ABSTRACT
When the captain of Dofâr decided to send us to the king, they put us in a vessel together with our belongings and some guards and took us on a five-day voyage by sea. We disembarked on a shore and travelled some two leagues inland without any path, over rocks and thorns, as far as a small village, and since they had given me some very tight Moorish shoes I arrived there with my feet raw and blistered, so that when we set off the next day and were forced to walk behind the camels along a path covered with stones, I suffered great torments as I was barefoot, since I could not put on the shoes they had given me because my feet by now were badly swollen and raw. Father Antonio Monserrate could not keep up with the camels either, because he was now an old man, so the next day they allowed us to climb up amidst the camels’ loads. We entered a large sand desert, and when it was time to eat they lit a fire and roasted many locusts, which they gave us to eat, but we could not put them in our mouths. When they saw that, they made an apa1 with a little wheat flour that they had brought from <[f. 335v/324v]> from the supplies they had taken from our vessel and cooked it in the embers, and that is what they fed us from then onwards, with nothing else at all; we were only sorry that there was so little, and so we were always hungry.
