The Journeyer

TO-BHOT

1

IT was a long journey from Khanbalik to the Orlok Bayan’s site of operations, nearly as many li as from Khanbalik to Kashgar, but my two escorts and I rode light and fast. We carried only essential traveling gear—no food or cookware or bedding—and the heaviest items, the powder-charged brass balls, were divided among our three extra horses. Those were also fleet steeds, not the usual trudging pack animals, so all six horses were capable of proceeding at the Mongols’ war-march pace of canter and walk and canter. Whenever any horse began to show signs of wearying, we had only to pause at the nearest of the Road Minister’s horse posts and demand six fresh ones.

I had not known what Kubilai had meant when he said that he had already sent advance riders to “ready the route.” But I learned that that was an arrangement made whenever the Khakhan or any of his important emissaries made a long cross-country journey. Those riders went ahead to announce the journeyer’s imminent approach, and every Wang of every province, every prefect of every prefecture, even the elders of every least village, were expected to prepare for the passing-through. So there were always comfortable beds waiting in the best possible accommodations, good cooks waiting to prepare the best available fare, even new wells dug if necessary to supply sweet water in arid regions. That is why we were enabled to carry only the lightest of packs. Every night, too, there were women supplied for our enjoyment, but, as Kubilai had also said, I was too fatigued and saddle sore to make use of them. Instead, I spent each night’s short interval between table and bed in scribbling down on paper what details and landmarks I had noticed during that day’s travel.

We rode in a southwestering arc from Khanbalik, and I cannot remember how many villages, towns and cities we passed through or spent a night in, but only two of them were of estimable size. One was Xian, which the War Minister Chao had pointed out to me on his great map and told me had once been the capital city of the First Emperor of these lands. Xian had dwindled considerably in the centuries since, and, though still a busy and prosperous crossroads city, possessed none of the finery of an imperial capital. The other big city was Cheng-du—in what was called the Red Basin country, because the earth there is not yellow, as in most of the rest of Kithai. Cheng-du was the capital city of the province called Si-chuan, and its Wang inhabited a palace city-within-a-city almost as grand as that of Khanbalik. The Wang Mangalai, another of Kubilai’s sons, would gladly have had me stay a long time as his honored guest, and I was much tempted to rest there for a least a while. But, mindful of my mission, I made my excuses, and of course Mangalai accepted them, and I spent only a single night in his company.

From Cheng-du, my escorts and I turned directly west—into the mountainous border country where the Kithai province of Si-chuan and the Sung province of Yun-nan and the land of To-Bhot all mingled together—and our pace slowed as we began a long climb that soon became a steep climb. The mountains were not so sky-reaching as, for instance, the Pai-Mir of High Tartary. These had much more forest growth on them and no snow, and even in deep winter, I was told, the snow never clung to them for long, except on their very tops. But these mountains, if less high than others I had seen, were much more vertical in their general configuration. Except for the wooded slopes, they were mostly monstrous slabs set on end, separated by narrow, deep, dark ravines. But at least they were solid mountains; we did not have to dodge any avalanches, and I did not ever hear any of them booming roundabout. The country was called by its inhabitants the Land of the Four Rivers, those four streams being locally named the N’mai, the Nu, the Lan-kang and the Jin-sha. But those waters, said the natives, broadened and deepened as they flowed out of the mountains, to become the four greatest rivers of that part of the world, better known by their downstream names of Irawadi, Sal-win, Me-kong and Yang-tze. The first three of those, when they got beyond Yun-nan Province, ran southward or southeastward into the tropical lands called Champa. The fourth would become that Yang-tze of which I have earlier spoken—the Tremendous River—which runs eastward clear to the Sea of Kithai.

But I and my escorts were crossing those rivers far upstream of where they became only four—in the highlands where the rivers began as a multitude of tributary streams. There were so many that they did not all have names, but none was contemptible on that account. Every single stream was a rushing white water which, through the ages, had worn its own individual channel through the mountains, and every single channel was a slab-sided gorge that might have been cleft by the downward slash of some jinni’s giant shimshir sword. The only way along and across those precipitous gashes in the mountains was by way of what the local people proudly called their Pillar Road.

Calling it a road at all was a considerable exaggeration, but it did stand on pillars—or, more accurately, corbels—logs driven and wedged into cracks and crannies in the cliffsides, and planks laid across them, and layers of earth and straw piled on. It could better have been called the Shelf Road. Or even better, the Blind Road, because I traveled most of it with my eyes shut, trusting in the surefootedness and imperturbability of my horse, and hoping it was shod with the never-slip shoes made of the “Marco’s sheep” horn. To open my eyes and look up, down, ahead, behind or sideways made me equally giddy. Glancing upward or downward gave much the same sight: two walls of gray rock converging with distance to a narrow, bright, green-edged crack—up there the sky between two fringes of trees, down yonder the water that looked like a moss-lined brook, but was really a rushing river between two belts of forest. Ahead or behind was the vertiginous view of the Pillar Road shelf that looked too fragile to bear its own weight, never mind a horse and rider, or a train of them. Looking to one side, I would see the cliff that brushed my stirrup and seemed to threaten to give me a sudden shove. Looking the other way, I would see the farther cliff, which appeared to stand so close that I was tempted to reach out and touch it—and to lean was to risk toppling from my saddle and falling forever.

The only thing more dizzying than following the Pillar Road along the cliffsides was the crossing from one side of a gorge to the other, on what the mountain folk, without exaggeration, called the Limp Bridges. Those were made of planks and thick ropes of twisted cane strips, and they swayed in the winds that blew ceaselessly through the mountains, and they swayed worse when a man stepped out onto them, and they swayed even worse when he led his horse out behind him, and during those crossings I think even the horses shut their eyes.

Though Kubilai’s advance riders had made sure that all the mountain inhabitants expected the arrival of me and my escorts, and we got the best hospitality those people could give us, it was not exactly of royal quality. Only occasionally did we come to a place in the mountains flat and habitable enough to support even a meager village of woodcutters’ huts. More often we spent the night in a cliff niche where the road was built wide enough for travelers going in opposite directions to edge past each other. At those places there was a group of rough men stationed, waiting to receive us, having erected a yak-hair tent for us to sleep in, and having brought some meat or killed a mountain sheep or goat to cook for us over an open camp fire.

I well remember the first time we stopped in such a place, when the day was just darkening to dusk. The three mountain men awaiting us made salutations and ko-tou and—since we could not converse; they knew no Mongol, and spoke some tongue which was not even Han—they immediately set about making our evening meal. They built up a good fire, and spitted some cutlets of musk deer over it, and hung a pot of water to heat. I noticed that the men had made the fire of wooden branches—which must have required much labor of clambering up and down the steep ravine sides to collect—but also had a small pile of pieces of zhu-gan cane lying beside it. The dusk had deepened to full darkness by the time the food was ready, and, while two of the men served us, the other tossed one of those bits of cane onto the fire.

The deer meat was better than the usual mountain fare of mutton or goat, but the accompaniments were ghastly. The meat was handed to me in a hunk, for me to hold while I tore at it with my teeth. The only implement provided me was a shallow wooden bowl, into which one of the servers poured hot green cha. But I had taken only a couple of sips before the other server politely took it from me, to add to it. He held a platter of yak butter, all stuck about with hairs and lint and road dust, and grooved by the fingers of those who had dug at it previously, and with his own black fingernails raked off a lump and dropped it into my cha to melt. The dirty yak butter would have been repellent enough, but then he opened a filthy cloth sack and poured into the cha bowl something that looked like sawdust.

“Tsampa,” he said.

When I only peered at the mess with disgust and bewilderment, he demonstrated what was to be done with it. He stuck his grimy fingers into my bowl and worked the sawdust and butter together until it became a paste, then a doughy lump when it had absorbed all the cha in the bowl. Then, before I could move to prevent it, he pinched off a wad of that tepid, dirty dough and poked it into my mouth.

“Tsampa,” he said again, and chewed and swallowed as if to show me how.

I could now taste—apart from the bitter green cha and the rancid, cheesy yak butter—that the apparent sawdust was really barley meal. But I do not know if I would voluntarily have swallowed the wad, except that I was abruptly startled into doing so. The camp fire gave a sudden, tremendous bang! and threw up a constellation of sparks into the darkness—and I gulped my tsampa and leaped to my feet, and so did my two escorts, while the noise echoed and reechoed from all the mountains around. Two things went through my mind in that instant. One was the dreadful thought that one of the charged brass balls had somehow fallen into the fire. The other was a recollection of words once heard: “Expect me when you least expect me.”

But the mountain men were laughing at our surprise, and making gestures to calm us and explain what had happened. They held up one of the pieces of zhu-gan cane and pointed to the fire and jumped about and bared their teeth and growled. They made it clear enough. The mountains were full of tigers and wolves. To keep them off, it was their practice to toss into the camp fire every so often a joint of zhu-gan. The heat evidently made its inner juices seethe until the steam burst the cane apart—quite like a charge of the flaming powder—with that enormous noise. I had no doubt that it would keep predators at bay; it had made me swallow the awful stuff called tsampa.

Later on, I got so I could eat tsampa, never with enjoyment, but at least without violent repugnance. A man’s body requires other nourishment than meat and cha, and barley was the only domestic vegetable grown in those highlands. Tsampa was cheap and easily transportable and sustaining, if nothing else, and could be made a trifle more appetizing by the addition of sugar or salt or vinegar or the fermented bean sauce. I never got as fond of it as were the natives, who, after making the dough at mealtime, would tuck balls of the stuff inside their clothes and wear the tsampa all night and next day, so it got salted by their sweat, and they would pluck out a bit whenever they felt like having a snack.

I also got better acquainted with the zhu-gan cane. In Khanbalik, I had known it only as a graceful floral subject for painters like the Lady Chao and the Master of the Boneless Colors. But in these regions it was such a staple of life that I believe the people could not have existed without it. The zhu-gan grew wild, everywhere in the lowlands, from the Si-Chuan-Yun-nan border country southward throughout the tropics of Champa—where it was variously named in the various languages: banwu and mambu and other names—and everywhere it was used for many more purposes than frightening off tigers.

The zhu-gan would resemble any ordinary reed or cane, at least when it is young and only as thick as a finger, except that at intervals it has—very like a finger—nodes or knuckles along its length. Those mark little walls inside the cane, which interrupt its tubular length into separate compartments. For some uses—such as being thrown into a fire to burst—a single joint-length of the cane is employed, the wall intact at either end. For other purposes, the walls inside are punched through to make the cane a long tube. When the zhu-gan is no bigger around than a finger, it is easily cut with a knife. As it grows—and a single cane can get as tall and as big around as any tree—it must be laboriously sawed, for then it is almost as rigid as iron. But big or small, the zhu-gan is a beautiful plant, the cane part of it a golden color, the nodes sprouting withes with delicate green leaves at the ends; an immense clump of zhu-gan, all gold and green and catching the sun in its fronds, is a subject worthy of any painter.

In one of the few lowland places we crossed in that region, we came to a village built entirely of zhu-gan, and furnished with it, and totally dependent on it. The village, called Chieh-chieh, sat in a wide valley, through which ran one of the innumerable rivers of that country, and the whole valley bottom was thick with groves of the zhu-gan, and Chieh-chieh looked as if it too had grown there. Its houses were all made of the golden cane. Their walls were composed of arm-thick stalks of it, stood up side by side and lashed together; thicker lengths of zhu-gan were the posts and columns that held up roofs of split-cane segments laid over-and-underlapping like curved tiles. Inside each house, the furniture of tables and couches and floor mats was woven of slender strips peeled from the zhu-gan, as also were things like boxes, bird cages and baskets.

Because the river was bordered by extensive marshes, Chieh-chieh was situated several li distant from it, but the river’s water was brought all that way through a pipe made of waist-thick canes joined end to end, and in the village square that water spilled into a trough made of half a log-sized zhu-gan. From the trough, the village boys and girls carried water to their cane-built homes in buckets and pots and bottles, all of which were joints of zhu-gan of various sizes. In the homes, the women used splinters of the cane for pins and needles, and the unraveled fiber of it for thread. The menfolk made from split lengths of the cane both their hunting bows and the arrows for them, and carried the arrows in a quiver that was only a big joint of zhu-gan. They used tree-sized stalks of the cane as the masts for their fishing boats and, with ropes braided of zhu-gan fibers, hung from those masts sails of lattice-worked zhu-gan strips. The village’s headman probably had little writing to do, but he did it with a pen made of cane strip, split at one end, and wrote on paper made from the pulp scraped from the soft interior walls of the cane, and kept his written scrolls in a vase-sized joint of zhu-gan.

When my escorts and I dined that night in Chieh-chieh, the meal was served in bowls that were halved joints of big zhu-gan, and the nimble tongs were slender sticks of zhu-gan, and the meal included—besides river fish fresh-caught with a zhu-gan fiber net and broiled over a fire of burning zhu-gan scraps—the soft-boiled and succulent shoots of new-sprouted zhu-gan, and some of the same shoots pickled for a condiment, and some more of them candied for a sweet. None of us visitors was ill or injured, but, if we had been, we might have been doctored with tang-zhu, which is a liquid that fills the hollow joints of the zhu-gan when it has just come to maturity, and that tang-zhu has many medicinal uses.

I learned all those things about the zhu-gan from Chieh-chieh’s elderly headman, one Wu. He was the only villager who spoke Mongol, and in consequence he and I sat up talking quite late, while my two escorts, one after the other, wearied of listening to us and went off to their allotted bedchambers. Old Wu and I were at last interrupted by a young woman coming into the cane-walled room where we sat on cane couches, to make what sounded like a whine of complaint.

“She wishes to know if you are never coming to bed,” said Wu. “This is the prime female of Chieh-chieh, chosen from all the others to make your night here memorable, and she is eager to get on with it.”

“Hospitable of her,” I said, and regarded her with speculation.

The people in that Land of the Four Rivers, men and women alike, wore clothing that was lumpy and shapeless: a hat like a sort of pod for the head, robes and wraps and shawls layered from shoulders to feet, clumsy boots with upturned toes. The body garments were all patterned in broad stripes of two different colors, and everybody in a village wore the same two colors, and the colors of each village were different—so a “foreigner” from the next village down the road could be instantly recognized—and the colors were always dark and dingy ones (in Chieh-chieh they were brown and gray) so they would not show the ingrained dirt of them. In the mountain communities, that costume made the people blend into their background, which may have been useful for hunting or hiding. But in Chieh-chieh, against the background of bright gold and green, it made them obtrusively unsightly.

Since the men and women were indistinguishably garbed, indistinguishably hairless of face, flat of features, ruddy-brown of complexion, they had to show—even for their own convenience, I would suppose—something to mark their sex. So the stripes of a woman’s garments went up and down, the stripes of a man’s from side to side. A real foreigner like myself, not immediately perceiving that subtle difference of costume, could only tell them apart when they took off their pod hats. The men could then be seen to have their heads shaven and a gold or silver ring in the left ear. The women had their hair twisted into a multitude of thin, spiky braids—to be specific, exactly one hundred and eight braids, that being the number of books in the Kandjur, the Buddhist scriptures, and these people being all Buddhists.

Since my journey that day had not been a punishing one, and since the prettiness of the cane-built village had relaxed and rested me, I was inclined to indulge my curiosity as to what other evidences of femininity might lurk beneath this young woman’s graceless garments. I noticed that she was wearing an ornament: a neck chain from which depended a fringe of jingling silver coins—and, assuming that they also numbered one hundred and eight, I said to old Wu:

“When you call her the village’s prime female, do you refer to her wealth or her piety?”

“Neither,” he said. “The coins attest to her female charms and desirability.”

“Indeed?” I said, and stared at her. The neck chain was attractive enough, but I could not see how it made her any more so.

“In this land, our young women compete,” he explained, “as to which of them can lie with the most men—those of their own village, or other villages, or casual passersby, or the men of trains traveling through —and require of each man a coin in token of the coupling. Clearly, the girl who amasses the most coins has attracted and satisfied the most men, and is preeminent among women.”

“You mean marked an outcast, surely.”

“I mean preeminent. When she finally is ready to marry and settle down, she can take her pick of husbands. Every eligible young man vies for her hand.”

“Her hand no doubt being the least used-up part of her,” I said, slightly scandalized. “In civilized lands, a man marries a virgin whom he knows is his alone.”

“That is all that can be known of a virgin,” said old Wu, with a disparaging sniff. “A man wedding a virgin risks getting a fish less warm than the one you ate at dinner. A man wedding any of our women gets credentials of her desirability and experience and talents. He also gets, not incidentally, a fair dowry of coins. And this young lady is most eager now to add your coin to her string, for she has never had one from a Ferenghi.”

I was not averse to lying with nonvirgins, and it might have been instructive to lie with one who brought credentials to the encounter. But the young woman was most regrettably plain, and I did not much like being regarded as just one more of a string. So I mumbled some excuse about being on a pilgrimage, and bound by a vow of the Ferenghi religion. I gave her a coin anyway, as recompense for my spurning of her well-attested charms, and escaped to my bed. It was a bedstead woven of strips of zhu-gan and it was very comfortable, but it creaked all night, with just me alone in it, and must have waked the whole village if I had availed myself of Chieh-chieh’s prime female. So I decided that the zhu-gan cane, for all its marvelous usefulness to mankind, was not ideal for every human purpose.

2

MY escorts and I rode on, through the alternation of mountains, ravines and valleys, sometimes up on the stark heights of the Pillar Road, occasionally down in the bright zhu-gan lowlands. That terrain did not change noticeably, but we realized that we had reached the High Land of To-Bhot when the people we met began to greet us by uncovering their heads, scratching the right ear, rubbing the left hip, and sticking out their tongues at us. That absurd salute—signifying that the greeter intends to think, hear, do or speak no evil—was peculiar to the people called Drok and Bho. Actually, they were the same people, only the nomads were called Drok and the settled ones Bho. The herder-and-hunter Drok lived like the plains-dwelling Mongols, and might have been indistinguishable from them except for their style of tent, which was black instead of yellow and was not supported by an interior lattice, as was the yurtu. A Drok tent had its walls pegged to the ground and its top hung up by long ropes which ran over high poles propped some distance away, then down to ground pegs farther off. That gave the tent the appearance of a black karakurt spider, crouched among its skinny, high-kneed legs.

The farmer-and-merchant Bho, though they had settled in communities, lived even more uncomfortably than the nomad Drok. They had tucked their villages and towns into high cliff crannies, which required them to pile their houses one atop another and another. That was contrary to what I knew of the Buddhist religion, which holds that the human head is the residence of the soul, so that a mother will not even pat the head of her own child. Yet here were the Bho living in such a manner that everybody dumped his wastes and trash and excretions on his neighbor’s plot and rooftop, and often enough in his very hair. That custom of building as high up as possible, I learned, dated from some long-ago time when the Bho worshiped a god called Amnyi Machen, or “Old Man Great Peacock,” who was believed to live in the highest peaks, and everyone tried to reside close to the god.

But now all the Bho were Buddhists, so on top of every community was perched a lamasarai, called by its inhabitants the Pota-lá. (Lá meant mount, and Pota was the Bho pronunciation of Buddha. And I will not make ribald word-play on that fact, from the indecorous meaning of “pota” in the Venetian tongue. No one has any need to invent derisions of the Bho and their religion.) The Pota-la being the topmost and most populous building in every community, the result was that the priests and monks—here called lamas and trapas—excreted copiously on all their lay congregation downhill. I was to find that Buddhism, in its To-Bhot form of Potaism, was dismally degraded by even stranger lunacies.

A Bho town might look charming when we saw it from afar—say, across the landscape of the huge blue-and-yellow poppies unique to To-Bhot, and the “Pota’s hair” willow trees hung with yellow bloom, and the clear blue sky speckled pink and black with rose finches and ravens. Any cliffside town was a vertical jumble of cliff-colored houses, distinguishable from the cliff because they oozed smoke from their little windows—curiously shaped windows, wider at the top than at the bottom—and that clutter of houses was overtopped by the even more jumbled Pota-lá, all turrets and gilded roofs and promenades and outside staircases and varicolored pennants flapping in the breeze, and dark-robed trapas pacing sedately about the terraces. But when we got closer, what had appeared from a distance comely, serene, even holy of aspect, was revealed to be ugly, torpid and squalid.

The quaint little windows of the town’s residences were set only in the upper stories, to be above the ghastly mess and smell of the streets. The populace at first seemed to consist only of wandering goats and fowl and skulking yellow mastiffs, and the steep, narrow, twisty alleys were thick with droppings we assumed to be theirs. But then we would begin to meet people, and wish we had been satisfied with the cleaner animals, because when the people stuck out their tongues in greeting, we could see that their tongues were the only un-dirt-caked things about them. They wore robes as drab and grimy as had the people in the lowlands; if males and females wore differing patterns of the drabness and griminess, I could not discern them. There were very few men, and a great many women, but I could tell the sexes apart because the men took the trouble to open their long robes when they urinated in the street; the women simply squatted; they wore nothing under their outer robes, or I hoped they did not. Sometimes a larger than ordinary heap of dung in the street would stir feebly, and I would see that it was a human being laid out to die, usually a very old man or woman.

My Mongol escorts confided to me that the Bho, in former times, disposed of their old folks by eating their corpses—on the theory that the dead could wish no finer resting place than the guts of their own get—and had discontinued that practice only after Potaism became the prevailing religion, because the Pota-Buddha had frowned on the eating of meat. The only relic of the former custom was that families now conserved the skulls of their dead and made them into drinking bowls or little drums, so that the departed could still partake of holiday feasts and music making. Nowadays the Bho observed four other methods of sepulture. They burned the dead on mountaintops, or left them there for the birds, or they threw them into the rivers and ponds from which they got their drinking water, or they cut the corpses into pieces and fed them to dogs. The latter was the method most preferred, because that hastened the dissolution of the flesh, and until the old flesh was gone, its habitant soul was marooned in a sort of Purgatory between death here and rebirth elsewhere. The bodies of the poor were merely thrown to the packs of street curs, but the bodies of the rich were conveyed to special lamasarais which maintained kennels of sanctified mastiffs.

Those practices doubtless accounted for To-Bhot’s teeming population of scavenger vultures and ravens and magpies and dogs, but they also accounted for more humans’ dying than necessary. The dogs were so many that they were exceedingly liable to the canine madness, and in their fits they bit people as well as each other. More of the Bho were slain by the canine infection than by all the vile diseases engendered by their own squalor. Often, the heap in the street would be not just feebly stirring, but writhing and contorting and howling like a dog, in the terrible death agonies of that madness.

Because I had no wish to be bitten, and because I was on my way to war, I procured a bow and arrows and began to improve my aim and my arm by shooting every stray dog that came within range. That earned me black looks from the religious and the lay Potaists alike, who would rather that people die for no reason than that people should kill for good reason. However, since I carried the Khakhan’s plaque, no one dared to do more than scowl and mutter, and I became quite proficient with both the broad-head and narrow-head arrows, and I hope I effected some small improvement in that wretched land, but I doubt it. I doubt that anyone or anything could.

On our arrival in any Bho community, my escorts and I climbed as quickly as we could to the Pota-lá on top, where we honored visitors were always put up, it affording the best of local accommodations. That meant only that we did not get excreted on from above—though, if we had, it could not have made the rooms and the bedding and the food and the company much filthier. Before leaving Kithai, I had heard a Han gentleman quote a contemptuous saying of his people—that the three national products of To-Bhot were lamas, women and dogs—and now I believed him. It was apparent that the disproportionate number of women in the town down the hill was owing to the fact that at least a third of their men had taken holy orders and residence in some lamasarai. Having seen the Bho women, I could not much fault the Bho men for having fled, but I did think that they might have fled to some existence better than a living embalmment.

Entering a Pota-lá courtyard, we were greeted first by the creaking, fluttering and clattering of prayer mills, prayer flags and prayer bones, then by the roars and snarls of the savage yellow To-Bhot mastiffs, which in those places were at least kept chained to the walls. Also along those walls, in every least niche, there was incense or a juniper sprig burning, but its perfume was insufficient to mask the overall miasma of yak-dung fires, putrid yak butter and unwashed religiosity. After meeting the noise and the stench, we met a number of monks and a few priests plodding majestically toward us, each of them holding out across his palms the khata, the pale blue silk scarf with which (instead of his tongue) every upper-class Bho salutes an equal or superior. They addressed me as Kungö, which means “Highness,” and I properly addressed each lama as Kundün, “Presence,” and each trapa as Rimpoche, “Treasured One”—though it nearly gagged me to utter such honorific lies. I could see nothing treasurable about any of them. Their robes, which had first seemed to be of ecclesiastically sedate colors, could be seen up close to have been originally bright red, and were dark only from years of accumulated dirt. Their faces, hands and shaved heads were blotched with a brown plant-sap they daubed on their various skin diseases, and their chins and chops were shiny with the yak butter that drenched everything they ate.

In the matter of foods at the lamasarais, we were most often served Potaist vegetable meals, of course—tsampa, boiled nettles, ferns—and a strange, stringy, slimy, bright-pink stalk of some plant unknown to me. I suspect that the holy men ate it only because it made one’s urine pink for days afterward, and that effluent trickle no doubt awed the people downhill of the lamasarai. But the Bho had a peculiar selectivity about the Potaist injunction against eating meat. They would not slaughter domestic fowl or cattle, but would allow the slaying of game pheasants and antelope. So the lamas and trapas sometimes provided those venisons for us, as an excuse for them to enjoy the meats as well. (I am not unjustly scoffing at their hypocrite austerities. One lama was introduced to me as “a most holy of holy men” because he subsisted on “absolutely no nourishment except a few bowls of cha a day.” Out of skeptic curiosity, I kept a close eye on that lama, and eventually caught him in the preparation of his mealtime bowl. It was not cha leaves he used in the steeping, but cha-like shreds of dried meat.)

However un-Potaistly lavish our meals sometimes were, they were never very elegant. We being honored guests, we were always seated to dine in the Pota-lá’s “chanting hall,” so we had the mealtime entertainment of several dozen trapas dolefully chanting while they thumped skull drums and rattled prayer bones. Among the serving platters and eating bowls, the banquet table bore an array of spittoons, and the holy men used them to the point of overflow. All about the dark hall stood statues of the Pota and his numerous disciple godlings and the numerous adversary demons, and every one of them was visible even in the gloom, because it gleamed with its slathering of yak butter. Where we Christians would light a candle to a saint, or perhaps leave with him a taolèta, it was the Bho’s practice to smear their idols with yak butter, and the thick and ancient layers reeked of rancid decay. Whether the Pota and the other images were gratified by that, I do not know, but I can attest that the local vermin were. Even when the hall was full of noisy diners and chanters, I could hear the squeaks and snickers of mice and rats as they—plus cockroaches, centipedes and God knows what else—scurried foraging up and down the statues. Most nauseating of all, we and our dinner hosts always sat on what I at first took to be a low dais built up above the floor level. It felt rather spongy under me, so I furtively investigated to see what it was made of—and discovered that we were seated atop nothing but a mound of compacted food droppings, the detritus of decades or maybe centuries of the holy men’s slovenly drool-ings and slobberings of their meals.

When their mouths were not masticating or otherwise occupied, the holy men chanted almost continuously, in concert at the top of their lungs, in solitude under their breaths. One chant went like this: “Lha so so, khi ho ho,” which meant more or less, “Come gods, begone demons!” A shorter one went like this: “Lha gyelo,” meaning “The gods are victorious!” But the chant that was heard most often and interminably and everywhere in To-Bhot went like this: “Om mani pémé hum.” The opening and closing noises of it were always intoned in a drawn-out manner, so: “O-o-o-om” and “Hu-u-u-um,” and they constituted just a sort of “amen.” The other two words meant, literally, “the jewel in the lotus,” in the same sense that those terms are used in the Han lexicon of sex. In other words, the holy men were chanting, “Amen, the male organ is inside the female’s! Amen!”

Now, one of the Han religions prevailing back in Kithai, the one they call Tao, “the Way,” has an unashamed connection with sex. In Taoism, the male essence is called yang and the female’s is yin, and everything else in the universe—whether material, intangible, spiritual, whatever—is regarded as being either yang or yin, hence totally discrete and opposite (as men and women are) or complementary and necessary to each other (as men and women are). Thus active things are called yang, passive ones yin. Heat and cold, the heavens and the earth, sun and moon, light and darkness, fire and water, they are all respectively yang and yin, or, as anyone can recognize, inextricably yang-yin. At the most basic level of human behavior, when a man couples with a woman and absorbs her female yin by means of his male yang, he is not in any sense tinged with effeminacy, but becomes more of a complete man, stronger, more alive, more aware, more worthwhile. And just so, the woman becomes more of a woman by accepting his yang with her yin. From that elementary foundation, Tao proceeds up to metaphysical heights and abstractions that I cannot pretend to grasp.

It may be that some Han Taoist, wandering into To-Bhot long ago, when the natives still worshiped the Old Peacock, kindly tried to explain to them his amiable religion. The Bho could hardly have misunderstood the universal act of putting male organ into female—or jewel into lotus, as the Han would have expressed it—or mani into pémé, in their language. But such oafs would have been baffled by the higher significances of yang and yin, so all they ever retained of Tao was that preposterous chant of “Om mani pémé hum.” Still, not even the Bho could have built much of a religion on a prayer that had no loftier meaning than “Amen, stick it in her! Amen!” So, as they later and gradually adopted Buddhism from India, they must have adapted the chant to fit that religion. All they had to do was construe the “jewel” as Buddha, or Pota, because he is so often portrayed as sitting in meditation on a large lotus blossom. So the chant came to mean something like “Amen, Pota is in his place! Amen!” And then, no doubt, some later lamas—in the way that self-appointed sages always complicate even the purest faith with their unsolicited commentaries and interpretations—decided to festoon the simple chant with more abstruse aspects. So they decreed that the word mani (jewel, male genitals, Pota) would henceforth signify The Means, and the word pémé (lotus, female genitals, Pota’s place) would henceforth refer to Nirvana. Thus the chant became a prayer beseeching The Means to achieve that Nirvana oblivion which Potaists deem the highest end of life: “Amen, blot me out! Amen!”

Certainly, Potaism no longer had any laudable connection with sexual relations between men and women, because at least one of every three Bho males, at puberty or even younger, fled from the prospect of ever having to endure sex with any Bho female, and took the red robe of religion. So far as I could tell, that vow of celibacy was the only qualification necessary for entrance into a Pota-lá and eventual elevation through the ascending degrees of monkhood and priesthood. The chabis, or novices, were given nothing like a secular education or seminary instruction, and I encountered only three or four of the oldest and highest-grade lamas who could even read and write the “Om mani peme hum,” let alone the one hundred and eight books of the Kandjur scriptures, let alone the two hundred and twenty-five Tengyur books of commentary on the Kandjur. In speaking of the holy men’s celibacy, however, I should rightly have said celibacy in regard to females. Many of the lamas and trapas flagrantly flaunted their amorousness toward each other, to leave no doubt that they had forsworn sordid, ordinary, normal sex.

Potaism, however it developed, was a religion demanding only sheer quantity of devotion, not any quality of it. By that I mean a seeker of oblivion simply had to repeat “Om mani pémé hum” enough times during his life and he expected that would take him to Nirvana when he died. He did not even have to speak the words, or repeat them in any way requiring his own volition. I have mentioned prayer mills; they were everywhere in the lamasarais, and in every house, and even to be found standing in empty countryside. They were drumlike cylinders within which were wound paper scrolls on which the mani chant was written. A man had only to give the cylinder a spin with his hand and those “repetitions” of the prayer counted to his credit. Sometimes he rigged it like a waterwheel, so that a stream or cascade kept it turning and praying constantly. Or he could hoist a flag inscribed with the prayer, or a whole line of them—those were far more frequently to be seen in To-Bhot than any lines of washing hung out—and every flap the wind gave every flag was credited to him. Or he could run his hand along a line of dangling sheep shoulder blades, each bone inscribed with the mani, strung like wind chimes, and they prayed for him as long as they went on clattering.

I once came upon a trapa crouched beside a creek, flinging into it and hauling out again a tile attached to a string. He had been doing that, he said, all his adult life, and would go on doing it until he died.

“Doing what?” I asked, thinking that perhaps, in some idiotic Bho way, he was trying to emulate San Piero as a fisher of souls. The monk showed me his tile; it was engraved with the mani prayer, in the fashion of a yin seal. He explained that he was “imprinting” the prayer on the running water, stamping it there over and over again, and he was accruing piety with every invisible “impression.”

Another time, in a Pota-lá courtyard, I saw two trapas come to violent blows because one of them had given a twirl to a prayer mill and then, glancing back as he walked on, saw a brother monk stop the mill and spin it in the other direction to pray for him.

Atop one of the major towns on our way was an especially large lamasarai, and there I made bold to seek audience of its venerable and filthy and sap-daubed Grand Lama.

“Presence,” I addressed the old abbot, “I seldom observe anything going on in any Pota-lá that looks like ecclesiastical activity. Aside from twirling prayer mills or shaking prayer bones, what exactly are your religious duties?”

In a voice like the rustle of far-off leaves, he said, “I sit in my cell, my son Highness, or sometimes in a remote cave, or on a lonely mountaintop, and I meditate.”

“Meditate on what, Presence?”

“On my once having laid eyes on the Kian-gan Kundün.”

“And what would that be?”

“The Sovereign Presence, the Holiest of Lamas, he who is an actual reincarnation of the Pota. He resides in Lha-Ssa, the City of the Gods, a long, long journey from here, where the people are building for him a Pota-lá worthy of his occupancy. They have been building on it for more than six hundred years now, but they expect to have it completed in only four or five hundred more. The Holiest will be pleased to grace it with his Sovereign Presence, for it will be a palace most magnificent when it is finally done.”

“Are you saying, Presence, that this Kian-gan Kundün has been alive and waiting for six hundred years? And he will still be alive when the palace is finished?”

“Assuredly so, my son Highness. Of course you, being ch’hipa—outside the belief—might not see him so. His corporeal integument dies from time to time, and then his lamas must cast about the land and find the infant boy into whom his soul has transmigrated. So the Sovereign Presence looks physically different, from lifetime to lifetime. But we nang-pa—we within the belief—we know him to be always the same Holiest of Lamas, and the Pota reincarnated.”

It seemed to me somewhat unfair that the Pota, having created and prescribed Nirvana for his devotees, evidently never got to rest obliviously there himself, but had to keep on being fetched back to Lha-Ssa, a town doubtless as awful as any other in To-Bhot. But I refrained from remarking on that, and gently prompted the old abbot:

“So you made the far journey to Lha-Ssa, and you saw the Holiest of Lamas … ?”

“Yes, my son Highness, and that event has occupied my meditations and contemplations and devotions ever since. You may not believe this, but the Holiest actually opened his own rheumy old eyes and looked at me.” He put on a wrinkled smile of rapt reminiscence. “I think, if the Holiest had not been then so ancient and approaching his next transmigration, he might almost have summoned up his strength and spoken to me.”

“You and he only looked at each other? And that has furnished you with meat for meditation ever since?”

“Ever since. Just that one bleared glance from the Holiest was the commencement of my wisdom. Forty-eight years ago, that was.”

“For nearly half a century, Presence, you have done nothing but contemplate that single fleeting occurrence?”

“A man blessed with the beginning of wisdom is obligated to let it ripen without distraction. I have forgone all other interests and pursuits. I do not interrupt my meditation even to take meals.” He arranged his wrinkles and blotches in a look of blissful martyrdom. “I subsist on only an occasional bowl of weak cha.”

“I have heard of such wondrous abstentions, Presence. Meanwhile, I suppose you share with your underlamas the fruits of your meditations, for their instruction.”

“Dear me, no, young Highness.” His wrinkles rearranged into a startled and slightly offended look. “Wisdom cannot be taught, it must be learned. The learning to be done by others is up to them. Now, if you will excuse me for saying so, this brief audience with you has constituted the longest distraction of my meditative life … .”

So I made my obeisances and left him, and sought out a lama of fewer pustules and less exalted degree, and inquired what he did when he was not churning prayers out of a mill.

“I meditate, Highness,” he said. “What else?”

“Meditate on what, Presence?”

“I fix my mental regard on the Grand Lama, for he once visited Lha-Ssa and looked upon the visage of the Kian-gan Kundün. From that, he acquired great holiness.”

“And you hope to absorb some holiness from meditating on him?”

“Dear me, no. Holiness cannot be taken, only bestowed. I can, however, hope from that meditation to extract some small wisdom.”

“And that wisdom you will impart to whom? To your junior lamas? To the trapas?”

“Really, Highness! One never casts one’s regard downward, only upward! Where else is wisdom? Now, if you will excuse me … .”

So I went and found a trapa, recently accepted into monkhood after a long novitiate as a chabi, and asked what he contemplated while awaiting elevation to the priesthood.

“Why, the holiness of my elders and superiors, of course, Highness. They are the receptacles containing all the wisdom of all the ages.”

“But, if they never teach you anything, Treasured One, whence comes that knowledge to you? You all claim to be eager to acquire it, but what is the source of it?”

“Knowledge?” he said, with lofty contempt. “Only worldly creatures like the Han fret about knowledge. We wish to acquire wisdom.”

Interesting, I thought. That same disdainful estimate had once been made of me—and by a Han. Nevertheless, I was not prepared to believe, then or now, that inertness and torpor represent the highest attainment humanity can aspire to. In my opinion, stillness is not always evidence of intelligence, and silence is not always evidence of a mind at work. Most vegetables are still and silent. In my opinion, meditation is not infallibly productive of profound ideas. I have seen vultures meditate on a full belly, and then do nothing more profound than regurgitate. In my opinion, inarticulate and obscure pronouncements are not always expressive of a wisdom so mystically sublime that only sages can comprehend it. The mouthings of the Potaist holy men were inarticulate and obscure, but so were the yappings of their lamasarai curs.

I went and found a chabi, the lowest form of life in a Pota-lá, and asked how his time was spent.

“My admission here was granted on condition that I apprentice as a cleaning orderly,” he said. “But of course I pass most of my time meditating on my mantra.”

“And what is that, boy?”

“A few syllables from the Kandjur of holy scripture, assigned to me for my contemplation. When I have meditated long enough upon the mantra—some years perhaps—and it has expanded my mind sufficiently, I may be considered fit to rise to the status of trapa, and then begin to contemplate larger bits of the Kandjur.”

“Did it ever occur to you, boy, actually to spend your time in cleaning this sty, and studying ways to clean it better?”

He stared at me as if I had been rendered rabid by a dog bite. “Instead of my mantra, Highness? Whatever for? Cleaning is the lowliest of occupations, and he who would rise should look upward, not downward.”

I snorted. “Your Grand Lama does nothing but squat and contemplate the Holiest of Lamas, while his underlamas do nothing but squat and contemplate him. All the trapas do nothing but squat and contemplate the lamas. I would wager that the first apprentice who ever actually learned cleanliness could overthrow the whole regime. Become the master of this Pota-lá, and then the Pope of Potaism, and eventually the Wang of all To-Bhot.”

“You have been grievously mad-bit by a dog, Highness,” he said, looking alarmed. “I will run and fetch one of our physicians—the pulse-feeler or the urine-smeller—that he may attend you in your affliction.”

Well, so much for the holy men. The influence of Potaism on the lay population of To-Bhot was about equally elevating. The men had learned to twirl any prayer mill they encountered, and the women had learned to screw up their hair into one hundred and eight braids, and both men and women were careful always, when walking past any holy edifice, to walk to the left of it and keep it always on their right hand. I do not know exactly why, except that there was a saying, “Beware the demons on the left,” and there were to be found in the countryside a great many stone walls and piled-up heaps of stone that had some indiscernible religious significance, and the road always divided around them, so that a traveler from either direction could keep the holiness on his right.

At every twilight, all the men, women and children of every community would leave off their day’s occupations, if any, and squat in the town streets or on their own rooftops, while they were led by the lamas and trapas of the Pota-lá overhead, in chanting their evening appeal for oblivion, “Om mani pémé hum,” over and over again. I might have been impressed by what was at least an example of popular solidarity and unabashed religiosity—in contrast to Venice, say, where my sophisticated townsfolk would blush to make even the sign of the cross in any gathering more public than a church service—but I simply could not admire a people’s devotion to a religion that did no good for them, or anyone.

Presumably it prepared them for the oblivion of Nirvana, but it made them so phlegmatic in this life, and so oblivious to this world, that I could not imagine how they would recognize the other oblivion when they got there. Most religions, I think, inspire their followers to an occasional activity and enterprise. Even the detestable Hindus sometimes bestir themselves, if only to butcher each other. But the Potaists had not enough initiative to kill a rabid dog, or even bother to step out of its way when it lunged. As well as I could tell, the Bho evinced one sole ambition: to break out of their constitutional torpor only long enough to advance into absolute and eternal coma.

Regard just one example of Bho apathy. In a land where so many men had retreated into celibacy and there was a consequent abundance of women, I would have expected to find the normal men enjoying a paradise: taking their pick of the females and taking as many as they wished. Not so. It was the females who did the picking and collecting. The women followed the custom I had earlier encountered: casually coupling before marriage with as many passersby as possible, and extorting a memento coin from each, so that, at marriageable age, the female laden with the most coins was the most desirable wife-to-be. But she did not simply take for husband the most eligible man in her community; she took several of them. Instead of each man being the Shah of a whole anderun of wives and concubines, every marriageable woman possessed a whole anderun of men, and the legions of her less comely sisters were doomed to spinsterhood.

One might say, well, that at least showed some enterprise on the part of at least a few women. But it was a poor showing, because what sort of eligible men could a woman choose her consorts from?

All those males with enough ambition and energy to walk uphill had done exactly that, and vanished into the Pota-lá. Of the remainder, the only ones with any verifiable manhood and livelihood were usually those committed to the carrying-on of an established family farm or herd or trade. So a woman who could take her pick of men did so, not by marrying into one of those “best families,” but by marrying the whole family—anyway, the male members of it. That made for some complex conjugalities. I met one woman who was married to two brothers and to a son of each of them, and had children by all. Another woman was married to three brothers, while her daughter by one of them was married to the two others of them, plus another man she had procured somewhere outside the house.

How anybody in those tangled and inbred unions ever knew whose children were whose, I have no notion, and I suspect that none of them cared to know. I have concluded that the Bho people’s atrocious marital customs accounted for their general feeblemindedness, and also for their Potaist travesty of the Buddhist religion, and their continued sapless adherence to it, and their laughable belief that Potaism represented the accumulation of “all the wisdom of all the ages.” I came to that conclusion when, much later, I talked about the Bho to some distinguished Han physicians. They told me that generations of close inbreeding—common to mountain communities, and inevitable in those fanatically faith-bound —must produce a people of physical lethargy and diminished brain. If that is true, and I am convinced it is, then Potaism represents To-Bhot’s accumulation of all the imbecility of all the ages.

3

“YOUR Royal Father Kubilai prides himself on ruling peoples of quality,” I said to the Wang Ukuruji. “Why did he ever trouble to conquer and annex this miserable land of To-Bhot?”

“For its gold,” said Ukuruji, without great enthusiasm. “Gold dust can be panned from almost any river or creek bed in this country. We could get a lot more of it, of course, if I could make the wretched Bho dig and mine the sources of it. But they have been persuaded by their cursed lamas that gold nuggets and veins are the roots of the metal. Those must be left undisturbed, or they will not produce the gold dust, which is their pollen.” He laughed, and ruefully wagged his head. “Vakh!”

“One more evidence of the Bho intellect,” I said. “The land may be worth something, but the people are not. Why did Kubilai condemn his own son to govern them?”

“Somebody has to,” he said, with a resigned shrug. “The lamas would probably tell you that I must have committed some vile crime in some former existence, to deserve being made ruler of the Drok and the Bho. They might be right.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “your father will give you Yun-nan to rule instead —or in addition to To-Bhot.”

“That is what I devoutly hope,” he said. “Which is why I removed my court from the capital to this garrison town, to be close to the Yun-nan war zone, and await here the war’s outcome.”

This garrison town, actually a trade-route market city named Ba-Tang, was where my escorts and I had ended our long journey from Khanbalik, and found the Wang Ukuruji, alerted by our advance riders, awaiting our arrival. Ba-Tang was in To-Bhot, but was the largest city conveniently close to the Yun-nan frontier of the Sung Empire. So this was where the Orlok Bayan had chosen to set his headquarters, and from which he repeatedly led or sent incursions southward against the Yi people. Ba-Tang had not been evacuated of its Bho inhabitants, but they were almost outnumbered by the Mongols occupying the city and its outskirts and the valley roundabout—five tomans of troops and their camp-follower women, the Orlok and his numerous staff, the Wang and his courtiers.

“I am ready and eager to move on again at a moment’s notice,” Ukuruji continued, “if ever Bayan succeeds in taking Yun-nan, and if my father gives me leave to go there. The Yi people will naturally be inimical to a Mongol overlord at first, but I had rather go among raging enemies than stay among the blighted Bho.”

“You mentioned your capital, Wang. I assume you mean the city of Lha-Ssa.”

“No. Why?”

“I was told that there dwells the Holiest of Lamas, the Sovereign Presence. I took it to be the chief city of the nation.”

He laughed. “Yes, there is the Holiest of Lamas at Lha-Ssa. There is another Holiest of Lamas at a place called Dri-Kung, and another at Pak-Dup, and another at Tsal, and others in other places. Vakh! You must understand that there is not just a single noxious Potaism, but innumerable rival sects of it, no one to be any more admired or abominated than another, and every one recognizing a different Holiest Lama at its head. For convenience, I recognize a Holiest Lama named Phags-pa, whose lamasarai is at the city of Shigat-Se, so that is where I have located the capital. Nominally at least, the venerable Phags-pa and I are co-governors of the country, he of its spiritual aspects, I of the temporal. He is a despicable old fraud, but no worse than any of the other Holiest Lamas, I suspect.”

“And Shigat-Se?” I asked. “Is it as fine a city as I have heard Lha-Ssa to be?”

“Probably,” he grunted. “Shigat-Se is a dunghill. And so, no doubt, is Lha-Ssa.”

“Well,” I said, as cheerfully as I could, “you must be grateful to be residing for a while in this more beautiful place.”

Ba-Tang was situated on the east bank of the river Jin-sha, which was here a white-water stream tumbling down the middle of a broad valley plain, but downstream in Yun-nan it would collect other tributary waters and widen and eventually become the mighty river Yang-tze. The Ba-Tang valley, in this season of summer, was gold and green and blue, with bright touches of other colors. The blue was the high, windswept sky. The gold was the color of the Bho’s barley fields and zhu-gan groves and the countless yellow yurtu tents of the Mongol bok. But beyond the cultivated and camped-on areas, the valley was the rich green of forests —elms and junipers and pines—besprinkled with the colors of wild roses, bluebells, anemones, columbine, irises and, over all, morning glories of every hue, wreathing every tree and bush.

In such a setting, any town would have been as obtrusive as an ulcer on a beautiful face. But Ba-Tang, since it had the whole valley to spread out in, had set its buildings side by side, not atop each other, and not squashed close together, and the river disposed of most of its wastes, so it was not quite so ugly and filthy as most Bho communities. The inhabitants even dressed better than other Bho. At any rate, the upper-class folk among them could be recognized by their garnet-colored robes and gowns, nicely trimmed with fur of otter, pard or tiger, and an upper-class woman’s hundred-and-eight braids of hair were adorned with kauri shells, bits of turquoise and even coral from some far distant sea.

“Can it be that these Bho here are superior to those elsewhere in To-Bhot?” I asked hopefully. “They at least appear to have different customs. As I rode into the town, the people were commencing their New Year celebration. Everywhere else, the year begins in midwinter.”

“So it does here. And there is no such thing as a superior Bho, not anywhere in the world. Do not deceive yourself.”

“I could not have been deceived about the festivities, Wang. A parade—with the dragons and the lanterns and all—it was clearly in honor of the New Year. Listen, you can hear the gongs and drums from here.” He and I were seated, drinking from horns of arkhi, on a terrace of his temporary palace, some way upriver of Ba-Tang.

“Yes, I hear them. The poor sheep-wits.” He shook his head in deprecation. “It is indeed a New Year festivity, but not to welcome a real new year. It seems there has been an outbreak of sickness in the town. Only the flux, which is a common summertime affliction of the bowels, but no Potaist can be convinced that anything ever happens normally. The local lamas, in their wisdom, decided that the flux was the doing of demons, and they decreed a New Year celebration, so the demons will think they were mistaken in the season, and will go away and take their summer sickness with them.”

I said with a sigh, “You are right. To find a Bho with good sense would be as unlikely as finding a white crow.”

“However, the lamas being furious with me, they may also have intended the celebration to drive the bowel demons upriver to here, and flush me out of this Pota-lá.”

For his temporary palace, Ukuruji had commandeered the town’s lamasarai, and had summarily evicted its entire population of lamas and trapas, and kept only the chabi novices to be servants to him and his courtiers. The holy men, he told me—jolted out of their stupor for once in their lives—had departed shaking their fists and invoking every curse the Pota could inflict. But the Wang and his court had now been for some months ensconced and comfortable. He had allotted me a whole suite of rooms on my arrival and, because my Mongol escorts desired to join our advance riders and their other fellows in the Orlok’s bok, had assigned me a retinue of chabis also.

Ukuruji went on, “Still, we ought to be thankful for the unseasonal New Year. Only on that holiday do the Bho clean their abodes or wash their garments or bathe themselves. So this year the Bho of Ba-Tang have twice got clean.”

“No wonder I took the town and the people to be out of the ordinary,” I muttered. “Well, as you say, let us be thankful. And let me laud you, Wang Ukuruji, for being perhaps the first man ever to have taught something more useful than religion to these folk. You have certainly made them transform this Pota-lá. I have lodged in lamasarais all across To-Bhot, but to see a clean chanting hall—or to see it at all—is something of a revelation.”

I looked from the terrace into that hall. No longer a gloomy cavern layered with stinking yak butter and ancient food droppings, it had been unshuttered to the sunlight, and the whole place scraped clean, and the encrusted images removed, and now it could be seen to have a floor of fine marble slabs. A chabi servant, at Ukuruji’s command, had just spread candle grease on that floor and was now polishing it by shuffling about wearing sheep-fleece hats on his feet.

“Also,” said the Wang, “as soon as the people washed themselves and their faces were discernible, I was able to cull out a few good-looking females. Even I, a non-Bho, think them almost worthy of the many coins they wear. Shall I send two or three tonight for your selection?” When I did not immediately accept, he said, “Surely you would not prefer one of the gaping leather bags of the bok!” Then he thought to add, delicately, “There are, among the chabis, two or three pretty boys.”

“Thank you, Wang,” I said. “I prefer women, but I prefer to be a woman’s first coin, so to speak, not her latest. Here in To-Bhot, that would mean coupling with a woman ugly and undesirable. So I shall decline, with thanks, and continue in chastity until perhaps I can get down south into Yun-nan, and hope the Yi women there are more to my taste.”

“I have been hoping the same,” he said. “Well, old Bayan is due to return any day from his latest foray down there. So you can present to him my Royal Father’s missive, and I will be greatly gratified if it contains orders for me to proceed southward with the armies. Until we convene, then, make yourself free of what comforts this place affords.”

That most hospitable young Wang must have gone straightaway to see if he could find for me a female who had not yet conferred her favors, but would merit a coin for them when she did. For, when I retired to my chambers at bedtime, my chabis proudly ushered forth two small persons. They had smiling, un-sap-splotched faces and were clad in clean, fur-trimmed, garnet-colored gowns. Like all the Bho, these small persons wore no underclothes, as I saw when the chabis whisked the gowns off them to show me that they were females. The chabis also made gestures and noises to acquaint me with the little girls’ names—Ryang and Odcho—and made further gestures to indicate that they were to be my bedmates. I could not speak the language of the chabis and the girls, but I managed, also with gestures, to inquire their age. Odcho was ten years old and Ryang was nine.

I could not help bursting into laughter, though it seemed to bewilder the chabis and offend the girls. Clearly, to find a passably good-looking virgin in To-Bhot, one had to rummage among the very children. I found that amusing, but also slightly frustrating to my curiosity for pertinent details. Since females of that tender age are so formless and so nearly devoid of sexual characteristics, Ryang and Odcho gave no indication of how they would look or perform when they grew up. Thus I cannot claim that I ever enjoyed a real Bho woman, or even examined one unclothed, and so am unable to report—as I have sedulously tried to report of women of other races—what physical attributes or interesting bodily features or copulative eccentricities may be noticed in the adult females of the Bho.

The only peculiarity I saw in the two girl children was that each of them bore a discoloration, like a birthmark, on her lower back just above the buttock cleft. It was a purplish spot on the creamy skin, about the size of a saucer, somewhat darker on the nine-year-old Ryang than on the older girl. Since the children were not sisters, I wondered at the coincidence, and one day asked Ukuruji if all Bho females had that blemish.

“All children, male as well as female,” he said. “And not just those of the Bho and Drok. The Han, the Yi, even Mongol infants are born with it. Your Ferenghi babies are not?”

“I never saw any such thing, no. Nor among the Persians, the Ar-meniyans, the Semitic Arabs and Jews … .”

“Indeed? We Mongols call it the ‘deer dapple,’ because it slowly fades and disappears—like the spots on a fawn—as a child grows older. It is usually gone by the age of ten or eleven. Another difference between us and you Westerners, eh? But a trifling one, I suppose.”

Some days later, the Orlok Bayan returned from his expedition, at the head of several thousand mounted warriors. The column looked travel-weary, but not much decimated by combat, as it included only a few dozen horses with empty saddles. When Bayan had changed into clean clothes at his yurtu pavilion in the bok, he came to the Pota-là palace, accompanied by some of his sardars and other officers, to pay his respects to the Wang and to meet me. We three sat around a table on the terrace, and the lesser officers sat at a distance apart, and all were attended by chabis dispensing horns and skulls of kumis and arkhi and some native Bho beverage brewed from barley.

“The Yi did their usual cowardly evasions,” Bayan grumbled, by way of report on his foray. “Hide and snipe and run away. I would chase the cursed runaways clear to the jungles of Champa, but that is what they hope for—that I will expose my flanks and outrun my supply lines. Anyway, a rider brought me word that a message from my Khakhan was on the way to here, so I broke off and turned back. Let the misbegotten Yi think they repulsed us; I do not care; I will savage them yet. I hope, Messenger Polo, you bring some good advice from Kubilai on how to do that.”

I handed over the letter, and the rest of us sat silent while he broke its waxen yin seals and unfolded it and read it. Bayan was a man of late middle age, sturdy and swarthy and scarred and ferocious-looking as any other Mongol warrior, but he also had the most fearsome teeth I ever saw in a human mouth. I watched him champ them as he perused the letter, and for a while I was more fascinated by his mouth than by the words that came out of it.

After some time of watching closely, I made out that the teeth were not his. That is to say, they were imitation teeth, made of heavy porcelain. They had been constructed for him—he told me later—after he lost all his real ones when a Samoyed foeman hit him in the mouth with an iron mace. I eventually saw other Mongols and Han wearing artificial teeth—they were called kin-chi by the Han physicians who specialized in the making of them—but Bayan’s were the first I ever saw, and the worst, evidently having been made for him by a physician not very fond of him. They looked as ponderous and granitic as roadside milestones, and they were held together and held in place by an elaborate grid of garish, glittering goldwork. Bayan himself told me that they were painfully uncomfortable, so he only wedged them between his gums when he had to call upon some dignitary, or had to eat, or wished to seduce a woman with his beauty. I did not say so, but it was my opinion that his kin-chi must have revolted every dignitary he champed them at, and every servant who waited upon him at table—and their effect upon a woman I did not wish even to speculate on.

“Well, Bayan,” Ukuruji was saying eagerly, “does my Royal Father command that I am to follow you into Yun-nan?”

“He does not say that you are not to,” Bayan replied diplomatically, and handed the document to the Wang for him to read for himself. Then the Orlok turned to me. “Very well. As Kubilai suggests, I will cause a proclamation to be made, loud and within hearing of the Yi, that they no longer have a secret friend in the Khanbalik court. Is that supposed to make them surrender on the spot? It seems to me that they would fight the harder, out of sheer peevishness.”

I said, “I do not know, Orlok.”

“And why does Kubilai suggest that I do the very thing I have tried to avoid doing? Penetrate so far into Yun-nan that my flanks and my rear are vulnerable?”

“I really do not know, Orlok. The Khakhan did not confide to me his ideas for either strategy or tactics.”

“Humph. Well, you must know this much, Polo. He appends a postscript—something about you having brought me some new weapon.”

“Yes, Orlok. It is a device that might help prosecute a war without too many soldiers being killed.”

“Being killed is what soldiers are for,” he said decisively. “What is this device?”

“A means by which to employ in combat the powder called huo-yao.”

He erupted, rather like the flaming powder himself, “Vakh! That again?” He gnashed his ghastly teeth and bellowed what I took to be a terrible profanity: “By the smelly old saddle of the sweaty god Tengri! Every year or so, another lunatic inventor proposes to replace cold steel with hot smoke. It has never worked yet!”

“This time it might, Orlok,” I said. “It is a totally new kind of huo-yao.” I beckoned to a hovering chabi and sent him running to my chambers to fetch one of the brass balls.

While we waited, Ukuruji finished reading the letter and said, “I think, Bayan, I perceive the intent in my Royal Father’s tactical proposal. So far, your troops have failed to close with the Yi in a decisive battle, because they continually melt away before you into the mountain recesses. But if your columns were to proceed far enough—so that the Yi saw an opportunity of utterly surrounding you—why, then they would have to trickle down from their hideaways and collect in mass at your flanks and rear.” The Orlok appeared both bored and exasperated by this explication but, out of respect for rank, he let him go on: “Thus, for the first time, you would have all the Yi foemen gathered and exposed, and distant from their bolt holes, and engageable in close combat. Well?”

“If my Wang will permit me,” said the Orlok. “That is all very likely true. But my Wang has himself mentioned the egregious flaw in that argument. I would be utterly surrounded. If I may draw a parallel, I submit that the most practical way of extinguishing a fire is not to plump one’s bare rump down on it.”

“Hm,” said Ukuruji. “Well … suppose you ventured only a portion of your troops, and held others in reserve … to swoop down when the Yi had collected behind the first columns … ?”

“Wang Ukuruji,” the Orlok said patiently. “The Yi are shifty and elusive, but they are not stupid. They know how many men and horses I have at my disposal, and probably even how many women usable for warriors. They would not be drawn into such a trap unless they could see and count that I had committed my entire force. And then—who is in the trap?”

“Hm,” Ukuruji murmured again, and subsided into a thoughtful silence.

The chabi returned, bringing the brass ball, and I explained to the Orlok all the incidents leading up to its contrivance, and how the Firemaster Shi had seen in it a new potential for military usefulness. When I had done, the Orlok champed his teeth some more, and gave me much the same look with which he had received the Wang’s tactical advice.

“Let me see if I understand you correctly, Polo,” he said. “You have brought me twelve of these elegant baubles, right? Now, correct me if I am wrong. From your own experience, you can assure me that each of the twelve will effectually demolish two persons—if they are both standing closely over it when it ignites—and if they are both unarmored, delicate, incautious and unsuspecting women.”

I mumbled, “Well, true, it happened that the two I spoke of were women, but—”

“Twelve balls. Each capable of killing two defenseless women. Meanwhile, down the farther valleys to the south, there are some fifty thousand staunch Yi men—warriors encased in leather armor stout enough to turn a blade. I cannot really expect them to huddle close when I roll a ball among them. Even if they did, let me think, fifty thousand minus, um, twenty-four … leaves, um … .”

I coughed and cleared my throat and said, “On my way hither, along the Pillar Road, I was struck by a notion for a different use of the balls than just to project them among the enemy. I perceived that the mountains hereabout are not much subject to landslides or rockslides—like the Pai-Mir, say—and these mountain people are evidently unwary of any such occurrences.”

For a change, he did not munch his teeth at me, but regarded me narrowly. “You are right. These mountains are reliably solid. So?”

“So if the brass balls were to be securely tucked into tight crevices of the high peaks along both crests above a valley, and all ignited at the same and proper moment, they should set loose a mighty avalanche. It would thunder down from both sides and completely fill the valley and mash and bury every living thing in it. To a people who have for so long felt safe among these mountains, even sheltered and protected by them, it would be a cataclysm immense and unexpected and inescapable. The avalanche would come down upon them like God’s boot heel. Of course, as the Wang has said, it would be necessary to arrange that all the foe be congregated in that one valley … .”

“Hui! That is it!” Ukuruji exclaimed. “First, Bayan, you have heralds make that proclamation proposed by my Royal Father. Then, as if that had given you mandate for a full-scale assault, you send your whole force into the likeliest valley, the mountains alongside it having previously been seeded with the huo-yao balls. The Yi will think you have taken leave of your senses, but they will take advantage of it. They will filter down from their hiding places and collect and cluster and prepare to assault from your sides and rear. And then—”

“Honorable Wang!” the Orlok bleated, almost pleadingly. “I should have to take leave of my senses! Not enough that I commit my entire five tomans—half a tuk—to be surrounded by the enemy. Now you wish me to condemn my fifty thousand men as well to a devastating avalanche! What good for us to wipe out the Yi warriors and have all Yun-nan prostrate before us, if we have no troops of our own left alive to take it and hold it?”

“Hm,” said Ukuruji yet again. “Well, our troops would at least be expecting the avalanche … .”

The Orlok refrained even from dignifying that with a comment. Just then, one of the serving chabis came out of the Pota-lá onto the terrace, bringing a leather flask of arkhi to refill our drinking horns and skull cups. Bayan, Ukuruji and I were sitting now with our eyes pensively fixed on the tabletop, so my gaze was caught by the bright garnet sleeves of that young Bho man dispensing the liquor. Then my eyes, idling on those movements of color, caught the similarly idling gaze of Ukuruji, and I saw his eyes quicken with light, and I think the garnet sleeves inspired in both of us the same outrageous idea at the same instant, but I was glad to let him do the expressing of it. He leaned urgently toward Bayan and said:

“Suppose we do not risk our own men to bait the trap. Suppose we send the worthless and expendable Bho … .”