Accounts of China and India. Abu Zayd al-Sirafi

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      ACCOUNTS OF CHINA AND INDIA: THE FIRST BOOK

       1.1.1 The Sea of Lārawī ¹

      … like a sail.² It often raises its head above the water, and then you can see what an enormous thing it is. It also often blows water from its mouth, and the water spouts up like a great lighthouse.³ When the sea is calm and the fish shoal together, it gathers them in with its tail then opens its mouth, and the fish can be seen in its gullet, sinking down into its depths as if into a well.⁴ The ships that sail this sea are wary of it, and at night the crews bang wooden clappers like those used by the Christians, for fear that one of them will blunder into their ship and capsize it.⁵

       1.1.2

      In this sea there is also a kind of fish that reaches twenty cubits in length.⁶ We caught one of these and split open its belly. Inside it was another fish of the same genus. We took this second fish out then split its belly open too—and there inside it was yet another fish of the same type! All of them were alive and flapping about, and they all resembled each other in form. This great fish is called the wāl. Huge though it is, there is another fish called the lashak, about a cubit in length, and if the wāl fish becomes so excessively greedy as to endanger the survival of the other fish in the sea, this small lashak fish is sent to overcome it. This it does by entering the inner ear of the wāl and not letting go until it has caused the wāl’s death. The lashak also attaches 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

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