In front of me stood a fat brown-faced shipmaster with a gold circlet in one ear, a look of contempt on his face, and his palm outstretched. He looked as if he might, after taking their money, chop one lot of pilgrims into pieces and salt them away in barrels for the feeding of the next lot. Behind him were the sea and the circling gulls and his ship tied up at the quay. The ship was a wallowing-shaped thing with its brown sail furled on the yard and its deck all a-clutter with wineskins, bales and bundles, chickens, pigs, and goats. I looked to see what the name of it was: Balena, Whale.’ If this ship is a whale,’ I said to the master in Italian (I had studied medicine in Salerno), ‘I hope that doesn’t make me … ’
The master laid his finger across his lips. ‘Don’t say it,’ he said. ‘Bad luck.’
I paid him fifty ducats and abandoned all hope. That is, I thought that I had abandoned all hope until I went below decks and smelled the smell there; then I found that there was yet more hope to abandon. I paid five more ducats to be allowed to sleep on deck with the chickens and the pigs and the goats.
When it was time to sail the seamen all lurched aboard fit for nothing but vomiting and sleeping. Some did one, some did both. When woken up to raise the sail and haul up the anchor they all began to sing. Their singing had that peculiar falseness sometimes heard in the choruses of provincial opera companies; it made one lose all confidence in any kind of human effort whatever; it made one doubt that the ship, the anchor, the ocean or indeed the world was real. The ocean proved to be real enough and the ship wallowed in it in a way that was sickening as only reality can be.
So it was that when that red sail appeared three days out I nodded with a sense of the fitness of things. Clearly such a ship as that Balena, such a master as that one, and such a crew as that crew had never been meant, in the general design of things, to move a load of pilgrims from an unholy to a Holy Land. There were about fifty pilgrims on board, and when some of the more experienced ones said that they thought the fast-moving red sail might be pirates we all asked the master for weapons with which to defend ourselves and the ship. ‘Softly, softly, good sirs,’ he said. ‘Be tranquil, there’s no use pissing into the wind.’ The crew then produced swords, pikes, and clubs and herded us into the after part of the ship where we watched the red sail growing ever larger until the pirates closed with us, lines were thrown from them to us, and the two ships linked arms like strolling sweethearts.
The pirate captain then came aboard without much ostentation but it was clear that he was accustomed to being treated with respect. He was a tall lean Muslim and as he stood facing the short fat Christian master of our vessel he seemed to embody some necessary complementarity; together they were obviously spin-maintainers. The two of them exchanged greetings with great civility and then began to haggle spiritedly in Arabic. We pilgrims naturally watched and listened with some interest, and it seemed to us that the master of the Balena was saying that we were very valuable while the pirate captain thought perhaps that we were not so very valuable. The negotiations concluded, money changed hands and we pilgrims changed ships. As we stepped over into the pirate vessel the pilgrim just ahead of me turned to me and said, ‘What’s the name of this ship, did you notice?’
‘Nineveh,’ I said, pleased with my own joke; I had noticed the name but could not read the Arabic characters. But later I asked a Greek-speaking pirate what the name was.
‘Nineveh,’ he said.
To be sold for a slave is a startling experience. The rest of the world knows so little about one and yet it is they who set the price. We were all stripped and examined and relieved of our luggage and whatever was in our pockets or sewn into our clothes. The pirate captain was delighted to find that I was a eunuch in good condition; he made that gesture of kissing the fingers made by all vendors who reckon that they have something especially fine to sell. In the slave market in Tripoli, standing in the cool and coloured shade of awnings, smelling the smoke of water pipes and a variety of Middle Eastern cooking that invited one to abandon introspection and embrace such pleasures of the senses as now offered, hearing Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, Turkish, and Greek spoken all round me I was not so distressed as one might think; it had never before happened to me that I was valued, and highly valued, for my visible qualities alone. It occurred to me that I might be bought for harem duty and I felt a little stir of pleasure; orchards are pleasant even if one can’t climb the trees.
A succession of prospective buyers stood before me and tilted their heads to one side, trying, I suppose, to imagine me in their houses as one imagines a table or a chair or a wall hanging. Would I go with the rest of it. A variety of people-buying faces looked at me from under turbans, fezzes, and kaffiyas. The pirate captain found many things to say about me, none of which I understood because he spoke in Arabic. He was at pains to show interested viewers that I had good teeth and he seemed particularly pleased by the arch of my foot, drawing attention to it frequently. In my mind I saw myself standing hour after hour outside the closed doors of a harem listening to laughter and low murmurings while little by little my feet grew flat.
There was standing before me a tall and noble-looking Turk with heroic moustaches, a red fez, a scarlet and purple jacket worked with gold. I judged him to be sixty or so. He put a large hand on my shoulder and drew me a few steps away from the others. He looked at me in such a way that I knew he was going to say something that would make me his friend. He said to me in Greek, ‘What if I say to you that the universe is a three-legged horse, eh? What then? What will you say to me?’
I said to him, ‘It is because the universe is a three-legged horse that the journey to the red heifer is so slow.’
‘Ah!’ he said, ‘You’re a Jew then.’
‘How does that follow?’ I said.
‘A Jew will consider anything,’ he said. ‘Are you or aren’t you?’
‘I am,’ I said.
‘I need you,’ he said. ‘Do you need me?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Done!’ he said. My price was twenty-five dinars but he counted out fifty gold dinars and gave them to the pirate captain.
‘This is twice as much as I have asked,’ said the pirate captain in Greek to the Turk. This pirate’s name, by the way, was Prodigality. He had formerly been a slave named Thrift who had in trading for his merchant master put by enough money to buy his freedom, and having done so he changed his name and went into piracy. ‘Why are you doing this?’ he said to the Turk.
‘I am afraid not to,’ said my new owner. ‘I want Allah to take notice that I am taking notice of my good fortune.’
‘If Allah’s taking notice I don’t want to look bad,’ said Prodigality, and counting out twenty-five dinars he put them into my hand.