The Journeyer

KITHAI

1

THE city of Kashgar I found to be of respectable size and of sturdy-built inns and shops and residences, not the mud-brick shacks we had been seeing in Tazhikistan. Kashgar was built for permanence, because it is the western gateway of Kithai, through which all Silk Road trains coming from or going to the West must pass. And we found that no train could pass without challenge. Some farsakhs before we got to the city walls, we were waved down by a group of Mongol sentries at a guard-post on the road. Beyond their shelter we could see the countless round yurtu tents of what appeared to be an entire army camped around Kashgar’s approaches.

“Mendu, Elder Brothers,” said one of the sentries. He was a typical Mongol warrior of forbidding brawn and ugliness, hung all about with weapons, but his salute was friendly enough.

“Mendu, sain bina,” said my father.

I could not then understand all the words which were spoken, but my father later repeated the conversation to me, in translation, and told me it was the standard sort of exchange between parties meeting anywhere in Mongol country. It was odd to hear such gracious formalities spoken by a seeming brute, for the sentry went on to inquire politely, “From under what part of Heaven do you come?”

“We are from under the skies of the far West,” my father replied. “And you, Elder Brother, where do you erect your yurtu?”

“Behold, my poor tent stands now among the bok of the Ilkhan Kaidu, who is currently encamped in this place, while surveying his dominions. Elder Brother, across what lands have you cast your beneficent shadow on your way hither?”

“We come most recently from the high Pai-Mir, down this Passage River. We wintered in the estimable place called Buzai Gumbad, which is also among your master Kaidu’s territories.”

“Verily, his dominions are far-flung and many. Has peace accompanied your journey?”

“So far we have traveled safely. And you, Elder Brother, are you at peace? Are your mares fruitful, and your wives?”

“All is prosperous and peaceful in our pastures. Whither does your karwan party proceed, then, Elder Brother?”

“We plan to stop some days in Kashgar. Is the place wholesome?”

“You can there light your fire in comfort and tranquillity, and the sheep are fat for eating. Before you proceed, however, this lowly minion of the Ilkhan would be pleased to know your ultimate destination.”

“We are bound eastward, for the far capital Khanbalik, to pay our respects to your very highest lord, the Khakhan Kubilai.” My father took out the letter we had carried for so long. “Has my Elder Brother stooped to learn the clerk’s humble art of reading?”

“Alas, Elder Brother, I have not attained to that high learning,” said the man, taking the document. “But even I can perceive and recognize the Great Seal of the Khakhan. I am desolated to realize that I have impeded the peaceful passage of such dignitaries as you must be.”

“You are but doing your duty, Elder Brother. Now, if I may have the letter back, we will proceed.”

But the sentry did not give it back. “My master Kaidu is but a miserable hut to a mighty pavilion alongside his Elder Cousin the high lord Kubilai. For that reason he will yearn for the privilege of seeing his cousin’s written words, and reading them with reverence. No doubt my master will also wish to receive and greet his lordly cousin’s distinguished emissaries from the West. So, if I may, Elder Brother, I will show him this paper.”

“Really, Elder Brother,” my father said, with some impatience, “we require no pomp or ceremony. We would be pleased just to go straight on through Kashgar without causing any fuss.”

The sentry paid no heed. “Here in Kashgar, the various inns are reserved to various sorts of guests. There is a karwansarai for horse traders, another for grain merchants … .”

“We already knew that,” growled Uncle Mafio. “We have been here before.”

“Then I recommend to you, Elder Brothers, the one that is reserved for passing travelers, the Inn of the Five Felicities. It is in the Lane of Perfumed Humanity. Anyone in Kashgar can direct—”

“We know where it is.”

“Then you will be so kind as to lodge there until the Ilkhan Kaidu requests the honor of your presence in his pavilion yurtu.” He stepped back, still holding the letter, and waved us on. “Now go in peace, Elder Brothers. A good journey to you.”

When we had ridden out of the sentry’s hearing, Uncle Mafio grumbled, “Merda with a piecrust on it! Of all the Mongol armies, we ride into Kaidu’s.”

“Yes,” said my father. “To have come all this way through his lands without incident, only to come up against the man himself.”

My uncle nodded glumly and said, “This may be as far as we get.”

To explain why my father and uncle voiced annoyance and concern, I must explain some things about this land of Kithai to which we had come. First, its name is universally pronounced in the West “Cathay,” and there is nothing I can do to change that. I would not even try, because the rightly pronounced “Kithai” is itself rather an arbitrary name, bestowed by the Mongols, and only comparatively recently, only some fifty years before I was born. This land was the first the Mongols conquered in their rampage across the world, and it is where Kubilai chose to set his throne, and it is the hub of the many spokes of the Mongols’ widespread empire—just as our Venice is the holding center of our Republic’s many possessions: Thessaly and Crete and the Veneto mainland and all the rest. However, just as the Vèneti people originally came to the Venetian lagoon from somewhere out of the north, so did the Mongols come to Kithai.

“They have a legend,” said my father, when we all were comfortably settled in Kashgar’s karwansarai of the Five Felicities, and were discussing our situation. “It is a laughable legend, but the Mongols believe it. They say that once upon a time, long ago, a widow woman lived alone and lonely in a yurtu on the snowy plains. And out of loneliness, she befriended a blue wolf of the wild, and eventually she mated with it, and from their coupling sprang the first ancestors of the Mongols.”

That legendary start of their race occurred in a land far north of Kithai, a land called Sibir. I have never visited there, nor ever wanted to, for it is said to be a flat and uninteresting country of perpetual snow and frost. In such a harsh land, it was perhaps only natural that the various Mongol tribes (one of which called itself “the Kithai”) should have found nothing better to do than to fight among themselves. But one man of them, Temuchin by name, rallied together several tribes and, one by one, subdued the others, until all the Mongols were his to command, and they called him Khan, meaning Great Lord, and they gave him a new name, Chinghiz, meaning Perfect Warrior.

Under Chinghiz Khan, the Mongols left their northland and swept southward—to this immense country, which was then the Empire of Chin—and they conquered it, and called it Kithai. The other conquests made by the Mongols, in the rest of the world, I need not recount in series, since they are too well known to history. Suffice it to say that Chinghiz and his lesser Ilkhans and later his sons and grandsons extended the Mongol domains westward to the banks of the River Dnieper in the Polish Ukraine, and to the gates of Constantinople on the Sea of Marmara—which sea, incidentally, like the Adriatic, we Venetians regard as our private pond.

“We Venetians made the word ‘horde’ from the Mongol word yurtu,” my father reminded me, “and we called the marauders collectively the Mongol Horde.” Then he went on to tell me something I had not known. “In Constantinople I heard them called by a different name: the Golden Horde. That was because the Mongol armies invading that region had come originally from this region, and you have seen the yellowness of the soil hereabout. They always colored their tents yellow like the earth, for partial concealment. So—yellow yurtu: Golden Horde. However, the Mongols who marched straight west out of their native Sibir were accustomed to coloring their yurtus white, like the Sibir snows. So those armies, invading the Ukraine, were called by their victims the White Horde. I suppose there may yet be Other-Colored Hordes.”

If the Mongols had never conquered more than Kithai, they would have had much to boast about. The tremendous land stretches from the mountains of Tazhikistan eastward to the shores of the great ocean called the Sea of Kithai, or by some people the Sea of Chin. To the north, Kithai abuts on the Sibir wasteland where the Mongols originated. In the south—in those days, when I had first arrived in the country—Kithai bordered on the Empire of Sung. However, as I shall tell in its place, the Mongols later conquered that empire, too, and called it Manzi, and absorbed it into Kubilai’s Khanate.

But even in those days of my first arrival, the Mongol Empire was so immense that—as I have repeatedly indicated—it was divided into numerous provinces, each under the sovereignty of a different Ilkhan. Those provinces had been parceled out with no particular attention paid to any previous map-drawn borders observed by former rulers now overthrown. The Ilkhan Abagha, for example, was the lord of what had been the Empire of Persia, but his lands also included much of what had been Greater Armenia and Anatolia to the west of Persia and, on the east, India Aryana. There, Abagha’s domain bordered on the lands apportioned to his distant cousin, the Ilkhan Kaidu, who reigned over the Balkh region, the Pai-Mir, all of Tazhikistan and this western Sin-kiang Province of Kithai where my father, my uncle and I now lodged.

The Mongols’ accession to empire and power and wealth had not lessened their lamentable propensity for quarreling among themselves. They quite frequently fought each other, just as they had used to do when they were only ragged savages in the wastes of Sibir, before Chinghiz unified them and impelled them to greatness. The Khakhan Kubilai was a grandson of that Chinghiz, and all the Ilkhans of the outlying provinces were likewise direct descendants of that Perfect Warrior. It might be supposed that they should have constituted a close-knit royal family. But several were descended from different sons of Chinghiz, and had been distanced from each other by two or three generations of the family tree’s branchings apart, and not all were satisfied that they had inherited their fair share of the empire bequeathed by their mutual progenitor.

This Ilkhan Kaidu, for instance, whose summons to audience we were now awaiting, was the grandson of Kubilai’s uncle, Okkodai. That Okkodai, in his time, had himself been the ruling Khakhan, the second after Chinghiz, and evidently his grandson Kaidu resented the fact that the title and throne had passed to a different branch of the line. Evidently he felt, too, that he deserved more of the Khanate than he presently held. Anyway, Kaidu had several times made incursions on the lands given to Abagha, which was tantamount to insubordination against the Khakhan, for Abagha was Kubilai’s nephew, son of his brother, and his close ally in the otherwise disputatious family.

“Kaidu has never yet rebelled openly against Kubilai,” said my father. “But, besides harassing Kubilai’s favorite nephew, he has disregarded many court edicts, and usurped privileges to which he is not entitled, and in other ways has flouted the Khakhan’s authority. If he deems us friends of Kubilai, then he must regard us as enemies of himself.”

Nostril, sounding woeful, said, “I thought we were only having a trivial delay, master. Are we instead in danger again?”

Uncle Mafio muttered, “As the rabbit said in the fable: ‘If that is not a wolf, it is a damned big dog.’”

“He may snatch for himself all the gifts we are carrying to Khanbalik,” said my father. “Out of envy and spite, as much as rapacity.”

“Surely not,” I said. “That would most certainly be flagrant lesa-maestà, defying the Khakhan’s letter of safe conduct. And Kubilai would be furious, would he not, if we arrived empty-handed at his court, and told him why?”

“Only if we did arrive there,” my father said ominously. “Kaidu is presently the gatekeeper of this stage of the Silk Road. He holds the power of life and death here. We can only wait and see.”

We were kept waiting for some days before we were bidden to our confrontation with the Ilkhan, but no one hindered our freedom of movement. So I spent some of that time in wandering about within the walls of Kashgar. I had long ago learned that crossing a border between two nations is not like going through a gate between two different gardens. Even in the far countries, all so exotically different from Venice, to go from one land into the next usually brought no more surprise than one finds, say, in crossing from the Veneto into the Duchy of Padua or Verona. The first commonfolk I had seen in Kithai looked just like those I had been seeing for months, and at first glimpse the city of Kashgar might have been only a much bigger and better-built version of the Tazhik trade town of Murghab. But on closer acquaintance I did find Kashgar different in many respects from anywhere I had visited before.

In addition to the Mongol occupiers and settlers in the vicinity, the population included Tazhiks from across the border, and people of various other origins, Uzbek and Turki and I know not how many others. All of those the Mongols lumped under the name of Uighur, a word which means only “ally,” but signified more. The various Uighurs were not just allied to the Mongols, they were all in some measure related by racial heritage, language and customs. Anyway, except for some variation in their dress and adornments, they all looked like Mongols—berry-brown of complexion, slit-eyed, notably hairy, big-boned, burly and squat and rough-hewn. But the population also included persons who were totally distinct—from me as well as from the Mongoloid peoples—in appearance, language and comportment. Those were the Han people, I learned, the aboriginal inhabitants of these lands.

Most of them had faces paler than mine, of a delicate ivory tint, like the best grade of parchment, and bearing little or no facial hair. Their eyes were not narrowed by heavily pouched lids, like the Mongols’, but were nevertheless so very slitlike as to appear slanted. Their bodies and limbs were fine-boned, slim and seeming almost fragile. If, when one looked at a shaggy Mongol or one of his Uighur relatives, one thought at once, “That man has lived always out of doors,” then one was inclined to think, when looking at a Han, even a wretched farmer hard at work in his field, filthy with mud and manure, “That man was born and raised indoors.” But one did not have to look; a blind man would perceive a Han to be unique, merely hearing him talk.

The Han language resembles no other on this earth. While I had no trouble learning to speak Mongol, and to write with its alphabet, I never learned more than a rudimentary comprehension of Han. The Mongol speech is gruff and harsh, like its speakers, but it at least employs sounds not too different from those heard in our Western languages. The Han, by contrast, is a speech of staccato syllables, and they are sung rather than spoken. Evidently the Han throat is incapable of forming more than a very few of the sounds that other people make. The sound of r, for one, is quite beyond them. My name in their speech was always Mah-ko. And, having so very few noises to work with, the Han must sound them on different tones—high, mid, low, rising, falling—to make a sufficient variety for compiling a vocabulary. It is like this: suppose our Ambrosian plainsong Gloria in excelsis had that meaning of “glory in the highest” only when sung to its traditional up and down neumes, and, if the syllables were sung in different ups and downs, were to change its meaning utterly—to “darkness in the lowest” or “dishonor to the basest” or even “fish for the frying.”

But there were no fish to be had in Kashgar. Our Uighur innkeeper almost proudly explained why. Here in this place, he said, we were as far inland as a person could get from any sea on the earth—the temperate oceans to the east and west, the tropic seas to the south, the frozen white ones in the north. Nowhere else in the world, he said, as if it were a thing to boast about, was there any spot farther from the sea. Kashgar had no freshwater fish either, he said, for the Passage River was too much befouled by the city’s effluxions to support any. I was already aware of the effluxions, having noticed one sort here that I had never seen before. Every city spews out sewage and garbage and smoke, but the smoke of Kashgar was peculiar. It came from the stone that burns, and this was the first place I saw it.

In a sense, the burnable rock is the exact opposite of that rock I earlier saw in Balkh, which produces the cloth that will not burn. Many of my untraveled fellow Venetians have derided both stones as unbelievable, when I have spoken of them. But other Venetians—mariners in the English trade—tell me that the burning rock is well known and commonly used for fuel in England, where it is called kohle. In the Mongol lands it was called simply “the black”—kara—for that is its color. It occurs in extensive strata just a little way under the yellow soil, so it is easily got at with simple picks and spades, and, being rather crumbly, the stone is easily broken into wieldy chunks. A hearth or brazier heaped with those chunks requires a kindling fire of wood, but once the kara is alight it burns much longer than wood and gives a greater heat, as does naft oil. It is abundant and free for the digging and its only fault is its dense smoke. Because every Kashgar household and workshop and karwansarai used it for fuel, a pall hung perpetually between the city and the sky.

At least the kara did not, like camel or yak dung, give a noxious flavor to the food cooked over it, and the food served us in Kashgar was already dismally familiar of flavor. There were flocks of goats as well as sheep, and herds of cows and domestic yaks all over the landscape, and pigs and chickens and ducks in every backyard, but the staple meat at the Five Felicities was still the everlasting mutton. The Uighur peoples, like the Mongol, have no national religion, and I could not then make out whether the Han did. But Kashgar, as a trade crossroads, represented in its permanent and transient population just about every religion that exists, and the sheep is the one animal edible by communicants of all of them. And the aromatic, weak, not intoxicating, hence not religiously objectionable cha was still the staple beverage.

Kithai did introduce one pleasing improvement to our meals. Instead of rice, we got a side dish called miàn. That was not exactly new to us, as it was only a pasta of the vermicelli string sort, but it was a welcome old acquaintance. Usually it was served boiled al dente, just as Venetian vermicelli is, but sometimes it was cut into small bits and fried to crunchy kinks. What was new about it—to me, anyway—was that it was served with two slender sticks for the eating of it. I stared at this curiosity, nonplussed, and my father and uncle laughed at the expression on my face.

“They are called kuài-zi,” said my father. “The nimble tongs. And they are more practical than they look. Observe, Marco.”

Holding both of his sticks in the fingers of one hand, he began most adroitly to pick up bits of meat and skeins of the miàn. It took me some fumbling minutes to learn the use of the nimble-tong sticks, but, when I had, I found them to be notably neater than the Mongol fashion of eating with the fingers, and indeed more efficacious for twirling up strings of pasta than our Venetian skewers and spoons.

The Uighur landlord smiled approvingly when he saw me begin to pick and peck and spool with the sticks, and informed me that the nimble tongs were a Han contribution to fine dining. He went on to assert that the miàn-vermicelli was a Han invention, too, but I contested that. I told him that pasta of every variety had been on every table of the Italian peninsula ever since a Roman ship’s cook fortuitously conceived the making of it. Perhaps, I suggested, the Han had learned of it during some Caesarean era of trade between Rome and Kithai.

“No doubt it happened so,” said the innkeeper, he being a man of impeccable politeness.

I must say that I found all the commonfolk of Kithai, of every race—when they were not bloodily engaged in feud, revenge, banditry, rebellion or warfare—to be exceptionally courteous of address and comportment. And that gentility, I believe, was a contribution of the Han.

The Han language, as if to make up for its many inherent deficiencies, is replete with flowery expressions and ornate turns of phrase and intricate formalities, and the Han’s manners are also exquisitely refined. They are a people of a very ancient and high culture, but whether their elegant speech and graces impelled their civilization or simply grew out of it, I have no idea. However, I do believe that all the other nations in proximity to the Han, though woefully inferior in culture, acquired from them at least those outward trappings of advanced civilization. Even in Venice, I had seen how people ape their betters, in appearance if not in substance. No shopkeeper is ever anything loftier than a shopkeeper, but he who purveys to fine ladies will converse better than the one who sells only to boat wives. A Mongol warrior may be by nature an uncouth barbarian, but when he chooses—as witness the first sentry who had challenged us—he can speak as politely as any Han, and exhibit manners suitable for a court ballroom.

Even in this rough frontier trade town, the Han influence was evident. I walked through streets with names like Flowery Benevolence and Crystallized Fragrance and, in a market square called Productive Endeavor and Fair Exchange, I saw lumpish Mongol soldiers buying caged bright songbirds and bowls of shiny tiny fish to adorn their rude army quarters. Every stall in the market had a sign, a long, narrow board hung vertically, and passersby helpfully translated for me the words inscribed in the Mongol alphabet or the Han characters. Besides giving notice of what the stall sold: “Pheasant Eggs for Making Hair Pomade” or “Spicy-Odored Indigo Dye,” each board added a few words of advice: “Loitering and Gossiping Are Not Conducive to Good Business” or “Former Customers Have Induced the Sad Necessity of Denying Credit” or something of the sort.

But if there was one aspect of Kashgar that first told me Kithai was different from other places I had been, it was the endless variety of smells. True, every other Eastern community had been odorous, but chiefly and awfully of old urine. Kashgar was not free of that stale smell, but it had many and better others. Most noticeable was the odor of kara smoke, which is not unpleasant, and into that were blended countless and fragrant incenses, which the people burned in their houses and shops as well as in places of worship. Also, at all hours of the day and night, one could smell foodstuffs cooking. That was sometimes familiar: the simple, good, mouth-watering aroma of pork chops frying in some non-Muslim kitchen. But the scent was often otherwise: the smell of a pot of frogs being boiled or a dog being stewed defies description. And sometimes it was an exotically nice smell: that of burned sugar, for example, when I watched a Han vendor of sweets melt bright-colored sugars over a brazier and then, as magically as a sorcerer, somehow blow and spin that fondant into delicate shapes of floss—a flower with pink petals and green leaves, a brown man on a white horse, a dragon with many wings of different colors.

In baskets in the market were more kinds of cha leaves than I had known existed, all aromatic and no two smelling alike; and jars of spices of pungencies new to me; and baskets of flowers of shapes and colors and perfumes I had never encountered before. Even our Inn of the Five Felicities smelled different from all the others we had inhabited, and the landlord told me why. In the plaster of the walls was mixed red meleghèta pepper. It discouraged insects, he said, and I believed him, for the place was singularly clean of vermin. However, this being early summer, I could not verify his other claim: that the hot red pepper made the rooms warmer in winter.

I saw no other Venetian traders in the city, or Genoese or Pisan or any other of our commercial rivals, but we Polos were not the only white men. Or white men, so-called; I remember being asked by a Han scholar, many years later:

“Why are you people of Europe called white? You have more of a brick-red complexion.”

Anyway, there were a few other whites in Kashgar, and their brick-redness was easily visible among the Eastern skin colors. During my first day’s stroll through the streets, I saw two bearded white men deep in conversation, and one of them was Uncle Mafio. The other wore the vestments of a Nestorian priest, and had a flat-backed head that identified him as an Armeniyan. I wondered what my uncle could have found to discuss with a heretic cleric, but I did not intrude, only waved a greeting as I went by.

2

ON one of the days of our enforced idleness, I went outside the city walls to view the camp of the Mongols—what they called their bok—and to exercise what Mongol words I knew, and to learn some new ones.

The first new words I learned were these: “Hui! Nohaigan hori!” and I learned them in a hurry, for they mean “Olà! Call off your dogs!” Packs of large and truculent mastiffs prowled freely through the whole bok, and every yurtu had two or three chained at its entrance. I learned also that I was wise to be carrying my riding quirt, as the Mongols always do, for beating off the curs. And I early learned to leave the quirt outside whenever I entered a yurtu, for to carry it inside would be unmannerly, would offend the human occupants, being an implication that they were no better than dogs.

There were other niceties of behavior to be observed. A stranger must approach a yurtu by walking first between two of the camp fires outside, thus properly purifying himself. Also, one never steps upon the threshold of a yurtu when entering or leaving it, and never whistles while inside it. I learned those things because the Mongols were eager to receive me and to instruct me in their ways and to query me about mine. Indeed, they were almost overwhelmingly eager. If the Mongols have one trait exceeding the ferocity they show to inimical outsiders, it is the inquisitiveness they show about peaceable ones. The single most frequent sound in their speech is “uu,” which is not a word but a vocal question mark.

“Sain bina, sain urkek! Good meeting, good brother!” a group of warriors greeted me, and then immediately inquired, “From under what skies do you come, uu?”

“From under the skies of the West,” I said, and they widened their eyes as much as those slits would widen, and they exclaimed:

“Hui! Those skies are immense, and they shelter many lands. In your Western country, did you dwell beneath a roof, uu, or a tent, uu?”

“In my native city, a roof. But I have been long upon the road, and living under a tent, when not the open sky.”

“Sain!” they cried, smiling broadly. “All men are brothers, is that not true, uu? But those men who dwell beneath tents are even closer brothers, as close as twins. Welcome, twin brother!”

And they bowed and gestured me into the yurtu belonging to one of them. Except for its being portable, it bore little relation to my flimsy sleeping tent. Its interior was only a single round room, but it was a commodious six paces in diameter and its top was well above a standing man’s head. The walls were of interlaced wooden laths, vertical walls from ground level to shoulder height, then curving inward to form a dome. At its top center was an open roundel, whence the smoke from the room’s heating brazier escaped. The lath framework supported the yurtu’s outer covering: overlapping sheets of heavy felt, colored yellow with clay, lashed to the frame by crisscrossed ropes. The furnishings were few and simple, but of good quality: floor carpets and couches of cushions, also all made of brightly colored felt. The yurtu was as sturdy and warm and weather-repellent as any house, but it could be dismantled in an hour and compacted into bundles small and light enough to be carried on a single pack saddle.

My Mongol greeters and I entered the yurtu through the felt-flapped opening which, as in all Mongol edifices, was on its southern side. I was motioned to take a seat on the “man’s bed” of the establishment, the one on the north side of the yurtu, where I could sit facing the good-omened south. (Beds for women and children were ranged around the less-auspicious other sides.) I sank down on the felt-covered cushions, and my host pressed into my hand a drinking vessel that was simply a ram’s horn. Into it, he poured from a leather bag a rank-smelling and bluish-white thin liquid.

“Kumis,” he said it was.

I waited politely until all the men held full horns. Then I did as they did, which was to dip fingers into the kumis and flick a few drops in each direction of the compass. They explained, well enough for me to comprehend, that we were saluting “the fire” to the south, “the air” to the east, “the water” to the west and “the dead” to the north. Then we all raised our horns and drank deeply, and I committed a bad breach of manners. Kumis, I would learn, is to the Mongols a drink as beloved and sacrosanct as qahwah is to the Arabs. I thought it was awful and, unpardonably, I let my face express my opinion. The men all looked distressed. One of them said hopefully that I would grow to like the taste in time, and another said I would like the exhilarating effect of it even more. But my host took my horn and drank it empty, then refilled it from a different leather bag and handed the vessel back to me, saying, “This is arkhi.”

The arkhi had a better smell, but I sipped at it cautiously, for it looked just like the kumis. I was gratified that it tasted much better, rather like a wine of medium quality. I nodded and smiled and asked the source of their beverages, for I had seen no vineyards in the vicinity. I was astonished when my host said proudly:

“From the good milk of healthy mares.”

Except for their weapons and armor, the Mongols manufacture two things, and only two, and those are made by the Mongol women, and I had just encountered both of them. I was seated on felt-covered pillows in a felt-covered tent, and I was drinking a beverage made from mare’s milk. I think the Mongol females are not ignorant of the arts of spinning and weaving, but scorn them as basely effeminate, for these women are veritable Amazons. Anyway, the woven fabrics they wear they buy from other peoples. But they are most expert in beating and matting together the hairs of animals into felts of every weight, from the heavy yurtu coverings to a cloth that is as soft and fine as Welsh flannel.

The Mongol women also disdain every kind of milk except the equine. They do not even give their children to suck from their own breasts, but nourish them from infancy on mare’s milk. They do some uncommon things with that fluid, and it did not take me long to overcome my repugnance and become an enthusiastic partaker of all the Mongol milk products. The most prevalent is the mildly intoxicating kumis. It is made by putting fresh mare’s milk into a great leather sack, which the women beat with heavy clubs until butter forms. They scoop off the butter and leave the fluid residue to ferment. That kumis then is pungent and sharp to the tongue, with an aftertaste rather like almonds, and a man who drinks enough of it can get estimably drunk. If the sack of milk is beaten longer, until both butter and curds are separated, and the very thin remaining liquid left to ferment, it becomes the more agreeably sweet and wholesome and effervescent sort of kumis called arkhi. And a man can get drunk on that without drinking a very great deal of it.

Besides making use of the butter acquired from the milk, the Mongol women make an ingenious use of the curds. They spread them in the sun and let them dry to a hard cake. That substance, called grut, they crumble into pellets which can be kept indefinitely without spoiling. Some of it is set aside for the wintertime, when the herd mares give no milk, and some is put into pouches to be carried as emergency rations by men going on the march. The grut has only to be dissolved in water to make a quick and nourishing thick drink.

The actual milking of the herd mares is done by the Mongol men; it constitutes some kind of masculine prerogative and is forbidden to the women. But the subsequent making of kumis and arkhi and grut, like the making of felt, is women’s work. In fact, all the work in a Mongol bok is done by the women.

“Because the only proper concern of men is the making of war,” said my host that day. “And the only proper concern of women is the tending of their men. Uu?”

It cannot be denied that, since a Mongol army goes everywhere accompanied by all the warriors’ wives, and extra women for the unmarried men, and the offspring of all those women, the men seldom have to give attention to anything but the fighting. A woman unaided can take down or put up a yurtu, and do all the necessary chores of keeping it supplied and maintained and clean and in good repair, and keeping her man fed and clothed and in fighting humor and cosseted when he is wounded, and keeping his war gear in ready condition, and his horses as well. The children also work, collecting dung or kara for the bok fires, doing herdsman and guard duty. On the few occasions when a battle has gone against the Mongols, and they have had to call up their encamped reserves, the women have been known to seize up weapons and go themselves into the fray, and give good account of themselves.

I regret to say that the Mongol females do not resemble the warrior Amazons of antiquity as portrayed by Western artists. They could almost be mistaken for Mongol males, because they have the same flat face, the broad cheekbones, the leathery complexion, the puffed eyelids making slits of eyes that, when visible, are always redly inflamed. The women may be less burly than the men, but they do not appear so, because they wear equally bulky clothes. Like the men, accustomed to riding for most of their lives, and riding astride, they have the same shambling horseman’s gait when afoot. The women do differ in not wearing a wispy beard or mustache, which some of the men do. The men also have their hair hanging long and braided behind, and sometimes shaven on the crown like a priest’s tonsure. The women pile their hair up on top of their head in an elaborate fashion—and perhaps they do this just once in a lifetime, because they then varnish it in place with the sap of the wutung tree. And on top of that, they fix a high headpiece called a gugu, a thing made of bark, decorated with bits of colored felt and ribbons. Her cemented hair and her gugu together make a woman some two feet taller than a man, so cumbrously tall that she can enter a yurtu only by bowing her head.

While I sat conversing with my hosts, the woman of the yurtu several times came in and went out, and she had to bend like that every time. But the bending was not a genuflection, and she showed no other signs of servility. She simply bustled about at her work, fetching fresh flagons of kumis and arkhi for us, taking out the emptied ones, and otherwise seeing to our comfort. The man who was her husband addressed her as Nai, which just means Woman, but the other men said courteously Sain Nai. I was interested to see that a Good Woman, although she works like a slave, does not behave like a slave and is not treated as a slave. A Mongol woman does not, like a Muslim woman, have to hide her face behind a chador or hide her whole self in pardah or endure any of the other female humiliations of Islam. She is expected to be chaste, at least after marriage, but no one is appalled if she uses immodest language or laughs at a bawdy story—or tells one, as this Sain Nai did.

She had, unbidden, laid a meal for us on the felt carpet in the middle of the yurtu. And then, equally unbidden, she squatted down to eat with us—and was not forbidden—which surprised and delighted me almost as much as the meal did. She had served a sort of Mongol version of the Venetian scaldavivande: a bowl of boiling-hot broth, a smaller bowl of red-brown sauce and a platter of strips of raw lamb. We all took turns dipping pieces of meat into the scalding broth, cooking it to our taste, dipping it into the piquant sauce and then eating it. The Sain Nai, like the men, dipped her bits of meat barely long enough to warm them, and ate them nearly raw. Any doubts about Mongol women being as robust as their men were dispelled by the sight of that one tearing at the hunks of meat, her hands and teeth and lips all bloodied. One difference: the men ate without talking, giving all their attention to the food; the woman, in the intervals between her devourings, was most voluble.

I gathered that she was making fun of the newest wife her husband had acquired. (There was no limit to the number of women a Mongol man could wed, so long as he could afford to set up each one in a separate yurtu.) The woman acidly remarked that he had been dead drunk when he asked for the hand of this latest one. All the men chuckled, the husband included. And they all snickered and giggled as she listed the new wife’s shortcomings, evidently in ribald terms. And they absolutely guffawed and fell about on the carpet when she concluded by suggesting that the new wife probably urinated standing up, like a man.

That was not the most comical thing I had ever heard, but it was certain evidence that the Mongol women enjoy a freedom denied to almost all other females in the East. Except in comeliness, they are more like Venetian women: full of liveliness and good cheer, because they know they are the equals and comrades of their men, only having different functions and responsibilities in life.

The Mongol males do not simply sit idle while their women drudge, or at least do not all the time. After our meal, my hosts walked with me about the bok, showing me the work of men variously occupied at fletching, armoring, currying, cutling and other military crafts. The fletchers, having already laid up a good store of ordinary arrows, were that day forging special arrowheads pierced with holes in a way that, they told me, would make the arrows whistle and shriek in their flight, thereby putting fear in the heart of an enemy. Some of the armorers were thunderously hammering sheets of red-hot iron into the form of breastplates for men and horses, and others were more quietly doing the same with cuirbouilli, heavy leather boiled to softness, then shaped and let dry, when it gets almost as hard as iron. The curriers were making wide waist belts ornamented with colored stones—not to be worn for mere decoration, they told me, but to protect the wearers against thunder and lightning. The cutlers were making wicked shimshirs and daggers, and putting new edges onto old blades, and fitting helves to battle axes, and one of them was forging a lance that had a curious hook projecting from the blade—to yank an enemy from his saddle, the maker told me.

“A fallen foe can be more neatly skewered,” added one of my guides. “The earth makes a firmer stop than the air, to pin him against.”

“However, we disdain too easy a stroke,” said another. “When the foe is unhorsed, we ride back a way from where he lies, and wait for him to cry defiance—or mercy.”

“Yes, and then plunge the lance point through his open mouth,” said another. “That is a fine feat of aim when done at the gallop.”

Those remarks put my hosts in a mood of happy reminiscence, and they went on to recount for me various stories of their people’s wars and campaigns and battles. None of those engagements seemed ever to have ended in a defeat for the Mongols, but always a victory and a conquest and a profitable pillage afterward. Of the many tales they told, I recall two with special clarity, for in them the Mongols contended, not just with other men, but with fire and ice.

They told how, once upon a time, during their siege of some city in India, the cowardly but cunning Hindu defenders had tried to rout them by sending against them a cavalry troop of unusual composition. The horses bore riders made of hammered copper in the shape of men, and each of those charging riders was in reality a mobile furnace, the copper shell being filled with burning coals and flaming oil-soaked cotton. Whether the Hindus intended to spread conflagration among the Mongol Horde, or merely consternation, never was known. For the furnace-warriors so singed their own mounts that the horses sensibly bucked them off, and the Mongols rode unimpeded into the city, and slaughtered all its less-incandescent defenders, and made the city their own.

Again, the Mongols waged a campaign against a savage tribe of Samoyeds in the cold far north. Before the battle began, the men of that tribe ran to a nearby river and plunged into it, and then, on emerging, rolled in the dust of the riverbank. They let that coating freeze upon their bodies, then repeated the process several more times, until they were armored all over with thick mud-ice, and judged themselves safe against the Mongols’ arrows and blades. Perhaps they were, but the frozen armor made the Samoyeds so thick and clumsy that they could neither fight nor dodge, and the Mongols simply trampled them under the hoofs of their steeds.

So fire and ice had unsuccessfully been used against them, but the Mongols themselves had occasionally used water, and successfully. In the Kazhak country, for example, the Mongols once besieged a city called Kzyl-Orda, and it long held out against them. The word Kazhak means “man without a master,” and the Kazhak warriors, whom we in the West call Cossacks, are very nearly as formidable as the Mongols. But the besiegers did not simply sit encircling the city and waiting for it to surrender. They made use of their wait by digging a new channel for the nearby Syr-Daria River. They diverted its course and let it flood Kzyl-Orda and drown every person in it.

“Flooding is a good way of taking a city,” said one of the men. “Better than pitching in big boulders or fire arrows. Another good way is the catapulting into it of diseased dead bodies. Kills all the defenders, you see, but leaves the buildings intact for new occupants. The only bad thing about those methods is that they cheat our leaders of their favorite enjoyment—making their celebration banquet on human tables.”

“Human tables?” I said, thinking I must have misheard. “Uu?”

They laughed as they explained. The tables were heavy planks supported on the bent backs of kneeling men, the vanquished officers of whatever army they defeated. And they laughed right heartily as they imitated the moans and sobs of those hungry men bowed under the weight of planks laden with high-heaped trenchers of meat and brimming jugs of kumis. And they positively guffawed as they imitated the even more piteous cries of those table-men when the feasting was done, when the Mongol celebrants vaulted onto the tables to do their furious, stamping, leaping victory dances.

In telling their war stories, the men mentioned various leaders under whom they had served, and the leaders all seemed to have had a confusing variety of titles and ranks. But I gradually divined that a Mongol army is really not a shapeless horde, but a model of organization. Of every ten warriors, the strongest and fiercest and most war-experienced is made captain. Similarly, of every ten captains, one is chief, thereby having command of a hundred men. And the ordering continues to progress by tens. Of every ten chief-captains, one is flag-captain, with fully a thousand men rallying to his pennant. Then, of every ten flag-captains, one is the sardar, having command of ten thousand men. The word for “ten thousand” is toman, and that word also means “yak’s tail,” so the sardar’s standard is a plume of yak tail on a pole instead of a flag.

It is a superbly efficient system of command, since any officer at any level from captain up to sardar need confer with only nine other equals when making his plans and decisions and dispositions. There is only one rank higher than sardar. That is orlok, meaning roughly a commander-in-chief, who has under him at least ten sardars and their tomans, making a tuk of a hundred thousand warriors, sometimes more. His power is so awesome that the rank of orlok is seldom given to any man but an actual ruling Ilkhan of the Chinghiz family line. The army then camped in bok about Kashgar was a part of the forces commanded by the Orlok-and-Ilkhan Kaidu.

Any Mongol officer, besides being a good leader in combat, must at other times be what Moses was to the Israelites on the move. Whether he is the captain of ten men or the sardar of ten thousand, he is responsible for the movement and the provisioning of them and their wives and their women and their children and many other camp followers—such as the aged veterans who have no usefulness whatever, but who have the right to refuse retirement into garrison inactivity. The officer is also responsible for the herds of livestock that go afield with his troops: the horses for riding, the beasts for butchering, the yaks or asses or mules or camels for pack carrying. To count just the horses, every Mongol man travels with a string of war steeds and kumis-milk mares that number, on the average, eighteen all together.

Of the various leading officers mentioned by my hosts, the only name I recognized was that of the Ilkhan Kaidu. So I asked if they had ever been led in battle by the Khakhan Kubilai whom I hoped to meet in the not too distant future. They said they had never had the high honor to be directly under his command, but had been fortunate enough to glimpse him once or twice at some remove. They said he was of manly beauty and soldierly bearing and statesmanlike wisdom, but that the most impressive of his qualities was his much-feared temper.

“He can be more fierce even than our fierce Ilkhan Kaidu,” said one of them. “No man is eager to raise the wrath of the Khakhan Kubilai. Not even Kaidu.”

“Nor the very elements of the earth and sky,” said another. “Why, people call out the name of the Khakhan when it thunders—‘Kubilai!’—so the lightning will not strike them. I have heard even our fearless Kaidu do that.”

“Truly,” said another, “in the presence of the Khakhan Kubilai, the wind does not presume to blow too strongly, or the rain to fall harder than a drizzle, or to splash up any mud on his boots. Even the water in his pitcher shrinks fearfully from him.”

I commented that that must be rather a nuisance when he was thirsty. That was a sacrilegious remark to make about the most powerful man in the world, but no one present raised an eyebrow, for we were all quite drunk by then. We were seated again in the yurtu, and my hosts had gone through several flagons of kumis, and I had imbibed a goodly amount of their arkhi. The Mongols will not ever constrain themselves to have just one drink, or let a guest have just one, for when the one is downed they exclaim:

“A man cannot walk on one foot!” and they pour another. And that one foot requires another, and that another, and so on. The Mongols go even into death still drinking, so to speak. A slain warrior is always buried on the battlefield under a cairn of stones, and he is interred in a seated position, holding his drinking horn in his hand at waist level.

The day had given way to darkness when I decided that I had better stop drinking or risk qualifying for interment myself. I climbed to my feet and thanked my hosts for their hospitality and made my farewells and took my leave of them, while they cried cordially after me, “Mendu, sain urkek! A good horse and a wide plain to you, until we meet again!”

I was not on a horse, but afoot, and therefore staggered somewhat. But that excited no comment from anybody, as I weaved through the bok and back through the Kashgar gate and through the scented streets to the karwansarai of the Five Felicities. I lurched into our chamber, and stopped short, staring. A large, black-garbed, black-bearded priest stood there. It took me a moment to recognize him as my Uncle Mafio and, in my fuddled condition, all I could think was, “Dear God, what depth of depravity has he sunk to now? Uu?”

3

I slumped onto a bench and sat grinning as my uncle preened piously in his cassock. My father, sounding peeved, quoted an old saying: “The clothes make the man, but a habit does not make a monk. Let alone a priest, Mafio. Where did you get it?”

“I bought it from that Father Boyajian. You remember him, Nico, from when we were here last.”

“Yes. An Armeniyan would probably peddle the Host. Why did you not make him an offer for that?”

“A sacramental wafer would mean nothing to the Ilkhan Kaidu, but this disguise will. His own chief wife, the Ilkhatun, is a converted Christian—at least a Nestorian. So I am trusting that Kaidu will respect this cloth.”

“Why? You do not. I have heard you criticize the Church in utterances that verge on heresy. And now this. It is blasphemy!”

Uncle Mafio protested, “The cassock is not in itself a liturgical garment. Anybody can wear one, as long as he does not pretend to its sanctity. I do not. I could not, if I wanted to. Deuteronomy, you know: ‘An eunuch, whose testicles are broken, shall not enter into the Church of the Lord.’ Capòn mal caponà.”

“Mafìo! Do not try to justify your impiety with self-pity.”

“I am only saying that if Kaidu mistakes me for a priest, I see no need to correct him. Boyajian gives it as his opinion that a Christian may employ any subterfuge in dealing with a heathen.”

“I do not accept a Nestorian reprobate as an authority on Christian behavior.”

“Had you rather accept Kaidu’s decree? Confiscation, or worse? Look, Nico. He has Kubilai’s letter; he knows that we were bidden to bring priests to Kithai. Without any priests, we are mere vagrants wandering through Kaidu’s domain with a most tempting lot of valuables. I will not claim that I am a priest, but if Kaidu supposes it—”

“That white collar never protected anybody’s neck from a headsman’s ax.”

“It is better than nothing. Kaidu can do as he pleases to ordinary travelers, but if he slays or detains a priest, the ripples will eventually reach Kubilai’s court. And a priest whom Kubilai sent for? We know that Kaidu is temerarious, but I doubt that he is suicidally so.” Uncle Mafio turned to me. “What do you say, Marco? Observe your uncle as a reverend father. How do I look?”

“Magnissifent,” I said thickly.

“Hm,” he murmured, regarding me more closely. “It will help, yes, if Kaidu is as drunk as you are.”

I started to say that he probably would be, but I fell suddenly asleep where I sat.

The next morning, my uncle was again wearing the cassock when he came to the karwansarai’s dining table, and my father again began berating him. Nostril and I were present, but did not participate in the dispute. To the Muslim slave it was, I suppose, a matter of total unconcern. And I stayed silent because my head was hurting. But both the argument and our breaking of our fast were interrupted by the arrival of a Mongol messenger from the bok. The man, dressed in splendid war regalia, swaggered into the inn like a newcome conqueror, strode directly to our table and, without any courtesy of greeting, said to us—in Farsi to make sure we all understood:

“Arise and come with me, dead men, for the Ilkhan Kaidu would hear your last words!”

Nostril gasped so that he choked on whatever he was eating, and began to cough, meanwhile goggling his eyes with terror. My father pounded him on the back and said, “Be not alarmed, good slave. That is the usual wording of a summons from a Mongol lord. It portends no harm.”

“Or it does not necessarily,” my uncle amended. “I am still glad that I thought of this disguise.”

“Too late to make you doff it now,” muttered my father, for the messenger was pointing imperiously toward the outer door. “I just hope, Mafio, that you will temper your profane performance with priestly decorum.”

Uncle Mafio raised his right hand to each of the three of us in the sign of benediction, smiled beatifically and said with utmost unction, “Si non caste, tamen caute.”

The mock-pious gesture and the mock-solemn Latin play on words were so typical of my uncle’s mischievously cheerful bravado that I—even feeling as sour as I did—had to laugh aloud. Granted, Mafio Polo had some lamentable shortcomings as a Christian and as a man, but he was a good companion to have standing by in an uneasy situation. The Mongol messenger glowered at me when I laughed, and he barked his command at us again, and we all got up and followed him from the building at a quick march.

It was raining that day, which did not do much to lighten my mal di capo, or to make more cheerful our trudge through the streets and beyond the city wall and through the packs of yapping and snarling dogs of the Mongol bok. We hardly raised our heads to look around until the messenger shouted, “Halt!” and directed us to pass between the two fires burning before the entrance to Kaidu’s yurtu.

I had not been near it on my previous visit to the camp, and now I realized that this was the sort of yurtu which must have inspired the Western word “horde.” It would indeed have encompassed a whole horde of the ordinary yurtu tents, for this was a grand pavilion. It was almost as high and as big around as the karwansarai in which we were residing; but that was a solidly built edifice, and this was entirely of yellow-clayed felt, supported by tent poles and stakes and braided horsehair ropes. Several mastiffs roared and lunged against their chains at the south-facing entrance, and on either side of that flapped opening hung elaborately embroidered felt panels. The yurtu was no palace, but it certainly overshadowed the lesser ones of the bok. And next to it rested the wagon which transported it from place to place, for Kaidu’s pavilion was usually moved intact, not dismantled and bundled. The wagon was the most huge I have ever seen anywhere: a flat bed of planks, as big as a meadow, balanced on an axle like a tree trunk and with wheels like mill wheels. The drawing of it, I learned later, required fully twenty-two yaks hitched in two wide spans of eleven abreast. (The drafters had to be placid yaks or oxen; no horses or camels would have worked in such close proximity. )

The messenger ducked under the yurtu’s flap to announce us to his lord, emerged again and jerked his arm to order us inside. Then, as we passed him, he barred Nostril’s way, growling, “No slaves!” and kept him outside. There was a reason for that. The Mongols regard themselves as naturally superior to all other freemen in the world, even kings and such, so any man who is held inferior by their inferiors is considered unworthy even of contempt.

The Ilkhan Kaidu regarded us in silence as we crossed the brilliantly carpeted and pillow-furnished interior, to where he sat sprawled on a heap of furs—all gorgeously striped and spotted: evidently the pelts of tigers and pards—on a dais that set him above us. He was dressed in battle armor of polished metals and leathers, and wore on his head an earflapped hat of karakul. He had eyebrows that looked like detached bits of the kinky black karakul, and not small bits either. Under them, his slit eyes were red-shot, seemingly inflamed by rage at the very sight of us. On his either side stood a warrior, as handsomely caparisoned as the man who had fetched us. One held a lance erect, the other held a sort of canopy on a pole over Kaidu’s head, and both stood as rigid as statues.

We three made a slow approach. In front of the furry throne, we made a dignified slight bow, all together, as if we had rehearsed it, and looked up at Kaidu, waiting for him to make the first indication of the mood of this meeting. He continued for some moments to stare at us, as if we were vermin that had crawled out from under the yurtu’s carpetings. Then he did something disgusting. He made a hawking noise from deep in his throat, bringing up a great wad of phlegm into his mouth. Then he languidly unsprawled himself from his couch and stood upright and turned to the guardsman at his right, and with his thumb pressed the man’s chin so that his mouth opened. Then Kaidu spat his hawked-up gob of substance directly into the man’s mouth and thumbed it shut again—the warrior’s expression and rigidity never changing—and languidly resumed his seat, his eyes again on us and glittering evilly.

It had clearly been a gesture intended to awe us with his power and arrogance and uncordiality, and it would have served to cow me, I think. But at least one of us—Mafìo Polo—was not impressed. When Kaidu spoke his first words, in the Mongol language and in a harsh voice: “Now, interlopers—” he got no further, for my uncle daringly interrupted, in the same language:

“First, if it please the Ilkhan, we will sing a praise to God for having conducted us safely across so many lands into the Lord Kaidu’s august presence.” And, to the astonishment of myself—probably also of my father and the Mongols—he began bawling out the old Christmas hymn:

A solis orbu cardine

Et usque terre limitem …

“It does not please the Ilkhan,” Kaidu said through his teeth, when my uncle drew breath at that point. But my father and I, emboldened, had joined in for the next two lines:

Christum canamus principem

Natum Maria virgine …

“Enough!” bellowed Kaidu, and our voices trailed off. Fixing his red eyes on Uncle Mafio, the Ilkhan said, “You are a Christian priest.” He said it natly—loathingly, in fact—so my uncle did not have to take it as a question, which would have required him to deny it.

He said only, “I am here at the behest of the Khan of All Khans,” and indicated the paper Kaidu was holding clenched in one hand.

“Hui, yes,” said Kaidu, with an acid smile. He unfolded the document in a manner suggesting that it was filthy to the touch. “At the behest of my esteemed cousin. I notice that my cousin wrote this ukaz on yellow paper, as the Chin emperors used to do. Kubilai and I conquered that decadent empire, but he more and more imitates its effete customs. Vakh! He has become no better than a Kalmuk! And our old war god Tengri is no longer good enough for him, either, it seems. Now he must import womanish Ferenghi priests.”

“Merely to enlarge his knowledge of the world, Lord Kaidu,” said my father, in a conciliatory voice. “Not to propagate any new—”

“The only way to know the world,” Kaidu said savagely, “is to seize it and wring it!” He flicked his lurid gaze from one to another of us. “Do you dispute that, uu?”

“To dispute the Lord Kaidu,” murmured my father, “would be like eggs attacking stones, as the saying goes.”

“Well, at least you manifest some good sense,” the Ilkhan said grudgingly. “I trust you also have the sense to realize that this ukaz is dated some years ago and some seven thousand li distant from here. Even if cousin Kubilai has not totally forgotten it by now, I am in no way bound to honor it.”

My uncle murmured, even more meekly than my father had done, “It is said: How can a tiger be subject to the law?”

“Exactly,” grunted the Ilkhan. “If I choose, I can regard you as mere trespassers. Ferenghi interlopers with no good intent. And I can condemn you to summary execution.”

“Some say,” murmured my father, more meekly yet, “that tigers are really the agents of Heaven, appointed to chase down those who have somehow eluded their deserved date with death.”

“Yes,” said the Ilkhan, looking slightly exasperated by all this agreement and mollification. “On the other hand, even a tiger can sometimes be lenient. Much as I detest my cousin for abandoning his Mongol heritage—much as I despise the increasing degeneracy of his court—I I would let you go there and join his retinue. I could, if I so choose.”

My father clapped his hands, as if in admiration of the Ilkhan’s wisdom, and said with delight, “Clearly the Lord Kaidu remembers, then, the old Han story of the clever wife Ling.”

“Of course,” said the Ilkhan. “It was in my mind as I spoke.” He unbent enough to smile frigidly at my father. My father smiled warmly back. There was an interval of silence. “However,” Kaidu resumed, “that story is told in many variations. In which version did you hear it, uu, trespasser?”

My father cleared his throat and declaimed, “Ling was wife to a rich man who was overfond of wine, and was forever sending her to the wine shop to fetch bottles for him. The lady Ling, fearing for his health, would deliberately prolong the errands, or water the wine, or hide it, to keep him from drinking so much. At which her husband would be wroth and would beat her. Finally, two things happened. The lady Ling fell out of love with her husband, although he was rich, and she noticed how handsome was the wine-shop clerk, although he was a humble tradesman. Thereafter, she willingly bought wine at her husband’s command, and even poured it for him, and urged it on him. Eventually the husband died in a drunkard’s convulsions, and she inherited all his wealth, and she married the wine-shop clerk, and they both were rich and happy ever after.”

“Yes,” said the Ilkhan. “That is the correct story.” There was another silence, and a longer one. Then Kaidu said, more to himself than to us, “Yes, the drunkard caused his own rot, and others helped it along, until he rotted through and fell, and was supplanted by a better. It is legendary, and it is salutary.”

Just as quietly, my uncle said, “Also legendary is the tiger’s patience in the tracking of his prey.”

Kaidu shook himself, as if awakening from a reverie, and said, “A tiger can be lenient as well as patient. I have already said so. I shall therefore let you all proceed in peace. I will even give you an escort against the hazards of the road. And you, priest, for all I care, you may convert cousin Kubilai and his entire court to your enfeebling religion. I hope you do. I wish you success.”

“One nod of the head,” my father exclaimed, “is heard farther than a thunderclap. You have done a good thing, Lord Kaidu, and its echoes will long resound.”

“Just one thing,” said the Ilkhan, again using a tone of severity. “I am told by my Lady Ilkhatun, who is a Christian and should know, that Christian priests maintain a vow of poverty, and possess nothing of material value. But I am also informed that you men travel with horses heavy-laden with treasure.”

My father threw my uncle a look of annoyance, and said, “Some baubles, Lord Kaidu. They belong to no priest, but are destined for your cousin Kubilai. They are tokens of tribute from the Shah of Persia and the Sultan of India Aryana.”

“The Sultan is my liege subject,” said Kaidu. “He has no right to give away what belongs to me. And the Shah is a subject of my cousin the Ilkhan Abagha, who is no friend to me. Whatever he sends is contraband, subject to confiscation. Do you understand me, uu?”

“But, Lord Kaidu, we have promised to deliver—”

“A broken promise is no more than a broken pot. The potter can always make more. Have no concern for your promises, Ferenghi. Just bring your packhorses at this hour tomorrow, here to my yurtu, and let me see which of the baubles catch my fancy. I may let you keep some few of them. Do you understand, uu?”

“Lord Kaidu—”

“Uu! Do you understand?”

“Yes, Lord Kaidu.”

“Since you understand, then obey!” He abruptly stood up, signaling the end of the audience.

We bowed our way out of the great yurtu, and collected Nostril from where he waited outside, and we started back through the rain and the mud underfoot, this time unaccompanied, and my uncle said to my father:

“I think we did rather well, Nico, in concert there. Especially adroit of you to remember that Ling story. I never heard it before.”

“Neither did I,” my father said drily. “But surely the Han have some such instructive tale, among the many they do have.”

I opened my mouth for the first time. “Something else you said, Father, gave me an idea. I will meet you back at the inn.”

I parted from them, to go and call on my Mongol hosts of the day before. I requested an introduction to one of their armorers, and got it, and asked the man at the forge if I might borrow for a day one of his yet-unhammered sheets of metal. He graciously found for me a piece of copper that was long and broad, but thin, so it wobbled and rippled and thrummed as I carried it to the karwansarai. My father and uncle paid no attention as I carried it into our room and leaned it against the wall, for they were again arguing.

“All the fault of that cassock,” said my father. “Your being an impoverished priest gave Kaidu the notion of impoverishing us.”

“Nonsense, Nico,” said my uncle. “He would have found some other excuse, if that had not occurred to him. What we must do is offer him freely something from our hoard, and hope he will ignore the rest.”

“Well … ,” said my father, thinking. “Suppose we give him our cods of musk. At least they are ours to give.”

“Oh, come, Nico! To that sweaty barbarian? Musk is for making fine perfume. You might as well give Kaidu a powder puff, for all the use he would have of it.”

They kept on like that, but I stopped listening, for I had my own idea, and I went to explain to Nostril the part he would play in it.

The next day, a day of only drizzling rain, Nostril loaded two of the three packhorses with our cargo of valuables—we of course always kept them safe inside our chambers whenever we lodged in a karwansarai—and also roped my sheet of metal onto one of the horses, and led them for us to the Mongol bok. There, when we entered the Ilkhan’s yurtu, he stayed outside to unload the goods, and Kaidu’s guardsmen began carrying them in and stripped off their protective wrappers.

“Hui!” Kaidu exclaimed, as he started to inspect the various objects. “These engraved golden platters are superb! A gift from the Shah Zaman, you said, uu?”

“Yes,” my father said coldly, and my uncle added, in a melancholy voice, “A boy named Aziz once strapped them on his feet to cross a quicksand,” and I took out a kerchief and loudly blew my nose.

There came from outside a low, mumbling, bumbling mutter of sound. The Ilkhan looked up, surprised, saying, “Was that thunder, uu? I thought there was only a sprinkle of rain … .”

“I beg to inform the Great Lord Kaidu,” said one of his guardsmen, bowing low, “that the day is gray and wet, but there are no thunderclouds to be seen.”

“Curious,” Kaidu muttered, and put down the golden dishes. He rummaged among the many other things accumulating in the tent and, finding a particularly elegant ruby necklace, again exclaimed, “Hui!” He held it up to admire it. “The Ilkhatun will thank you personally for this.”

“Thank the Sultan Kutb-ud-Din,” said my father.

I blew my nose into my kerchief. The rippling rumble of thunder came again from outside, and somewhat louder now. The Ilkhan started so that he dropped the string of rubies, and his mouth closed and opened soundlessly—but framing a word I could read from his lips—and then said aloud, “There it is again! But thunder without thunderclouds … uu … ?”

When a third item caught his greedy eye, a bolt of fine Kashmir cloth, I barely gave him time to cry “Hui!” before I blew my nose, and the thunder gave a menacing grumble, and he jerked his hand away as if the cloth had burned him, and again he mouthed the word, and my father and uncle gave me an odd look.

“Pardon, Lord Kaidu,” I said. “I think this thunder weather has given me a head cold.”

“You are pardoned,” he said offhandedly. “Aha! And this, is this one of those famous Persian qali carpets, uu?”

Nose blow. Veritable clamor of thunder. His hand again jerked away and his lips convulsively made the word, and he glanced fearfully skyward. Then he looked around at us, his slit eyes almost opened to roundness, and he said:

“I was but toying with you!”

“My lord?” inquired Uncle Mafio, whose own lips were twitching now.

“Toying! Jesting! Teasing you!” Kaidu said, almost pleadingly. “A tiger sometimes toys with his quarry, when he is not hungry. And I am not hungry! Not for tawdry acquisitions. I am Kaidu, and I own countless mou of land and innumerable li of the Silk Road and more cities than I have hairs and more subject people than a gobi has pebbles. Did you really think I lack for rubies and gold dishes and Persian qali, uu?” He feigned a hearty laugh, “Ah, ha, ha, ha!” even bending double to pound his meaty fists on his massive knees. “But I had you worried, did I not, uu? You took my toying in earnest.”

“Yes, you truly fooled us, Lord Kaidu,” said my uncle, managing to subdue his own incipient merriment.

“And now the thunder has ceased,” said the Ilkhan, listening. “Guards! Wrap up all these things again and reload them on the horses of these elder brothers.”

“Why, thank you, Lord Kaidu,” said my father, but his twinkling eyes were on me.

“And here, here is my cousin’s letter of ukaz,” said the Ilkhan, pressing it into my uncle’s hand. “I return it to you, priest. Take yourself and your religion and these paltry baubles to Kubilai. Perhaps he is a collector of such trinkets, but Kaidu is not. Kaidu does not take, he gives! Two of the best warriors of my personal pavilion guard will attend you to your karwansarai, and they will ride with you whenever you are ready to continue your journey eastward … .”

I slipped out of the yurtu as the guardsmen began to carry out the rejected goods, and slipped around to the back side of it, where Nostril stood holding the metal sheet by one edge and waiting to flap it again whenever he heard me blow my nose. I gave him the signal employed throughout the East to mean “purpose accomplished”—showing him my fist with upraised thumb—took the piece of copper from him and trotted across the bok to return it to the armorer, and got back to the Ilkhan’s yurtu by the time the horses were reloaded.

Kaidu stood in the entrance of his pavilion, waving and shouting, “A good horse and a wide plain to you!” until we were out of earshot.

Then my uncle said, in Venetian, not to be overheard by the two Mongol escorts leading our horses and theirs, “Verily, we have all done well in concert. Nico, you only invented a good story. Marco invented a thunder god!” and he flung his arms about my shoulders and Nostril’s, and gave us both a hearty squeeze.

4

WE had now come so far around the world, and into lands so very little known, that our Kitab was no longer of the slightest use to us. Clearly, the mapmaker al-Idrisi had never ventured into these regions, and apparently never had met anyone who had, from whom he could ask even hearsay information. His maps rounded off the eastern edge of Asia much too shortly and abruptly at the great ocean called the Sea of Kithai. Thus they gave the false impression that Kashgar was at no enormous distance from our destination, Kubilai’s capital city of Khanbalik, which itself lies well inland of that ocean. But, as my father and uncle warned me, and as I wearily verified for myself, Kashgar and Khanbalik in fact are a whole half a continent apart—half of a continent immeasurably bigger than al-Idrisi had imagined it to be. We journeyers had almost exactly as far yet to go as we had already come from Suvediye away back on the Levant shore of the Mediterranean.

Distance is distance, no matter whether it is calculated in the number of human footsteps or the number of days on horseback required to get over it. Nevertheless, here in Kithai, any distance always sounded longer, because here it was counted not in farsakhs but in li. The farsakh, comprising about two and a half of our Western miles, was invented by Persians and Arabs who, having always been far travelers, are accustomed to think in expansive terms of measurement. But the li, which is only about one-third of a mile, was invented by the Han, and they are for the most part homebodies. The common Han peasant in his lifetime probably never ventures more than a few li away from the farm village where he was born. So I suppose, to his mind, a third of a mile is a far distance. Anyway, when we Polos left Kashgar, I was still accustomed to calculating in farsakhs, so it did not much dismay me to say to myself that we had only some eight or nine hundred of them to go to Khanbalik. But when I gradually got used to calculating in li, the number of them was appalling: some six thousand seven hundred from Kashgar to Khanbalik. If I had not previously appreciated the vastness of the Mongol Empire, I surely did now, as I contemplated the vastness of just its central nation of Kithai.

There were two ceremonies attendant on our departure from Kashgar. Our Mongol escorts insisted that our horses—now numbering six mounts and three pack animals—must be treated to a certain ritual for protection against the “azghun” of the trail. Azghun means “desert voices,” and I gathered that those were some sort of goblins which infest the wilderness. So the warriors brought from their bok a man called a shamàn—what they would describe as a priest and we would describe as a sorcerer. The wild-eyed and paint-daubed shaman, who looked rather like a goblin himself, mumbled some incantations and poured some drops of blood on the heads of our horses and pronounced them protected. He offered to do the same for us unbelievers, but we politely declined on the ground that we had our own accompanying priest.

The other ceremony was the settling of our bill with the landlord of the karwansarai, and that involved more time and fuss than the sorcery had. My father and uncle did not simply accept and pay the innkeeper’s account, but haggled with him over every single item. And the bill did include every single item of our stay—the space we had occupied in the inn and our beasts had occupied in the stable, the quantity of food eaten by ourselves and grain eaten by our horses, the amounts of water we and they had swallowed, and the cha leaves steeped in ours, the kara fuel that had been burned for our comfort, the amount of lamplight we had enjoyed and the measures of oil required for that—everything but the air we had breathed. As the discussion heated up, it was joined by the inn’s cook, or Governor of the Kettle, as he styled himself, and the man who had served our meals, or the Steward of the Table, and they two began vociferously adding up the number of paces they had walked and the weights they had carried and the amounts of efficiency and sweat and genius they had expended in our behalf … .

But I soon realized that this was not a contest of larceny on the landlord’s part versus outrage on ours. It was merely an expected formality—another custom derived from the complicated comportment of the Han people—a ceremony that is so enjoyed by both creditor and debtor that they can string it out to hours of eloquent argument, mutual abuse and reconciliation, claim and denial, refusal and compromise, until eventually they agree to agree, and the account is paid, and they emerge better friends than they were before. When we finally rode away from the inn, the landlord, the Kettle Governor, the Table Steward and all the other servants stood at the door, waving and calling after us the Han farewell: “Man zou,” which means, “Leave us only if you must.”

The Silk Road forks into two as it goes eastward from Kashgar. This is because there is a desert directly to the east of the city, a dry, peeling, curling desert, like a plain of shattered yellow pottery, a desert as big as a nation, and just the name of it gives good reason to avoid it, for its name is Takla Makan, meaning “once in, never out.” So a traveler on the Silk Road can choose the branch which loops northeasterly around that desert or the one looping southeast of it, which is the one we took. The road led us from one to the next of a chain of habitable oases and small farm villages, about a day’s journey apart. Always off to our left were the lion-tawny sands of the Takla Makan and, to our right, the snow-topped Kun-lun mountain range, beyond which, to the south, lies the high land of To-Bhot.

Although we were skirting clear of the desert, along its pleasantly verdant and well-watered rimlands, this was high summertime, so we had to endure a lot of desert weather that edged over from it. The only really tolerable days were those on which a wind blew down from the snowy mountains. Most frequently the days were windless, but not still, for on those days the nearness of the smoldering desert made the air about us seem to tremble. The sun might have been a blunt instrument, a brass bludgeon, beating on the air so that it rang shrill with heat. And when occasionally there came a wind from the desert, it brought the desert with it. The Takla Makan then stood on end—making moving towers of pale-yellow dust, and those towers gradually turned brown, getting darker and heavier until they toppled over onto us, turning high noon to an oppressive dusk, seething viciously and stinging the skin like a beating with twig brooms.

That dun-colored dust of the lion-colored Takla Makan is known everywhere in Kithai, even by untraveled people who have no least suspicion of the desert’s existence. The dust rustles through the streets of Khanbalik, thousands of li away, and powders the flowers in the gardens of Xan-du, farther yet, and scums the lake waters of Hang-zho, farther yet, and is cursed by the tidy housekeepers of every other Kithai city I ever was in. And once, when I sailed in a ship far upon the Sea of Kithai, not just out of touch but out of sight of the shore, I found that same dust sifting down upon the deck. A visitor to Kithai might later lose his memory of everything else he saw and experienced there, but he will forever feel the pale dun dust settling on him, never letting him forget that once he walked that lion-colored land.

The buran, as the Mongols call a dust storm of the Takla Makan, has a curious effect which I never encountered in any such storm in any other desert. While a buran was buffeting us, and for a long while after it had blown on past, it somehow made the hair of our heads stand fantastically on end, and the hairs of our beards bristle like quills, and our clothes crackle as if they had turned to stiff paper, and if we chanced to touch another person we saw a snapping spark and felt a small jolt like that from cat fur briskly rubbed.

Also, the buran’s passing, like the passing of a celestial broom, would leave the night air immaculately clean and clear. The stars came out in multitudes untellable, infinitely more of them than I ever saw elsewhere, every tiniest one as bright as a gem and the familiar bigger stars so big that they looked globular, like little moons. Meanwhile, the actual moon up there, even if it was in the phase we would ordinarily call “new”—only a fragile fingernail crescent of it lighted—was nevertheless visible in its whole roundness, a bronze full moon cradled in the new moon’s silver arms.

And on such a night, if we looked out over the Takla Makan from our camping or lodging place, we could see even stranger lights, blue ones, bobbing and dipping and twinkling over the surface of the desert, sometimes one or two, sometimes whole bevies of them. They might have been lamps or candles carried about by persons in a distant karwan camp out there, but we knew they were not. They were too blue to be flames of fire, and they winked on and off too abruptly to have been kindled by any human agency, and their presence, like that of the day’s buran, made our hair and beards stir uneasily. Besides all that, it was well-known that no human beings ever traveled or camped in the Takla Makan. Not living human beings. Not willingly.

The first time we saw the lights, I inquired of our escorts what they might be. The Mongol named Ussu said, in a hushed voice, “The beads of Heaven, Ferenghi.”

“But what makes them?”

The one named Donduk said curtly, “Be silent and listen, Ferenghi.”

I did, and, even as far from the desert as we were standing, I heard faint sighs and sobs and soughings, as if small night winds were fitfully blowing. But there was no wind.

“The azghun, Ferenghi,” Ussu explained. “The beads and the voices always come together.”

“Many an inexperienced traveler,” added Donduk, in a supercilious way, “has seen the lights and heard the cries, and thought them to be a fellow traveler in trouble, and gone seeking to help, and been lured by them away, not ever to be seen again. They are the azghun, the desert voices, and the mysterious beads of Heaven. Hence the desert’s name—once in, never out.”

I wish I could claim that I divined the cause of those manifestations, or at least a better explanation of them than wicked goblins, but I did not. I knew that the azghun and the lights occurred only after the passing of a buran, and a buran was only a mighty mass of dry sand blowing about. I wondered, did that friction have something in common with the rubbing of a cat’s fur? But out there in the desert, the sand grains had nothing to rub against except each other … .

So, baffled by that mystery, I applied my mind to a smaller but more accessible one. Why did Ussu and Donduk, though they knew all our names and had no trouble saying them, always address us Polos indiscriminately as Ferenghi? Ussu spoke the word amiably enough; he seemed to enjoy traveling with us, as a change from boring garrison duty back at Kaidu’s bok. But Donduk spoke the word distastefully, seeming to regard this journey as a nursemaid attention to us unworthy persons. I rather liked Ussu, and did not like Donduk, but they always were together, so I asked them both: why Ferenghi?

“Because you are Ferenghi,” said Ussu, looking puzzled, as if I had asked a witless question.

“But you also call my father Ferenghi. And my uncle.”

“He and he is Ferenghi also,” said Ussu.

“But you call Nostril Nostril. Is that because he is a slave?”

“No,” said Donduk scornfully. “Because he is not Ferenghi.”

“Elder Brothers,” I persisted. “I am trying to find out what Ferenghi means.”

“Ferenghi means only Ferenghi,” snapped Donduk, and threw up his hands in disgust, and so did I.

But that mystery I finally did figure out: Ferenghi was only their pronunciation of Frank. Their people must first have heard Westerners call themselves Franks eight centuries ago, in the time of the Frankish Empire, when some of the Mongols’ own ancestors, then called Bulgars and Hiung-nu, or Huns, invaded the West and gave their names to Bulgaria and Hungary. Ever since then, apparently, the Mongols have called any white Westerner a Ferenghi, no matter his real nationality. Well, it was no more inaccurate than the calling of all Mongols Mongols, though they were really of many different origins.

Ussu and Donduk told me, for instance, how their Mongol cousins the Kirghiz had come into existence. The name derived from the Mongol words kirk kiz, they said, meaning “forty virgins,” because sometime in the remote past there had existed in some remote place that many virgin females, unlikely though it might seem to us moderns, and all forty of them had got impregnated by the foam blown from an enchanted lake, and from the resultant miraculous mass birth had descended all the people now called Kirghiz. That was interesting, but I found more interesting another thing Ussu and Donduk told me about the Kirghiz. They lived in the perpetually frozen Sibir, far north of Kithai, and perforce had invented two ingenious methods of getting about those harsh lands. They would strap to the bottom of their boots bits of highly polished bone, on which they could glide far and fast upon the ice of frozen waters. Or they would similarly strap on long boards like barrel staves, to skim far and fast over the snowy wastes.

The very next farm village on our way was populated by yet another breed of Mongols. Some of the communities on that stretch of the Silk Road were peopled by Uighurs, those nationalities “allied” to the Mongols, and others were peopled by Han folk, and Ussu and Donduk had not made any comment about them. But when we came to this particular village, they told us the people were Kalmuk Mongols, and they spat the name, thus: “Kalmuk! Vakh!”—vakh being a Mongol noise to register sheer disgust, and the Kalmuk were disgusting, right enough. They were the filthiest human creatures I ever saw outside of India. To depict just one aspect of their filthiness, let me say this: not only did they never wash their bodies, they never even took off their clothes, day or night. When a Kalmuk’s outer garment got too worn to be serviceable, he or she did not discard it, but simply donned a new one over it, and continued wearing layers upon layers of ragged clothes until the undermost gradually rotted and shredded away from underneath, like a sort of ghastly scurf of the crotch. I will not attempt to say how they smelled.

But the name Kalmuk, I learned, is not a national or tribal designation. It is only the Mongol word meaning one who stays, or one who settles down in any place. All normal Mongols being nomads, they have a deep disdain for any of their race who ceases roaming and takes up a fixed abode. In the majority opinion, any Mongol who becomes a Kalmuk is doomed to degeneracy and depravity, and if the Kalmuk people I saw and smelled were typical, then the majority have good reason to despise them. And now I recalled having heard the Ilkhan Kaidu speak slightingly of the Khakhan Kubilai as “no better than a Kalmuk.” Vakh, I thought, if I find that he is, I shall turn around and go straight back to Venice.

However, despite my awareness that the word Mongol was a too general term for a multiplicity of peoples, I found it convenient to go on using the name. I soon realized also that the other, the original, inhabitants of Kithai were not all Han, either. There were nationalities called Yi and Hui and Naxi and Hezhe and Miao and God knows how many others, of skin colors ranging from ivory to bronze. But, as with the Mongols, I continued to think of all those other nationalities as Han. For one reason, their languages all sounded very much alike to me. For another, every one of those races regarded every other as inferior, and so called each other by their various words meaning Dog People. For still another reason, they all called any foreigner, including me, a name even less deserved than Frank. In Han and in every other of their singsong languages and dialects, any outlander is a Barbarian.

As we rode farther and farther along the Silk Road, it became increasingly crowded with traffic—groups and trains of traveling traders like ourselves, individual farmers and herders and artisans taking their wares to market towns, Mongol families and clans and whole boks on the move. I remembered how Isidoro Priuli, our clerk of the Compagnia Polo, had remarked, just before we left Venice, that the Silk Road had been a busy thoroughfare from the most ancient times, and now I saw reason to believe him. Over the years and centuries and maybe millennia, the traffic on that road had worn it down far below the level of the surrounding terrain. In places it was a broad trench so deep that a farmer in his nearby bean patch might see no more of the passing processions than the flick of a cart driver’s upraised whip. And down inside that trench, the cartwheels’ ruts had worn so deep that every cart now had to go where the ruts went. A carter never had to worry about his vehicle’s overturning, but neither could he pull it to one side when he needed to relieve himself. To change direction on the road—say, to turn off to some side-village destination—a driver had to keep going until he came to a junction where there were diverging ruts in which to set his wheels.

The carts used in that region of Kithai were of a peculiar type. They had immensely big wheels with knobbed rims, standing so high that they often reached above the wooden or canvas cart roof. Perhaps the wheels had had to be built bigger and bigger over the years just so their axles would clear the hump of ground between the road ruts. Each such wagon also had an awning projecting from its top front, to cover the driver from inclement weather, and that awning was considerately extended on poles far enough so that it also sheltered the team of horses, oxen or asses pulling the wagon.

I had heard much about the cleverness and inventiveness and ingenuity of the inhabitants of Kithai, but I now had cause to wonder if those qualities might be overrated. Very well, every cart had an awning to shelter its draft animals as well as its driver, and maybe that was a clever invention. But every wagon also had to carry several sets of spare axles for its wheels. That was because every separate province of Kithai has its own idea of how far apart a cart’s wheels should be, and of course its local wagons have long ago put the roads’ ruts that far apart. So the distance between the ruts is wide, for example, on the stretch of Silk Road that goes through Sin-kiang, but narrow on the road through the province of Tsing-hai, wide again but not quite so wide in Ho-nan, and so on. A carter traversing any considerable length of the Silk Road must stop every so often, laboriously take the wheels and axles off his wagon, put on axles of a different breadth and replace the wheels.

Every draft animal wore a bag slung under its tail by a webbing around its hindquarters, to collect its droppings while on the move. That was not to keep the road clean or to spare annoyance to people coming along behind. We were by now out of the region where the earth was full of burnable kara rock, free for the taking, so every carter carefully hoarded his animals’ dung to fuel the camp fire on which he would prepare his mutton and miàn and cha.

We saw many herds of sheep being driven to market or to pasture, and the sheep too wore peculiar backside appendages. The sheep were of the fat-tailed breed, and that breed is to be seen all over the East, but I had never seen any so fat-tailed as these. A sheep’s clublike tail might weigh ten or twelve pounds, nearly a tenth of its whole body weight. It was a genuine burden to the creature, and also that tail is considered the best part of the animal for eating. So each sheep had a light rope harness to drag a little plank behind it, and on that trailing shelf its tail rode safe from being bruised or unnecessarily dirtied. We saw also many herds of swine being driven, and it seemed to me that they could have used some expenditure of inventiveness, too. The pigs of Kithai are also a distinctive breed, being long in the body and ludicrously swaybacked, so that their bellies actually drag the ground, and I wondered why their herders had not considerately provided something like belly wheels.

Our escorts Ussu and Donduk were contemptuous of the wheeled vehicles and slow-plodding herds on the road. They were Mongols, and they thought all rights of way should be reserved to horseback riders. They grumbled that the Khakhan Kubilai had not yet kept a promise he had made some time ago: to level every least obstruction on every plain in Kithai, so that a horseman could canter across the entire country, even in darkest night, and never fear his horse’s stumbling. They were naturally impatient of our having to lead packhorses and proceed at a sedate pace instead of galloping headlong. So they now and then found a way to enliven what to them was a boring journey.

At one of our night stops, when we camped by the road instead of pushing on to a karwansarai, Ussu and Donduk bought from a nearby camp of drovers one of their fat-tailed sheep and some doughy ewe cheese. (I should probably say they procured those things, for I doubt that they paid anything to the Han shepherds.) Donduk unslung his battle-ax, sliced away the sheep’s tail-drag harness and in almost the same single motion cut off the animal’s head. He and Ussu sprang onto their horses, and one of them reached down to catch up by the club tail the sheep’s still-twitching and blood-spouting carcass, and the two riders began a gleefully galloping game of bous-kashia. They thundered back and forth between our camp and that of the sheepherders, wrenching the trophy animal from one another, slinging it about, dropping it frequently, trampling over it. Which of them won the game, or how they could tell, I do not know, but they tired at last and flung down at our feet the limp and gory thing, all covered with dust and dead leaves.

“Tonight’s meal,” said Ussu. “Good and tender now, uu?”

Somewhat to my surprise, he and Donduk volunteered to do the skinning and butchering and cooking themselves. It seems that Mongol men do not mind doing woman’s work when there are no women about to do it. The meal they made was one to remember, but not with bon-gusto. They began by retrieving the sheep’s lopped-off head, and it was spitted with the rest of the animal over our fire. A whole sheep should have sufficed to gorge several families of hearty eaters, but Ussu and Donduk and Nostril, with not much help from us other three, consumed that entire animal from nose to fat tail. The eating of the head was the least appetizing to watch and listen to. One of the gourmands would slice off a cheek from it, another an ear, the other a lip, and they would dip those awful fragments in a bowl of peppered juice from the meat, and chew and slurp and slobber and swallow and belch and fart. Since Mongols consider it bad manners for men to talk while they dine, that succession of good-mannered noises was not varied until they got down to the body bones and added the sound of sucking out the marrow.

We Polos ate only the meat sliced from the sheep’s loins—well-beaten by the bous-kashia and admittedly most tender. Or we would have preferred to eat only that, but Ussu and Donduk kept carving and pressing on us the real delicacies: pieces of the tail, meaning blobs of yellow-white fat. They quivered and trembled repulsively in our fingers, but we could not in politeness refuse, so we somehow managed to gag them down, and I can still feel the way those ghastly gobbets went slimily palpitating down my gullet. After the first dreadful mouthful, I tried to clean my palate with a hearty swig of cha—and nearly strangled. Too late I discovered that Ussu, after brewing the cha leaves with boiling water, had not stopped there as civilized cooks do, but had melted into the drink chunks of mutton fat and ewe cheese. That Mongol-style cha would make a nourishing full meal all by itself, I suppose, but I must say that it was downright revolting.

We ate other meals on the Silk Road that are more pleasant to recall. This far into the interior of Kithai, the Han and Uighur karwansarai landlords did not limit their fare to only the things a Muslim can eat, so we found a good diversity of meats—including that of the illik, which is a tiny roe deer that barks like a dog, and of a lovelily golden-feathered pheasant, and steaks cut from yaks, and even the meat of black bears and brown bears, which abound here. When we camped in the open, Uncle Mafio and the two Mongols vied at providing game for the pot: ducks and geese and rabbits and once a desert qazèl, but more usually they sought ground squirrels to shoot, because those little creatures thoughtfully provide the fuel for their own cooking. A hunter knows that, when he has no kara or wood or dried dung to make a fire with, he has only to look for the ground squirrels and their holes; even in a desert barren, they somehow contrive to put a weather-protective dome over their holes, of laced twigs and grass, well dried for the burning.

There were many other wild creatures in that region, not for eating but interesting to observe. There were black vultures with wings so broad that a man would have to take three paces to walk from tip to tip; and a snake so much resembling yellow metal that I would have sworn it was made of molten gold, but, having been informed that it was deadly venomous, I never touched one to find out. There was a little animal called a yerbò, like a mouse but with extravagantly long hind legs and tail, upon which three appendages it hopped about upright; and a magnificently beautiful wild cat called a palang, which I once saw making a meal of a wild ass it had downed, and which was like the heraldic pard, only not yellow of coat, but silvery gray with black rosettes spotted all over it.

The Mongols taught me to pick various wild plants as vegetable dishes for our meals—wild onions, for example, which go so well with any venison meat. There was a growth that they called the hair plant, and it did look exactly like a shock of black human hair. Neither its name nor its appearance was very appetizing, but when boiled and seasoned with a bit of vinegar, it made a delicate pickle condiment. Another oddity was what they called the vegetable lamb; they averred that it was indeed a mongrel creature bred from a mating of animal and plant, and said they preferred eating it to eating real lamb. It was tasty enough, but it was really only the woolly rootstalk of a certain fern.

The one ravishingly delicious novelty I found on that stage of the journey was the wonderful melon called the hami. Even the method of its growing was a novelty. When the vines started forming their fruit buds, the melon farmers paved over the whole field with slabs of slate for the vines to lie on. Instead of the melons’ getting sunshine only on their upper sides, those slates reflected the sun’s heat so that the hami ripened evenly all the way around. The hami had flesh of a pale greenish-white, so crisp that it crackled when bitten, dripping with juice, of a cool and refreshing flavor, not cloying but just the right sweetness. The hami had a taste and a fragrance different from all other fruits, and was almost as good when dried into flakes for travel rations, and has never been surpassed in my experience by any other garden sweet.

When we had been traveling for two or three weeks, the Silk Road abruptly turned northward for a little way, the only time it touched the Takla Makan, making a very short traverse across that desert’s eastern-most edge, then turning directly east again toward a town named Dun-huang. That northward jink of the road took us through a pass that twined among some low mountains—really they were extremely high sand dunes—called the Flame Hills.

There is a legend to account for every place-name in Kithai, and according to legend these hills once were lushly forested and green, until they were set afire by some malicious kwei, or demons. A monkey god came along and kindly blew out the flames, but there was nothing left except these mountainous heaps of sand, still glowing like embers. That is the legend. I am more inclined to think that the Flame Hills are so called because their sands are a sort of burnt ocher color, and are windswept into flame-shaped furrows and wrinkles, and they perpetually shimmer behind a curtain of hot air, and—especially at sunset—they do glow a truly fiery red-orange color. But the most curious thing about them was a nest of four eggs which Ussu and Donkuk uncovered from the sand at the base of one of the dunes. I would have thought the objects were only large stones, perfectly oval and smooth and about the size of hami melons, but Donduk insisted:

“These are the abandoned eggs of a giant rukh bird. Such nests can be found all along the Flame Hills here.”

When I held one, I realized that it was indeed too light for a stone of that size. And when I examined it, I saw that it did have a porous surface, exactly as do the eggs of hens or ducks or any other bird. These were eggs, all right, and far bigger even than those of the camel-bird, which I had seen in Persian markets. I wondered what kind of a for-tagiona these would make if I broke them and scrambled them and fried them for our evening meal.

“These Flame Hills,” said Ussu, “must have been the rukh’s favored nesting place in times past, Ferenghi, do you not think so, uu?”

“Times very long past,” I suggested, for I had just tried to crack one of the eggs. Although it was not of stonelike weight, it had long ago aged and petrified to stonelike solidity. So the things were both uneatable and unhatchable, and they were too unwieldy for me to carry one off for a memento. They were most certainly eggs, and of a size that could have been laid only by a monster bird, but whether in truth that bird had been a rukh, I cannot say.

5

DUN-HUANG was a thriving trade town, about as big and as populous as Kashgar, sitting in a sandy basin ringed by camel-colored rock cliffs. But where Kashgar’s inns had catered to Muslim travelers, those of Dun-huang made special provision for the tastes and customs of Buddhists. This was because the town had been founded, some nine hundred years ago, when a traveling trader of the Buddhist faith was beset, somewhere on the Silk Road hereabout, by bandits or the azghun voices or a kwei demon or something, and was somehow miraculously saved from those malign clutches. So he paused here to give thanks to the Buddha, and he did that by making a statue of that deity and placing it in a niche in one of the cliffs. In the nine centuries since, every other Buddhist traveler on the Silk Road has added an adornment to another of those caves. And now the name of Dun-huang, though it really means only Yellow Cliffs, is sometimes translated as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.

The designation is too modest. I would call these the Caves of the Million Buddhas, at the very least. For there are now some hundreds of caves pocking the cliffs, some natural, some hewn out by hand, and in them are perhaps two thousand statues of the Buddha, large and small, but on the cave walls are painted frescoes displaying at least a thousand times that many images of the Buddha, not to mention lesser divinities and worthies of the Buddha’s retinue. I could discern that most of the images were male, and some just as clearly female, but a goodly number were indistinct as to sex. However, all had one feature in common: they all had tremendously elongated ears with lobes dangling to their shoulders.

“It is a common belief,” said the old Han caretaker, “that a person born with large ears and well-defined earlobes is destined for good fortune. Since the most fortunate of all humans were the Buddha and his disciples, we assume that they had such ears, and we depict them so.”

That aged ubashi, or monk, was pleased to conduct me on a tour of the caves, and he spoke Farsi for the occasion. I followed him from niche to cavern to grotto, and in all of them were statues of the Buddha, standing or lying peacefully asleep or, most often, sitting cross-legged on a giant lotus blossom. The monk told me that Buddha is an ancient Indian word meaning the Enlightened One, and that the Buddha had been a Prince of India before his apotheosis. So I might have expected the statues to be all of a black and runty man, but they were not. Buddhism long ago spread from India to other nations, and evidently every devout traveler who paid to put up a statue or a painting had envisioned the Buddha as looking like him. Some of the older images were indeed dark and scrawny like Hindus, but others could have been Alexandrine Apollos or hawklike Persians or leathery Mongols, and the most recently done all had unlined faces with waxy complexions and placid expressions and slanted slit eyes; that is to say, they were pure Han.

It was also evident that, in the past, Muslim marauders had often swept through Dun-huang, for many of the statues were in ruins, hacked apart, revealing their simple construction of gesso molded onto cane and reed armatures, or at the least were cruelly disfigured. As I have told, the Muslims detest any portrayal of a living being. So here, when they had not had time to destroy a statue utterly, they had chopped the head off it (the head being the abode of life) or, in even more haste, they had been satisfied to gouge out the eyes from it (the eyes being the expression of life). The Muslims had taken the trouble to scratch out even the tiny eyes of many thousands of miniature painted images on the walls—even those of delicate and pretty female figures.

“And the females,” said the old monk mournfully, “are not even divinities at all.” He pointed to one lively little figure. “She is a Devatas, one of the celestial dancing girls who entertain the blessed souls in the Sukhavati, the Pure Land between lives. And this one”—he pointed to a girl who was painted in the act of flying, in a swallowlike swirl of skirts and veils—“she is an Apsaras, one of the celestial temptresses.”

“There are temptresses in the Buddhist Heaven?” I asked, intrigued.

He sniffed and said, “Only to prevent an overcrowding of the Pure Land.”

“Indeed? How?”

“The Apsarases have the duty of seducing holy men here on earth, so their souls get damned to the Awful Land of Naraka between lives, instead of the blissful Sukhavati.”

“Ah,” said I, to show that I comprehended. “An Apsaras is a sùccubo.”

Buddhism has certain other parallels to our True Faith. Its devotees are adjured not to kill, not to tell untruths, not to take what is not given, not to indulge in sexual misbehavior. But in other respects, it is very different from Christianity. Buddhists are also adjured not to drink intoxicants, not to eat after the noon hour, not to attend entertainments, not to wear bodily adornments, not to sleep or even rest on a comfortable mattress. The religion does have the equivalents of our monks and nuns and priests, called ubashi and ubashanza and lamas, and Buddha enjoined them to live lives of poverty, as ours also are admonished, but few of them comply.

For example, Buddha told his followers to wear nothing but “yellowed garments”—by which he meant mere rags discolored by mold and decay. But the Buddhist monks and nuns obey that instruction only to the letter, not the spirit, for they are now arrayed in robes of the costliest fabrics, gaudily dyed in hues from brilliant yellow to fiery orange. They also have grand temples, called potkadas, and monasteries, called lamasarais, richly endowed and furnished. Also, I suspect that every Buddhist owns many more personal possessions than the few that Buddha specified: a sleeping mat, three rags for garments, a knife, a needle, a begging bowl with which to solicit one meager meal a day, and a water strainer with which to dip out from one’s drinking water any incautious insects or fry or tadpoles, lest they get swallowed.

The water strainer illustrates Buddhism’s foremost rule: that no creature alive, however humble or minute, shall ever be killed, deliberately or even accidentally. However, this has nothing in common with a Christian’s wish to be good so as to go to Heaven after death. A Buddhist believes that a good man dies only to be reborn as a better man, further on his way to Enlightenment. And he believes that a bad man dies only to be reborn as a lesser grade of creature: an animal, bird, fish or insect. That is why a Buddhist must not kill anything. Since every least speck of life in Creation is presumably a soul trying to clamber up the ladder of Enlightenment, a Buddhist dares not squash so much as a louse, for it could be his late grandfather, demoted after death, or his future grandson on the way to being born.

A Christian might admire a Buddhist’s reverence for life, no matter the ludicrous illogic behind it, except for two inevitable results of it. One is that every Buddhist man, woman and child is a seething nest of lice and fleas, and I found those vermin all too ready to risk their Enlightenment by emigrating onto Christian unbelievers like me. Also, a Buddhist of course cannot eat animal flesh. The devout confine themselves to boiled rice and water, and the most liberal will not eat anything more daring than milk and fruit and vegetables. So that is what we journeyers got in the Dun-huang inn: at mealtime, boiled fronds and tendrils and weak cha and bland custards, and at bedtime, fleas and ticks and bedbugs and lice.

“There was formerly here in Dun-huang a very holy lama,” said my Han monk, in a voice of reverence, “so holy that he ate only raw rice, uncooked. And to further his humility even more, he wore an iron chain clenched about his shrunken belly. The chafing of the rusty chain made a sore, and it became quite putrid, generating a quantity of maggots. And if one of those munching maggots chanced to fall to the ground, the lama would lovingly pick it up, saying, ‘Why do you flee, beloved? Did you not find enough to eat?’ and he would tenderly replace it in the juiciest part of the sore.”

That instructive tale may not have furthered my own humility, but it did diminish my appetite so that, when I got back to the inn, I was easily able to forgo that night’s meal of pallid pap. Meanwhile, the monk went on:

“That lama eventually became a walking sore, and was consumed by it, and died of it. We all admire and envy him, for he surely moved far along the way to Enlightenment.”

“I sincerely hope so,” I said. “But what happens at the end of that way? Does the Enlightened One finally get to Heaven then?”

“Nothing so crass,” said the ubashi. “One hopes, by means of sequacious rebirths and lifetimes of striving upward, eventually to be freed of having to live at all. To be liberated from the bondage of human needs and desires and passions and griefs and miseries. One hopes to achieve Nirvana, which means ‘the blowing-out.’”

He was not jesting. A Buddhist has not the aim, as we do, of meriting for his soul an eternity of glad existence in the mansions of Heaven. A Buddhist yearns only for absolute extinction, or, as the monk put it, “a merging with the Infinite.” He did admit that his religion makes provision for several heavenly Pure Lands and hellish Awful Lands, but they are—something like our Purgatory or Limbo—only way stations between a soul’s successive rebirths on the way to Nirvana. And at that ultimate destination a soul gets snuffed out, as a candle flame is snuffed, nevermore to enjoy or endure not earth nor Heaven nor Hell nor anything.

I had cause to reflect on those beliefs, as our company continued eastward from Dun-huang, on a day that was marvelously full of things to reflect on.

We departed the inn at sunrise, when all the just-waking birds were uttering their morning chirps and cheeps and twitters, so many and so loud that they sounded like grease sizzling in a great pan. Then the later-rousing doves awoke, to murmur their discreet plaints and regrets, but in such numbers that their low warbling was near a roar. A considerable karwan train was also leaving the inn yard that morning, and in these regions the camels wore their bells not on a neckband, but on their front knees. So they strode out jingling and clanging and bonging as if they musically rejoiced in being on the move. I rode my horse alongside one of that train’s wagons for a space, and one of its massive wheels had caught up somewhere a spray of jasmine in its spokes, and every time that high wheel revolved it brought the blossoms past my face and wafted their sweet scent to my nose.

The route out of the Dun-huang basin took us through a cleft in the cave-pocked cliffs, and that opened into a valley verdant with trees and fields and wildflowers, the last such oasis we would see for a while. As we rode through that valley I saw something so beautiful that I still can see it in my memory. Some way ahead of us, a plume of golden-yellow smoke rose up on the morning breeze, and we all remarked on it and wondered at it. Perhaps it came from a fire in a karwan camp, but what could the campers be burning to make such a distinctively colored cloud? The smoke continued to rise and billow, and eventually we came up to it and saw that it was not smoke at all. On the left side of the valley there was a meadow totally covered with golden-yellow flowers, and all those numberless flowers were exultantly freeing their golden-yellow pollen to let the breeze carry it across the Silk Road and away to the other slopes of the valley. We rode through that cloud of seeming smoke, and we came out the other side of it, and we and our horses shimmered in the sunlight as if we had been freshly plated with pure gold.

Another thing. From the valley, we emerged into a land of undulant sand dunes, but the sand was no longer the color of camels or lions, it was a dark silvery gray, like a powdered metal. Nostril got down from his horse to relieve himself, and climbed over a dune of the gray sand, seeking privacy, and to his surprise—and mine—the sand barked like a peevish dog at each of his footsteps. It made no particular noise when Nostril wetted on it, but, as he turned to descend the dune, his foot slipped and he slid the whole way down from the crest, and his slide was accompanied by a lovely loud musical note, vibrato, as if a string on the world’s biggest lute had been thrummed.

“Mashallah!” Nostril blurted fearfully, as he picked himself up. He ran all the way from the sand to the firmer surface of the road before pausing to dust himself off.

My father and uncle and the two escorts were all laughing at him. One of the Mongols said, “These sands are called the lui-ing.”

“The thunder voices,” Uncle Mafio translated for me. “Nico and I have heard them when we passed this way before. They will cry also if the wind blows hard, and they cry loudest in winter, when the sands are cold.”

Now, that was a thing most marvelous. But it was only a thing of this earth, as were the sunrise birdsongs and the common camel bells and the perfumed jasmine and the golden wild flowers so determined to flourish that they flung their seed haphazard to the wind.

This world is fair, I thought, and life is good, no matter whether one is certain of Heaven or apprehensive of Hell at the end of it. I could only pity such pathetic persons as Buddhists, deeming the earth and their existence on it so ugly and miserable and repugnant that their highest yearning was to flee into sheer oblivion. Not I, not ever I. If I might accept any of the Buddhist beliefs, it would be that of rebirth over and over into this world, though it mean coming back sometimes as a lowly dove or a sprig of jasmine between my human incarnations. Yes, I thought, if I could I would go on living forever.

6

THE land continued gray, but that color got darker as we went eastward, darkening to veritable black—black grit and black gravel drifting over black bedrock—for we had come now to another desert, one too broad and extensive for the Silk Road to skirt around. It was called by the Mongols the Gobi, and by the Han the Sha-mo, both words meaning a desert of that peculiar composition: one from which all the sand had long ago blown away, leaving only the heavier particles, and they all black. It made for an unearthly landscape, appearing to be not of pebbles and stones and rocks, but of even harder metal. In the sun, every black hill and boulder and ridge glittered with a sharp bright rim as if it had been honed on a whetstone. The only growing things were the colorless plumes of camel-weed and some tufts of colorless grass like fine metal wires.

The Gobi is also called by travelers the Great Silence, because any conversation softer than a shout goes unheard there, and so does the clatter of black stones rolling and shifting underfoot, and so do the piteous whinnies of sore-footed horses, and so do the whines and grumbles of a complainer like Nostril, all such noises blotted out by the everlasting wail of the wind. Over the Gobi the wind blows ceaselessly through three hundred and sixty days of the year, and, in the late summer days of our crossing, it blew as hot as a blast from the opened doors of the fearsome ovens of the vasty kitchens of the nethermost levels of Satan’s fiercest Inferno.

The next town we came to, Anxi, must be the most desolately situated community in all Kithai. It was a mere cluster of shacky shops peddling karwan necessities, and some travelers’ inns and stables, all of unpainted wood and mud-brick much pitted and eroded by wind-blown grit. The town had come into being there on the edge of the dreary Gobi only because at this point the two branches of the Silk Road came together again—the southerly one by which we arrived in town, and the other route that had circled around north of the Takla Makan—and at Anxi they merged into the single road that goes on, without again dividing, over the interminable more li to the Kithai capital of Khanbalik. At this convergence of roads, there was of course an even more bustling traffic of individual traders and groups and families and karwan trains. But one procession of mule-drawn wagons made me ask our escorts:

“What kind of train is that? It moves so slowly and so quietly.”

All the wheels of the wagons had their rims tied about with bunched hay and rags, to muffle the sound of them, and the mules had their hoofs tied in bags of wadding for the same purpose. That did not make the train entirely noiseless, for the wheels and hoofs still made a rumbling and clumping sound, and there was much creaking of the wooden wagon beds and leather harness, but its progress was quieter than that of most trains. Besides the Han men driving the wagon mules, other Han were mounted on mules as outriders and, as they accompanied the train through Anxi, they rode like an honor guard, shouldering a path through the crowded streets, but never using their voices to demand clear passage.

The street folk moved obligingly aside and silenced their own chatter and averted their faces, as if the train were that of some grand and haughty personage. But there was no one in the procession except those drivers and escorts; no one rode in any of the several score wagons. They were occupied only by heaps of what might have been rolled tents or rugs, many hundreds of them, cloth-wrapped long bundles, piled like cordwood in the wagon beds. Whatever those objects were, they looked very old, and they gave off a dry, musty smell, and their cloth wrappings were all tattered and shredded and flapping. When the wagons jounced on the rutted streets, they shed bits and flakes of cloth.

“Like shrouds decaying,” I remarked.

To my astonishment, Ussu said, “That is what they are.” In a hushed voice, he added, “Show respect, Ferenghi. Turn away and do not stare as they go by.”

He did not speak again until the muffled train had passed. Then he told me that all Han people have a great desire to be buried in the places where they were born, and their survivors bend every effort to have that done. Since most of the Han who keep inns and shops on the far western reaches of the Silk Road had come originally from the more populous eastern end of the country, that was where they wished their remains to rest. So any Han who died in the west was only shallowly buried, and when—after many years—a sufficiency of them had died, their families in the east would organize a train and send it west. All those bodies would be dug up and collected and transported together back to their native regions. It happened perhaps only once in a generation, said Ussu, so I could count myself unique among Ferenghi, to have glimpsed one of the karwans of the corpses.

All along the Silk Road from Kashgar, we had been fording the occasional minor river—meager streams trickling down from the mountain snows in the south and quickly soaking into the desert to the north. But some weeks eastward of Anxi we found a more considerable river going easterly with us. In its beginnings, it was a merrily tumbling clear water, but every time the road brought us again alongside it, we saw that it was wider and deeper and more turbulent and turning dun-yellow with its accumulation of silt; hence the name given it, Huang, the Yellow River. Swooping throughout the whole breadth of Kithai, the Huang is one of the two great river systems of these lands. The other is far to the south of this, an even mightier water—called Yang-tze, meaning simply Tremendous River—traversing the land of Kithai.

“That Yang-tze and this Huang,” my father said instructively, “they are, after the historic Nile, the second and third longest rivers in all the traveled world.”

I might facetiously have remarked that the Huang must be the tallest river on earth. What I mean—and I am seldom believed when I say this—is that through much of its length the Huang River stands above the land surrounding it.

“But how can that be?” people protest. “A river is not independent of the earth. If a river should rise, it would merely overflow onto the land about.”

But the Yellow River does not, except at disastrous intervals. Over the years and generations and centuries, the Han farmers along the river have built up earthen levees to reinforce its banks. But, because the Huang carries such quantities of silt, and continuously deposits that on its bed, its surface level also continuously goes up. So the Han farmers, over generations and centuries and eons, have had to keep building the levees higher. Thus, between those artificial banks, the Yellow River literally does stand higher than the land. In some places, if I had wished to jump into the river, I would have had to climb a bank higher than a four-storied building.

“But big as they are, those levees are only of packed earth,” said my father. “In one very rainy year while we were last here, we saw the Huang get so full and boisterous that it broke those banks.”

“A river held up in the air and then let fall,” I mused. “It must have been something to see.”

Uncle Mafio said, “Like watching Venice and the whole mainland Veneto submerge beneath the lagoon, if you can imagine such a thing. A flood of unbelievable extent. Entire villages and towns dissolved. Whole nations of people drowned.”

“It happens not every year, God be thanked,” said my father. “But often enough to have given the Yellow River its other name—the Scourge of the Sons of Han.”

However, as long as the river runs tame, the Han make good use of it. Here and there along the banks, I saw the biggest wheels in the world: waterwheels of wood and cane as high as twenty men standing atop one another. Around the wheels’ rims were multitudes of buckets and scoops, which the river considerately filled and lifted and spilled into irrigation canals.

And in one place, I saw a boat beside the bank that had immense, revolving paddlewheels on either side. On first seeing it, I thought it was some kind of Han invention to replace man-worked oars for propulsion. But again I was disillusioned of the vaunted Han inventiveness, for I realized that the craft was only moored to the bank and the paddlewheels were merely turned by the river current. They in turn rotated axles and spokes inside the vessel to make millstones grind grain. So the whole thing was nothing but a water mill, novel only in that it was not stationary, but could be moved up and down the river, to any place where there was a harvest of grain to be ground into flour.

There were innumerable other kinds of vessels, for the Yellow River was more crowded with traffic than was the Silk Road. The Han people, having such tremendous distances over which to freight their goods and produce, prefer to use their waterways rather than overland methods of transport. It is really a sensible practice, however much their Mongol masters ridicule the Han’s disregard for horses. A horse or any other pack animal, over any distance, will eat more grain than it can carry, but the river boatmen consume very little man-fueling food to accomplish each li of travel. So the Han rightfully respect and revere their rivers; they even give the name of River of Heaven to what we Westerners call the Milky Way.

On the Yellow River there were many shallow scows, called san-pan, and each scow’s crew was a family, to whom the boat was simultaneously home, transport and livelihood. The males of the family did the san-pan’s rowing or towing upstream, and the steering downstream, and the loading and unloading of the cargo. The females did what seemed to be perpetual cooking and laundering. And among them played a multitude of smaller boys and girls, all blithely naked except for a large gourd tied at the waist, to help them float when they fell overboard, which they did with regularity.

There were many larger craft propelled by sails. When I asked our escorts what they were called, the Mongols indifferently said what sounded like “chunk.” The correct Han word, I learned, is chuan, but that means only sailing vessels in general; I never did learn the thirty-eight different names of the thirty-eight different kinds of rivergoing and seagoing “chunks.”

Anyway, the smallest of them was as big as a Flemish cog, but of shallow draft, and looked to me ridiculously cumbersome, like an immense floating wooden shoe. But I gradually perceived that the chuan’s shape is not patterned on a fish, as most Western vessels are, for a fishlike celerity. It is patterned on a duck, for stability on the water, and I could see that it floated serenely over the Yellow River’s most tumultuous whirlpools and whitecaps. Perhaps because the chuan is slow and sturdy, it has only a single rudder for steering, not two as on our vessels, and it is set amidship at the stern and requires no more than a single steersman. A chuan’s sails are also odd, not being let to belly in the wind, but latticed by slats at intervals, so they look rather like ribbed bat wings. And when it is necessary to shorten sail, they are not reefed like ours, but are folded, slat by slat, like a griglia of persiana window blinds.

Of all the craft I saw on that river, though, the most striking was a small oared skiff called a hu-pan. It was ludicrously unsymmetrical, being bent in a sideways arc. Now, a Venetian gòndola is also built with a touch of camber to allow for the fact that the gondolier paddles always on the right side, but a gòndola’s keel bend is so slight as to be unnoticeable. These hu-pan were as skewed as a shimshir sword laid on its side. Again, it was a matter of practicality. A hu-pan always travels close against the riverbank, and as its oarsman variously keeps its concave or convex side to the bending shore, it more easily slips around the river bends. Of course, the rower must keep switching stern for bow as the river twists this way and that, so his progress resembles that of an agitated water-strider insect.

Before long, however, I had something even more strange to wonder at—on the land, not on the river. Near a village called Zong-zhai, we came to a deserted and tumbledown ruin that must once have been a substantial stone edifice with two stout watchtowers. Our escort Ussu told me that it had in olden time been a Han fortress of some long-past dynasty, and was still called by its old name: the Gates of Jade. The fortress was not actually a gate, and certainly not made of jade, but it constituted the western end of a massively thick and impressively high wall stretching northeastward from this point.

The Great Wall, as foreigners call it, is more colorfully called by the Han the “Mouth” of their land. In times past, the Han spoke of themselves as the People Within the Mouth, meaning this wall, and spoke of all other nations to the north and westward as the People Outside the Mouth. Whenever a Han criminal or traitor was condemned to exile, he was said to have been “spat beyond the Mouth.” The wall was built to keep all but the Han outside it, and it is unquestionably the longest and strongest defensive barrier ever built by human hands. How many hands, or how long they labored, no one can say. But the construction of it must have consumed the entire lives of many generations of whole populations of men.

According to tradition, the wall follows the wandering course laid out by a favorite white horse of a certain Emperor Chin, the Han ruler who commenced its construction in some distantly ancient time. But I doubt that story, for no horse would willingly have taken such a difficult route along mountaintop ridges, as much of the wall does. Certainly we and our horses did not. Though the remaining weeks of our seemingly never-to-end journey across Kithai required us generally to follow the course of that seemingly never-to-end wall—and while we were seldom out of sight of it from then on—we could usually find lower and easier ground downhill of it.

The Great Wall winds sinuously across Kithai, sometimes uninterruptedly from horizon to horizon, but in other places it takes advantage of natural ramparts like peaks and cliffs, and incorporates them into its length, then resumes again on more vulnerable ground beyond. Also, it is not everywhere just a single wall. In one region of eastern Kithai, we found that there were three parallel walls, one behind another, at intervals some hundred li apart.

The wall is not everywhere of the same composition. Its more easterly stretches are built of great squared rocks, neatly and firmly mortared together—as if in those places it was built under the Emperor Chin’s stern eye—and is to this day still staunch and unbroken: a great, high, thick, solid bulwark, its top wide enough for a troop of horsemen to ride abreast, and with embrasured battlements on either side of that walltop roadway, and with bulky watchtowers jutting up even higher at intervals. But in some of its western lengths—as if the Emperor’s subjects and slaves did only perfunctory work, knowing he would never come to inspect—the wall was built only shoddily, of stones and mud slapped together in a structure not so high nor thick, and consequently has been much crumbled and interrupted by gaps over the centuries.

Nevertheless, in sum, the Great Wall is a majestic and awesome thing, and I am not easily able to describe it in terms comprehensible to a Westerner. But let me put it this way. If the wall could somehow be transported intact out of Kithai, and all its numerous segments laid end to end, starting from Venice, thence going northwestward over the continent of Europe, across the Alps, over the meadows and rivers and forests and everything else, clear to the North Sea at the Flemish port of Bruges, there would yet be enough of the wall to double back again that same tremendous distance to Venice, and still there would be enough of the wall left over to extend from Venice westward to the border of France.

Considering the undeniable grandeur of the Great Wall, why did my father and uncle, who had seen it before, not ever mention it to me, to excite my anticipation of seeing it? And why did I myself not tell of such a marvel in that earlier book recounting my journeys? It was not, in this case, an omission of something which I judged people would refuse to believe. I neglected to mention the wall because—for all its prodigiousness—I deemed it a trivial achievement of the Han, and I still do. It seemed to me one more disavowal of the reputed genius of the natives of Kithai, and it still does. For this reason:

As we rode along beside the Great Wall, I remarked to Ussu and Donduk, “You Mongols were People Outside the Mouth, but now you are inside it. Did your armies have no trouble breaching that barrier?”

Donduk sneered. “Since the wall was first built, in times before history, no invader has ever had any trouble getting over it. We Mongols and our ancestors have done it again and again over the centuries. Even a puny Ferenghi could do it.”

“Why is that?” I asked. “Were all other armies always better warriors than the Han defenders?”

“What defenders, uu?” Ussu said contemptuously.

“Why, the sentries on the parapets. They must have been able to see any enemy approaching from afar. And surely they had legions to summon for the repelling of enemies.”

“Oh, yes, that is true.”

“Well, then? Were they so easy to defeat?”

“Defeat!” they said together, their voices still heavy with disdain. Ussu explained the reason for their scorn. “No one ever had to defeat them. Any outsider who ever wished to cross the wall had merely to bribe the sentries with a bit of silver. Vakh! No wall is any taller or stronger or more forbidding than the men behind it.”

And I saw that it was so. The Great Wall, built with God knows what expenditure of money and time and labor and sweat and blood and lives, has never been any more a deterrent to invaders than has the merest boundary line casually drawn on a map. The Great Wall’s only real claim to notability is in its being the world’s most stupendous monument to futility.

As witness: we came at last, some weeks later, to the city which that wall enwraps most securely, where the wall is highest and thickest and best preserved. The city there behind the wall has been known through the ages by many different names: Ji-cheng and Ji and Yu-zho and Chung-tu and other names—and at one time or another it has been the capital of many different empires of the Han people: the Chin and the Chou and the Tang dynasties, and no doubt others. But what availed the enormous wall? Today that city into which we rode is named Khanbalik, “City of the Khan”—commemorating the latest invader to cross the Great Wall and conquer this land, and by my reckoning the grandest of them: the man who resoundingly but justifiably titled himself Great Khan, Khan of All Khans, Khan of the Nations, son of Tulei and brother of Mangu Khan, grandson of Chinghiz Khan, Mightiest of the Mongols, the Khakhan Kubilai.