The Sixth Voyage of Sindbad the Sailor - Page 2

Author: Laurence Housman

When we had explored the island and wondered at the many strange things it contained, we searched among the wreckage on the shore and found some few barrels of preserved meats, and on these we stayed our hunger. With the provisions on the shore and the fruit we secured on the island we were in no danger of starvation, but a kind of fever seized upon our company and one after another sickened and died. This was a time of stress and despair. Day after day the living buried the dead until there was only one left, and that one was I.

But God in His mercy led my footsteps forth and I roamed in the island, restless for the end. In my wanderings I came to a river gushing forth out of the side of a mountain, and, after flowing for a space between banks of verdure in a valley, entering again another mountain.

Having followed it to this point, I sat down upon a bank against the mountain wall and pondered. And I said within myself, " This river flowing through caverns within the mountain must have an opening somewhere, perchance in a fertile country where people dwell." For a long time I turned the chances of this within my mind and at last decided to build a raft and commit myself upon it to the current; for at most it were better to die that way than in my present desolation.

By means of ropes and wreckage from the seashore my raft was soon constructed, and in its construction I omitted not to measure it according to the width of the river. Then, full of a wild hope that I might at length reach an inhabited region, I stowed upon it rich goods from the shore, ambergris from the spring, and the rarest jewels I could find in the beds of the watercourses. As I set myself upon the raft and launched it, I said, " If I perish, I perish; but if I come to the haunts of men, I come to them rich in precious things."