A Journey to the End of the Millennium Read Free Page A

from the blow but showed no surprise; nor did he ask for any explanation. Since the beginning of the voyage he had become used to the fact that no man spared the rod upon him, if only to restrain this son of the desert, who ever since he had been taken onto the high seas had lost his stability and, like a small, lithe wild animal, terrified the moment it is caged, had taken to roaming the labyrinthine crannies of the ship day and night to nestle up to any living creature, whether man or beast. In despair Ben Attar and his partner had resolved to put him ashore in some harbor and pick him up again on the return journey, but the fair wind that had filled the sail during the first two weeks had carried them far from the Iberian Peninsula, and when they stopped at a fishing village near Santiago de Compostela to take on fresh water no Muslim could be found to take the bewildered boy even temporarily under his wing. The Arabs refused to leave him in the hands of Christians , for they knew well that with the approach of the millennium they would not receive back what they had left, but a cowed little new Christian.
    It was on account of the rumors that had been flooding Andalus and the Maghreb this last year, about a new fanaticism spreading through the Christian principalities and kingdoms, that the Jewish merchant and his Arab partner Abu Lutfi had decided to minimize their travels by land, so as not to endanger themselves and their merchandise by journeying among hamlets, villages, estates, and monasteries swarming with Christians who were feverishly yearning for theirwounded Messiah to descend from heaven to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of his birth but who still feared that that moment would be a day of reckoning for accumulated sins, particularly for the stiff-necked Jews and Muslims who walked freely and calmly in their midst, not believing in the crucified godhead nor expecting any salvation from it. And so, in these twilight days, as faiths were sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next, it was preferable to restrict encounters with adherents of another faith and to be content, at least for the greater part of the way, to travel by sea, for the sea, which can reveal itself at times to be capricious and cruel, owes no obligation to what is beyond its reach. Instead of heading east through the Straits of Gibraltar and sailing northward along the Mediterranean coast to the mouth of the Rhone, and then going up that great river swarming with local craft, and thence seeking the distant harbor town along ruined roads thronged with zealots in search of sacrificial victims, they had decided to hearken to the counsel of an ancient, much-traveled mariner . This man, Abd el-Shafi by name, whose great-grandfather had been taken captive during one of the last Viking raids on Andalus and had been compelled to accompany his captors for many long years upon the seas and rivers of Europe, had brought them two old maps painted on parchment, with green seas and yellow continents abounding in red bays and blue rivers on which one could travel almost anywhere. On close scrutiny the two maps were slightly different—for instance, the land of the Scots appeared on one but was missing from the other, its place being occupied by sea—but both maps agreed as to the existence of a winding northern river, although they called it by slightly different names, which would enable the North African traders to sail, without their feet touching dry land, from the harbor of Tangier all the way to the distant town of Paris, to which a year previously their third partner, Raphael Abulafia, had withdrawn himself.
    And so, on the advice of that ancient mariner of captive pirate stock, who showed mounting interest in their journey, they had purchased in the port of Salé a big ship, old but built of sound timber, which had served in bygone days as a guardship in the fleet of the caliph Hashem the First. Without removing the old bridge in