Here and there sprays of shards, volleys of coals, fell on the bank, and the travelers had to cover their faces so as not to be scarred.
“What day is today?” Baudolino shouted to his companions. Solomon, who kept the tally of every Saturday, remembered that the week had just begun, and for the river to halt its flow they would have to wait at least six days. “And then, when it stops, we won’t be able to cross it, in violation of the Sabbath laws,” he cried, distraught. “Why did the Holy One, may his name be forever blessed, in his wisdom not cause this river to stop on Sunday, since you gentiles are all unbelievers anyway and you trample the festive repose under your feet?”
“Don’t worry about Saturday,” Baudolino cried. “For if the river were to stop, I would know very well how to make you cross it without causing you to sin. I would just prop you on a mule while you’re asleep. The problem is what you yourself told us: when the river stops flowing, along the banks a barrier of flames springs up, so we’re back at the beginning. … It’s useless then to wait here for six days. Let’s go towards the source, and perhaps there is a crossing place before the river is born.”
“What? What?” his companions cried, not understanding any of it; but then, seeing him move, they followed, thinking that perhaps he had had a good idea. On the contrary, it was a very bad one, because they rode for six days, seeing that the river’s bed did, indeed, narrow, becoming first a stream and then a creek, but they arrived at the source only towards the fifth day.
By then, for two days they had seen above the horizon an impervious chain of high mountains, which loomed over the travelers, almost blocking their view of the sky, crammed as they were in an ever narrower passage, with no exit, from which, way, way above, could now be seen only a great cloud barely luminescent, that gnawed the top of those peaks.
Here, from a fissure, like a wound between two mountains, they saw the Sambatyon springing up: a roiling of sandstone, a gurgling of tuff, a dripping of muck, a ticking of shards, a grumbling of clotted earth, an overflowing of clods, a rain of clay, all gradually transformed into a steady flow, which began its journey towards some boundless ocean of sand.
Our friends spent a day trying to skirt the mountains and discover a pass above the source, but in vain. They were in fact threatened by sudden moraines that came and shattered at the hoofs of their horses; they had to take a more tortuous path, night caught them in a place where every now and then blocks of living sulphur rolled from the peak; farther on, the heat became unbearable, and they realized that, if they continued, even if they found a way to cross the mountains, when the water of their flasks was finished in that dead nature, they would find no form of humidity, so they decided to turn back. But they discovered they had become lost in those meanders, and it took them another day to find the source again.
They arrived when, according to Solomon’s calculations, Saturday had already passed and, even if the river had stopped, it had now already resumed its course, and they would have to wait another six days. Uttering exclamations that certainly did not assure them the benevolence of heaven, they decided to follow the river, in the hope that it would open into a mouth, or delta, or estuary as might be, transforming itself into a more restful wasteland.
So they traveled for some dawns and some sunsets, moving away from the banks to find more welcoming zones, and heaven must have forgotten their abuses, because they came upon a little oasis with some greenery and a very meager pool of water, still sufficient to give them relief and a supply for a few more days. Then they went on, always accompanied by the flow
of the river, under glowing skies occasionally striped with black clouds, fine and flat as the stones of Bubuctor.
Until, after almost five days’ travel, and nights as sultry as the days, they realized that the continuous churn of that tide was changing. The river had assumed a greater speed, in its flow something like currents were visible, rapids that dragged along shreds of basalt like straws, a distant thunder was heard. … Then, more and more impetuous, the Sambatyon subdivided into myriad streamlets, which penetrated among mountainous slopes like the fingers of a hand in a clump of mud; at times a wave was swallowed by a grotto, then, from a sort of rocky passage that seemed impassable, it emerged with a roar and flung itself angrily towards the valley. Abruptly, after a vast curve they were forced to make because the banks had become impervious, lashed by granite whirlwinds, the friends reached the top of a plateau, and saw the Sambatyon below them, annihilated in a sort of maw of Hell.
There were cataracts that plunged down from dozens of rocky eaves arranged like an amphitheater, into a boundless final vortex, an incessant retching of granite, an eddy of bitumen, a sole undertow of alum, a churning of schist, a clash of orpiment against the banks. And on the matter that the vortex erupted towards the sky, but low with respect to the eyes of those who looked down as if from the top of a tower, the sun’s rays formed on those silicious droplets an immense rainbow that, as every body reflected the rays with varying splendor according to its own nature, had many more colors than those usually formed in the sky after a storm, and, unlike them, seemed destined to shine eternally, never dissolving.
It was a reddening of haematrites and cinnabars, a glow of blackness as if it were steel, a flight of crumbs of aureopigment from yellow to bright orange, a blueness of armenium, a whiteness of calcinated shells, a greening of malachite, a fading of liothargirium into saffrons ever paler, a blare of risigallam, a belching of greenish earth that faded into dust of crisocolla and then transmigrated into nuances of indigo and violet, a triumph of aurum musivum, a purpling of burnt white lead, a flaring of sandracca, a couch of silvered clay, a single transparence of alabaster.
No human voice could make itself heard in that clangor, nor did the travelers have any desire to speak. They witnessed the death agony of the Sambatyon enraged at having to vanish into the bowels of the earth, trying to take with it all that surrounded it, clenching its stones to express all its impotence.
Neither Baudolino nor his friends realized how long they admired the wraths of the precipice where the river was unwillingly buried, but they must have lingered there at length, and the sunset of Friday had arrived, hence the beginning of Saturday; because all of a sudden, as if at a command, the river stiffened in cadaveric rigidity, and the vortex at the bottom of the abyss was changed into a scaly, inert valley where, sudden and terrifying, an enormous silence reigned.
They waited, expecting, as foretold by the story they had heard, a barrier of flames to rise along the banks. But nothing happened. The river was silent, the whirling particles above it slowly settled into its bed, the night sky became serene, displaying a glitter of stars till then hidden.
“So you see you mustn’t always believe what they tell you,” Baudolino concluded. “We live in a world where people invent the most incredible stories. Solomon, this is a tale you Jews put into circulation to prevent Christians from coming to these parts.”
Solomon did not answer, because he was a man of quick intelligence, and at that moment he understood that Baudolino was pondering how to make him cross the river. “I will not fall asleep,” he said at once. “Don’t think about it,” Baudolino replied. “Rest, while we look for a ford.”
Solomon would have liked to flee, but on Saturday he couldn’t ride, still less travel over mountainous heights. So he remained seated all night, striking his head with his fists and cursing his fate and, with it, the accursed gentiles.
The following morning, when the others picked out a place where they could cross without risk, Baudolino went back to Solomon, smiled at him with affectionate understanding, and struck him with a club just behind the ear.
And so it was that Rabbi Solomon, alone among the sons of Israel, crossed the Sambatyon on the Sabbath, in his sleep.
- Baudolino arrives at Pndapetzim
Crossing the Sambatyon did not mean they had arrived in the kingdom of Prester John. It meant simply that they had abandoned known lands where only the boldest travelers had gone. In fact, the friends had to proceed for many more days still, and through lands at least as rough as the banks of that river of stone. Then they reached a plain that was endless. On the far horizon they could make out a mountainous presence, fairly low, but jagged with peaks slender as fingers, which reminded Baudolino of the Alps when he had crossed them as a boy on the eastern slope, to travel from Italy into Germany—but those were far higher and more imposing.
The rise was, however, at the extreme horizon, and in that plain the horses advanced toilsomely because a hardy vegetation grew everywhere, like
