Midday in Baghdad was too hot to stand in. A porter was going along that road under a heavy load. His name was Sindbad.
He set the load down at the gate of a large house and sat in the shade. A good smell came over the wall, and the sound of instruments with it. He closed his eyes and spoke his mind aloud.
In one city, he said, one man is inside this gate and another is outside it. It was less a complaint than a question he had no answer to.
The Gate Opens
Somebody comes out and calls the porter in. The master of the house heard what he said and is asking him inside. The porter is afraid, but he leaves his load at the gate and follows.
People are sitting around a wide room and a table is laid. An old man in the middle has him brought close and puts food in front of him first. Only after he has eaten does the old man ask his name.
The porter says it, and the room goes quiet. The old man laughs and says his own name is Sindbad too. One of them is Sindbad the porter and the other is Sindbad the sailor.
What Was Said at the Gate
The sailor says he heard every word spoken at his gate. He does not scold him for it. He says he was once outside that gate himself.
The porter is uncomfortable where he is sitting. He is eating another man’s food in another man’s house with his own lot exposed. And what the sailor says next is not comfort.
He asks the porter to hear his story. Judge it, he says, once you know how this wealth arrived. It is the teller asking the favour, not the listener.
What It Cost
The sailor says he spent everything his father left him. Selling what remained and boarding a ship was the beginning. After that he went to sea seven times.
Not one of the seven was an easy voyage. Ships broke apart, men scattered, and again and again he was the one left. Not one voyage brought everybody home.
What the porter saw at the gate was a wall, a smell, the sound of instruments. How many times the man inside nearly died is not visible from out there. What is visible from outside is the result.
Seven Days of It
The sailor proposes one voyage a day for seven days. He tells the porter to come back each of those days. And each time he leaves, he sends him off with gold.
There is something strange in this arrangement. The one telling the story is paying the one hearing it. Without a listener those seven voyages are left nowhere.
The story deepens by one layer here. Inside Shahrazad’s story to the king, a sailor tells his story to a porter. In the first part a fisherman told a jinni, and now the teller changes again.
Today, Where Only Results Show
We tend to see other people’s results first. Houses and positions and numbers are visible from outside, and the time before them is not. Somebody standing at a gate can see as far as the wall.
That does not make the porter’s question wrong. In the same city one man is inside the gate and another is outside it. Explain the whole difference by effort and the ones who never came back disappear.
This chapter does not settle it for us. What the sailor does is reach for a story instead of showing off what he owns. That is one of the things a man inside the gate can do for a man outside it.
From the next chapter the seven come one at a time. On the first voyage he puts in at a green island and steps onto it. It was not an island.