Story embodies more than one other adventure belonging
to the History of Sindbad.[5] The Duke and his comrades, navigating in
some unknown ramification of the Euxine, fall within the fatal attraction
of the Magnet Mountain. Hurried by this augmenting force, their ship is
described as crashing through the rotten forest of masts already drawn to
their doom: -
"Et ferit impulsus majoris verbere montem
Quam si diplosas impingat machina turres."
There they starve, and the dead are deposited on the lofty poop to be
carried away by the daily visits of the gryphons: -
- "Quae grifae membra leonis
Et pennas aquilae simulantes unguibus atris
Tollentes miseranda suis dant prandia pullis."
When only the Duke and six others survive, the wisest of the party
suggests the scheme which Rabbi Benjamin has related: -
- "Quaeramus tergora, et armis
Vestiti prius, optatis volvamur in illis,
Ut nos tollentes mentita cadavera Grifae
Pullis objiciant, a queis facientibus armis
Et cute dissuta, nos, si volet, Ille Deorum
Optimus eripiet."
Which scheme is successfully carried out. The wanderers then make a raft
on which they embark on a river which plunges into a cavern in the heart
of a mountain; and after a time they emerge in the country of Arimaspia
inhabited by the Cyclopes; and so on. The Gryphon story also appears in
the romance of Huon de Bordeaux, as well as in the tale called 'Hasan of
el-Basrah' in Lane's Version of the Arabian Nights.
It is in the China Seas that Ibn Batuta beheld the Rukh, first like a
mountain in the sea where no mountain should be, and then "when the sun
rose," says he, "we saw the mountain aloft in the air, and the clear sky
between it and the sea. We were in astonishment at this, and I observed
that the sailors were weeping and bidding each other adieu, so I called
out, 'What is the matter?' They replied, 'What we took for a mountain is
"the Rukh." If it sees us, it will send us to destruction.' It was then
some 10 miles from the junk. But God Almighty was gracious unto us, and
sent us a fair wind, which turned us from the direction in which the Rukh
was; so we did not see him well enough to take cognizance of his real
shape." In this story we have evidently a case of abnormal refraction,
causing an island to appear suspended in the air.[6]
The Archipelago was perhaps the legitimate habitat of the Rukh, before
circumstances localised it in the direction of Madagascar. In the Indian
Sea, says Kazwini, is a bird of size so vast that when it is dead men take
the half of its bill and make a ship of it! And there too Pigafetta heard
of this bird, under its Hindu name of Garuda, so big that it could fly
away with an elephant.[7] Kazwini also says that the 'Angka carries off
an elephant as a hawk flies off with a mouse; his flight is like the loud
thunder.
