Accounts of China and India. Abu Zayd al-Sirafi

itself to ships, so the great fish do not go near ships, for fear of these smaller fish.

       1.1.3

      In this sea there is also a kind of fish whose face resembles that of a human and that flies over the water. The name of these fish is mīj. Another kind of fish watches out for it from beneath the surface of the water, and when the mīj falls back into the water, this second fish swallows it. It is called ʿanqatūs. All fish eat each other.

THE SEA OF HARKAND

       1.2.1 The islands of al-Dībājāt and Sarandīb

      The third sea is the Sea of Harkand. Between it and the Sea of Lārawī there are many islands. They are said to be 1900 in number, and they are the boundary between these two seas, of Lārawī and Harkand. These islands are ruled by a woman. Ambergris of enormous size is washed up on the shores of these islands, and a single piece of it can be as big as a room, or thereabouts. This ambergris grows on the seabed as a plant does, and if the sea becomes rough, it is cast up from the bottom as if it were mushrooms or truffles.⁷ These islands that the woman rules are planted with coconut palms. The distance between one island and the next is two, three, or four farsakhs, and all of them are inhabited and planted with coconuts. They use cowries for money, and their queen stores them up in her treasuries. It is said that there are no people more skilled in manufacturing than the people of this island group and that they can even produce a finished shirt on the loom, woven complete with sleeves, gores, and a placket at the neck. In their construction of ships and houses, too, as in all their other work, they reach the same level of technical perfection. The cowries, which have an animal spirit,⁸ come to them on the surface of the water. A coconut-palm frond is used to collect them: it is placed on the surface of the water, and the cowries attach themselves to it. They call them kabtaj.

       1.2.2

      The last of these islands is Sarandīb, in the Sea of Harkand. It is the chief of all these islands, which they call al-Dībājāt. At Sarandīb is the place where they dive for pearls.⁹ The sea entirely surrounds the island.¹⁰ In the territory of Sarandīb is a mountain called al-Rahūn. It is on this that Adam descended, eternal peace be upon him, and his footprint is on the bare rock of the summit of this mountain, impressed in the stone. There is only one footprint at the summit of this mountain, but it is said that Adam, eternal peace be upon him, took another step into the sea. It is said, too, that the footprint on the summit of this mountain is about seventy cubits long.¹¹ Around this mountain lies the area where gems are mined—rubies, yellow sapphires, and blue sapphires. In this island there are two kings.¹² It is a large and extensive island in which aloewood,¹³ gold, and gems are to be found, while in the sea surrounding it there are pearls and chanks, which are those trumpets that are blown and which they keep in their treasuries.¹⁴

       1.2.3 The islands of the Sea of Harkand

      Crossing this sea to Sarandīb, one finds islands that, although not many, are so great in extent that their exact size is unknown. One of them is an island called al-Rāmanī. It is ruled by several kings, and its extent is said to be eight hundred or nine hundred farsakhs. It has places where gold is mined and, in an area known as Fanṣūr, sources from which the high-grade sort of camphor comes.¹⁵

       1.2.4

      These large islands have other smaller islands in their vicinity. One of these is an island called al-Niyān, whose inhabitants have much gold. They live on coconuts, also using them as a condiment and as the source of an oil to apply to their skin. If one of them wishes to marry, he is only allowed to do so in return for a skull taken from one of their enemies. If he kills two of the enemy, he marries two women. Similarly, if he kills fifty, he marries fifty woman in return for the fifty skulls. The reason for this is that they have so many enemies that the more of them a man dares to kill, the more desirable they find him. In this island—I mean al-Rāmanī—there are many elephants, and also sapan wood and rattans.¹⁶ There is also a tribe who eat people. The island faces two seas, those of Harkand and Salāhiṭ.

       1.2.5

      After al-Rāmanī lies a group of islands called Lanjabālūs. In them live a numerous people who are naked, both the men and the women, except that the women have the leaves of trees covering their pudenda. When the merchants’ ships pass by, these people come out to them in boats both small and large to barter with the crews, exchanging ambergris and coconuts for iron and such coverings as they need for their bodies, as it is neither hot nor cold in their land.¹⁷

      Beyond these people are two islands separated by a sea that is called Andamān. Their inhabitants eat people alive. They are black and have frizzy hair,¹⁸ hideous faces and eyes, and long feet—the foot of one of them is about a cubit long (meaning his penis)¹⁹—and they are naked. They have no boats, and if they did, they would eat anyone who passed by them.²⁰ It sometimes happens that ships make a slow passage and are delayed in their voyage because of unfavorable winds. As a result, the ships’ water runs out, and their crews make for these people’s islands to get water. When this happens, the islanders often catch some of the crew, although most of them get away.

       1.2.6

      After this island group, there are some rocky islets lying off the route the ships follow. It is said that there are silver mines in them. They are uninhabited, and not every ship that makes for them is able to find them. In fact they were only discovered when a ship passed one of the islets, which is called al-Khushnāmī, spotted it, and made for it. When day broke, the crew went ashore in a boat to gather firewood. They kindled a fire, and molten silver flowed from the ground, at which they realized that it was a source of the metal. They carried off with them as much as they wanted. When they set sail, however, the sea grew stormy, and they had to throw overboard all the silver they had taken. After this, people equipped expeditions to this islet but could not locate it. The sea is full of countless stories like this, of forbidden islands that the sailors cannot find, and of others that can never be reached.

       1.2.7 Dangers in the Sea of Harkand

      In this sea a white cloud may often be seen casting a shadow over the ships. From it a long thin tongue of vapor emerges and descends until it meets the water of the sea, at which the water boils up like a whirlwind. If this whirlwind makes contact with a ship, it swallows it up. Then the cloud rises, and from it falls rain containing debris from the sea. I do not know if the cloud draws up water from the sea, or how this happens.²¹

      In each of these seas there is a wind that blows up and stirs the water, whipping it up until it seethes like cauldrons on the boil. When this happens, it casts up what it contains on to the islands that are in it, wrecking ships and casting ashore huge great dead fish. At times it even casts up boulders and entire outcrops of rock, as if they were arrows shot from a bow.

      The Sea of Harkand, however, has another wind that blows from a bearing between the west and the Big Dipper.²² This makes the sea seethe like boiling cauldrons and causes it to cast up large quantities of ambergris. The deeper the sea and the lower its bottom lies, the better the ambergris is in quality. And when the waves of this sea—I mean Harkand—grow big, the water seems to you like a blazing fire.²³ In this sea there is a fish called lukham, a predator that swallows people …²⁴

MARITIME COMMERCE BETWEEN THE ARABS AND THE CHINESE

       1.3.1 The Chinese port of Khānfū

      … in their hands …²⁵ so that the goods are in short supply. One of the reasons for such a shortage is the frequent outbreak of fire at Khānfū, the port of the China ships and entrepôt of Arab and Chinese trade, and the resulting destruction of goods in the conflagration. This is because their houses there are built of wood and split bamboo. Another reason for shortages is that outbound or returning ships might be wrecked, or