The Journeyer

BALKH

1

WE went now a little south of east, to skirt the Karakum, or Black Sands, which is another desert lying due eastward of Mashhad. We chose a route across the Karabil, or Cold Plateau, which is a long shelf of more solid and verdant land extending like a coastline between the bleak dry ocean of Black Sands to the north and the bleak escarpment of the treeless Paropamisus Mountains to the south.

It would have made a shorter journey to go straight across the Karakum desert, but we were weary of desert. And it would have been a more easeful journey if we had gone farther to the southward, through the valleys of the Paropamisus, for there we would have found accommodation in a succession of villages and towns and even cities of respectable size, such as Herat and Maimana. But we preferred to take the middle course. We were well accustomed to camping out of doors, and that high Karabil plateau must have got its name only by comparison to lower and warmer lands, for it was not terribly cold even then in early wintertime. We simply added layers of shirts and pai-jamah and abas as we needed them, and found the weather tolerable enough.

The Karabil consisted mostly of monotonous grassland, but there were also stands of trees—pistachio, zizafun, willow and conifers. We had seen many greener and more pleasant lands, and would see many others, but, after having endured the Great Salt, we found even the dull gray grass and scanty foliage of the Karabil a delight to our eyes, and our horses found it adequate for forage. After the lifeless desert, that plateau seemed to us to teem with wildlife. There were coveys of quail, and flocks of a red-legged partridge, and everywhere marmots peeking from their burrows and whistling peevishly at our passing. There were migrant geese and ducks wintering there, or at least passing through: a kind of goose with a barred head-feathering, and a duck of lovely russet and gold plumage. There were multitudes of brown lizards, some of them so immense—longer than my leg—that they frequently startled our horses.

There were herds of several different sorts of delicate qazèl, and of a large and handsome wild ass, called in that region the kulan. When we first saw it, my father said that he almost wished we could stop and capture some, and tame them, and take them back to the West for sale, as they would fetch a far better price than the mules which noblemen and ladies buy for their mounts. The kulan is veritably as big as a mule, and has the same jug head and short tail, but it is of an extraordinarily rich dark-brown coat with a pale belly, and it is beautiful. A man can never tire of watching the herds of them swiftly running and frisking and wheeling in unison. But the Karabil natives told us the kulan cannot be tamed and ridden; they value it only for its edible flesh.

We ourselves, and Uncle Mafio especially, did much hunting on that stage of our journey, to supplement our travel rations. In Mashhad we had each procured a compact Mongol-style bow and the short arrows for it, and my uncle had practiced until he was expert with that weapon. As a rule, we tried to shy clear of the herds of qazèl and kulan, for we feared they might be attended by other hunters: wolves or lions, which also abound in the Karabil. But we did occasionally risk stalking a herd, and several times brought down a qazèl, and once a kulan. Almost every day we could count on getting a goose or duck or quail or partridge. That fresh meat would have been eminently enjoyable, except for one thing.

I forget what was the first creature we brought down with an arrow, or which of us it was who got it. But when we started to carve it for spitting over our fire, we discovered that it was riddled with some kind of small blind insects, dozens of them, alive and wriggling, snugged between the skin and flesh. Disgusted, we flung it aside and made do that night with a desert-type dried-food meal. But the very next day, we brought down some other sort of game, and found it identically infested. I do not know what demon afflicts every living wild creature of the Karabil. The natives we asked could not tell us, and seemed not to care, and even expressed disdain of our queasiness. So, since all our subsequently bagged game was similarly crawly, we forced ourselves to pick out the vermin and cook and eat the meat, and it did not make us ill, and eventually we came to regard the matter as commonplace.

Another thing we might have thought bothersome—but which, after the desert, we found rather exhilarating—was that three times during our traverse of the Karabil we had to cross a river. As I recall, their names were the Tedzhen, the Kushka and the Takhta. They were not wide waters, but they were cold and deep and fast-running, tumbling down from the Paropamisus heights to the Karakum flats, where eventually they would seep into the Black Sands and disappear. At each riverside we found a karwansarai, and each provided a ferry service, of a sort I found amusing. Our horses we simply unsaddled and unloaded and let swim across the rivers, which they did with aplomb. But we travelers were taken across, one at time, with our packs, by a ferryman plying a peculiar kind of raft called a masak. Each of those craft was not much bigger than a tub and consisted of a light framework of wood, supported by a score or so of inflated goatskins.

A masak was ludicrous looking, with all the tied-off stumps of goat legs poking up among its framing poles, but I learned that there was a reason for that. Those rivers ran briskly, and the men paddling had little control over something as awkward as a masak, so it yawed and rocked and revolved and pitched wildly as it went careening on a long diagonal from one shore to the other. Each crossing took quite a while, during which time the inflated goatskins leaked and bubbled and whistled. When the masak began to get alarmingly low in the water, the ferryman would stop paddling, untie the goat legs and vigorously blow into the hide bags, one after another, until they were buoyant again, and then deftly retie them. I should amend my earlier remark and say I found that an amusing mode of ferriage after I was on each occasion put safely aground on the other side. During the turbulent crossings, I had other feelings—compounded of giddiness, wetness, coldness, sea-sickness and expectation of imminent drowning.

At the Kushka ferry, I remember, another karwan party was preparing to cross, and we watched and wondered how it would manage, for it was traveling in a number of horse-drawn carts. But that did not deter the ferrymen. They unhitched the horses and sent them swimming for the far bank, and made several raft trips to transport the occupants and contents of the wagons. Then, as each cart was emptied, they eased it down the riverbank until its four wheels rested one apiece in four of the tubby little masaks, and they rowed it across in quaternion. That made a sight to see: each wagon dipping and dancing and whirling down the river, and its raftmen at each of its corners alternately paddling like Charon to make headway and puffing like Aeolus to keep the goatskins inflated.

I must remark that the riverside inns in the Karabil provided better ferriage than forage for their guests. At only one karwansarai did we have a decent meal, in fact something unique in our experience thus far: huge and tasty steaks carved from a fish caught in the river outside the door. The steaks were so tremendous that we marveled and asked permission to go into the kitchen for a look at the fish they had been cut from. It was called an ashyotr, and it was bigger than a big man, bigger than Uncle Mafio, and instead of scales it had a shell of bony plates, and beneath its long snout it had barbels like whiskers. In addition to giving edible flesh, the ashyotr yielded a black roe, each egg of seed-pearl size, and we ate some of that too, salted and pressed to make a relish called khavyah.

But at the other inns the food was awful, and there was no reason for it to be, given the abundance of game in that country. Every landlord of a karwansarai seemed to think that he must serve his guests something they had not lately been eating. Since we had been dining on such delicacies as game birds and wild qazèl does, the innkeepers fed us the mutton of domestic sheep. The Karabil is not sheep country, meaning that the meat had probably traveled as far from its point of origin as we had, to get to the karwansarai. Mutton had long since ceased to delight me, and this was dried and salted and tough, and there was no oil or vinegar or anything else to season it with, only pungent red meleghèta pepper, and it was invariably accompanied by beans boiled in sugar water. After enough such gaseous meals, we could probably have served instead of the goatskins to support the masak rafts. But, to say one good thing about the inns in the Karabil, they charged only for their human patrons, not for the karwan animals. That was because wood was hard to come by, and the beasts paid their own way by leaving their dung to be dried for fuel.

The next city of any consequence to which we came was Balkh, and in times past that had been a city of truly great consequence: the site of one of Alexander’s main encampments, a major station for karwan traders traveling the Silk Road, a city of crowded bazars and majestic temples and luxurious karwansarais. But it had stood in the path of the first waves of Mongols rampaging out of the fastnesses to the east—meaning that earliest Mongol Horde commanded by the invincible Chinghiz Khan—and in the year 1220 the Horde had stamped upon Balkh as a booted foot might stamp upon an ant nest.

It was more than half a century later that my father, my uncle, our slave and I arrived in Balkh, but the city had not even yet recovered from that disaster. Balkh was a grand and noble ruin, but it was still a ruin. It was perhaps as busy and thriving as of old, but its inns and granaries and warehouses were only slatternly buildings thrown together of the broken bricks and planks left after the ruination. They looked even more dingy and pathetic, standing as they did among the stumps of once towering columns, the tumbled remains of once mighty walls and the jagged shells of once perfect domes.

Of course, few of Balkh’s current inhabitants were old enough to have been there when Chinghiz sacked the city, or before, when it had been far-famed as Balkh Umn-al-Bulud, the “Mother of Cities.” But their sons and grandsons, who were now the proprietors of the inns and counting houses and other establishments, appeared as dazed and miserable as if the devastation had occurred only yesterday, and in their own seeing. When they spoke of the Mongols, they recited what must have been a litany committed to memory by every Balkhite: “Amdand u khandand u sokhtand u kushtand u burdand u raftand,” which means, “They came and they slew and they burned and they plundered and they seized their spoils and they went on.”

They had gone on, yes, but this whole land, like so many others, was still under tribute and allegiance to the Mongol Khanate. The glum demeanor of the Balkhites was understandable, since a Mongol garrison was still encamped nearby. Armed Mongol warriors strode through the bazàr crowds, remindful that the grandson of Chinghiz, the Khakhan Kubilai, still held his heavy boot poised over the city. And his appointed magistrates and tax collectors still peered watchfully over the shoulders of the Balkhites in their market stalls and money-changing booths.

I could say, as I have said before, and say it truthfully, that everywhere east of the Furat River basin, away back at the far western beginning of Persia, we journeyers had been traversing the lands of the Mongol Khanate. But if we had thus simplistically marked our maps—writing nothing but “Mongol Khanate” over that whole vast area of the world—we might as well not have kept up our maps at all. They would have been of little use to us or anyone else without more detail than that. We did expect to retrace our trail someday, when we returned home again, and we also hoped that the maps would be of use even after that, for the guidance of whole streams of commerce flowing back and forth between Venice and Kithai. So, every day or so, my father and uncle would get out our copy of the Kitab and, only after deliberation and consultation and final agreement, they would inscribe upon it the symbols for mountains and rivers and towns and deserts and other such landmarks.

That had now become a more necessary task than before. From the shores of the Levant all the way across Asia, to Balkh or hereabouts, the Arab mapmaker al-Idrisi had proved a dependable guide for us. As my father had long ago remarked, al-Idrisi himself must at some time have traveled through all those regions and seen them with his own eyes. But, from the vicinity of Balkh on eastward, al-Idrisi seemed to have relied on hearsay information from other travelers, and not very observant travelers at that. The Kitab’s more easterly map pages were notably empty of landmarks, and what major things it did show—things like rivers and mountain ranges—frequently turned out to be incorrectly located.

“Also, the maps from here on seem exceedingly small,” said my father, frowning at those pages.

“Yes, by God,” said my uncle, scratching and coughing. “There is an almighty lot more land than he indicates, between here and the eastern ocean.”

“Well,” said my father. “We must be that much more assiduous in our own mapping.”

He and Uncle Mafio could usually agree, without long debate, on the penning-in of mountains and waters and towns and deserts, because those were things we could see and judge the measure of. What required deliberation and discussion, and sometimes sheer guesswork, was the drawing-in of invisible things, which is to say the borders of nations. That was maddeningly difficult, and only partly because the spread of the Mongol Khanate had engulfed so many once-independent states and nations and even whole races as to render immaterial—except to a mapmaker—the question of where they had been, and where they had abutted, and where the lines between them had lain. It would have been difficult even if some native of each nation had come with us to pace off the bounds of it for us. I daresay that would be a troublesome job on our own Italian peninsula, where no two city-states can yet agree on each other’s limits of ownership and authority. But in central Asia the extents of the nations and their frontiers and even their names have been in flux since long before the Mongols made those matters moot.

I shall illustrate. Somewhere during our long traverse from Mashhad to Balkh, we had crossed the invisible line which, in Alexander’s time, marked the division between two lands known as Arya and Bactria. Now it marks—or at least it did until the Mongols came—the division between the lands of Greater Persia and Greater India. But let me pretend for a moment that the Mongol Khanate does not exist, and try to give some idea of the confusion attendant throughout history on that imprecise border.

India may once have been inhabited in all its vastness by the small, dark people we now know as the Indians. But long ago the incursions of more vigorous and courageous peoples pushed those original Indians into a smaller and smaller compass of land, so that nowadays the Hindu India lies far distant to the south and east of here. This northern India Aryana is the habitat of the descendants of those long-ago invaders, and they are not of the Hindu but of the Muslim religion. Every least tribe calls itself a nation and gives its nation a name and asserts that its nation has mappable borders. Most of the names hereabout end in -stan, which signifies “land of”—Khaljistan, meaning Land of the Khalji, and Pakhtunistan and Kohistan and Afghanistan and Nuristan and I disremember how many others.

In olden time, it was somewhere in this area, in either the then-Arya or the then-Bactria, that Alexander the Great, during his eastward march of conquest, met and fell enamored of and took to wife the Princess Roxana. Nobody can say exactly where that happened, or of what tribe’s “royal family” Roxana was a member. But nowadays and hereabout, every one of the local tribes—Pakhtuni, Khalji, Afghani, Kirghiz and every other—claims descent from, first, the royal line which produced Roxana and, also, the Macedonians of Alexander’s army. There may even be some cause for those claims. Although the greater number of people one sees in Balkh and its environs possess dark hair and skin and eyes, which presumably Roxana also had, there are among them many persons of fair complexion and blue or gray eyes and reddish or even yellow hair.

However, each tribe purports to be the only true descendants, and on that basis claims sole sovereignty over all these lands now constituting India Aryana. To me, that seemed a devious sort of reasoning, since even Alexander was a latecomer here, and an unwelcome marauder, so all the natives here—except perhaps the Princess Roxana—should have felt about the Macedonians as they now feel about the Mongols.

The one thing we found common to all the peoples in these regions was the still later come religion of Islam. In accord with Muslim custom, then, we never got to converse with any but the male persons, and that made Uncle Mafio skeptical of their boasts of their lineage. He quoted an old Venetian couplet:

La mare xe segura

E’l pare de ventura.

Which is to say that, while a father may claim to know, only a mother can know for certain who sired each of her children.

I have recounted this tangled and disjointed bit of history merely to indicate how it added to the other frustrations of us would-be mapmakers. Whenever my father and uncle sat down together to decide the designations to ink onto our map pages, hoping to do that tidily, the discussion might go untidily thus:

“To begin with, Mafio, this land is in the portion of the Khanate governed by the Ilkhan Kaidu. But we must be more specific.”

“How specific, Nico? We do not know what Kaidu or Kubilai or any other Mongol officially calls this region. All the Western cosmographers call it merely the India Aryana of Greater India.”

“They have never set foot upon it. The Westerner Alexander did, and he called it Bactria.”

“But most of the local folk call it Pakhtunistan.”

“On the other hand, al-Idrisi has it marked as Mazar-i-Sharif.”

“Gèsu! It occupies only a thumb span of the map. Is it worth this fuss?”

“The Ilkhan Kaidu would not maintain a garrison here if the land were worthless. And the Khakhan Kubilai will wish to see how accurately we have done our maps.”

“All right.” Sigh of exasperation. “Let us give it a good thinking over … .”

2

WE dawdled in Balkh for a time, not because it was an attractive city, but because there were high mountains to the eastward, on the way we had yet to go. And now there was snow thick on the ground even here in the lower lands, so we knew the mountains would be impassable until perhaps late in the spring. Since we had to wait out the winter somewhere, we decided that our Balkh karwansarai was a comfortable enough place to spend at least part of it.

The food was good and ample and fairly various, as it should have been, at such a crossroads of commerce. There were excellent breads, and several sorts of fish, and the meat, though it was mutton, was broiled in a tasty brochette manner called shashlik. There were savory winter melons and well-kept pomegranates, besides all the usual dried fruits. There was no qahwah in those parts, but there was another hot beverage called cha, made of steeped leaves, almost as vivifying as qahwah and equally fragrant, though in a different way, and much thinner in consistency. The staple vegetable was still beans and the only other accompaniment to the meals was the everlasting rice, but we contributed a fragment of a brick of zafràn to the kitchen, and so made the rice palatable and won those cooks the praise of every other patron of that karwansarai.

Since zafràn was as much of a novelty and a nonesuch in Balkh as it had been in other places, our budgets were ample for buying anything we needed or wanted. My father traded bits of the brick and hay zafràn for coin of the realm and, when an occasional merchant pleaded eloquently enough, would even deign to sell him a culm or two or three, so the khaja could start growing his own crocus crop. For each culm, my father demanded and got a number of gems of beryl or lapis lazura, of which stones this land is the chief source in all the world, and those were worth a great deal of coin indeed. So we were nicely well-to-do, and had not yet so much as opened our cods of musk.

We bought for ourselves heavy winter clothing, wools and furs, made in the local style. In that locality, the main garment was the chapon, which, as need required, could serve either for an overcoat or for a blanket or for a tent. When worn as a coat, it hung to the ground all around and its capacious sleeves hung a good foot-length beyond the fingertips. It looked ungainly and comical, but what people really looked at was not the fit but the color of one’s chapon, for that told one’s wealth. The lighter the color of the chapon, the harder it was to keep clean, and the more frequently it had to be cleaned, and the more it cost for that cleaning, and so it signified that the man wearing it cared little for that cost, and a chapon of pure snow-white color meant that its wearer was a man so rich he could be criminally spendthrift. My father and uncle and I each settled for a chapon of a medium tan color, indicating something modestly between opulence and the dark-brown of the chapon we bought for our slave Nostril. We also donned the local style of boot, called the chamus, which had a tough but flexible leather sole, bound to a soft leather upper which reached to the knee, and was held on by thongs wrapped around the calf. We also traded our flatland saddles, and paid a goodly sum of coin besides, to buy new saddles with high pommels and cantles that would seat us more securely during upland riding.

What time we were not buying or trading in the bazàr, we put to other uses. The slave Nostril fed and curried and combed our horses to prime condition, and we Polos made conversation with other karwan journeyers. We gave them our observations on the routes to the westward of Balkh, and those of them who had come from the east told us news of the routes and travel conditions out there. My father painstakingly wrote a letter of several pages to the Dona Fiordelisa, recounting our travels and progress and assuring her of our wellbeing, and gave it to the leader of a westbound train, to start it on the long way back to Venice. I remarked that a letter might have had a better prospect of getting there if he had posted one on the other side of the Great Salt.

“I did,” he said. “I gave one to a train going west from Kashan.”

I also remarked, without rancor, that he might have apprised my mother in the same way.

“I did,” he said again. “I wrote a letter every year, to her or to Isidoro. I had no way of knowing that they never arrived. But in those days the Mongols were still actively conquering new territories, not just occupying them, and the Silk Road was an even less reliable post route than it is now.”

In the evenings, he and my uncle put much devoted labor, as I have said, into bringing our maps up to date and place, and I did the same with my log papers of notes taken so far.

While doing that, I came upon the names of the Princesses Moth and Sunlight, away back in Baghdad, and I was made acutely aware that I had not lain with a woman since that long ago. Not that I really needed reminding; I had got quite tired of the only substitute: waging a war of the priests in the middle of every other night or so. But I have mentioned that the Mongols, having no perceptible organized religion of their own, do not interfere with the religions practiced by their tributary peoples; neither do they interfere with the laws observed by those peoples. So Balkh was still of Islam, and still abided by the sharaiyah, the law of Islam, and all of Balkh’s resident females either stayed at home in close pardah or walked abroad only in chador-muffled invisibility. For me to have brashly approached one would have meant, first, chancing the possibility that she was an aged crone like Sunlight, and worse, chancing the likely wrath of her menfolk or the imams and muftis of Islamic law.

Nostril, of course, had found one of his usual perverse (but lawful) outlets for his animal urges. In every karwan train that stopped at Balkh, each Muslim man who did not have an accompanying wife or concubine, or two or three of each, had his kuch-i-safari. That term also signifies “traveling wives,” but those really were boys, carried along to be used for wifely purposes, and there was no sharaiyah prohibition against strangers paying for a share of their favors. I knew that Nostril had hastened to do just that, for he had wheedled from me the money for it. But I was not tempted to emulate him. I had seen the kuch-i-safari, and had seen none among them to compare even remotely with the late Aziz.

So I went on wanting and wishing and lusting, and finding nothing to lust for. I could only stare hard at every walking heap I passed on the streets, and try in vain to descry what sort of female was inside that bale of clothing. Even doing no more than that, I was risking the outrage of the Balkhites. They call that idle ogling “Eve-baiting,” and condemn it as vicious.

Meanwhile, Uncle Mafìo was also being celibate, almost ostentatiously so. For a while, I assumed it was because he was still grieving for Aziz. But it was soon evident that he was simply becoming too physically weak to engage in any dalliance. His persistent cough had been for some time past getting insistent. Now it would come upon him in such racking spells as to leave him feeble afterwards, and compel him to take bed rest. He looked hale enough, and he seemed still as robust as ever, and his color was good. But now, when he began to find it intolerably tiring just to walk from our karwansarai to the bazàr and back, my father and I overrode his protestations and called in a hakim.

Now, that word hakim merely means “wise,” not necessarily educated in medicine or professionally qualified or experienced, and it may be given as a title to one who deserves it—say, the trusted physician to a palace court—or to one who may not, like a bazàr tomorrow-teller or an old beggar who gathers and sells herbs. So we were a trifle apprehensive about finding in these parts a person of real mèdego skill. We had seen many Balkhites with all too obvious afflictions—the most numerous being men with dangling goiters, like scrotums or melons, under their jawhne—and that did not much inspire us with confidence in the local medicinal arts. But our karwansarai keeper fetched for us a certain Hakim Khosro, and we put Uncle Mafìo in his hands.

He seemed to know what he was doing. He had to make only a brief examination diagnostic to tell my father, “Your brother is suffering from the hasht nafri. That means one-of-eight, and we call it that because one of eight will die of it. But even those mortally stricken do not often die until after a long time. The jinni of that disease is in no hurry. Your brother tells me he has had this condition for some while, and it has worsened only gradually.”

“The tisichezza it is, then,” said my father, nodding solemnly. “Where we come from, it is sometimes also called the subtle sickness. Can it be cured?”

“Seven times out of eight, yes,” said Hakim Khosro cheerfully enough. “To begin, I will need certain things from the kitchen.”

He called on the landlord to bring him eggs and millet seed and barley flour. Then he wrote some words on a number of bits of paper—“powerful verses from the Quran,” he said—and stuck those papers onto Uncle Mafio’s bare chest with dabs of egg yolk into which he had mixed the millet seed—“the jinni of this ailment seems to have some affinity to millet seeds.” Then he had the innkeeper help him sprinkle and rub flour all over my uncle’s torso, and rolled a number of goatskins tightly around him, explaining that this was “to promote the active sweating-out of the jinni’s poisons.”

“Malevolenza,” growled my uncle. “I cannot even scratch my itching elbow.”

Then he began coughing. Either the flour dust or the excessive heat inside the goatskins sent him into a fit of coughing that was worse than ever. His arms being pinioned by the wrapping, he could not pummel his chest for relief, or even cover his mouth, so the coughing went on until it seemed he would strangle, and his ruddy face got more red, and he sprayed little flecks of blood onto the hakim’s white aba. After some time of that agony, he turned pale and swooned dead away, and I thought he had strangled.

“No, be not alarmed, young man,” said Hakim Khosro. “This is nature’s means of cure. The jinni of this disease will not trouble a victim when he is not conscious of being troubled. You notice, when your uncle is in the faint, he does not cough.”

“He has only to die, then,” I said skeptically, “and he is permanently cured of coughing.”

The hakim laughed, unoffended, and said, “Be not suspicious either. The hasht nafri can only be arrested in nature’s good time, and I can but lend assistance to nature. See, he wakes now, and the fit has passed.”

“Gèsu,” Uncle Mafio muttered weakly.

“For now,” the hakim went on, “the best prescriptive is rest and perspiration. He is to stay in bed except when he must go to the mustarah, and that he will do frequently, for I am also giving him a strong purgative. There are always jinn hiding in the bowels, and it does no harm to get rid of them. So, each time the patient returns from the mustarah to bed, one of you—since I will not always be here—must dust him with a new coating of barley flour and rewrap the skins about him. I will look in from time to time, to write new verses to be pasted on his chest.”

So my father and I and the slave Nostril took turns tending Uncle Mafio. But that was no onerous duty—except for having to listen to his continuous grumbling about his enforced prostration—and after a while my father decided he might as well make another use of our stay in Balkh. He would leave Mafio in my keeping, and he and Nostril would travel to the capital city of these regions, to pay our respects to the local ruler (whose title was Sultan) and make us known to him as emissaries of the Khakhan Kubilai. Of course, that city was only nominally a capital, and its sovereign Sultan was, like the Shah Zaman of Persia, only a token ruler, subordinate to the Mongol Khanate. But the journey would also enable my father to embellish our maps with further details and modern designations. For example, our Kitab gave the name of that city as Kophes, and it was Nikaia in Alexander’s time, but nowadays and hereabout we heard it always called Kabul. So my father and Nostril saddled two of our horses and prepared to ride there.

The evening before they departed, Nostril sidled up to me. He had apparently taken notice of my lovelorn and forlorn condition, and perhaps he hoped to keep me out of trouble while I was left on my own in Balkh. He said:

“Master Marco, there is a certain house here in this city. It is the house of a Gebr, and I would have you look at it.”

“A Gebr?” I said. “Is that some sort of rare beast?”

“Not all that rare, but bestial, yes. A Gebr is one of the unregenerate Persians who never accepted the enlightenment of the Prophet (blessing and peace be upon him). Those people still worship Ormuzd, the discredited old-time god of fire, and engage in many wicked practices.”

“Oh,” I said, losing interest. “Why should I look at the house of yet another misbegotten heathen religion?”

“Because this Gebr, not being bound by Muslim law, expectably flouts all decencies. In front, his building is a shop vending articles made of amianthus, but in the rear it is a house of assignation, let by the Gebr to illicit lovers for their clandestine meetings. By the beard, it is an abomination!”

“What would you have me do about it? Go yourself and report it to a mufti.”

“No doubt I should, being a devout Muslim, but I will not yet. Not until you have verified the Gebr’s abomination, Master Marco.”

“I? What the devil do I care about it?”

“Are not you Christians even more scrupulous about other people’s decencies?”

“I do not abominate lovers,” I said, with a self-pitying sniffle. “I envy them. Would that I had one of my own to take to the Gebr’s back door.”

“Well, he also perpetrates another offense against morality. For those who do not have a convenient lover, the Gebr keeps two or three young girls in residence and available for hire.”

“Hm. This does begin to sound like a matter for reprobation. You did right to bring it to my attention, Nostril. Now, if you could point out that house, I would suitably reward your almost Christian vigilance … .”

And so the next day, a day when snow was falling, after he and my father had ridden off to the southeastward, and after I had made sure Uncle Mafio was well snugged in his goatskins, I walked into the shop Nostril had shown me. There was a counter piled with bolts and swatches of some heavy cloth, and also on it was a stone bowl of naft oil feeding a wick burning with a bright yellow flame, and behind the counter stood an elderly Persian with a red-hinna’ed beard.

“Show me your softest goods,” I said, as Nostril had instructed me to say.

“Room on the left,” said the Gebr, jerking his beard at a beaded curtain at the back of the shop. “One dirham.”

“I should like,” I specified, “a beautiful piece of goods.”

He sneered. “You show me a beautiful one among these country rustics, I will pay you. Be glad the goods are clean. One dirham.”

“Oh, well, any water to put out a fire,” I said. The man glowered as if I had spat at him, and I realized that was not the most tactful thing to say to a person who allegedly worshiped fire. I hastily laid my coin on the counter and pushed through the rattling curtain.

The little room was hung all about with locust twigs, for their sweet scent, and was furnished only with a charcoal brazier and a charpai, which is a crude bed made of a wooden frame laced crisscross with ropes. The girl was no prettier of face than the only other female I had paid to use, that boat girl Malgarita. This one was plainly of some local tribe, for she spoke the prevailing Pashtun tongue, and had a woefully scant vocabulary of Trade Farsi. If she told me her name, I did not catch it, because anybody speaking Pashtun sounds as if he or she is rapidly and repeatedly and simultaneously clearing the throat, spitting and sneezing.

But the girl was, as the Gebr had claimed, rather more cleanly of person than Malgarita had been. In fact, she made unmistakable complaint that I was not, and with some reason. In coming here, I had not worn my new-bought clothes; they were too bulky and difficult to get out of and into. I was wearing the garments I had worn while crossing the Great Salt and the Karabil, and I daresay they were markedly odoriferous. They were certainly so caked with dust and sweat and dirt and salt that they could almost stand upright even when I got out of them.

The girl held them at arm’s length, by her fingertips, and said, “dirty-dirty!” and “dahb!” and “bohut purana!” and several other gargled Pashtun noises indicative of revulsion. “I send yours, mine together, be clean.”

She swiftly took off her own clothes, bundled them with mine, bawled what was evidently a call for a servant, and handed the bundle out the door. I confess that my attention was mainly on the first naked female body I had seen since Kashan; nevertheless, I noticed that the girl’s clothing was made of a material so coarse and thick that, though cleaner than mine, it also could almost have stood alone.

The girl’s body was more fetching than her face, it being slim but bearing amazingly large, round, firm breasts for such a slender figure. I assumed that that was one reason why the girl had chosen a career in which she would cater mainly to transient infidels. Muslim men are better attracted by a big fundament, and do not much admire women’s breasts, regarding them only as milk spouts. Anyway, I hoped the girl would make her fortune in her chosen career while she was still young and shapely. Every woman of those “Alexandrine” tribes, well before middle age, grows so gross in the rest of her physique that her once-splendid bosom becomes just one of a series of fleshy shelves descending from her several chins to her several rolls of abdomen.

Another reason why I hoped the girl would make a fortune was that her chosen career was clearly no pleasure to her. When I attempted to share with her the enjoyment of the sexual act, by arousing her with fondling of her zambur, I found she had none. At the arch tip of her mihrab, where the tiny tuning key should have been, there was no slightest protrusion. For a moment I thought she was pathetically deformed, but then I realized that she was tabzir, as Islam demands. She had nothing there but a fissure of soft scar tissue. That lack may have diminished my own delight in my several ejaculations, because every time I approached spruzzo and she cried, “Ghi, ghi, ghi-ghi!”—meaning “Yes, yes, yes-yes!”—I was aware that she was only feigning an ecstasy of her own, and I thought it sad. But who am I to call criminal other people’s religious observances? Besides, I soon discovered that I had a lack of my own to worry about.

The Gebr came and banged on the outside of the door, shouting, “What do you want for a single dirham, eh?”

I had to concede that I had had my money’s worth, so I let the girl get up. She went, still naked, out the door to fetch a pan of water and a towel, meanwhile calling down the corridor for the return of our laundered clothes. She set the pan of tamarind-scented water on the room’s brazier to warm, and was using it to wash my parts when the next knock came on the door. But the servant handed in only the girl’s garments, with a long spate of Pashtun that must have been an explanation. The girl came back to me, an unreadable expression on her face, and said tentatively, as if asking a question, “Your clothes burn?”

“Yes, I suppose they would. Where are they?”

“No got,” she said, showing me that she had only her own.

“Ah, you do not mean burn. You mean dry. Is that it? Mine are not dry yet?”

“No. Gone. Your clothes all burn.”

“What does that mean? You said they would be washed.”

“Not wash. Clean. Not in water. In fire.”

“You put my clothes in a fire? They have burned?”

“Ghi.”

“Are you a fire worshiper too, or are you just divanè? You sent them to be washed in fire instead of water? Olà, Gebr! Persian! Olà, whoremaster!”

“No make trouble!” the girl pleaded, looking scared. “I give you dirham back.”

“I cannot wear a dirham across the city! What kind of lunatic place is this? Why did you people burn my clothes?”

“Wait. Look.” She snatched up a piece of unburned charcoal from the brazier and gave it a swipe across a sleeve of her own tunic to make a black mark. Then she held the sleeve over the burning coals.

“You are divanè!” I exclaimed. But the cloth did not take fire. There was only a single flash as the black mark burned away. The girl took the sleeve from the fire to show me how it was suddenly spotless, and babbled a mixture of Pashtun and Farsi, of which I gradually got the import. That heavy and mysterious fabric was always cleaned in that manner, and my clothes had been so crusty that she had taken them to be of the same material.

“All right,” I said. “I forgive you. It was a well-intentioned mistake. But I am still without anything to wear. Now what?”

She indicated that I could choose which of two things I would do. I could lodge a complaint with the Gebr master, and demand that he procure new raiment for me, which would cost the girl her day’s wages and probably a beating besides. Or I could put on what clothes were available—meaning some of hers—and go across the city of Balkh in feminine masquerade. Well, that meant no choice at all; I must be a gentleman; therefore I must play the lady.

I scuttled out through the shop as fast as I could, but I was still adjusting my chador veil, and the old Gebr behind the counter raised his eyebrows, exclaiming, “You took me seriously! You are showing me a beautiful one among these country rustics!”

I snarled at him one of the few Pashtun expressions I knew: “Bahi chut!” which is a directive to do something to one’s own sister.

He guffawed and called after me, “I would, if she were as pretty as you!” while I scurried out into the still falling snow.

Except for stumbling now and then, because I could see the ground only dimly through the obscuring snow and my chador, and also because I frequently stepped on my own hems, I got back to the karwansarai without incident. That disappointed me a little, for I had gone the whole way with my teeth and fists clenched and my temper seething, hoping to be rudely addressed or winked at by some Eve-baiting oaf, so I could kill him. I slipped into the inn by a rear door, unobserved, and hurried to put on clothes of my own, and started to throw away the girl’s. But then I reconsidered, and cut from her gown a square of the cloth to keep for a curiosity, and with it I have since astonished many persons disinclined to believe that any cloth could be proof against fire.

Now, I had heard of such a substance long before I left Venice. I had heard priests tell that the Pope at Rome kept among the treasured relics of the Church a sudarium, a cloth which had been used to wipe the Holy Brow of Jesus Christ. The cloth had been so sanctified by that use, they said, that it could nevermore be destroyed. It could be thrown into a fire, and left there for a long time, and taken out again miraculously entire and unscorched. I also had heard a distinguished physician contest the priestly claim that it was the Holy Sweat which made the sudarium impervious to destruction. He insisted that the cloth must be woven of the wool of the salamander, that creature which Aristotle averred lives comfortably in fire.

I will respectfully contradict both the reverent believers and the pragmatic Aristotelian. For I took the trouble to inquire about that unburnable fabric woven by the Gebr fire worshipers, and eventually I was shown how it is made, and the truth of the matter is this. In the mountains in the region of Balkh is found a certain rock of palpable softness. When that rock is crushed, it comes apart not in grains, as of sand, but in fibers, as of raw flax. And those fibers, after repeated mashing and drying and washing and drying again and carding and spindling, are spun together into thread. It is clear that of any thread a cloth can be woven, and it is equally clear that a cloth made of earth’s rock ought not burn. The curious rock and the coarse fiber and the magical material woven of it, all are regarded by the Gebr as sacred to their fire god Ahura Mazda, and they call that substance by a word meaning “unsoilable stone,” which I take the liberty of rendering in a more civilized tongue as amianthus.

3

MY father and Nostril were gone for some five or six weeks, and, because Uncle Mafio required my attendance only intermittently, I had a good deal of spare time on my hands. So I went back several times to the house of the Gebr Persian—each time taking care to wear clothes that would not need “laundering.” And every time I spoke the password, “Show me your softest goods,” the old man would convulse with amusement and roar, “Why, you were the softest and most appealing piece that ever passed through this shop!” and I would have to stand and endure his guffaws until he finally subsided into giggles and took my dirham and told me which room was available.

At one time or another, I sampled all three of his back-room wares. But all the girls were Pakhtuni Muslims and tabzir, meaning that I found only release with them, not any satisfaction worth mentioning. I could have done that with the kuch-i-safari, and more cheaply. I did not even learn more than a few words of Pashtun from the girls, deeming it too slovenly a language to be worth learning. Just for example, the sound gau, when spoken normally on an exhaled breath, means “cow,” but the same gau, spoken while breathing in, means “calf.” So imagine what the simple sentence “The cow has a calf” sounds like in Pashtun, and then try to imagine conducting a conversation of any more complexity.

On my way out through the amianthus-cloth shop, though, I would pause to exchange some few words in Farsi with the Gebr proprietor. He would usually make some further mocking remarks about the day I had had to masquerade as a woman, but he would also condescend to answer my questions about his peculiar religion. I asked because he was the only devotee of that old-time Persian religion I had ever met. He admitted that there were few believers left in these days, but he maintained that the religion once had reigned supreme, not only in Persia but west and east of there as well, from Armeniya to Bactria. And the first thing he told me about it was that I should not call a Gebr a Gebr.

“The word means only ‘non-Muslim’ and it is used by the Muslims derisively. We prefer to be called Zarduchi, for we are the followers of the prophet Zaratushtra, the Golden Camel. It was he who taught us to worship the god Ahura Mazda, whose name is nowadays slurred to Ormuzd.”

“And that means fire,” I said knowledgably, for Nostril had told me that much. I nodded toward the bright lamp that always burned in the shop.

“Not fire,” he said, sounding annoyed. “It is a stupid misbelief that we worship fire. Ahura Mazda is the God of Light, and we merely keep a flame burning as a reminder of His beneficent light which banishes the darkness of his adversary Ahriman.”

“Ah,” I said. “Not too different, then, from our own Lord God, Who contends against the adversary Satan.”

“No, not different at all. Your Christian God and Satan you got from the Jews, as the Muslims derived their Allah and Shaitan. And the God and the Devil of the Jews were frankly patterned on our Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. So were your God’s angels and your Satan’s demons copied from our celestial malakhim messengers and their daeva counterparts. So were your Heaven and Hell copied from Zaratushtra’s teachings about the nature of the afterlife.”

“Oh, come now!” I protested. “I hold no brief for the Jews or the Muslims, but the True Religion cannot have been a mere imitation of somebody else’s—”

He interrupted, “Look at any picture of a Christian deity or angel or saint. He or she is portrayed with a glowing halo, is that not so? It is a pretty fancy, but it was our fancy first. That halo imitates the light of our ever-burning flame, which in turn signifies the light of Ahura Mazda forever shining on His messengers and holy ones.”

That sounded likely enough that I could not dispute it, but neither would I concede it, of course. He went on:

“That is why we Zardushi have for centuries been persecuted and derided and dispersed and driven into exile. By Muslims and Jews and Christians alike. A people who pride themselves on possessing the only true religion must pretend that it came to them through some exclusive revelation. They do not like to be reminded that it merely derives from some other people’s original.”

I went back to the karwansarai that day, thinking: the Church is perhaps wise to demand faith and forbid reason in Christians. The more questions I ask, and the more answers I get, the less I seem to know of anything for certain. As I walked along, I scooped up a handful of snow from a snowbank I was passing, and I wadded it to a snowball. It was round and solid, like a certainty. But if I looked at it closely enough, its roundness really was a dense multitude of points and corners. If I held it long enough, its solidness would melt to water. That is the hazard in curiosity, I thought: all the certainties fragment and dissolve. A man curious enough and persistent enough might find even the round and solid ball of earth to be not so. He might be less proud of his faculty of reasoning when it left him with nothing whereon to stand. But then again, was not the truth a more solid foundation than illusion?

I forget whether it was on that day or another that I got back to the karwansarai to find that my father and Nostril had returned from their journey. The Hakim Khosro was there, too, and they were gathered about the sickbed of Uncle Mafio, all talking at once.

“ … Not in the city called Kabul. The Sultan Kutb-ud-Din now has a capital far to the southeast of there, a city called Delhi … .”

“No wonder you were gone so long,” said my uncle.

“ … Had to cross the vasty mountains, through a pass called the Khaibar …”

“ … Then clear across the land called Panjab …”

“Or properly Panch Ab,” the hakim put in, “meaning Five Rivers.”

“ … But worth the effort. The Sultan, like the Shah of Persia, was eager to send gifts of tribute and fealty to the Khakhan … .”

“ … So we now have an extra horse, laden with objects of gold and Kashmir cloth and rubies and …”

“But more important,” said my father, “how fares our patient Mafìo?”

“Empty,” growled my uncle, scratching his elbow. “From one end I have coughed out all my sputum, from the other I have spewed out every last turd and fart, and in between I have sweated out every last bead of perspiration. I am also infernally tired of being stuck all over wih paper charms and powdered all over like a bignè bun.”

“Otherwise, his condition is unchanged,” the Hakim Khosro said soberly. “My efforts to assist nature in a cure have not availed much. I am happy you are all together again, for I now wish you all to go from this place, and take the patient even closer to nature. Up, into the high mountains to the east, where the air is more clear and pure.”

“But cold,” my father objected. “As cold as charity. Can that be good for him?”

“Cold air is the cleanest air,” said the hakim. “I have determined that, by close observation and professional study. Witness: people who live in always cold climates, like the Russniaks, are a clean white of skin color; in hot climates, like the Indian Hindus, dirty brown or black. We Pakhtuni, living midway, are a sort of tan color. I urge you to take the patient, and take him soon, to those cold, clean, white mountain heights.”

When the hakim and we helped Uncle Mafio get up and get out of the goatskin wrappings and get dressed for the first time in weeks, we were dismayed to see how thin he had become. He looked even taller in his suddenly oversized clothes than he had seemed before, when his burliness had strained his clothes at the seams. He was also pale instead of ruddy, and his limbs were tremulous from disuse, but he proclaimed himself tremendously glad to be up and about. And later, in the hall of the karwansarai, when we dined that night, he bellowed to the other diners, in a voice as stentorian as ever, asking for the latest word on the mountain trails to the eastward.

Men from several other karwan trains responded, and told us of current conditions, and gave us much advice relevant to mountain travel. Or we hoped the advice was relevant, but we could not be sure, since no two of our informants seemed to agree on even the name of those mountains east of here.

One man said, “Those are the Himalaya, the Abode of the Snows. Before you go up into them, buy a phial of poppy juice to carry. In case of snowblindness, a few drops in the eyes will relieve the pain.”

And another man said, “Those are the Karakoram, the Black Mountains, the Cold Mountains. And the snow-fed waters up there are cold at all seasons of the year. Do not let your horses drink, except from a pail in which you have warmed the water a little, or they will be convulsed by cramps.”

And another said, “Those are the mountains called Hindu Kush, the Hindu Killers. In that hard terrain, a horse sometimes gets rebellious and unmanageable. Should that occur, simply tie the hair of the horse’s tail to its tongue, and it will quieten on the instant.”

And another said, “Those mountains are the Pai-Mir, meaning the Way to the Peaks. The only forage your horses will find yonder is the slate-colored, strong-smelling little shrub called burtsa. But your horses will always find it for you, and it is also good fuel for a fire, being naturally full of oil. Oddly enough, the greener it looks, the better the burtsa burns.”

And another said, “Those mountains are the Khwaja, the Masters. And up there the Masters make it impossible for you to lose your direction, even in the thickest storm. Just remember that every mountain is barren on its south face. If you see any trees or shrubs or growth at all, it is on the mountain’s north face.”

And another said, “Those mountains are the Muztagh, the Keepers. Try to get completely through and out of them before spring becomes summer, for then begins the Bad-i-sad-o-bist, the terrible Wind of One Hundred and Twenty Days.”

And yet another man said, “Those mountains are Solomon’s Throne, the Takht-i-Sulaiman. If you should encounter a whirlwind up there, you may be sure it issues from some cavern nearby, the den of one of the demons banished into that exile by the good King Solomon. Simply find that cavern and stop it with boulders, and the wind will die.”

So we packed and we paid for our keep and we said some goodbyes to those with whom we had got acquainted and again we moved on, my father and uncle and Nostril and I, riding our four mounts and leading a packhorse and two extra packhorses loaded with a princely amount of valuables. We went straight east from Balkh, through villages named Kholm and Qonduz and Taloqan, which seemed to exist only as marketplaces for the horse breeders who inhabit that grassy region. Everybody thereabout raises horses and is continually trading breed stallions and brood mares with his neighbors at the markets. The horses are fine ones, comparable to Arabians, though not so dainty in the shape of the head. Every breeder claims that his stock are descended from Alexander’s steed Bucephalas. Every breeder makes that claim for his stock only, which is ridiculous, with all the trading that goes on. Anyway, I never saw any horses there that had the peacock tail worn by Bucephalas in the illuminations to The Book of Alexander that I had pored over in my youth.

At this season, the grazing lands were covered by snow, so we could not see how the verdure thinned out as we went eastward. But we knew it did so, because the ground under the snow got pebbly, then rocky, and the villages ceased to be, and there was only an infrequent and inadequate karwansarai along the trail. After we had passed the last village, a cluster of piled-stone huts which called itself Keshem, in the foothills preceding the mountains, we had to make our own stopping places perhaps three nights out of four. That was not an idyllic way to live, sleeping under tents and under our chapons in snow and chill and wind, and generally having to dine on dried or salted travel rations.

We had worried that the outdoor life would be especially hard on Uncle Mafio. But he made no complaint even when we healthier ones did. He maintained that he was feeling better in that sharp, cold air, as the Hakim Khosro had predicted, and his cough had lessened and did not lately bring up any blood. He allowed the rest of us to take over what heavy work had to be done, but he would not let us shorten the marches on his account, and each day he sat his saddle or, on the rougher stretches, walked beside his horse, as indefatigably as any of us. We were not hurrying, anyway, for we knew we would have to halt for the rest of the winter as soon as we came up against the mountain ramparts. Also, after a while on that hard trail, living on hard rations, the rest of us were nearly as gaunt as Uncle Mafio was, and not eager to exert ourselves. Only Nostril kept his paunch, but it looked now less integral to him, like a separate melon he was carrying under his clothes.

When we came to the Ab-e-Panj River, we followed its broad valley upstream to the eastward, and from then on we were going uphill, ever higher above the level of the rest of the world. To speak of a valley ordinarily brings to mind a depression in the earth, but that one is many farsakhs wide and is lower only in relation to the mountains that rise far off on either side of it. If it were anywhere else in the world, that valley would not be on the world, but immeasurably far above it, high among the clouds, unseeable by mortal eyes, unattainable, like Heaven. Not that the valley resembles Heaven in any way, I hasten to say, it being cold and hard and inhospitable, not balmy and soft and welcoming.

The landscape was unvarying: the wide valley of tumbled rocks and scrub growth, all humped under quilts of snow; the white-water river running through; and far away on both sides the tooth-white, tooth-sharp mountains. Nothing ever changed there but the light, which ranged from sunrises colored like gilded peaches to sunsets colored like roses on fire, and, in between, skies so blue they were near to purple, except when the valley was roofed by clouds of wet gray wool wringing out snow or sleet.

The ground was nowhere level, being all a clutter of boulders and rocks and talus that we had to thread our way around or gingerly make our way across. But, apart from those ups and downs, our continuous climb was imperceptible to our sight, and we might almost have supposed that we were still on the plains. For, each night when we stopped to camp, the mountains on either horizon seemed identically high to those of the night before. But that was only because the mountains were getting higher, the farther we climbed that up-sloping valley. It was like going up a staircase where the banister always keeps pace with you and, if you do not look over, you do not realize that everything beyond is dropping down and away from you.

Nevertheless, we had various means of knowing that we were climbing all the time. One was the behavior of our horses. We two-legged creatures, when we occasionally dismounted to walk for a while, might not have been physically aware that each step forward was also a trifle higher, but the animals with legs fore and aft knew well that they always stood or moved at an incline. And, horses having good sense, they slyly exaggerated their trudging walk to make it seem a plodding labor, so that we would not press them to move faster.

Another indicator of the climb was the river running the length of the valley. The Ab-e-Panj, we had been told, is one of the headwater sources of the Oxus, that great river which Alexander crossed and recrossed, and in his Book it is described as immensely broad and slow-running and tranquil. However, that is far to the west and downhill of where we were now. The Ab-e-Panj alongside our trail was not wide nor deep, but it raced through that valley like an endless stampede of white horses, tossing white manes and tails. It even sounded sometimes more like a stampede than a river, the noise of its cascading water being often lost in the scrape and grate and rumble of the sizable boulders it rolled and jostled along its bed. A blind man could have told that the Abe-Panj was hurtling downhill and, for it to have such momentum, the river’s uphill end had to be somewhere far higher yet. In this winter season, certainly, the river could not for a moment have slowed its tumultuous pace, or it would have frozen solid, and there might not have existed any Oxus downstream. This was apparent, because every splash and spatter and lick of the water on the rock banks instantly turned to blue-white ice. Since that made the footing close to the river even more treacherous than the snow-covered ground—and also because every splash of the water that reached us froze on our horses’ legs and flanks, or on ours—we kept our trail well to one side of the river wherever we could.

Still another indicator of our continuous climb was the noticeable thinning of the very air. Now, I have been often disbelieved, and even jeered, when I have told of this to non-journeyers. I know as well as they do that air is weightless at all times, impalpable except when it moves as wind. When the disbelievers demanded to know how an element without the least weight can have less weight yet, I cannot tell them how, or why; I only know it does. It gets less and less substantial in those upland heights, and there are evidences to show it.

For one, a man has to breathe deeper to fill his lungs. This is not the panting occasioned by fast movement or brisk exercise; a man standing still has to do it. When I exerted myself—loading a horse’s packsaddle, say, or clambering over a boulder blocking the trail—I had to breathe so fast and hard and deep that it seemed I never would get enough air into me to sustain me. Some disbelievers have dismissed that as a delusion fostered by tedium and hardship, of which God knows we had enough to contend with, but I maintain that the insubstantial air was a very real thing. I will additionally adduce the fact that Uncle Mafio, though he like all of us had to breathe deep, was not so frequently or painfully afflicted by the need to cough. Clearly, the thin air of the heights lay not so heavily in his lungs and did not so often have to be forcibly expelled.

I have other evidence. Fire and air, both being weightless, are the closest-related of the four elements; everybody will concede that. And in the high lands where the air is feebler, so is fire. It burns more blue and dim than yellow and bright. This was not just a result of our having to burn the local burtsa shrub for fuel; I experimented with burning other and more familiar things, like paper, and the resultant flame was equally debile and languid. Even when we had a well-fueled and well-laid camp fire, it took longer to char a piece of meat or to boil a pot of water than it had done in lower lands. Not only that, the boiling water also took longer than customary to cook something put into it.

In that winter season, there were no great karwan trains on the trail, but we did meet an occasional other traveling party. Most of these were hunters and trappers of furs, moving from place to place in the mountains. The winter was their working season, and in the clement springtime they would take their accumulated stores of hides and pelts down to market in one of the lowland towns. Their shaggy little packhorses were heaped with the baled pelts of fox, wolf, pard, the urial, which is a wild sheep, and the goral, which is something between a goat and a qazèl. The hunter-trappers told us that this valley which we were climbing was called the Wakhan—or sometimes the Wakhan Corridor, because many mountain passes open off it on all sides, like doors off a corridor, and the valley constitutes both the border between and the access to all the lands beyond. To the south, they said, were passes leading out of the Corridor to lands called Chitral and Hunza and Kashmir, in the east leading to a land called To-Bhot, and in the north to the land of Tazhikistan.

“Ah, Tazhikistan is yonder?” said my father, turning to gaze to the north. “Then we are not too far now, Mafio, from the route we took homeward.”

“True,” said my uncle, sounding tired and relieved. “We have only to go through Tazhikistan, then a short way east to the city of Kashgar, and we are again in Kubilai’s Kithai.”

On their packhorses, the hunter-trappers also carried many horns which they had taken from a kind of wild sheep called the artak, and I, having so far seen only the lesser horn-racks of such animals as the qazèl and cows and domestic sheep, was mightily impressed by those horns. At their root end they were as big around as my thigh, and from there they spiraled tightly to points. On the animal’s head, the points would be easily a man’s length apart; but if the spirals could have been unwound and stretched out straight, each of the horns must have measured a man’s length. They were such magnificent things that I supposed the hunters took them and sold them for ornaments to be admired. No, they said, laughing; those great horns were to be cut and fashioned into all manner of useful articles: eating bowls and drinking cups and saddle stirrups and even horse shoes. They averred that a horse shod with such horn shoes would never slip on the most slippery road.

(Many months later, and higher in the mountains, when I saw some of those artak sheep alive and at liberty in the wild, I thought them so splendidly beautiful that I deplored the killing of them for merely utile purposes. My father and uncle, to whom utility meant commerce and commerce meant everything, laughed as the hunters had done, and chided my sentimentality, and from that time on referred sarcastically to the artak as “Marco’s sheep.”)

As we went on up the Wakhan, the mountains on either side remained as awesomely high as ever, but now, each time the snowfall let up enough for us to raise our eyes to the mountains’ immensity, they stood perceptibly closer to us. And the banks of ice on either side of the Ab-e-Panj River built up thicker and bluer, and constricted the racing water to an ever narrower stream between them, as if vividly to illustrate how the winter was closing its grip on the land.

The mountains kept shouldering in on us day by day, and finally others reared up in front of us as well, until we had those Titans standing close all around us except at our backs. We had come to the head end of that high valley, and the snowfall ceased briefly and the clouds cleared, for us to see the white mountain peaks and the cold blue sky magnificently reflected in a tremendous frozen lake, the Chaqmaqtin. From under the ice at its western end spilled the Ab-e-Panj we had been following, so we took the lake to be the river’s source, hence also the ultimate headwater of the fabled Oxus. My father and uncle marked it so, according to their practice, on the Kitab’s otherwise imprecise map of that region. I was not any help in locating our position, as the horizon was much too high and jagged for me to make use of the kamal. But, when the night sky was clear, I could at least tell, from the height of the North Star, that we were now a far way north of where we had begun our overland march at Suvediye on the Levant shore.

At the northeastern end of Lake Chaqmaqtin stood a community that called itself a town, Buzai Gumbad, but it really comprised only a single extensive karwansarai of many buildings, and roundabout it a tent city and the corrals of karwan trains encamped for the winter. It was evident that, come better weather, almost the entire population of Buzai Gumbad would get up and vacate the Wakhàn Corridor by way of its various passes. The landlord of the karwansarai was a jolly and expansive man named Iqbal, which means Good Fortune, and the name was apt for one who prospered richly by owning the only karwan stopping place on that stretch of the Silk Road. He was a native Wakhani, he said, born right there in the inn. But, as the son and grandson and great-grandson of previous generations of Buzai Gumbad’s innkeepers, he of course spoke Trade Farsi, and had, if not experience, good hearsay knowledge of the world beyond the mountains.

Spreading his arms wide, Iqbal welcomed us most cordially to “the high Pai-Mir, the Way to the Peaks, the Roof of the World,” and then confided that his extravagant words were no exaggeration. Here, he said, we were exactly one farsakh straight up—that is, two and a half miles—above the level of the earth’s seas and such sea-level cities as Venice and Acre and Basra. Landlord Iqbal did not explain how he could know so exactly the local altitude. But, assuming he spoke true—and because the mountain peaks around us visibly stood as high again—I would not dispute his claim that we had come to the Roof of the World.