سلام الترجمان

سلام الترجمان

Sallam the Interpreter — fluent in thirty tongues, and the only man al-Wathiq judged fit when a dream unsettled him about the barrier of Gog and Magog: fitted out with fifty young men, five thousand dinars and ten thousand dirhams for his own costs, a thousand dirhams and a year's rations per man, felt-lined leathers, fur kishtabads, wooden saddles and two hundred pack-mules, he carried al-Wathiq's letter to Ishaq ibn Isma'il governor of Armenia at Tiflis, whose letters passed him on to the lord of Sarir, the king of the Alans, Filan Shah and Tarkhan king of the Khazars, then some twenty-seven days on to the black evil-smelling land and the cities Gog and Magog had ruined, until he reached the forts by the mountain cleft holding the barrier — describing its iron gate, lock, key and twin forts and the Monday-and-Thursday knocking on the lock; Ibn Khurdadhbih heard the whole report from him and took it down ¹.