Caravan To Xanadu

CHAPTER 11

THE CHASM

When wild-riding couriers and exhausted runners brought news that the Khan’s train had been sighted over the hill, I gathered with a large number of the common sort on the precincts reserved for us in the park. After awhile there came a glimmer as from a rising sun in a little niche in a wooded crest where the road ran. An involuntary utterance, one of the strangest I had ever heard, rose from our crowd. I could best describe it as a prolonged grunt of happy wonder.

Knowing what to look for, as did the others, my sharp eyes were among the first to focus on the Khan’s equipage. He journeyed in a howdah at least twenty feet square and borne by not one elephant but four, all of them tuskers exactly ten feet tall, perfectly trained, and marching two by two. As it caught the sunlight it began to show reddish in hue, since the outside was covered with tiger skins. The interior was known to be lined with beaten gold, and the roof could be thrown open at the Khan’s wish.

Although we did not see them, three thousand of his personal bodyguard of nine thousand were riding out and ahead of the equipage on both sides of the road, but not setting foot in the road itself lest they raise dust. Behind the Khan marched a file of about twenty elephants, all richly caparisoned and bearing howdahs bright with inlay and lacquer and shining in the sun. In these rode one or more of the Khan’s four queens, and members of his family, with favorite attendants and outriders. Next in order were not his barons and courtiers, but fully a thousand horses white as speckless snow, semidivine beasts to the Tatar mind, bred for the Khan alone, and their like forbidden to any of his subjects. Occasionally he rode one of the stallions; the mares supplied milk and karvas, the Tatars’ mainstay and their ceremonial drink, to his kinsmen, wives, and concubines.

Behind these beautiful beasts came a mile-long file of carts bearing favorite hounds and hawks with their keepers, at least a hundred fierce eagles used in killing deer, and, which I had heard but could hardly believe, a score of hunting tigers, each in the company of a small dog to smell out game for it when the game took cover.^[25] These gorgeous beasts were not caged, merely kept in leash, and either rode in the carts or paced beside them in charge of their trainers. Other carts contained wolves for coursing wild cattle and heavy stags, and fully a hundred hunting leopards rode on horses, each in charge of a groom.

By the time all these had emerged into plain sight, the Khan’s equipage was not far from the eastern gate of the park, a great portal magnificently adorned and used only by him and his immediate family. As his equipage turned into its approach, we saw two gerfalcons rise from the opening in the roof of the car; obviously, they had been cast to hawk at a passing flock of cranes. This pair were the finest in all the royal mews of many thousand or they would not be riding with the Khan; quite possibly they were the best on earth. Perhaps that was why I took no joy in watching them tower and stoop. Their quarry had been doomed when the Khan’s eye first fell on them. That fall had been as crushing as a giant tree falling on their nests.

The Khan’s car passed through the sacred gate of the park and into the palace grounds. The file of elephants followed, while his immediate bodyguard of three thousand fell into close ranks and entered an adjacent gate. Led now by the drove of white horses, each with its groom, his train made their way through the south gate, then each section went its own way like the divisions of a well-trained army coming into camp. Behind the hawk and tiger carts, and the leashed wolves and the mounted leopards, marched another file of elephants, not as tall or as richly caparisoned as the first, but fully ten times as many. The men and women in the open howdahs were obviously great folk of the Court; I suspected that the curtained ones bore favorite concubines. And from these to the niche in the hills, as far as eye could see, rode company after company of horsemen. Some were richly dressed and evidently minor officials of the Court. Whole companies wore the same apparel, representing various services to the Khan—falconers, cooks, costumers, physicians, jongleurs and acrobats, vintners, tailors, jewelers, goldsmiths and silversmiths, and, in regiments of nine hundred riding ten abreast, his bodyguardsmen not today on duty.

These streamed from the ridge top to the various gates of the park and the city for more than two hours. So we spectators almost laughed at a mere hundred dog-handlers, each dressed in blue and holding two giant mastiffs on leash. We had better not laugh. We had better remember that Xanadu was not one of the Khan’s great hunting seats, where hawks and hounds, falcons and beaters and watchers, were numbered in thousands. In Xanadu the Khan kept cool, hunting only an hour or two each day. In other respects, his Court here was only a skeleton Court. For instance, in Peking the ménages of his four queens, each occupying a separate palace, numbered forty thousand in eunuchs, handmaidens, and slaves.

Behind the dogs, there walked barefoot in the dust a hundred men in rags. Indeed they were as tattered and dirty as the troops of beggars that many a Christian king hires on feast days to receive his alms and prove his charity. But no great baron, who sometimes played chess with the Khan, smirked with such pride as these matted-haired beasts. They called themselves the Khan’s astrologers. Actually they constituted the most powerful body of necromancers, sorcerers, and seers in all the world. They were the pick of all Asia and every one was a master of some diabolic art.

They brought up the rear of the imperial procession. The host of men and beasts coming into view in the dust clouds was made up of drovers, baggage wallahs, herds of cattle and sheep, and loaded camels without end. Only a few of us gapers stayed to watch them pass; the greater number of us sought good lookouts for a sight less magnificent but more heart-lifting and lucky. In the cool of the evening on the day of his arrival it was the custom of the Khan to ride out into the park, to see how the game had flourished in his absence, and to take a few head to start the season well. On the croup of his steed would ride a hunting leopard or perhaps a huge eagle, whom he would loose at a fallow deer. The open glades might give a glimpse of him as he raced behind the spotted cat or under the nine-barbed harpy. It might come to pass they would watch the very kill.

But I had business elsewhere.

Three days from today the Khan would hold durbar in the great hall of the palace. My own plans for that day were hardly worthy of the name: they amounted to one simple stroke, the results of which would depend on how well it was delivered, on circumstance, and on how close was my guess at the characters of Nicolo and Kublai Khan. I might be prevented from dealing it at all. That was in the lap of unknown gods and hence no immediate burden on my mind. My poverty would impair my preparations, but making the best of it brought me to the town’s old-clothes market, busy enough, but where no one ever smiled.

I was looking for a robe of a certain color and kind. I did not care how thin it had worn, provided it would hold together for one wearing—after that, I could get along without it, will I, nill I. Finding nothing barely suitable among these sorry relics of better days, I was cursing my own low spirits when I felt them take a sudden lift I had caught sight of my former copemate and fellow night-hawk, Pietro the Tatar. He was treating himself to lichi nuts from a street vendor and had not seen me yet. Instead of avoiding him, I raised my voice enough to attract his attention. Although the gains would be small at best, I thought to give him good news to take to his master.

At once he came strolling toward me, his eyes glistening. I affected chagrin at being seen in the ill-smelling resort of misfits, human and cloth.

“I take it you’re about to sell your old turnout, to fit yourself anew,” he said.

“I have a few winter garments that I can spare, now that summer’s come,” I answered. “But the prices paid at this raghouse are too low.”

“I doubt if you can do any better in the town.”

“I suppose I’ll have to let them go. I need a little money to dress Sheba for the slave market. With the hundred and fifty dinars that she’ll bring, I can lay in camel wool to sell in Shengking. There are several eastbound caravans that I can join.”

“Aren’t you going to offer her to your—to Nicolo Emir?”

“I thought he wouldn’t want her, if he gives the white slave girl to the Khan.”

“Why, he might take her anyway. He couldn’t lose very much on her.”

“I’m not going to ask him for any favors.”

“Why don’t you wait to see if he keeps the Frank Linda for himself? I heard him tell Maffeo malik that he hasn’t decided yet. If he does, he’ll probably pay you two hundred for Sheba. Anyway, you ought to see the durbar. I’ve asked our beadle to find me a stand in the outer gallery, and he can do the same for you.”

“Someone might recognize me and cry me for a thief. You were lucky that night—but I wasn’t.”

“My Tatar face didn’t stand out like yours did. And although you had nothing to gain by implicating me, some men would have done it anyway. If there’s any little favor I can do you——”

“I won’t want the place in the gallery, but I thank you anyway.”

“Is there anything else? You’ve had a lot of misfortune—I’ve prospered moderately—and if a dinar or two would help you dress Sheba——”

“Five dinars would help me a great deal, and I’ll repay them after I sell her.”

“Why, I’ll lend them to you gladly.” He handed me the five gold coins. “And I’m sorry you’ll not see the great sight.”

“I suppose Nicolo will cut a fine figure.” This was merely to make an assurance doubly sure.

By nature cruel, and sharing all his master’s triumphs, he relished my bitter tone.

“I suppose he will. He’s bought a new robe of ceremony. His servant took it into the sunlight to look for moths, and several of us saw it.”

I had been enjoying the game and had considered it merely that—to raise my spirits rather than make gains, although the five dinars was a windfall and if Nicolo had a last lingering doubt of my abjectness, Pietro’s gleeful report would set it at rest. Suddenly, though, it had proved of immense importance, and I had to guard my countenance from his sharp eyes.

“Why, I thought he’d wear his blue brocade with the golden pheasants.”

“This is dark-red brocade, of ankle length, with heavy golden eagles and silver deer, very large and splendid. It cost four hundred dinars.”

“Four hundred? If he’d given them to me, he’d have never missed them, and I could have kept my horse and my longbow and now Sheba.”

But I need not dissemble a deeply anxious face. The fear that had never lifted from me, awake or asleep, these last few days—never intense but ever dismal as a dull toothache—was of the failure of one straight, bold stroke aimed at Nicolo. Now I must face the likelihood of not being able to deliver it at all.

I had cause to remember some folk wisdom Miranda had learned from an old hostler in England:

For a nail rusted through the mare lost her shoe;

So she slid on a crack and fell and broke her back;

So her rider walked late where robbers lay in wait;

So dying unshriven he went not to Heaven.

O the wailing he did on the Devil’s hot grid

For iron worth a penny when thrift he hadn’t any.

2

If my mare lost the race it would not be by my lack of thrift. I spent the following morning searching for an accouterment I lacked, combing all the ground that offered the least hope. But the merchants would not rent to me any rig that would suit me well—they were suspicious of poorly dressed aliens with thin purses, especially when the town thronged with fly-by-nights—and what I could buy for my last handful of gold fell sorely short of my need.

I wished I could find a shrill-laughing, hand-waving Jew of the kind that owned pawnshops in Venice. Not that his heart might be softer than these quiet Chinese, but he would be more of a cosmopolitan and have more imagination. For some strange reason, no Jews had ever found their way to Xanadu.

The least sorry substitute for my requirement that I had money to buy turned up in the stock of a Bengali tailor. It was of ankle length, not badly worn, and made of brocade, although of inferior sort, but the wrong color, dull-looking, and without decoration. Still I paid a piece of gold to have the dealer hold it until tomorrow noon; unless Fortune turned her wheel to bring me something better, I was resolved to take it, make the best of it, and play the game. I was an adventurer and this was my great adventure. When my lips turned down at the corners in an evil sneer, I knew that I would risk everything to win.

At my cheap, mean, but private room at the caravanserai I found Sheba completing the task I had set her and her shining eyes signaling exciting news. After guarding against eavesdroppers, she spoke to me in a husky whisper thrilling to hear.

“If it’s your wish, Miranda will meet you tonight.”

“When and where?”

“At the third hour after midnight, three hundred of your long steps above the bridge in the Khan’s park.”

A cold thrill ran over my skin, the same as on the haunted desert, and I had to guard both my countenance and my voice.

“You misunderstood her. She meant three hundred paces on one side or other of the bridge along the road—her saying ‘above the bridge’ probably means toward the town——”

“No, master. She meant up the chasm of the stream.”

“But that’s forbidden to all except the Khan and his barons. I heard the people say it’s the most sacred——” I stopped to wonder at that word.

“His barons don’t go there. They wait for him on the rim. Not even his queens can go with him there. The people say he goes to meet the ghost of Genghis Khan and take counsel from him. So it’s the safest place you can find.”

“If we’re seen going in or coming out, we’ll be straightway whipped to death. Not only I—both of us. No doubt he has spies everywhere——”

“I spoke of that, but she doesn’t believe it. She says it couldn’t cross his mind that anyone would dare come near such a terrible spot. Anyway, the moon has almost waned away and there won’t be much light to spy by.”

“One of his soothsayers could find out——”

“She doesn’t think their magic will work against what’s good.”

The chill stayed in my flesh and blood and the marrow of my bones, but I drove my brain to pay heed to a memory seeking entrance like a shaft of sunlight probing its way through clouds. In a moment I had captured it and saw its bearing on the present pass. The hardy men of the Great Pamir dared not take Iskander’s path across the face of the cliff as tall as a mountain. If the same ledge overhung a ravine of ordinary depth, they would have essayed it bravely. But the fall from either one was down to death. Perceiving this, I had won a splendid prize.

“Tell Miranda that I’ll come with pleasure.”

3

The truth was, I went in great terror. I had gained the river edge where it flowed through the public precincts, then walked up its grassy bank in the light of the withered moon. Before long I came to a little fence, two feet high and made of frail bamboo, marking the forbidden ground. I stopped, my body drenched with sweat, and must shut my jaw to keep my teeth from knocking. But I could remember stopping at Iskander’s bridge, gazing down into the pit, and walking on. I stepped over the fence in one stride and again walked on. The wide stream hunched up and rushed past me with increasing speed and gathering sound. But my terror had passed from me as though by the breaking of an evil spell, and only an eerie sense of things not of this earth made my skin creep.

No doubt Miranda had chosen this meeting place because it was one of the most lonely in the world. She had chosen this hour in the late ebb of night because it was the least employed except by dreamers, spirits good and evil, and night birds and beasts. But I felt there were other causes in the first case, and I now discovered one, strangely warming my heart, in the second case. Tonight’s moon rose late. She had returned to the shape she bore when she was young and beautiful and promising great things—a deep-drawn bow with long pointed ends—but now she faced her western burial ground instead of her glorious birthplace, and almost all her promises had failed, and she had turned into a witch with a weird lamp. Yet because I needed her pale beams to guide my steps, Miranda had arranged for me to have them. Our appointment was the hour that she hung high. Pouring straight down, some of the beams fell into the deep, narrow chasm where I walked.

I walked a footpath beside the raging waters. Since the Khan came by a secluded lane over and down the ridge, it must have been worn by deer and other folk of the woods. Yet they too must traverse it in pricked-eared wonder, their wild hearts clamoring from intimations forbidden to me and to even the great Khan. I half saw, half divined, a scene of unworldly beauty. Its accompaniment was the river’s roar as Miranda’s singing had accompanied the beauty of her face and flowing hands. The walls of the canyon steeped as the river’s tumult grew. Their dark cedars stood one and one instead of close and thick as in the upper world; perhaps only a few of the most valiant could take root among the crags. Perhaps here was a great kingdom enchanted into this small space. Maybe it was a scene from a Land of Faery transported here by the arts of the Khan’s magicians.

No, it was only a natural wonder that a traveler in a wild and lonely land had chanced on and reported to the Khan. The romantic scene about me was but part of it, and likely a small part. The place where the Khan vanished and stayed long, the most holy on all the earth in his subject’s sight, was still ahead of me; and I surmised it to be the birthplace of the stream at the head of the canyon. When very he had laid eyes on it, had he decreed it the secret shrine of a great pleasure ground, where would stand his summer palace?

Below my musings I had kept loose track of my steps. When I had taken about three hundred, the moon gave me a glimpse of Miranda on the deer path. When I came near she smiled and, leaning toward me, spoke in my ear—else I could not have heard her above the multitoned thunder of the waters.

“Let’s go to the source,” she said. “I’ll lead the way.”

So we walked on. When there was no room to walk between the stream and the canyon walls, the path wound upward, seeking ledges and projections on the face of the cliff and clinging there like a living thing—but it had been made by living things, deer and suchlike who had business up the canyon and had found their way there. So their fawns could follow them, they had picked unerringly the safest route, for not even the wide-homed stags could survive a fall into the rock-bound cataracts, and only the highborn otters, to whom had been given dominion over wild, white floods, dared plunge and play. Thus Miranda and I, young, strong, good walkers, and with nerves steadied from many adventures, could follow in their steps.

When the path dipped to the water’s edge, I caught her hand and stopped her and spoke in her ear.

“Perhaps we’re the only people alive who’ve ever walked this path.”

“No, there are others who believe that God is greater than the Khan and who came here to affirm it. There are those whose souls are as haughty as his and came here at their command. And there must be those who had to come because of eager eyes and itching feet.”

“What did they find?”

“I think all of them found grace.”

I thought she might say “strength” instead of “grace.” I could not think through her meaning but I knew she spoke the truth. She was very pale and her eyes were big and soft and many intimations were being given her.

“Will I find it?”

“Yes, a little, unless you’re a demon, not a man.”

“How could I be a demon?”

“It’s very easy to become one, I think—although most who do are not recognized by real people and perhaps often not by themselves. All you’d have to do would be to get rid of your soul. I don’t mean to sell it. You hear of that, but I’ve thought it over, and who is there to buy it? Not the Devil. What would he do with it? I think you only have to stop wanting it and it dies.”

Spray from the surges flinging in my face stung like snow crystals. “This water is ice-cold,” I said, not in the least uneasy over changing the subject.

“Yet it doesn’t freeze in the bitterest winters. I suppose it’s too violent for frost to get hold of it. Did you know it chills the river for more than a mile below its mouth?”

“No.”

“The old gibbaleen told me.”

In the slow-swirling pools under the cascades it appeared milky-white, making me think of some of the glacier streams in the High Pamir. And now the air became intensely cold and only our exercise kept us warm. There was no longer any vegetation close to the brim.

We went on, farther and higher, and both of us became greatly afraid. But we had drawn so close that each of us recognized the other’s fear as the same, and it was one that Nature put into us, for our protection, not terror from a false god. Its main cause was the roar of the river between the rock walls in concatenation with a continuous explosion not far ahead. The path narrowed and steepened.

We followed it still and it led us to the canyon rim. The sound, though enormous, was not so terrible now that we had escaped from its reverberations on the rock walls; and we advanced through a cedar wood, walking hand in hand. And then we came to the birthplace of the river.

At least, this was its borning into the upper world, lit by the sun, moon, and stars, although it had had a dark fetal life in the womb of the mountain. We stood near the mouth of a cave whose breath was deathly cold. From its upper jaw hung a row of dragon teeth, long and sharp, and the lower was set with what looked like broken, blunt snags, but they shimmered in the weak moonlight, and I did not believe that they were limestone stalactites and stalagmites; nor did the portal itself look like stone. In a moment I guessed the truth. It was a cave of ice.

Now we saw other caves, many of them half-hidden by the crags, overhanging more than half of the inner rim of a bowl hewn by a giant stonecutter out of the solid rock. And in the bowl was as strange a spring as ever flowed.

The water did not well up continuously but burst up with enormous force at such rapid intervals that the ear could hardly distinguish the separate explosions. No doubt gushings and splashings and the continuous and compound echoes from the rocks and the ice caves almost filled the fleeting silences between the claps, to cause an undulating roar. But to the eye the ejaculations were distinct, and their effect on the mind was awesome in the extreme. They did not take the form of upbursting geysers, instead they lifted the whole body of water in the bowl in the shape of a giant mushroom that constantly overtowered the rim and which swelled out, rose several feet, and diminished again with each pulsation. Only a small fraction poured out to form the stream. And the underground river heaved up by the earth’s convulsions must be abysmally deep, for the rocks throbbed in time with the bursts, and we felt that their terrible central sound rose from far below us.

We walked nearer and took our stand on a crag from which we could look down into the crater. Its walls had been scoured and polished by the upheaving flood, and now we could hear another sound under or running through the terrific undulation. It was of stone bounding against stone. The only explanation I could conceive was that boulders and rock fragments were hurled up by the exploding waters and struck against the crater walls.

And now Miranda’s sharp eyes made a strange and thrilling discovery. Farther around on the crater rim was a seat carved out of solid rock, affording an open view of the heaving waters and their plunge into the chasm. Its lofty position and its shape of grandeur told us both in the same instant that it was a throne.

Miranda said something I could not hear. Smiling strangely then, she took my hand, and together we walked the short distance, and climbed the little rise that brought us to it. And here the uproar ceased to hurt the ears and stultify the brain, I did not know why unless, striking an adjacent cliff, it ricocheted in the form of echoes.

I knew it was not bravado, or even Miranda’s expectations, that caused me to sit on the throne. When I did so, she nodded her head slightly, and I realized the beauty in her face.

“Will you sit here?” I asked when, after a moment, I had risen.

“I don’t need to.”

“Do you think I’m the only one except the Khan who ever sat there?”

“Of course not. Kublai Khan didn’t carve it himself. The sculptor he’d appointed tried it plenty of times.”

“I think he had the sculptor strangled.”

“He may have, but that didn’t change it. And squirrels have climbed into the seat, and birds have lighted there.”

“Why did you have me meet you in the ravine?”

“I thought it would help you in what you intend to do.”

“Have you any idea what it is?”

“I’ve tried not to think. But Nicolo told me last night that you’d been seen in the old clothes market and you were trying to raise money for a journey. I think if the journey is to be only a mile from the market, it is going to be difficult and dangerous.”

“You still haven’t fully answered my question. You said you thought it would help me but you didn’t say why you wanted to help me—why you did help me.”

“Because when you were in desperate need of money, you didn’t sell Sheba.”

“No, I didn’t.” I spoke only because she stood waiting.

“Will you tell me why?”

“No, I can’t, because I don’t know. All I know is, I’m going to make the trial—take the journey you spoke of—without selling her, or not at all.”

“Not even as a last resort?”

“No.”

“Did you succeed in raising money any other way?”

“I had a little over twenty dinars and Pietro lent me five more.” And she returned my smile.

“Yet you’re going to make the trial?” she asked.

“Yes, the best I can.”

“Marco, do you remember when you took me from the house of Simon ben Reuben, he gave me a mezusah? That was a little gold shell to wear around my neck, containing the promises of his God.”

“I remember it well.”

“He got it himself just before I left, then spoke to me in a low voice. If ever I was in great need, I was to open it and get something out of it. Once I did open it. It was not when you were about to sell me—that was on your soul, not mine—but long after that, in the city of Bukhara. I saw what it was and put it back. I thought of the old Jew and all he stood for and I decided my need wasn’t as great as I had believed. I believed that someday there would come a greater one.”

I did not speak and only bent my head.

“I was right. It came when I lay awake in the middle of the night. So I opened the mezusah and took out what he’d given me. Cup your hand.”

I did so. She laid in it a diamond of the worth of two hundred dinars. The dying moon made it cast an inch-long luster on my palm.