Month: November 2016

I heard from Abu Reza bin Abdislam an-Nishapuri, who was speaking in the year 510, at Nishapur, in the Grand Mosque: “We were headed to Timghaj, and the caravan was about a thousand camels long.  One day, when we were stopped at a hot spring, we saw a woman standing at the top of a gravel heap, naked as to her head and naked as to her body, and rather well-formed, with a stature like cedar and a face like the moon and long, straight hair.  She was looking right at us.  Whatever we said to her, she gave no answer, but when we approached her she cried out and fled at a run, so fast that no horse could be faster.  Our guides were Turks, and they said: ‘this person is a monster, which they call a nesnas.'”  But let it be known that this is the noblest of animals, because of the three things that were mentioned before (namely, its upright stature, the width of its fingernails, and the hair on its head).

[regarding the second of these criteria, compare Diogenes Laertius’ story about Diogenes, Socrates, and the definition of man.  One day, Diogenes  of Sinope overheard a lecture in which Socrates claimed that man was a bipedal animal, without feathers.  The next day, Diogenes showed up in Socrates’ classroom holding a plucked chicken.  “Ecce Homo,” he said, but Socrates was quick on his feet and just added a third criterion to the previous day’s definition: man was a bipedal animal, without feathers, having broad fingernails (onukhoi, cognate with Nezami’s nakhen).]

When the brigantine had sailed away, we headed back inland along the same route that we’d followed before, but with a few extra men.  We followed the coast of the bay that we had discovered, and, after we’d traveled four leagues, we took four Indians captive, and we showed them corn to see if they recognized it, since up to that point we hadn’t found any sign of it.  They said they would take us to where there was some; and thus they took us to their village, which was at the head of the bay, not very far from where we were, and there they showed us a little bit of corn which wasn’t ready to be picked yet.  There we found many merchandise crates from Spin, and in each of them there was the body of a dead man, and the bodies were covered with animal hides that had been painted.  To the quartermaster it seemed that this was some kind of idolatry, and he burned the box with the bodies.  We also found pieces of canvas and woolen cloth, rags that seemed to have come from New Spain; we also found traces of gold.