I chose a man who had been twice at these mountains of emeralds; with the best boat then in the harbour, and on Tuesday the 14th of March, we sailed, with the wind at North East, from the harbour of Cosseir, about an hour before the dawn of day. We kept coasting along, with a very moderate wind, much diverted with the red and green appearances of the marble mountains upon the coast. Our vessel had one sail, like a straw mattress, made of the leaves of a kind of palm-tree, which they call Doom. It was fixed above, and drew up like a curtain, but did not lower with a yard like a sail; so that upon stress of weather, if the sail was furled, it was so top-heavy, that the ship must founder, or the mast be carried away. But, by way of indemnification, the planks of the vessel were sewed together, and there was not a nail, nor a piece of iron, in the whole ship; so that, when you struck upon a rock, seldom any damage ensued. For my own part, from an absolute detestation of her whole construction, I insisted upon keeping close along shore, at an easy sail.
The Continent, to the leeward of us, belonged to our friends the Ababdé. There was great plenty of shell-fish to be picked up on every shoal. I had loaded the vessel with four skins of fresh water, equal to four hogsheads, with cords, and buoys fixed to the end of each of them, so that, if we had been shipwrecked near land, as rubbing two slicks together made us fire, I was not afraid of receiving succour, before we were driven to the last extremity, provided we did not perish in the sea, of which I was not very apprehensive.
On the 15th, about nine o’clock, I saw a large high rock, like a pillar, rising out of the sea. At first, I took it for a part of the Continent; but, as we advanced nearer it, the sun being very clear, and the sea calm, I took an observation, and as our situation was lat. 25° 6´, and the island about a league distant, to the S. S. W. of us, I concluded its latitude to be pretty exactly 25° 37´ North. This island is about three miles from the shore, of an oval form, rising in the middle. It seems to me to be of granite; and is called, in the language of the country, Jibbel Siberget, which has been translated the Mountain of Emeralds. Siberget, however, is a word in the language of the Shepherds, who, I doubt, never in their lives saw an emerald; and though the Arabic translation is Jibbel Zumrud, and that word has been transferred to the emerald, a very fine stone, oftener seen since the discovery of the new world, yet I very much doubt, that either Siberget or Zumrud ever meant Emerald in old times. My reason is this, that we found, both here and in the Continent, splinters, and pieces of green pellucid chrystaline substance; yet, though green, they were veiny, clouded, and not at all so hard as rock-crystal; a mineral production certainly, but a little harder than glass, and this, I apprehend, was what the Shepherds, or people of Beja, called Siberget, the Latins Smaragdus, and the Moors Zumrud.
The 16th, at day-break in the morning, I took the Arab of Cosseir with me, who knew the place. We landed on a point perfectly desert; at first, sandy like Cosseir, afterwards, where the soil was fixed, producing some few plants of rue or absinthium. We advanced above three miles farther in a perfectly desert country, with only a few acacia-trees scattered here and there, and came to the foot of the mountains. I asked my guide the name of that place; he said it was Saiel. They are never at a loss for a name, and those who do not understand the language, always believe them. This would have been the case in the present conjuncture. He knew not the name of the place, and perhaps it had no name, but he called it Saiel, which signifies a male acacia-tree; merely because he saw an acacia growing there; and, with equal reason, he might have called every mile Saiel, from the Gulf of Suez to the line.
We see this abuse in the old Itineraries, especially in the [156]Antonine, from such a town to such a town, so many miles; and what is the next station? (el seggera) ten miles. This el seggera[157], the Latin readers take to be the name of a town, as Harduin, and all commentators on the classics, have done. But so far from Seggera signifying a town, it imports just the contrary, that there is no town there, but the traveller must be obliged to take up his quarters under a tree that night, for such is the meaning of Seggera as a station, and so likewise of Saiel.
At the foot of the mountain, or about seven yards up from the base of it, are five pits or shafts, none of them four feet in diameter, called the Zumrud Wells, from which the ancients are said to have drawn the emeralds. We were not provided with materials, and little endowed with inclination, to descend into any one of them, where the air was probably bad. I picked up the nozzels, and some fragments of lamps, like those of which we find millions in Italy: and some worn fragments, but very small ones, of that brittle green chrystal, which is the siberget and bilur of Ethiopia, perhaps the zumrud, the smaragdus described by Pliny, but by no means the emerald, known since the discovery of the new world, whose first character absolutely defeats its pretension, the true Peruvian emerald being equal in hardness to the ruby.
Pliny[158] reckons up twelve kind of emeralds, and names them all by the country where they are found. Many have thought the smaragdus to be but a finer kind of jasper. Pomet assures us it is a mineral, formed in iron, and says he had one to which iron-ore was sticking. If this was the case, the finest emeralds should not come from Peru, where, as far as ever has been yet discovered, there is no iron.
With regard to the Oriental emeralds, which they say come from the East Indies, they are now sufficiently known, and the value of each stone pretty well ascertained; but all our industry and avarice have not yet discovered a mine of emeralds there, as far as I have heard. That there were emeralds in the East Indies, upon the first discovery of it by the Cape, there is no sort of doubt; that there came emeralds from that quarter in the time of the Romans, seems to admit of as little; but few antique emeralds have ever been seen; and so greatly in esteem, and rare were they in those times, that it was made a crime for any artist to engrave upon an emerald[159].
It is very natural to suppose, that some people of the East had a communication and trade with the new world, before we attempted to share it with them; and that the emeralds, they had brought from that quarter, were those which came afterwards into Europe, and were called the Oriental, till they were confounded with the [160]Peruvian, by the quantity of that kind brought into the East Indies, by the Jews and Moors, after the discovery of the new Continent.
But what invincibly proves, that the ancients and we are not agreed as to the same stone, is, that [161]Theophrastus says, that in the Egyptian commentaries he saw mention made of an emerald four cubits, (six feet long,) which was sent as a present to one of their kings; and in one of the temples of Jupiter in Egypt he saw an obelisk 60 feet high, made of four emeralds: and Roderick of Toledo informs us, that, when the Saracens took that city, Tarik, their chief, had a table of an emerald 365 cubits, or 547½ feet long. The Moorish histories of the invasion of Spain are full of such emeralds.