Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Location 110
We should also bear in mind that the boundaries between fact and fiction were not as clearly drawn then as now. It was common in the medieval Arab literary world to present fantasy as fact. Even in modern times there are those who have been reluctant to recognize fantasy stories as fictions. In 1962 the American novelist Paul Bowles got to know Larbi Layachi, a watchman in Tangier. When Bowles explained how the plots of films were usually made up, Layachi was particularly struck by the fact that it was not forbidden to lie when making a film. Then something else struck him: ‘And books, like the books you write,’ he pursued. ‘They are all lies too?’ ‘They’re stories, like The Thousand and One Nights. You don’t call them lies, do you?’ ‘No, because they’re true. They happened long ago when the world was different from the way it is now, that’s all.’ I did not pursue the point.’1
Location 434
The fourteenth-century North African philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldun had this to say on the subject: It should be known that many weak-minded persons in cities hope to discover property under the surface of the earth and to make some profit from it. They believe that all the property of the nations of the past was stored underground and sealed with magic talismans. These seals, they believe, can be broken only by those who chance upon the necessary knowledge and can offer the proper incense, prayers, and sacrifices to break them.12 In the course of a sceptical and coruscating account of treasure hunting, Ibn Khaldun wondered ‘why should anyone who hoards his money and seals it with magical operations, thus making extraordinary efforts to keep it concealed, set up hints and clues as to how it may be found by anyone who cares to?’13 Many of the ‘professional’ treasure hunters were really con men who preyed upon the gullible, and Jawbari’s thirteenth-century manual on rogues’ tricks, the Kashf al-Asrar (Unveiling of Secrets), described them as ‘masters of a thousand and one dodges’.14 Additionally, many treasure-hunting manuals are so full of wondrous accounts of magical spells, death-dealing automata and stories about ill-fated earlier seekers after treasure that they should really be reassigned to the category of entertaining fiction.
Location 465
a lot of moralizing about the transience of worldly wealth and the vanity of earthly power. For example, the treasure seekers on the First Quest enter a gallery in which there is a sarcophagus in which: there was a dead man surrounded by piles of dinars with a golden tablet by his head. This had an inscription: ‘Whoever wishes this rubbish, doomed as it is to perish, let him take what he wants of it, for he will leave it behind as I have done and die as I have died, while his actions will be hung around his neck.’ Then again, those on the Second Quest encounter a shrouded corpse with a tablet of green topaz at its head, on which was the following inscription: ‘I am Shaddad the Great. I conquered a thousand cities; a thousand white elephants were collected for me; I lived for a thousand years and my kingdom covered both east and west, but when death came to me nothing of all that I had gathered was of any avail. You who see me, take heed for Time is not to be trusted.’
Location 492
One gets the sense that the treasure hunters are not so much seeking tangible treasures but really they are on a quest for adventure and strangeness. The story of a quest for treasure turns out to be the story of the quest for a story. As the man on the Third Quest says, when the centaur tries to bribe him not to see the magical crown, ‘We only want to look at marvels and to see what we have never seen before, and if we see the crown we can put it back in its place.’ (The plot of the Third Quest has a faint but eerie resemblance to Kipling’s story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’).
Location 7382
When she advanced she fascinated and when she turned back she destroyed.
✏️ This comes up a few times… good poetic line to showcase a powerful presence 🔗 Location 7382