The wall against Gog and Magog, and the talking tree

Turning east after the darkness, Eskandar came to a clean, bright city whose elders rode two miles out to meet him. When he asked about wonders they told him of their misery instead. Beyond the mountain lived Yajuj and Majuj (Gog and Magog), black-tongued and red-eyed, with boars' teeth, hair blue as indigo and ears like an elephant's. They slept on one ear and used the other as a blanket, and every female bore a thousand young. Each spring the clouds lifted sea-dragons out of the waves and dropped them on the land, and these people fed on them all year.

Eskandar paid for the work and the city supplied the labour. Smiths and masons came from every land with copper, brass, heavy hammers, lime, stone and firewood, and he built two walls from foot to summit across the pass. Course by course they laid charcoal, iron, a little copper and sulphur, poured naphtha and oil over them, heaped more charcoal on top and set it alight, while a hundred thousand smiths worked the bellows until, the poem says, the stars were weary of the heat. Everything fused into one, and the world was free of Yajuj and Majuj. Eskandar refused every gift the people offered.

The tree with two trunks

A month later he found a mountain of lapis lazuli with a house of yellow ruby on top. Inside, beside a spring of salt water, a dead man with a human body and a boar's head lay on a golden couch. Anyone who tried to take something, or even trod the dust there, trembled until he fell apart. A voice came from the salt spring: "You have seen much that no one else has seen. Draw rein now. Your life has grown short."

Shaken, he took the desert road to a green, happy city that had never seen an army or heard the name of a king. Its wonder was a tree with two trunks grown together, one male and one female: the male spoke by day, the female by night. Beyond it, said the guide, the world ended. At noon the leaves cried out, and the interpreter translated: why does Eskandar roam the world when he has had his share of good things? When his reign reaches twice seven years he must leave the throne. At midnight the female trunk spoke of greed and of the killing of kings. Would he be in Rum when his day came, Eskandar asked, so that his mother could see him alive? Neither your mother nor your kin will see you, the tree answered. Death will come soon, in a stranger's land.

Babylon

After further journeys, to Chin and back by way of Sind, he turned for home. Knowing his end was near, he thought of making sure no man of royal birth survived to march on Rum. The sage Arastalis (Aristotle) talked him out of it: give every noble a province and call none of them king. So began the moluk-e tavayef, the tribal kings. That same night Eskandar reached Babylon, where a woman gave birth to a child with a lion's head, hooves, a man's chest and shoulders and a cow's tail. It died as it was born. Under threat of death the astrologers explained: the king had been born under the sign of the lion, and as this lion-headed child lay dead, so his reign would be overturned.

He fell ill that day. He wrote to his mother not to grieve, asked to be laid in the soil of Misr, left Rum to any son Roshanak might bear and ordered a golden coffin filled with honey. Then he died. Persians wanted him buried in Iran and Rumans wanted him taken home, until a voice from a mountain at a place called Jarm answered that his dust belonged in Alexandria, the city he had built. There Arastalis, the sages, his mother and Roshanak mourned him. He killed thirty-six kings, Ferdowsi observes, and built ten cities that are now thorn-brakes; only the story remains.