ABSTRACT
At the end of the four months that we remained in the power of the Moorish king, news of us reached a Turk, the pasha of a kingdom that they call Iamân, which begins at the entrance to the Strait of Mecca. Since that king was his tributary, he wrote telling him to send us there at once, because all Portuguese {captives} belonged to the Grand Turk. The king was very upset at this, but because he had little power against the Turks he decided to send us together with four very fine horses, so that nobody could go to him and argue that he had taken a lot of goods from us, or that he was guilty of having kept us there for a long time without reporting it. He called the Moor who was to take us and told him to be very careful to give us food and whatever else we needed on the journey, without waiting for us to speak, because we never asked for anything. He also commanded them to give us horses to ride and a good guard, since there were many robbers on that road. When everything was ready, we departed on the eve of Saint John the Baptist1 and, after travelling for two days, we reached the last fortress in that kingdom, where they filled some skins with water and loaded them onto the camels. And we travelled across a desert at great speed for four days and four nights, without resting except at noon and in the early evening while the people and camels ate, which took very little time, because there was not a drop of water in the whole of that desert. And so they were very afraid that the weather might become overcast and prevent them from seeing the Pole Star, by which they took their bearings at night, because there was no road or any sign of one, and the water that they were carrying would not be sufficient if they did not travel at night as well. {[f. 385v]} <[f. 338v/327v]> We underwent <very> great hardships on those days, both because the camels have a very awkward gait when they urge them along fast and because we could not sleep, since we dared not do so on top of them in case we fell off, for they were very tall. And, even though they walked so fast and it was very hot, they did not drink a drop of water in all that time. On the morning of the fifth day we arrived at a spring, where we rested until the afternoon, when we set off again since the desert was not over yet. At dawn some thieves fell on a sharif who was at the back and robbed him, and his saying that he was Mohammed’s kinsman was to no avail at all. Afterwards he was very angry about it and said that they had not been content just to rob him but had also hit and punched him a lot, without respecting the fact that he was a {descendant} <kinsman> of Mohammed.
