Caravan To Xanadu

CHAPTER 4

KING OF THE SNOWS

In twelve days’ march from Balkh, we came to the fortified town of Talikun, in a fertile land close by a mountain of solid salt. Here the Mohammedan population is almost as wayward from the tenets of the Prophet as Nestorians from the teachings of the true Church. But they are great hunters as well as heavy topers of their thick, sweet wine; thievish but hospitable; half-civilized but good to look upon, with tall, well-molded bodies, ruddy skins, yellow to brown hair, and hazel eyes. I enjoyed meeting them on the roads and the close company of one of their prettiest daughters at the caravanserai at Qishm. Near the town stands the Mount of the Zend-Avestam, sacred to the Parsis, where burned the holiest fire in all the world, brought there by the hero Jamshid. Myself and Roxana—to my delight, the maid was named after very Alexander’s bride—lighted a fire of our own. It was not holy that I knew of, but most certainly beautiful, and it would glow in my memory for many a moon.

Beyond Qishm lay desolation as complete as it seemed without end, but we crossed it in three days. Then we came upon wonderful highlands, part of the great kingdom of Badakhshan under the Hindu Kush, and here I bought a marvelous red-bay mare with a white star on her forehead. It was the mark of Bucephalus, the seller told me, but I cared naught for that, when I had taken her down a rocky defile at full tilt. She was as sure-footed as a goat, swift as a mountain sheep, and I believed brave as a lion. I named her Roxana in remembrance of my good companion.

We moved among high mountains now, in the coolest and most bracing of air. We ate wild-sheep meat, the best in the world for flavor and strength-giving according to the people, wheat bread, and brook trout fried in walnut oil; we drank the cold, crystal-clear water in place of barley beer; and generally we thanked God for the life within our bosoms. Still we were not quite content with the common blessings of the days. On this cold, magnificent plateau, with manifold green parks that God laid out, there were mines of silver, mines of azure, and the richest mine in the world, for all we knew, producing the balas rubies of which very Venice had heard, red as pigeon blood, fiery as a hill girl’s heart, and almost as unobtainable as a roc’s egg.

If we could get hold of some of them, we could trade them for the favor of kings or the favors of their daughters. But the Emir owned the mines, amassing almost the whole output in his treasury, and selling only a few at extravagant prices. Only a very few went down the rathole, as the saying was. The Emir’s guards searched the mineworkers to their bungs; a guard caught with one was chained in the mine until he died, a poetic punishment that the Emir learned from the Tatar. If a slave girl was seen to wear one at the Court, the courtiers began bowing and kowtowing as though she would soon be queen.

You could wonder that no Tatar army had ridden hence, to loot the treasury and work the mine. The answer lay in the high, narrow passes, colder than Iceland, which alone gave entrance to the kingdom, and where a company of lean, wine-bibbling catapultists could hold off a button-nosed horde. Indeed the Emir remained one of the few independent monarchs in all Asia.

Yet Chance, in the person of the young and amorous wife of a road guard, put me on the track of a fair balas ruby. It had been presented by the present Emir’s father to a master goldsmith, with the right to sell it in his need; now the recipient’s hands had lamed and his eyes dimmed, and his grandsons had no money to buy wives, and he would sell the precious trophy at a bargain. The upshot of it was, after a night of backing and filling, the old man wept, kissed his pride and joy farewell, and laid it in my palm. Into his scrawny hand went a goatskin bag containing two hundred dinars in gold.

Considering the extreme rarity of balas rubies elsewhere in the world, and the unthinkable ranges, deserts, rivers, and kingdoms still stretching between here and the capital of Cathay, surely the flawless, fire-hearted jewel of five carats’ weight could be a modest and not unseemly gift to Kublai Khan.

When the custom officer at the border asked me if I had rubies, I could not resist bringing forth the stone in Maffeo’s sight. The official admired it, and after examining its carefully inscribed pedigree, assigned to me, he congratulated me on its possession. Maffeo’s smile seemed frozen on his face by a blizzard out of the Pamirs, and presently he entered the pavilion he shared with Nicolo.

In a moment he emerged and beckoned to me. I had been summoned there a good many times before—usually to receive instructions as to giving false information and withholding true, sometimes to plan mutually profitable buying and selling—and I resolved to be very casual about my acquisition. That it would be a subject of discussion I could not doubt.

“Maffeo tells me you have acquired a very beautiful balas ruby,” Nicolo began as soon as I was seated. The bluntness surprised me.

“A fair one, I think.”

“May I see it? The matter concerns the safety of the caravan.”

I showed him the stone. He examined it carefully with vividly lighted eyes.

“It’s very fine. Maffeo and I did no little jewel-buying on our previous expedition, and I flatter myself we both learned something about jewels. You could fairly ask five hundred bezants at the great Alexandrian bazaar.”

“I paid two hundred for it,” I said, wondering whether Nicolo would at last stoop to use me or trick me.

“An excellent bargain. It would be quite an attraction to the bandits that infest the mountains eastward. So I’d like to put two more with it, for a use I have in mind.”

He spoke pleasantly, as was his wont, but I could hardly bear to look at what he held in his palm. To my great relief, neither stone was the equal of mine.

“If I appraise your ruby at five hundred bezants, I should think these two together would be worth another five hundred,” Nicolo went on.

“Certainly.”

“If you agree, we’ll book them at that figure, and use them for bandit bait. If we can’t keep clear of the mountain wolves, and the stones are lost, you’re to be paid on that basis out of the great sum we have saved by the trick. But first, you’ll want to know its necessity.”

“I would, signor, truly.”

“Unlike the renegade Karaunas, who have their own gods and king, the bandits we’re likely to meet are devout Mohammedans and nominally subject to the Emir. So they’ll think twice about killing envoys and merchants in lawful passage. They probably wouldn’t strip us of our heavy goods, since they couldn’t readily dispose of them. Nor would they lay hand on our golden tablet, and would likely kowtow to it. But they’d certainly make off with all the money and jewels they could find. And if they suspect we’ve hidden some, they have ways, not at all pleasant, of uncovering them.”

“You said to use these jewels as bait——”

“Precisely. The bandits won’t expect us to have balas rubies, but they’ll not overlook the possibility. So we’ll have them hidden with what seems a great deal of cunning. One of us will give the secret away through a faked blunder or slip. Then when the rascals find them, they’ll never doubt but these are all we have and won’t look any further.”

I was able to hold my tongue but not the rush of color from my face.

“Well, do you agree?” Nicolo asked.

“Yes, if the amount to be saved justifies such a severe loss.”

“Show him, please, Maffeo.” And as Maffeo bent over a saddlebag, Nicolo continued to address me in a tone of pleasant casualness.

“Technically they’re not mine, although I have carte blanche as to the use of all but one. As the Khan’s envoy, I sought an audience with the Emir, and it happened that he had heard of me from the Khan’s viceroy at Samarkand. When I asked if I could convey his compliments to my master, he straightway decided to send him a gift. The main item was an especially fine ruby, but he furnished me with several more, to give the Khan and his family or trade along the way for equally noble gifts.” Nicolo paused, took a leather pouch that Maffeo handed him, and drew forth a double handful of cotton wool. It appeared about to burst into flame from seven balls of cold, blood-red fire glowing within the fleece. All were balas rubies to make up the lucky number of nine. The largest was the size of a crimson cherry of the Halil Rud; none of the others was less than twice as large as mine.

I had been slow in getting through my head the might, the majesty, even the meaning, of the word “king.” And that was only one of my fallings-short.

2

The road from Badakhshan to Kashgar and Yarkand is a long road, taking thirty days of fast travel. By avoiding narrow defiles where cataracts roared, glassy steeps where avalanches swept with their awful thundering brooms, we took nearer fifty. And it is the highest road, I reckon, in all the world.

It crosses Little Pamir and Great Pamir. It comes by a lake of crescent shape, which a genie cut with Mohammed’s sword, and which is the birthplace of the great, strange Oxus River. There was hardly a moment that we could not hear the distant deep-toned rumble of a snow slide. Everywhere and forever blew the snow clouds. In the lower valleys there were oases watered by melting glaciers, and here fruit ripened and birds sang and yellow grainfields rippled in the breeze; here were temples and schools and marts and crowds. But atop the vast plateau dwelt only wild men, in huts of stone and turf, and beasts and gods. The people called it Bam-i-Dunya, which means “Roof of the World.”

In these hanging gardens of God, even the cooking fires went against nature. The flames under the pot danced and dispersed; the water bubbled fiercely but was slow to scald your finger, and hard corn would not soften in an all-day boiling. Looking down from these heights, we saw the Oxus winding to the rim of the sky, the wild white streams that fed it bounding out from under bridges of snow, and the mighty ranges running without count or end. Amid them hung valleys so deep and savage that even the devilish wolves dared not venture down, and on a thousand peaks no man’s footprints had ever marked the snow.

In the mountains of Badakhshan we had seen and fed upon wild sheep. Fine, fat, and stoutly horned, they could not hold rushlights to the wild sheep of the Pamir, known as argalis.^[19] At first I saw them as gray dots on the high grass slopes, and knew them only through their immense twisted horns left about at hunter’s camps, or which were set in the snow to mark a trail, Often a horn was nearly five feet along its spiral, and a big pair measured an equal distance between the points. That a mere sheep could carry such a load upon its head I could hardly believe.

It was not a load, but a crown. This I perceived at my first close glimpse of a big ram. He was standing atop a crag, his head lifted, his feet together, his back arched, his whole bearing noble beyond description. I began to perceive that God had created him expressly to befit and reveal the Great Pamir. No lesser creature could concord with its sublime concept—one vast garth halfway to heaven, tall as the sea is deep, walled in a white wall whose towers and battlements pierced the sky.

His horns were of little use to him in defense against his natural enemies, the wolves that hunted in small, bold, villainous bands or the lone, long-furred, heavy-tailed gray-and-black snow leopards, among the most beautiful of beasts, that lay in wait for him on banks and ledges, sprang, transfixed the bounding neck artery with their fangs, and slew. He butted his rivals for the swift, smaller-horned ewes—their collisions could be heard afar through the still air in the great tournaments of the rut—but only to vanquish, not to kill. The horns were a God-given decoration not to the good servant but to the high born. Their wearers must bear them up steeps that would break the heart of an unburdened horse, bound with them from rock to rock, ran with them along ledges and across the deadly crevices. Yet they would rather die than lay them down; their very weight, like that of a king’s crown of massive gold, made demands upon their strength which they gloried to meet.

I longed to test my courage, cunning, endurance, and other human gifts against his splendid strength—eyes eagle-sharp, nose and ears as keen as a fallow deer’s, the swiftness and sureness of his feet, his prowess to ascend where I could not follow. I wished to pursue him into his snowy fastnesses, slay him if I could, and bring back his horns to adorn my lodge, a memento of our conflict, and to eat of his flesh with no mere belly hunger but in the ancient ceremony of obtaining a share of his powers. Thereby, as all wise men knew, I would become more sure-footed, swift, stronghearted, and long-winded, and perhaps more lustful. Countless rams had been foreordained to win or to lose magnificent contests with hunters; that went with their appointment and birthright. And this contest would be more equal than most and hence more thrilling, because the villagers usually went forth in bands, picking no particular quarry but killing any of the flock whose escape they could cut off, while I would hunt alone for a lone mountain king.

Our caravan could not stop to let a junior merchant spend a day on the lofty sheep range. But an avalanche in a defile stopped it until such time as some fair-haired, blue-eyed falcon trappers, calling themselves Kaffirs and bivouacked near by, could shovel out a passage. That would take about five hours, I thought. It would be folly to essay the lofty grass slopes in that short time. . . . But the skin on my neck prickled when I came on a pair of ram’s horns laid out on the sod roof of the chiefs house. They were the largest I had yet seen.

When I admired them, the Kaffir answered me in high spirits. I caught only one word of his language—Iskander, the Central Asian rendition of Alexander, almost synonymous with “king” in this part of the world. What Alexander the Great or his many namesakes had to do with sheep hunting I could not guess. But the fellow’s gestures—an expansive stretching of his arms and vigorous pointings to a mountaintop—arrested my deepest attention and stirred my imagination. Presently a cameleer of the Sarikol addressed him in some lingua franca of the snows, who in turn spoke to me in the base Turki-Persian dialect larded with Arabic words, which I had picked up long since.

“The chief says that these horns are small compared to the horns of the ram that his people have named Iskander.”

“Why have they named him that?”

“Because he is greatest of all the rams they have ever seen.”

“Where are his pasture and his fold?”

“Straight up this mountain.”

“Then why don’t they pursue and kill him?”

“Because he and his ewes, being sharp-eyed as saker falcons, discover their approach, and take off from the grass slopes over a ledge that leads to inaccessible rimrock. It is out of arrow cast and they dare not follow those sure feet across a void deeper than Gehenna.”

Suddenly I was struck by a thought resounding within my skull like a thunderstorm in a mountain chasm. I had remembered Nicolo’s speaking of Kublai Khan’s interest in distant lands, and the delight he took in wonders of all sorts. It was somewhat doubtful if any of his viceroys had sent him horns of these magnificent wild sheep, and highly unlikely that he had seen a head so great that illiterate tribesmen would name its bearer after their hero-god, Alexander. And if the Khan was as illustrious as I liked to picture him, perhaps he would consider such a head, presented to him by its winner, almost as fine a gift as a priceless ruby.

It happened that my red-bay mare Roxana was daily proving herself as beyond praise. I tightened her cinch till she grunted, then mounted her with no load other than my gold and jewels, bow and quiver, a piece of dried goat flesh, and my woolen barracan to wear when I met the wolf-fanged wind on the open mountainsides. The Kaffirs gave me careful directions. Roxana began her long, grueling climb.

I rode her up the broad shoulder of the mountain, across treacherous slide rock, and around the rim of a gully. Already the wide green parklands looked like garden plots, the lakes were as sapphires set in the stone; eagles skimmed screaming over the hollow gorges half a mile below us. If I sat horizontal to my horse’s back both of us would topple to our deaths, so I lay along the saddle, clutching her mane. Not until her eyes were bloodshot and her nostrils red and she sobbed for breath did I get down and fasten her to a pillar-like abutment of a weathered crag to wait for me. She had saved me a little time and perhaps a crucial amount of wind, strength, and sweat.

Now I made my way on foot, by such routes as I could find, toward a lofty grass slope running up to a sheer cliff under the crest. Scattered over it were fifty or more small forms, revealed by the clear air as heavy-headed beasts, some lying down, most of them in the broken movements of grazing. All but one varied in color from snow-white to dark gray. With that one exception, they resembled other flocks that I had seen, made up of lambs, ewes, half-grown rams, and full-grown rams. But the darkest of the lot—showing almost black in this light—was by all means the largest.

I felt a great surge of suspense and feverish desire.

I climbed steadily and steeply for half an hour, and the scope of the adventure widened and deepened every minute. It was partly the effect of my human solitude in all this vastness of mountain and sky. It was like the coming-true of a forgotten dream, which must be the way that Heaven breaks upon the newly dead—a place unimaginable by the living brain and yet instantly recognizable by the soul through some previous instruction. No Heaven would be so empty, cold, silent, and forlornly beautiful, I thought; but some last Hell might be. Beyond the seventh Hell that doers of great evil have dared fear, there may be another in which every soul wanders alone in an ineffable vastness of mountain and sky. There is no pain except a little in his legs and chest, but he must contemplate himself forever in a last, utter, irredeemable divorcement from God.

I stopped, rested a moment, and steadied my swimming head. It came to me that the sheep had already seen me, that even the spring lambs knew of my approach, but being the great argalis, lords of the realm, they took no notice of me. It might be for sport or some symbol untranslatable to the human mind. Those lying down rose one at a time, and I thought that the flock grazed closer to one another and looked up more often. I drew within six hundred yards. Now there was a movement going on, so slow and calm that it was hardly apparent. The ewes with lambs were feeding closest to the rocky flank of the grass slope, the barren ewes were next, then the young rams, and then the heavy-horned and lordly elders. But the king had not partaken in this action. From a dead stop, light as a bouncing ball, he bounded to the top of a six-foot boulder. There he stood in motionless majesty, gazing not in my direction, it seemed, but over my head.

I gained the same slope and almost the same elevation, although still four hundred paces distant. A ewe and her lamb strolled around the curve of the hill and disappeared. Others of her kind followed with gradually quickening pace. The barren ewes left in a group—they were ashamed, I thought, of their dry teats, and hung together for company—and then the half-grown rams in a dignified file, not deigning to look back. As I drew within what we call arrow cast, but too far for any hit but a lucky one from a falling shaft, only mature rams remained on the slope. Five of these had withdrawn to its end, near the top of a ridge. The sixth, who was Iskander the King, remained on his dais, obviously poised, immobile and magnificent. He had turned enough to show me his profile sharp against a snowbank further up the slope. I could hardly believe his magnitude and beauty.

All the lesser rams had made off along a ledge so narrow it looked like a seam in the rock, dipping to what mountain men called a saddle and leading to a shelf projecting from the face of a cliff. Leisurely the five elders made the crossing. Iskander remained as still as the stone itself.

I worked my way over dangerous slide rock to the slippery grass. Now I crouched within two hundred paces of my quarry, at which range a broadhead arrow may kill clean. The shot would be an extremely difficult one, worthy of Coeur-de-Lion in the mountain breeze, yet I was amazed at the beast’s boldness. Suddenly I conceived of the explanation. The savage huntsmen of his acquaintance had weak bows that could not cast that far. Indeed I had never seen them attempt a shot at more than half the distance. Perhaps Iskander would scorn to fly from a tall form with an evil smell twenty bounds distant. He would wait until the humming hornets fell only a little short. That was his pride before his liege-men and his ewes. . . .

I decided to close within a hundred and fifty paces, then try the shot. The breeze was more cold than strong; with a full draw and a hard aim and a clean loose I had a fair chance to win. But when I had got that far, and the moment came to play the chance for all it was worth, I could not bear not to pass it by.

Whatever its first cause—perhaps superstitious fear of the gods—it was one of the most worthy actions of my life. Gaining these heights had been an inspiring experience and its glow was on me still. I was seeing Iskander not only as king of the rams, but as more than as a protagonist of the Pamir, even as a proof of the magnificence and mystery of life itself, and hence its hope. I did not want to win the great prize by taking advantage of his ignorance of the strength of my weapon. I would keep to my original intention—to follow him where other hunters had never ventured, or to give up the quest.

The issue was as clean-cut as though by Fate’s contrivance. The retreat of Iskander’s flock, where presently he would withdraw out of my arrow range, was a cul-de-sac. There was no possibility of his climbing up the sheer cliffs rimming the shelf; as before when men drove him from his pasture, he would wait there until they went away. And I could engage him by one operation only—following him along the ledge and across the saddle to his citadel.

I advanced a few more steps. Iskander sprang down, shook his rump, and trotted after his flock. At the very end of the grass slope he stopped, nibbled a moment, glanced back at me, and leaped nimbly onto the ledge. But now he began to progress with portentous care.

Following slowly, I felt a great deal of inner tumult. While hating the thought of turning back, I did not know how great a risk I was willing to run. The flock was in plain sight on the shelf beyond the saddle. Their king joined them, and all gazed in my direction. It was a strange thing that they would seek a retreat from which there was no outlet; I could account for it only by its serving them before. It might indicate that even wolves and leopards eschewed the passage, or that the rams could hold it against them.

I gained the ridge and my gaze made the journey that my feet must soon make, if I were to win. My eyes bulged at the narrow way along the face of the precipice, overhanging the profound gulf. Then I felt them thrill to a magnificent discovery.

The Kaffir tribesmen had said that the gulf was as deep as Gehenna’s. As I gazed down, the expression struck me as only too apt—the cliff fell away fathom after dizzy fathom until my head reeled, then leaped down in a series of steeps to a dimly descried glen where maybe demons dwelt. To fall off the ledge would mean to drop sheer, perhaps turning over slowly in the air for several seconds, each as long as a term in Purgatory; then striking the steeps, to bounce, leap, and careen into the glen three cables’ lengths below. But it was the depth of the void, rather than the narrowness of the bridge, that had blanched the faces of the mountaineers and had made them turn back.

I firmly believed that if this same ledge had overhung an ordinary ravine, they would have essayed to cross it without crippling terror. Yet a sixty-foot fall on rock will kill almost as surely as one of sixteen hundred.

So my adversary was still myself. My feet would be equal to the passage if my soul kept faith with its high birth by valor and resolve, both proofs of implacable pride.

I considered depositing here every ounce of impedimenta—all my arrows except three, my pouch containing keys and a little sand glass and a few other belongings useful or beloved, even my dagger. Why not all my clothes except my sandals? But thinking of the figure I would cut in the eyes of my quarry made me grin, and I decided to go as I was. Up and down and across mountains, Iskander went as he was. I was not a naked anchorite looking for visions in the wilderness, but a Venetian gentleman on a superb adventure.

For the first hundred feet, I kept my eyes stoutly on the footing. But this was a false stoutness. As the ledge narrowed ahead of me, deeper and deeper in my mind’s eye yawned the chasm. It was at my side and a little behind where the Devil walks. Its unseen presence made my eyes ache and my thoughts muddle and my belly sicken. Already I yearned to grope with my hands at the treacherous shale. I was going to fall. . . .

Then I stopped, looked up at the sky, thought upon the marvel of my being here, alone for the moment in the Great Pamir, then without hanging on, slowly swept my gaze downward into the void.

I saw the multicolored rocks of the opposite side of the chasm, not nearly as steep and high, but to look down the precipice to the series of cliffs below, ending at last in the dark glen, required that I lean my shoulders a little outward and bend my head. With my sweat cold upon me, but my eyes narrow and hard and perhaps a turning-down of my lip corners in almost a sneer, I did so. I gazed into the Pit. It differed only in externals from those set in the path of millions of my fellow men. The evil spells cast by its demons are greatly weakened by the power of the human eye.

At that moment, I won the victory.

It did not matter as much as before whether I laid Iskander low and took his horns. But King Fate had decreed—or his pet monkey Chance had prayed—that the adventure would end fittingly, in a beautiful sweep of event. I had passed the most perilous span of the ledge and was approaching the saddle. Still more than a hundred paces distant, Iskander had become restless. He moved back and forth in front of his flock and tossed his crowned head. Presently he stopped, gave me a long, unflinching look, and then uttered a deep-toned bleat that carried far in the airy silence. Resolutely he started back.

I could not doubt that he had perceived my almost completed crossing of the moat guarding his citadel, and had come out to do battle.

I flipped an arrow over my shoulder onto my bow. Iskander walked briskly, then broke into an easy run. I stood with my right leg braced behind me, my left bent in front, and put my shoulder into the draw. I could not wait until he crossed the saddle into point-blank range. That would bring him onto the face of the precipice, from where he would plummet to ruin on the rocks below. My movements were timed to loose the shaft when he was about sixty paces distant, coming into the rise of the saddle. To strike the base of the burly neck would not be a difficult shot on the good wide ground. But whatever the adversities of the time and place, I dared not miss.

My bow rounded. Iskander gained speed. A slight action of my fingers freed the string and the long arrow with its broad head of whetted steel sped smoothly on its way. I was not fixed to shoot again, lest the sudden movements make me lose my balance, so I held my stand, trusting all to the well-loosed shaft. As it struck and plunged deep, the great ram rose on his hind legs, his horns in a magnificent last flourish against the sky.

Giantlike he toppled, but with a final wrench of his body, he fell with his head toward me. Kingly still, he raised his head to look at me. Slowly it lowered, not as though cast down by the hand of Death, but from the weight of a crown he could no longer bear.