At the northeastern end of Lake Chaqmaqtin stood a community that called itself a town, Buzai Gumbad, but it really comprised only a single extensive karwansarai of many buildings, and roundabout it a tent city and the corrals of karwan trains encamped for the winter. It was evident that, come better weather, almost the entire population of Buzai Gumbad would get up and vacate the Wakhàn Corridor by way of its various passes. The landlord of the karwansarai was a jolly and expansive man named Iqbal, which means Good Fortune, and the name was apt for one who prospered richly by owning the only karwan stopping place on that stretch of the Silk Road. He was a native Wakhani, he said, born right there in the inn. But, as the son and grandson and great-grandson of previous generations of Buzai Gumbad’s innkeepers, he of course spoke Trade Farsi, and had, if not experience, good hearsay knowledge of the world beyond the mountains.
Spreading his arms wide, Iqbal welcomed us most cordially to “the high Pai-Mir, the Way to the Peaks, the Roof of the World,” and then confided that his extravagant words were no exaggeration. Here, he said, we were exactly one farsakh straight up—that is, two and a half miles—above the level of the earth’s seas and such sea-level cities as Venice and Acre and Basra. Landlord Iqbal did not explain how he could know so exactly the local altitude. But, assuming he spoke true—and because the mountain peaks around us visibly stood as high again—I would not dispute his claim that we had come to the Roof of the World.
THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
1
WE engaged a room for ourselves, including Nostril as one of us, in the main building of the inn, and corral space for our horses outside, and prepared to stay in Buzai Gumbad until the winter broke. The karwansarai was no very elegant place, and, because all its appurtenances and most of its supplies had to be imported from beyond the mountains, Iqbal charged his guests high for their keep. But the place was actually more comfortable than it had to be, considering the circumstance that it was all there was, and that neither Iqbal nor his forebears need ever have bothered to provide any more than the most rudimentary shelter and provender.
The main building was of two stories—the first karwansarai I had seen built so—the bottom half being a commodious stable for Iqbal’s own cattle and sheep, which constituted both his life savings and his inn’s larder. The upstairs was for people, and was encircled by an open portico which had, outside each sleeping chamber, a privy hole cut in its floor, so that the guests’ droppings fell into the inn yard for the benefit of a flock of scrawny chickens. The lodgings being upstairs over the stable meant that we enjoyed the warmth wafting upward from the animals, but we did not much enjoy the smell of them. Still, that was not so bad as the smell of us and the other long-unwashed guests and our unwashed garments. The landlord would not squander precious dried-dung fuel on anything like a hammam or hot water for washing clothes.
He preferred, and so did we guests, to use the fuel to keep our beds warm at night. All of Iqbal’s beds were of the style called in the East the kang, a hollow platform of piled-up stones covered with boards supporting a heap of camel-hair blankets. Before retiring, one lifted the planks, spread some dry dung inside the kang and placed on that a few burning coals. The newcome traveler usually did it inexpertly at first, and either froze all night or set the planks afire under him. But with practice one learned to lay the fire so that it smoldered all night at an even warmth, and did not make quite enough smoke to suffocate everybody in the room. Each guest chamber also had a lamp, handmade by Iqbal himself, and the like of which I never saw elsewhere. To make one, he would take a camel’s bladder, blow it up to a sphere, then paint it with lacquer to make it hold that shape and to give it a bright design of many colors. With a hole cut out of it so it could be positioned over a candle or an oil lamp, that big globe gave a varicolored and most radiant glow.
The inn’s everyday meals were the usual Muslim monotony: mutton and rice, rice and mutton, boiled beans, big rounds of a thin-rolled, chewy bread called nan, and, for drink, a green-colored cha that always had an inexplicable slight taste of fish. But good host Iqbal did his best to vary the monotony whenever he had an excuse: on every Muslim Sabbath Friday and on the various Muslim feste days which occurred during that winter. I do not know what the days celebrated—they had names like Zu-1-Heggeh and Yom Ashura—but on such occasions we were served beef instead of mutton, and a rice called pilaf, colored red or yellow or blue. There were also sometimes fried meat tarts called samosa, and a sort of sharbat confection of snow flavored with pistachio or sandalwood, and once—once only, but I think I still can taste it—for a sweet, we were served a pudding made of crushed ginger and garlic.
There was nothing to prevent our eating the various foods of other nationalities and religions, and we frequently did. In the lesser outbuildings of the karwansarai, and in tents all around it, were camped the people of many karwan trains, and they were people of many different countries and customs and languages. There were Persian and Arab merchants and Pakhtuni horse traders who had come, like us, from the west, and big blond Russniaks from the far north, and shaggy, burly Tazhiks from the nearer north, and flat-faced Bho from the easterly land called the High Place of the Bho, or To-Bhot in their language, and dark-skinned little Hindus and Tamil Cholas from southern India, and gray-eyed, sandy-haired people called Hunzukut and Kalash from the nearer south, and some Jews of indeterminate origin, and numerous others. This was the commingled population which made of Buzai Gumbad a town-sized community—in the wintertime, anyway—and they all exerted themselves to make it a well-run and livable town. Indeed, it was a much more neighborly and friendly community than many settled and permanent ones I have been in.
At any mealtime, anybody could sit down at any family’s cook fire and be made welcome—even if he and they could not speak a mutually comprehensible language—the understanding being that his next cook fire would be equally hospitable to any comer. By the end of that winter, I think we Polos had sampled every kind of food that was served in Buzai Gumbad, and, since we did there no cooking of our own, had treated as many strangers to meals in Iqbal’s dining hall. Besides offering a variety of eating experiences—some memorable for their deliciousness, a few memorable for their awfulness—the community provided other diversions. Almost every day was a festa day for some group of people, and they were pleased to have everybody else in the encampment come and watch or join in their music making and singing and dancing and games of sport. All the doings in Buzai Gumbad were not festive, of course, but the diversity of people managed to unite in more solemn matters, too. Because they observed among them so many different codes of law, they had elected one man of every color, tongue and religion gathered there, to sit together as a court for hearing complaints of pilferage and trespass and other disturbances of the peace.
I have mentioned the law court and the festivities in the same breath, as it were, because they figured together in one incident I found amusing. The handsome people called the Kalash were a quarrelsome sort, but only among themselves, and not ferociously so; their quarrels usually ended in laughter all around. They were also a merry and musical and graceful sort; they had any number of different Kalash dances, with names like the kikli and the dhamal, and they danced them almost every day. But one of their dances, called the luddi, remains unique in my experience of dances.
I saw it performed first by a Kalash man who had been hailed before the motley court of Buzai Gumbad, accused of having stolen a set of camel bells from a Kalash neighbor. When the court acquitted him, for lack of evidence, the entire contingent of Kalash folk—including his accuser—set up a squalling and clattering music of flutes and chimta tongs and hand drums, and the man began to dance the flailing, flinging luddi dance, and eventually his whole family joined him in it. I saw the luddi performed next by the other Kalash man, the one who had lost the camel bells. When the court was unable to produce either the bells or a punishable culprit, it ordered that a collection be taken up from every head of household in the
encampment to recompense the victim. This meant only a few coppers from every contributor, but the total was probably more than the purloined bells had been worth. And when the man was handed the money, the entire contingent of Kalash folk—including the accused but acquitted thief—again set up a screechy, rackety music of flutes and tongs and hand drums, and that man began to dance the flailing, flinging luddi dance, and eventually his whole family joined him in it. The luddi, I learned, is a Kalash dance which the happily quarrelsome Kalash dance only and specifically to celebrate a victory in litigation. I wish I could introduce to litigious Venice something of the sort.
I thought the composite court had judged wisely in that case, as I thought they did in most cases, considering what a touchy job they had. Of all the peoples gathered in Buzai Gumbad, probably no two were accustomed to abiding by (or disobeying) the same set of laws. Drunken rape seemed to be a commonplace among the Nestorian Russniaks, as Sodomite sex was among the Muslim Arabs, while both those practices were regarded with horror by the pagan and irreligious Kalash. Petty thievery was a way of life for the Hindus, and that was tolerantly condoned by the Bho, who regarded anything not tied down as ownerless, but theft was condemned as criminal by the dirty but honest Tazhiks. So the members of the court had to tread a narrow course, trying to dispense acceptable justice while not insulting any group’s accepted customs. And not every case brought to trial was as trivial as the affair of the stolen camel bells.
One that had come to court before we Polos arrived was still being recounted and discussed and argued over. An elderly Arab merchant had charged the youngest and comeliest of his four wives with having abandoned him and eloped to the tent of a young and good-looking Russniak. The outraged husband did not want her back; he wanted her and her lover condemned to death. The Russniak contended that under the law of his homeland a woman was as fair game as any forest animal, and belonged to the taker. Besides, he said, he truly loved her. The errant wife, a woman of the Kirghiz people, pleaded that she had found her lawful husband repugnant, in that he never entered her except in the foul Arab manner, by the rear entrance, and she felt entitled to a change of partners, if only to get a change of position. But besides that, she said, she truly loved the Russniak. I asked our landlord Iqbal how the trial had come out. (Iqbal, being one of the few permanent inhabitants of Buzai Gumbad, hence a leading citizen, was naturally elected to every winter’s new court.)
He shrugged and said, “Marriage is marriage in any land, and a man’s wife is his property. We had to find for the cuckolded husband in that aspect of the case. He was given permission to put his faithless wife to death. But we denied him any part in deciding the fate of her lover.”
“What was his punishment?”
“He was only made to stop loving her.”
“But she was dead. What use—?”
“We decreed that his love for her must die, too.”
“I—I do not quite understand. How could that be done?”
“The woman’s dead body was laid naked on a hillside. The convicted adulterer was chained and staked just out of reach of her. They were left that way.”
“For him to starve to death beside her?”
“Oh, no. He was fed and watered and kept quite comfortable until he was released. He is free now, and he still lives, but he no longer loves her.”
I shook my head. “Forgive me, Mirza Iqbal, but I really do not understand.”
“A dead body, lying unburied, does not just lie there. It changes, day by day. On the first day, only some discoloration, wherever there was last a pressure on the skin. In the woman’s case, some mottling about the throat, where her husband’s fingers had strangled her. The lover had to sit and see those blotches appearing on her flesh. Perhaps they were not too gruesome to look at. But a day or so later, a cadaver’s abdomen begins to swell. In another little while, a dead body begins to belch and otherwise expel its inner pressures in manners most unmannerly. Later, there come flies—”
“Thank you. I begin to understand.”
“Yes, and he had to watch it all. In the cold here, the process is slowed somewhat, but the decay is inexorable. And as the corpse putrefies, the vultures and the kites descend, and the shaqàl dogs come boldly closer, and—”
“Yes, yes.”
“In ten days or thereabouts, when the remains were deliquescing, the young man had lost all love for her. We believe so, anyway. He was quite insane by then. He went away with the Russniak train, but being led on a rope behind their wagons. He still lives, yes, but if Allah is merciful, perhaps he will not live long.”
The karwan trains wintering there on the Roof of the World were laden with all sorts of goods and, while I found many of them worth admiring—silks and spices, jewels and pearls, furs and hides—most of those were no great novelty to me. But some of the trade items I had never even heard of before. A train of Samoyeds, for instance, was bringing down from the far north baled sheets of what they called Muscovy glass. It looked like glass cut into rectangular panes, and each sheet measured about my arm’s length square, but its transparency was marred by cracklings and webbings and blemishes. I learned that it was not real glass at all, but a product of another strange kind of rock. Rather like amianthus, which comes apart in fibers, this rock peels apart like the pages of a book, yielding the thin, brittle, blearily transparent sheets. The material was far inferior to real glass, such as that made at Murano, but the art of glassworking is unknown in most of the East, so the Muscovy glass was a fairly adequate substitute and, said the Samoyeds, fetched a good price in the markets.
From the other end of the earth, from the far south, a train of Tamil Cholas was transporting out of India toward Balkh heavy bags of nothing but salt. I laughed at the dark-skinned little men. I had seen no lack of salt in Balkh, and I thought them stupid to be lugging such a common commodity across whole continents. The tiny, timid Cholas begged my indulgence of their obsequious explanation: it was “sea salt,” they said. I tasted it—no different from any other salt—and I laughed again. So they explained further: there was some quality inherent to sea salt, they claimed, that is lacking in other sorts. The use of it as a seasoning for foods would prevent people’s being beset by goiters, and for that reason they expected the sea salt to sell in these lands for a price worth their trouble of bringing it so far. “Magic salt?” I scoffed, for I had seen many of those ghastly goiters, and I knew they would require more than the eating of a sprinkling of salt to remove. I laughed again at the Cholas’ credulity and folly, and they looked properly chastened, and I went on my way.
The riding and pack animals corraled about the lakeside were almost as various as their owners. There were whole herds of horses and asses, of course, and even a few fine mules. But the many camels there were not the same sort that we had formerly seen and used in the lowland deserts. These were not so tall or long-legged, but bulkier of build, and made to look even more ponderous by their long, thick hair. They also wore a mane, like a horse, except that the mane depended from the bottom, not the top, of their long necks. But the chief novelty of them was that they all had two humps instead of one; it made them easier to ride, since they had a natural saddle declivity between the two humps. I was told that these Bactrian camels were best adapted to wintry conditions and mountainous terrain, as the single-humped Arabian camels are to heat and thirst and desert sands.
Another animal new to me was the pack-carrier of the Bho people, called by them an yyag and by most other people a yak. This was a massive creature with the head of a cow and the tail of a horse, at opposite ends of a body resembling a haystack in shape and size and texture. The yak may stand as high as a man’s shoulder, but its head is carried low, at about a man’s knee level. Its shaggy, coarse hair—black or gray or mixed dark and white in patches—hangs all the way to the ground, obscuring hoofs that look too dainty for its great bulk, but those hoofs are astonishingly precise of step and placement on narrow mountain trails. A yak grunts and grumbles l
ike a pig, and continuously gnashes its millstone teeth as it shambles along.
I learned later that yak meat is as good to eat as the best beef, but no yak-herder in Buzai Gumbad had occasion to slaughter one of the animals while we were there. The Bho did, however, milk the cow yaks of their herds, a procedure which takes some daring, given the immense size and unpredictable irritability of those animals. That milk, of which the Bho had so much that they gave it freely to others, was delicious, and the butter which the Bho made from it would have been a praiseworthy delicacy if only it had not always had long yak hairs embedded in it. The yak gives other useful products: its coarse hair can be woven into tents so sturdy that they will stand against mountain gales, and its much finer tail hairs make excellent fly whisks.
Among the smaller animals at Buzai Gumbad, I saw many of the red-legged partridges I had in other places seen wild, these having their wings clipped so they could not fly. Since the camp children were forever playing hide-and-seek with the bird, I took them to be kept for either pets or pest catchers—every tent and building being infested with insect vermin. But I soon learned that the partridges had another and peculiar utility for the Kalash and Hunzukut women.