Haroun bade both of us,
“until the Destroyer of Delights and Sunderer of Societies et cetera.
Let there be couscous.”
“And wine!” called Abu Nuwas.
There were both, of a quality not inferior to that of the barley soup.
Following our enjoyment of them the caliph made known his wish
that Captain and Mrs. Simon Bey el-Loor proceed as soon as conve-
nient with Mustafa mu-Allim to our establishment near Basra for the
honeymoon purpose of planning, preparing, and embarking upon
Voyage Seven. Should that voyage succeed, it was his wish that we
attempt in due time to return, bringing with us news of his fellow

556
Two Interludes

caliph’s welfare plus a number of magical timepieces such as mine for
himself and his retinue. And should that return voyage succeed as well,
it was his hope that we would thenceforth alternate our years between
this caliphate and that, overseeing their regular commerce.
It wanted only the quick conference of our eyes for Yasmin to re-
spond for both of us, “We hear and shall obey, God willing.”
“Grilled pheasant, then,” Haroun ordered. “Rabbit kabobs.”
“Wine,” ordered Abu Nuwas.
“Done.” “Done.”
“It is our wish finally,” the vizier said on behalf of the caliph after
these had been served, enjoyed, and cleared, “that the three house-
holds of sayyids Hajj Masud, Ibn al-Hamra, and our messenger often
intervisit and be the caliph’s frequent guests as well, so that for years
to come we may enjoy the eloquence of Kuzia Fakan’s dancing to the
music of her inspired accompanists. And it is our command that they
treat us now to another of their performances.”
Tap tata tap-tap, Kuzia’s finger-cymbals replied at once. Tap tap,
affirmed Fatmah’s tambourine. Which was to say (piped Nuzhat from
her side table), We hear and obey!
We it was then who heard and saw the remarkable Dance of De-
nouements: how with the several and independent though profoundly
interrelated motions of her limbs and digits, eyebrows and buttocks,
ears, navel, and every other movable appurtenance, Kuzia Fakan bod-
ied forth the dramaturgy of closure. After only the swiftest of choreo-
graphical synopses of my disruption of Sindbad’s end-of-Ramadan
feast, his proposal and my counterproposal, our subsequent alternat-
ing voyage-tales and the interstitial thickenings of plot and subplots,
before our eyes Kuzia danced the rising action to its climax, adroitly
interweaving exposition with complication of the conflict. There in
her hips Shaitan intercepted Zahir and was itself fatally overtaken by
Jabal’s navy, while a single earlobe recapitulated Allah’s Great Tale of
Jayda the Cairene. There between Kuzia’s shoulders I was rugged into
Yasmin’s apartment and back out to the Basra marshes, stoned on
bhang; her eyelids and belly told of my return in poor-porter guise to
sing my lament and raise the dramatical stakes. Came next the grand
reprise of that foreshadowing, done with double-breasted variations
on the ground-theme of her buttocks: the Commander of the Faithful
and his vizier, in beggars’ garb, manifesting themselves to us last

557
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

night, declaring Yasmin and her lover wed, the bride intact, our union
triumphantly consummated. With what subtlety and pacing then, be-
fore each present player in our plot, Kuzia danced out his⁄her just
deserts: these raised up, these brought low, these paired with those,
justice done (both retributive and distributive), catharsis catharsed,
epiphany epiphed, dramatic tension resolved, ground-situation altered
meaningfully and irreversibly.
Shabash, Fatmah Awad: well done! Mabrouk, Nuzhat: good show!
Brava, brava, Kuzia Fakan!
“Wine!” Abu Nuwas cheered from the threshold.
Sweat-soaked and breathless, Kuzia sprawled athwart the table, her
head in her beaming husband’s lap and her articulate but narratively
exhausted bare brown feet upon her cushion opposite. That being at
the caliph’s right hand, when he had done applauding her perfor-
mance he stroked her instep with that hand and said, “In the three
hundred sixty-five pleasure domes of our harem there is not one pair
of feet so skillful as these. We expect to attend them from time to time
in nights to come.”
“They hear and obey,” Kuzia assured him with all ten toes. “Do
they not, my husband?”
“As Allah lives,” Ibn al-Hamra carminely acknowledged.
Haroun nodded. “Then we now pronounce this denouement dis-
pensed. There remains its implementation, the details of which we
leave to our vizier and other lieutenants.” Jafar al-Barmaki, still smiling
on his cushion beside Ibn al-Hamra, snapped his fingers once, and a
number of splendidly armed guards materialized where just a moment
before the table-waiters had been arrayed. Abu Nuwas rolled from the
doorway in mock terror before them. Vizier and caliph rose together,
and from the side table likewise Masrur the sword-bearer and the
moon-faced messenger.
“We bid you all good afternoon,” said Haroun al-Rashid. “Fare you
well, Captain Bey el-Loor and most green-eyed Yasmin. Sayyids and
ladies all, farewell, and even you, Sindbad the Sailor. Before evening
prayer call, begone from here — and fare you well.”
“Not yet!” cried Abu Nuwas from the floor. The caliph rounded
upon him sternly. Guards stirred; Masrur handled his scimitar. But
the poet rose swaying to his feet, lifted his wine cup, and declaimed:

558
Two Interludes

No last word without a period.
No dessert without mint tea.
After the Ending comes the Wrap-up;
After Haroun al-Rashid comes me
“to toast your sundry denouements as follows: All please rise.”
We did, and whether the poet’s inebriation was real, feigned, or
feignedly feigned, he balanced himself down the main table’s length as
if walking a beam and raised his cup to each of us in turn — beginning
with myself, to whom he said somewhat cryptically:
“You will find your Serendib … under a blue wuzara!”
Then, to Mustafa mu-Allim: “If your needle won’t point north, sail
south.”
To Hajj Masud and Fatmah Awad: “Bang tambourine till you wear
your carpets through.”
To Jayda, with a thrust of his pelvis: “Your future I foresee in yonder
camel’s hump.”
To Salim, with another: “Buggee now shall bugger be!”
To Sindbad: “In quicksand slowly shall the sinful sailor sink.”
Then, over Sindbad’s head to Nuzhat’s and Haroun’s vizier’s mes-
senger’s side table: “Piper play new pipe and messenger message till you
both be winded.”
Next, to Kuzia Fakan and Ibn al-Hamra: “The wandering Bedou will
give him red horns to match his cheeks.”
Relapsing more or less into meter then, to Yasmin:
May you lose it twice again twixt lunch and dinner
And hang more such pretty laundry on the line.
And finally, inspired by that rhythm back to rhyme and raising his cup to Allah:
May our caliph and his vizier live forever,
And Abu Nuwas have one more cup of wine!

559

                  

Somebody’s Next Voyage

What do we imagine we’re doing, really, Yasmin and her “Simon Bey
el-Loor,” in Basra and in Baghdad, through the busy honeymoon sea-
son that follows the caliph’s dispensations?
Sindbad the Sailor, when Haroun and all guests have gone, with-
draws wordlessly to his Tub of Last Resort (replaced right side up
now in the courtyard, inside the Tub of Truth) and will have nothing
further to do with the story of his life. He neither turns a hand to
prepare for his imminent exile nor stays others from preparing for him
as they wish. Jayda and Salim energetically do so, the duenna lament-
ing her fate to Allah and the world while busily ordering the house
servants to pack this and that, the page bustling importantly about
and smirking that who can no longer pitch (we approximate the Arab
proverb) must catch. The three musicians, too, busy themselves in the
harem, packing their belongings and kissing one another, tearful but
eager to commence their separate next chapters.
As for us: between that midday and the evening meal, just as Abu
Nuwas has proposed, we lose and find ourselves in each other at least
once again, if perhaps not twice. Then toward afternoon’s end we

560
Somebody’s Next Voyage

reappear, rerobed at Yasmin’s suggestion in sea-blue, to bid due fare-
wells. Salim we find dressed like a Bedou sheik and already mounted
upon the camel Mustafa; he gives imperious commands to a troop of
porters sent by the grand vizier to rig the Tub of Truth with carrying
poles, like a sedan chair, and see to its portage. They go about their
work indifferent to his strutting.
“Won’t you ride in there, too?” Yasmin asks Jayda.
With some asperity the duenna replies, “As he wishes.” She does
not mean her son.
Yasmin reminds her, “You’re to give the orders,” and her old nurse
responds, “You may turn the world upside down, Miss Wear-the-
Pants. I’ve ordered him to order me.”
“I’ll say good-bye, then, Jayda. To him, too. Lift me, please,
Simon.”
Salim taunts, “He has seen enough of you.”
Declares Yasmin, “That is no longer for him to say.” Not at all
eagerly, her husband interlaces his fingers to give her a step up into
the outer tub and stands by uncomfortably with sphinx-faced Jayda
when the blue djellaba disappears over its edge.
Presently from his camel-perch Salim hoots, “Yallah, Bey el-Loor!
If you saw what I see!”
“You see nothing,” Yasmin’s twice-tubbed voice replies. “You see a
dutiful ex-daughter bidding her ex-father farewell forever.”
“I see what I see,” Salim gloats. Another silent minute passes before
our blue-cowled bride reemerges and matter-of-factly bids, “Off to
the desert with him, Jayda.” To her husband then, “Which way to
Serendib?”
“South, to begin with,” offers Mustafa mu-Allim, who has agreed
to stay to dinner with us even though he’s far too full of Haroun’s
denouement-lunch to eat anything more that day. “All voyages begin
at Basra.”
“To Basra, then, yes? As soon as possible.”
We watch the little caravan leave the courtyard for the Sahra al
Hijarah. Of her officially former father Yasmin reports, “I tied Umar’s
pouch to his forehead like a Jew’s phylactery. He’s pretending to be-
lieve that it will lead him to Marjanah.”
“Or pretending to pretend,” her husband uneasily reminds her.
Then, though our intention is to repair promptly with Mustafa to the

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

house near Basra in pursuit of the caliph’s directive, after a high-
spirited dinner and affectionate farewells to Nuzhat, Fatmah Awad,
and Kuzia Fakan (and their companions, the vizier’s messenger, Hajj
Masud, and even Ibn al-Hamra), Yasmin proposes that we restore the
courtyard gardens and refill its ponds and fountains to their “Sha’ban”
splendor before closing the place down for our voyage.
In truth there is no hurry, and so we do. Indeed, so frequent is our
traffic between the seaport and the capital, the boatyard and Haroun’s
palace, that in the year that follows we maintain both of Sindbad’s
former establishments with a cook and caretaker and commute be-
tween them while preparing with Mustafa for the vague adventure to
come. As those preparations mature, we decide that upon our depar-
ture we will make an outright gift of the Baghdad house to Hajj Ma-
sud and Fatmah Awad (our frequent guests at both places, as are
Nuzhat and her moon-faced friend; also Kuzia Fakan, when she is not
dancing to the caliph’s tune — and, yes, even Ibn al-Hamra) and of
the Basra place to Mustafa.
“Hajj Masud?” that worthy exclaims. “Sindbad’s house to Hajj Ma-
sud the rug merchant?” Fatmah discreetly rustles her ever-present tam-
bourine. “And to his devoted companion?” the rug man adds. But
they will accept the gift only with the grateful stipulation that they
maintain it in trust for us for ten years or until our return from Se-
rendib, whichever comes earlier to pass, or — Allah forfend! — until
news arrives of our loss at sea. Mustafa, likewise, declines with thanks
the marsh-side house near Basra, for reasons not dissimilar to those
that led him to decline the caliph’s offer of Nuzhat. But he fully
approves of our amended proposal (to be implemented by Jafar al-
Barmaki) to convert the place into a haven for derelict sailors, with a
light ever burning at its seaward gate to guide them thither.
The vizier himself becomes a periodic caller upon us and the sym-
pathetic monitor of our project, whose peculiar nature and difficulty
he seems quite to appreciate. It is all very well for Yasmin to prove to
be a quick learner of navigation and the fine points of sailing, and a
ready student of English, too. All very well for Simon Bey el-Loor and
company to attempt something like the reverse of many seagoing replicas: not an ancient design constructed with modern materials but, of necessity, vice versa, insofar as is permitted by its chief designer’s limited grasp of naval architecture and Mustafa’s of “modern” design 

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Somebody’s Next Voyage

concepts — though his general boat-building sense is superb. And all very well, of course, for our man in the interstices of love and boat-work to write out fuller accounts of Sindbad’s six voyages and his own,
interweaving among them the story of his unaccountable season in
the house and world of Sindbad the Sailor, in the caliphate of Haroun
al-Rashid.
“But what, really,” Jafar asks us one cordial evening, “do you imag-
ine yourselves to be doing?”
What he means is that by now there can be no serious doubt as to
which side of that hypothetical Boundary Sayyid Simon is on. There
is no “U.S. embassy” around some corner of Haroun’s Baghdad (Jafar
has had the whole city checked for us); no rug-shop passageway from
the “Jmaa el Fna” of this world back to the “Dronningen’s Gade” of
that. If the odd vessel under our construction should, by improbable
hazard, survive the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, then the Seren-
dib whose Adam’s Peak we’ll raise will be Serendib, will it not? Not
some “Sri Lanka” on the Boundary’s farther side. Nevertheless we
busily love and plan, put our affairs conscientiously in order, and work
and play through our honeymoon year as if in a sustained and vivid
dream.
“Why do you not simply stay here?” the vizier goes so far as to
inquire of us, or propose. “From what Sayyid Simon has reported, I
find his Serendib to be after all not so blessed a place as one had
imagined, and his station in it to have been at best equivocal. Sayyid
himself is no longer a young man. Sindbad’s fortune will last the pair
of you more than a lifetime, and you enjoy the caliph’s favor as well as
Allah’s. I believe I can explain diplomatically to the Commander of the
Faithful why your good-faith intentions are literally impossible of
accomplishment. …”
To which our narrator replies, Thanks, but no: Yasmin’s world is
truly not his, nor his hers; if we can’t intervisit between them, we’ll
try to reach some third that’s neither — an island as far out of her
time as out of his, where nothing fixes us in any world except
Nature’s — and there improvise our own world out of elements from
all three.
“Misl al kikayat,” in Jafar’s opinion. “All fanciful-romantic enough,
no doubt, for a time — though why one would flee voluntarily from
the most civilized city in Islam I cannot imagine. But soon enough,

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

my friend, you’ll be a truly old man, and your green-eyed partner,
believe it or not, an old woman, though always younger than yourself,
and you’ll find yourselves craving if not requiring the comforts of
Baghdad. What’s more, it may be that Allah will bless you with chil-
dren. How will you educate them properly, out there on some faraway
island?”
Quickly, emphatically, and not quite to the point, Yasmin declares,
“There will be no children.” Both men turn to her. “Let’s speak only
of the voyage,” she quietly requests.
“Well,” her husband replies to Jafar, “I suppose we’ll navigate that
stretch of it when the time comes.” So the three stroll outside through
the ultramarine evening to the specially constructed ways on the
marsh flat where Bey el-Loor once crawled from the Shatt al Arab like
the first amphibian, and they admire the sturdy ketch-rigged vessel
there a-building, its salty sheer and tumble home, deep keel and long,
low cabin trunk: a scaled-up, Arabized version of Simon Behler’s
memory of Captain Joshua Slocum’s famous Spray, in which that
doughty New Englander in the 1890s made the first known solo cir-
cumnavigation of the globe. But even as the vizier commends its un-
usual lines, and compliments Mustafa and the workmen, and presents
the captain-designate with a new token of the caliph’s encouragement
(a jeweled dagger larger than Yasmin’s, to replace the fish-fileting knife
that our man has carried with him through many a chapter), he shakes
his head and again wonders aloud, “What exactly is it that you imagine
you’re going to do?”
The day arrives that we have been neither hastening nor postpon-
ing, neither particularly fearing nor, by this time, particularly antici-
pating: when there is nothing further to be done in the way of
preparation for our voyage. Zahir 3 has been named and numbered;
whichever of its predecessors ought properly to be thought of as the
first and which the second, we agree that this is the third and “chris-
ten” it with the Arabic numeral, not the Roman. It has been launched,
sea-tried, modified here and there, retried, commissioned, provisioned.
Our literal and psychological mooring lines have been singled up; the
season is favorable, the weather fair. It is either go or stay.
Our friend Kuzia Fakan, as it happens, is just then visiting (with,
yes, Ibn al-Hamra, a contented though no less florid fellow these days,
at peace with himself and us) and has brought us a gift of two matching

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Somebody’s Next Voyage

gold rings in token of her own impending journey and new life-venture: with the caliph’s reluctant blessing the couple are opening a
jewelry shop in Cairo, a long-standing ambition of Kuzia’s that her
husband is shrewdly bankrolling to get her away from Haroun’s pal-
ace. To Bedouin Kuzia, our open sea is as uninviting as the desert she
came from; even Baghdad has come to seem to her a provincial back-
water compared to what Jayda has endlessly told her in time past
about the souks and bazaars of Cairo. Ibo smiles, reddens, nods. Our
rings are inscribed with charms in both Arabic and Roman letters (the
goldsmith was from Alexandria), meant to keep their wearers afloat
and in love forever — or more precisely, until the Destroyer of De-
lights makes his inevitable visit, may it be not soon. We have taken the
visitors for a little day-sail, much to Kuzia’s discomfiture; now the
guests have stepped gladly back onto the dock, but the hosts lounge
on awhile, idly yet edgily, in Zahir 3’s varnish-gleaming cockpit. Yas-
min twists and twists her new ring upon her finger; her husband is
moved to wonder, uneasily, Is she going to remove it?
Instead, from somewhere under the sea-blue wuzara she has taken
to wearing like any male sailor or longshoreman, she suddenly with-
draws her own bejeweled, now-famous knife — our man’s blood
surges — and with one surprising stroke cuts the ketch’s forward
spring line.
“Yallah!” cheers one of the dockhands who are standing by (as are
Kuzia Fakan, Ibn al-Hamra, Mustafa mu-Allim, and others), and as if
on signal he casts off the bow line he has just secured. Quick-thinking
Kuzia takes up the cry — “Yallah!” — and other hands cast off our aft
spring and stern lines, leaving Zahir tethered by a single breast line.
Laughing, its official captain protests, “Hold on! I’ve got things to
work out yet with Ankh el-Zhash!”
Such has become our affectionate nickname for Mustafa — who,
however, hunkering gravely on the pier just beside our cockpit, affirms
with a nod of his turban Yasmin’s resolve. “There is nothing more to
be worked out. Your wife is right; the tide runs. Shall I not cast off?”
For all of several seconds, “Simon” considers. Rather than drawing
his own new blade then, he quietly orders, “Breast line away,” and
fetches the fall of it aboard like his own umbilicus. As Zahir 3 gently
drifts clear, the couple embrace in the cockpit, acknowledging good-
byes from the dock. Yasmin steps then smartly to the tiller, beautifully

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

laminated of ebony and poon; her husband to the hempen halyards,
to raise the clean canvas mainsail on its varnished gaff.
“Allah ’l-mueen!” callas Kuzia Fakan across the widening space: “God will help!”
To himself, as the sail fills and the ketch gains steerageway, our man
says, “Yes, well.”

These mismatched but perfectly suited, more or less married lovers:
what do they imagine they’re doing? I see them clear the port of Basra
and stand down the Bahr Faris, “shaking down” their craft and set-
ding into the rhythms of aboard-ship life. I see them pass white-
knuckled through the vicinity of Qeshm, through the Hormuz Strait,
into the Gulf of Oman. With great good fortune they manage not to
fall afoul of pirates; they cope successfully with squalls and sundry
small-to-medium-size mishaps, as if Allah really were monitoring and
gracing them. They grow seasoned and ever cannier in the ways of
their vessel, the sea, each other. For Yasmin, particularly, such self-
reliance and freedom of action is paradise, however rough the going.
As necessary they put ashore to rewater, reprovision, and make re-
pairs; Yasmin’s pleasure then is to pass as a remarkably pretty sailor
boy, catamite no doubt to Zahir’s lean and grizzled skipper. They
make their way down the Arabian Sea, through the Lakshadweep Is-
lands and along the Malabar Coast; I see them reaching on the
northeast monsoon winds day after jewel-starred night, a trying but
exhilarating magic-carpet ride southeast toward the tip of India.
It will be in that neighborhood, I expect — where the parallels of
North Latitude dwindle toward o° and the meridians of East Longi-
tude approach that of Adam’s Peak — that Zahir 3 meets the truly life-
threatening storm that all sailors dread but must expect sooner or later
to confront: the one to survive which depends as much upon sheer
good luck as upon seaworthiness in the vessel and good seamanship
in the crew. By this time Simon Bey el-Loor is by way of being a
master of the art of shorthanded small-boat sailing, and Yasmin at
the very least a sailor first-class, able within her not inconsiderable
strength to do anything her husband can do in the management of
their vessel. They function together superbly. But they are without
radio, weather service, hydrographic charts, compass, and sextant, not
to mention loran, SatNav, and the rest. They are without weather-proof

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Somebody’s Next Voyage

sails and lines, aluminum spars, stainless-steel standing rigging and stanchions and lifelines, high-efficiency bilge pumps, inflatable life   raft, Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. Their Personal
Flotation Devices are segmented vests of cork and sailcloth designed
by Simon and fabricated by Nuzhat, as gifted with the needle as with
her flute; even a few weeks of the tropical marine environment has
riddled them with rot and mildew.
What concerns me most, however, is their vessel. Not its low-tech,
high-maintenance materials: sailors for centuries made do with wood
and hemp, cotton and bronze; Josh Slocum’s Spray was built of noth-
ing more durable. But the design … Simon William Behler knows
himself to be no naval architect; a seasoned sailor but only a knowl-
edgeable novice at marine design and construction, he has endeavored
to meld his experience of modern materials and his memory of tradi-
tional designs with the very different conceptions and experience of
medieval Arab shipwrights. Quixotic is the kindest adjective for any-
one’s venturing offshore in the product of that combination, and yet
Zahir 3 has nearly three thousand nautical miles under her keel by the
time she leaves the Maldive Islands astern, points her bowsprit due
east toward “Serendib,” and meets the tremendous storm head-on.
But not even “quixotic” will do to describe (nor would even steel and
state-of-the-art synthetics suffice to achieve) the goal of navigating the
Boundary between Yasmin’s world and her husband’s, between “Si-
mon Bey el-Loor” and Simon William Behler.
Sindbad’s daughter knows what she’s doing: she is sailing with her
chosen mate, wifing him to wherever, exactly as she pledged on their
wedding night. But what does her husband imagine he’s doing?
Where does he imagine he is? Who?
Whatever he imagines, the storm is real, and though the couple
struggle with it heroically through a day and a night and another day,
as night refalls I see reality overwhelm them and their craft. In the
mad wind and seas, knockdown follows knockdown; Zahir 3 is pitch-
poled, rolled, dismasted, pooped, swamped, and ultimately sunk. Can
“our man” have imagined that things would turn out otherwise? As
the possible long shot, perhaps (whatever “otherwise” might have led
to), but I credit Simon William Behler with understanding that the
more likely end of his seventh voyage would be something like this,
the classic Sindbad situation: once again derelict in Allah’s ocean,

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The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

bruised and battered, hungry, thirsty, spent, but no bones broken, no
blood to fetch the sharks even sooner — and not alone: a pair of lovers
clinging to a shattered spar (they tie themselves turban-fast to it
through the storm’s tag end), with no land in sight, no food no water
no hope of rescue, the only questions what form of death will reach
them first and which of them earlier. In the long history of seafaring,
how many luckless sailors have shared their extremity! Time to turn
our narrative eyes away and hope their agony will be brief.
But “Luckless!” Yasmin protests when, after black hours of immer-
sion, her mate mutters something like the above in the course of la-
menting that he has brought her to this pass. “How many lovers have
the good luck to end their story together?” If in fact this is the end
(she goes on to say as her failing strength permits); but don’t all the
lessons of a certain old sailor’s voyages teach that what has befallen us
is merely the prerequisite to reaching Island One, Voyage Seven? Our
story isn’t over; only its beginning is.
Et cetera, through that night’s dark end, doubtless only to buoy her
friend’s spirits and her own, and he loves her all the more for that.
Nevertheless, he’s sinking: exhaustion, hypothermia even in so warm
an ocean, despair (Where did he imagine he was? What doing?). The
wind has mercifully blown itself out. The night sea calms. There are
stars, whose names they know.
The woman embraces the man, in part for warmth’s sake, and
speaks on softly, a shivering Scheherazade, as he rocks with her in the
swell and floats in and out of consciousness. She even teases him: she
is his lost “Jay-Moor” swum back to him by “logistically assisted ser-
endipity.” She is his lost “Day-zee” leading him back to their bower
on the Island of Island Creek. She is Princess Wakini of that long-ago
Lagoon. …
Unless he’s dreaming, he hears her say presently that she sees a
single small light to eastward, low on the horizon. My watch dial, he
thinks he replies: five a.m. No, she insists: it’s the beachfires of pil-
grims, she bets, making ready to climb Adam’s Peak in the first dawn.
He himself sees nothing; can no longer speak; is not this time “drown-
ing into sleep” but, surely, sleeping into his drowning.
“I see our island, Simon!” she almost whispers. She has unbound
herself now, stripped off even her blue wuzara to free herself for the

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Somebody’s Next Voyage

swim. Now she’s unbinding him. She turns his watch-wrist her way;
our gift-rings tap.
“Time,” she says, and she turns the bezel of his watch. “Follow me
now, my darling. Let go. Let’s go.”
She herself has already done so: let go of their spar, of him. She
moves off gently toward what she says she sees in the gray blush east-
ward. But she’s smiling back his way, her green eyes urging him to
follow.
More easily than he had ever imagined, he does.

569

Interlude: The Last Words of
Somebody the Sailor

“Well, so,” said Simon Behler to himself: “I’ve been stranded with less.”
For this time — though once again naked, salt-soaked, sunburnt;
again sore-muscled, ache-jointed, daze-headed, also ungroomed un-
barbered unoriented and all but out of breath — I was blessed not
only with my watch (its hour disjoint from the overhead sun, its date
some summer-weather  31) but with a gold ring to press my
cracked lips to and turn upon its brine-swollen finger. I took on faith,
of necessity, the charmed letters graved inside: love’s initials in two
scripts.
Where was I beached this time, then, in hand-me-down but stub-
bornly serviceable birthday suit? Some marshy lowland: brown sand,
tall green spartina, brown and green cattails; estuarine-olive water,
brackish, tepid, tranquil. Air subtropical, but as in a temperate-zone
midsummer. Trees nonequatorial: white cedar, black locust, sweet-
gum, loblolly pine. So far, so good, said (as it were) my old hand’s eye.
Nothing to be seen in the way of beachfire, pilgrim, peak, not to men-
tion my young heart-, soul-, and shipmate. No sign of buoy, boat, 

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Interlude: The Last Words of Somebody the Sailor

building, bridge — but there a blue heron stalked, there an osprey wheeled; that was a red-winged blackbird’s rasp, a mockingbird’s cadenza.
Understanding thereby where (mid-East-Coast-North-American
tidewater cove) more clearly than when how why or who, in time I
grunted myself together, picked myself up, and gimped me up-shore
on waking legs, perhaps to meet … whomever: my Chesapeake
Athene or Nausicaä-on-the-Chaptico; my East-Dorset, fin-de-siècle
Whomever. What would be my initial time-fix, I managed to wonder:
crabber’s johnboat? Discarded Sheik condom or Camel cigarette pack?
Full name spelled out on beach in urinary cursive? Or, after all, just
around the next point, an alabaster roc dome, shoal of jewels, lost late-
life love with matching ring?
None of the above. Instead, half buried in the sand ahead, where
creek debouches into river at the Island Point day beacon, a little can-
ister as red and yellow as Howard Garton’s old Bellanca. Smiling but
in no hurry, I retrieved my Bon Ami: not the modern redesign, but
the classic container of my boyhood.
Almost empty, but not quite. Hasn’t scratched yet.
Well, I would return it, one way or another. If my dead reckoning
was right, behind a certain creek-mouth islet not much farther on was
the Eastern Shore Asylum, which no doubt would welcome me as one
of its strays if I swam over: a semicentenarian buck-naked but for
wristwatch, ring, and forty-year-old can of patent cleanser. Or I
might reverse course, wander back down-shore, river-bridgeward,
past Dorset General and up the white-clapboard, silver-mapled streets
of home. In those years when I used now and then to slip by moonlight
into East Dorset from my back bedroom via my catalpa-tree “escape
route,” had I returned by the same trunk and limbs? Naked stranger
enters second-story bedroom in broad midday via Chinese Cigar tree: an-
other shortcut to asylum.
Or I could take the third way, yes: up-creek in my brother’s ever-
leaking initiation-skiff as far into my place of origin as I could get till
I was got: bail my way past the old tomato canneries, crab pickeries,
oyster shuckeries and tideside shacks to the neglected plot at that
place’s head and heart. I would ground my vessel on a nearby flat and
scale the rusty chain-link fence along Cemetery Ave. I’d find the
family, take my ease there among the dandelions with

571

572

THE DESTROYER OF
DELIGHTS

or,
The Familiar Stranger

            

From her absence in my story’s wrap-up, its narrator concludes, we may
infer that old Scheherazade achieved her narrative end. Okay?
Pleat-skirted or not, sleek-nyloned, auburn-haired or not — and
stethoscoped, green-tunicked, multifunction-digitaled — his audience
he now recognizes to have been all along his oldest friend.
Okay, she says, and sighs, and then brilliantly smiles: lost sister
Bijou, green-eyed BeeGee; fellow ovum, comrade, pal; come to …
play a game with him, one of their old ones; tell him a story; let him
know his real and first and final name.
The poor devil down the hall has howled himself out.
Remember how it was? she says, familiar stranger: In the spaceship,
weightless, making ready to go Outside? You went first, you always
thought, but I was the one; I went first. I know the way. Follow
me, now:
Two. One.

573

574

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Barth lives in Maryland and teaches at Johns Hopkins University.
He is the author of ten previous books, and a winner of the National
Book Award for fiction for his novel Chimera.

575