I do not mean the sound of wind or snowstorm or sandstorm raging through them, though God knows we heard those sounds often enough. We were frequently breasting a wind into which a man could literally let himself fall, and not hit the ground but hang atilt, held up by the blast. And to that wind’s bawling noise would be added the seethe of windblown snow or the sizzle of windblown dust, according as we were in the heights where winter still held sway or in the deep gorges where it was now late springtime.
No, the noise I remember so well was the sound of the mountains’ decay. It was a surprise to me, that mountains so titanic could be falling to pieces all the time, falling apart, falling down. When I first heard the sound, I thought it was thunder rolling among the crags, and I marveled, for there were no clouds anywhere in the pure blue sky that day, and anyway I could not imagine a thunderstorm occurring in such crystalline cold weather. I reined my mount to a halt, and sat still in the saddle, listening attentively.
The sound began as a deep-throated rumble somewhere out ahead of us, and it loudened to a distant roar, and then that sound was compounded by its echoes. Other mountains heard it and repeated it, like a choir of voices taking up, one after another, the theme from a solo singer singing bass. The voices enlarged on that theme and amplified it and added to it the resonances of tenors and baritones, until the sound was coming from over there and from over yonder and from behind me and from all around me. I remained transfixed by the thrumming reverberation, while it dwindled from a thunder to a mutter and a mumble and faded away diminuendo. The mountains’ voices only lingeringly let go, one after another, so that my human ear could not discern the moment when the sound died into silence.
The Chola named Talvar rode up beside me on his scraggly little horse, and gave me a look and broke my enthrallment by saying in his Tamil tongue, “Batu jatuh,” and in Farsi, “Khak uftadan,” both of which said, “Avalanche.” I nodded as if I had known it all the while, and kneed my horse to move on.
That was only the first of innumerable occasions; the noise could be heard almost any time of day or night. Sometimes it would come from so near our trail that we would hear it above the creak and clatter of our harness and cartwheels and the grumbling and tooth-gnashing of our yak herd. And if we looked up quickly, before the echoes confused the direction, we would see rising into the sky from behind some ridge a smoke-like plume of dust or a glittering billow of snow particles, marking the place where the slide had occurred. But I could hear the noise of more distant rockfalls whenever I chose to listen for them. I had only to ride ahead of the train or dawdle behind its racket, and wait for not long. I would hear, from one direction or another, a mountain groaning in the agony of losing a part of itself, and then the echoes overlapping from every other direction: all the other mountains joining in a dirge.
The slides were sometimes of snow and ice, as can happen also in the Alps. But they more often marked the slow corruption of the mountains themselves, for these Pai-Mir, though infinitely bigger than the Alps, are notably less substantial. They appear steadfast and eternal from a distance, but I have seen them close. They are made of a rock much veined and cracked and flawed, and the mountains’ very loftiness contributes to their instability. If the wind nudges a single pebble from a high place, its rolling can dislodge other fragments, and their movement shoves loose other stones until, all rolling together, their ever more rapid downhill progress can topple huge boulders, and those in falling can sheer the lip off a vast cliff, and that in coming down can cleave away the whole side of a mountain. And so on, until a mass of rocks, stones, pebbles, gravel, earth and dust, usually mushed with snow, slush and ice—a mass perhaps the size of a minor Alp—sluices down into the narrow gorges or even narrower ravines that separate the mountains.
Any living thing in the path of a Pai-Mir avalanche is doomed. We came upon much evidence—the bones and skulls and splendid horn racks of goral, urial and “Marco’s sheep,” and the bones and skulls and pathetically broken belongings of men—the relics of long-dead wild flocks and long-lost karwan trains. Those unfortunates had heard the mountains moan, then groan, then bellow, and they had never since heard anything at all. Only chance preserved us from the same fate, for there is no trail or camping spot or time of day that is exempt from avalanche. Happily, none fell on us, but on many occasions we found the trail absolutely obliterated, and had to seek a way around the interruption. This was trouble enough when the slide had left in our path an unclimbable barrier of rubble. It was much harder on the frequent trail that was nothing but a narrow shelf chiseled from the face of a cliff, and an avalanche had broken it with an unvaultable void. Then we would have to retrace our steps for many farsakhs backward, and trudge many, many weary farsakhs circuitously roundabout before we were headed north again.
So my father and uncle and Nostril all cursed bitterly and the Cholas whimpered miserably every time they heard the rumble of rockfall, from whatever direction. But I was always stirred by the sound, and I cannot understand why other travelers seem to think it not worth mentioning in their reminiscences, for what the noise means is that these great mountains will not last forever. The crumbling of them will of course take centuries and millennia and eons before the Pai-Mir crumble down even to the still-grand stature of the Alps—but crumble they will, and eventually to a featureless flat land. Realizing that, I wondered why, if God intended only to let them fall, He had piled them so extravagantly high as they are now. And I wondered too, and I wonder still, how immeasurably, stupendously, unutterably high these mountains must have been when God made them in the Beginning.
All the mountains being of unvarying colors, the only changes we could see in their appearance were those made by weather and time of day. On clear days, the high peaks caught the brilliance of dawn while we were still benighted, and they held the glow of sunset long after we had camped and supped and bedded down in darkness. On days when there were clouds in the sky, we would see a white cloud trail across a bare brown crag and hide it. Then, when the cloud had passed, the pinnacle would reappear, but now as white with snow as if it had shredded off rags of the cloud in which to drape itself.
When we ourselves were high up, climbing an upward trail, the high light up there played tricks with our eyesight. In most mountain country there is always a slight haze which renders each farther object a little dimmer to the eye, so one can judge which objects are near and which far. But in the Pai-Mir there is no trace of haze, and it is impossible to reckon the distance or even the size of the most common and familiar objects. I would often fix my gaze on a mountain peak on the far horizon, then be startled to see our pack yaks scrambling over it, a mere rock pile and only a hundred paces distant from me. Or I would glimpse a hulking surragoy—one of the wild mountain yaks, like a fragment of mountain himself—lurking just to one side of our trail, and I would worry that he might lure our tame yaks to run away from us, but then realize that he was actually standing a farsakh away, and there was a whole valley between us.
The high air was as tricksome as the light. As it had done in the Wakhàn (which we now regarded as a mere lowland), the air refused to support the flames of our cook fires more than meagerly, and they burned only pale and blue and tepid, and our water pots took an eternity to come to a boil. Up here, somehow, the thin air also affected the heat of the very sunshine. The sunny side of a boulder would be too uncomfortably hot to lean against, but its shady side would be too uncomfortably cold. Sometimes we would have to doff our heavy chapon overcoats because the sun made them so swelteringly hot, but not a crystal of the snow all about us would be melting. The sun would fire icicles into blindingly bright and iridescent rainbows, but never make them drip.
However, that was only in clear and sunny weather on the heights, when the winter briefly slept. I think these heights are where the old man winter goes to mope and sulk when all the rest of the world spurns him and welcomes warmer seasons. And in here, perhaps in one or another of the many mountain caves and ca
verns, old winter retires to doze from time to time. But he sleeps uneasily and he continually reawakens, yawning great gusts of cold and flailing long arms of wind and from his white beard combing cascades of snow. Often and often, I watched the snowy high peaks blend into a fresh fall of snow and vanish in its whiteness; then the nearer ridges would disappear, and then the yaks leading our train, and then the rest of it, and finally everything beyond my horse’s wind-whipped mane would disappear in whiteness. In some of those storms the snow was so thick and the gale so fierce that we riders could progress best by turning and sitting backward on our saddles, letting our mounts pick their onward way, tacking like boats against the blast.
Since we were constantly going uphill and down, that iron weather would soften every few days, when we descended into the warm, dry, dusty gorges where young lady spring had arrived, then would harden around us again when we ascended once more into the domains still held by old man winter. So we alternated: plodding through snow above, slogging through mud below; half frozen by a sleet storm above, half suffocated by a whirling dust-devil below. But as we progressed ever northward, we began to see in the narrow valley bottoms bits of living green—stunted bushes and sparse grasses, then small and timid patches of meadow; an occasional greening-out tree, then stands of them. Those fragmentary verdant areas looked so new and alien, set among the snow-white and harsh-black and arid-dun heights, that they might have been snippets of faraway other countries cut out with scissors and inexplicably scattered through this wasteland.
Still farther north, the mountains were farther apart, allowing for wider and greener valleys, and the terrain was even more remarkable for its contrasts. Against the mountains’ cold white background shone a hundred different greens, all warm with sunlight—voluminous dark-green chinar trees, pale silver-green locust trees, poplars tall and slender like green feathers, aspens twinkling their leaves from the green side to the gray-pearl side. And under and among the trees glowed a hundred different other colors—the bright yellow cups of the flowers called tulbands, the bright reds and pinks of wild roses, the radiant purple of the flower called lilak. That is a tall-growing shrub, so the lilak’s purple plumes looked even more vivacious for our seeing them always from below, against the stark white snowline, and its perfume—one of the most delicious of all flower fragrances—smelled the sweeter for being borne on the absolutely odorless and sterile wind from the snowfields.
In one of those valleys we came to the first river we had encountered since leaving the Ab-e-Panj, this one the Murghab by name, and beside it was the town of the same name. We took the opportunity to rest for two nights in a karwansarai there, and to bathe ourselves and wash our clothes in the river. Then we bade goodbye to the Cholas and kept on northward. I hoped that Talvar and his comrades did get much coin for their sea salt, because Murghab had not much else to offer. It was a shabby town and its Tazhik inhabitants were distinctive only for their exceptional resemblance to their co-inhabitants, the yaks—men and women alike being hairy, smelly, broad of face and features and torso, bovine in their impassivity and incuriosity. Murghab was empty of enticements to linger there, but the Cholas would leave it having nothing better to look forward to, only the grueling journey back across the high Pai-Mir and all of India.
Our own journey, from Murghab on, was not too arduous, we having got well used to traveling in these highlands. Also, the farther-north ranges were not so high or wintry, their slopes were not so steep, the passes were not so far to climb up to and over and down from, and the intervening valleys were broad and green and flowery and pleasant. According to what calculations I could make with our kamàl, we were now much farther north than Alexander had ever penetrated into central Asia, and, according to our Kitab maps, we were now squarely in the center of that largest land mass on earth. So we were astonished and bewildered one day to find ourselves on the shore of a sea. From the shore where the wavelets lapped at our horses’ fetlocks, the waters stretched away to the west as far as the eye could see. We knew, of course, that a mighty inland sea does exist in central Asia, the Ghelan or Caspian by name, but we had to be far, far east of that one. I briefly felt sorry for our recent companions, the Cholas, thinking they had fetched all their sea salt to a land already provided with a more than ample salt sea.
But we tasted the water, and it was fresh and sweet and crystal clear. This was a lake, then, but that was not much less astounding—to encounter a vastly big and deep lake situated as high as an Alp above the bulk of the world. Our northward route took us up its eastern shore, and we were many days in passing it. On every one of those days, we made excuse to camp early in the evening, so we could bathe and wade and disport ourselves in those balmy, sparkling waters. We found no towns on the lake shore, but there were the mud-brick and driftwood huts of Tazhik shepherds and woodcutters and charcoal burners. They told us that the lake was called Karakul, which is to say Black Fleece, which is the name of that breed of domestic sheep raised by all the shepherds in the vicinity.
That was one more oddity about the lake: that it should have the name of an animal; but that animal is admittedly not a common one. In fact, looking at a herd of those sheep, one might wonder why they are called kara, since the adult rams and ewes are mostly of varying shades of gray and grayish-white, only a few of them being black. The explanation is in the much-prized fur for which the karakul is noted. That costly pelt, of tight and kinky black curls, is not just a shearing of the sheep’s fleece. It is a lamb skin, and all the karakul lambs are born black, and the pelt is obtained by killing and flaying a lamb before it is three days old. A day older, and the pure black color loses some of its black intensity, and no fur trader will accept it as karakul.
A week’s journey north of the lake, we came to a river flowing from west to east. It was called by the local Tazhiks the Kek-Su, or Passage River. The name was fitting, for its broad valley did constitute a clear passage through the mountains, and we gladly followed it eastward, down and down from the highlands we had been among for so long. Even our horses were grateful for that easier passage; the rocky mountains had been hard on both their bellies and their hoofs; down here was ample grass for feed and it was soft under their feet. Curiously, at every single village and even isolated hut we came to, my father or uncle asked again the name of the river, and every time were told, “Kek-Su.” Nostril and I wondered at their insistently repeated question, but they only laughed at our puzzlement and would not explain why they needed so many reassurances that we were following the Passage River. Then one day we came upon the sixth or seventh of the valley villages and, when my father asked a man there, “What do you call the river?” the man politely replied, “Ko-tzu.”
The river was the same as yesterday, the terrain was no different from yesterday’s, the man looked as yaklike as any other Tazhik, but he had pronounced the name differently. My father turned in his saddle to shout back to Uncle Mafio, riding a little way behind us—and he shouted it triumphantly—“We have arrived!” Then he dismounted, picked up a handful of the road’s yellowish dirt and regarded it almost fondly.
“Arrived where?” I asked. “I do not understand.”
“The river’s name is the same: the Passage,” said my father. “But this good fellow spoke it in the Han language. We have crossed the border from Tazhikistan. This is the stretch of the Silk Road by which your uncle and I went westward home. The city of Kashgar is only two days or so ahead of us.”
“So we are now in the province of Sin-kiang,” said Uncle Mafio, who had ridden up to us. “Formerly a province of the Chin Empire. But now Sin-kiang, and everything east of here, is a part of the Mongol Empire. Nephew Marco, you are finally in the heartland of the Khanate.”
“You are standing,” said my father, “upon the yellow earth of Kithai, which extends from here to the great eastern ocean. Marco, my son, you have come at last to the domain of the Khakhan Kubilai.”
KITHAI
1
THE city of Kashgar
I found to be of respectable size and of sturdy-built inns and shops and residences, not the mud-brick shacks we had been seeing in Tazhikistan. Kashgar was built for permanence, because it is the western gateway of Kithai, through which all Silk Road trains coming from or going to the West must pass. And we found that no train could pass without challenge. Some farsakhs before we got to the city walls, we were waved down by a group of Mongol sentries at a guard-post on the road. Beyond their shelter we could see the countless round yurtu tents of what appeared to be an entire army camped around Kashgar’s approaches.
“Mendu, Elder Brothers,” said one of the sentries. He was a typical Mongol warrior of forbidding brawn and ugliness, hung all about with weapons, but his salute was friendly enough.
“Mendu, sain bina,” said my father.
I could not then understand all the words which were spoken, but my father later repeated the conversation to me, in translation, and told me it was the standard sort of exchange between parties meeting anywhere in Mongol country. It was odd to hear such gracious formalities spoken by a seeming brute, for the sentry went on to inquire politely, “From under what part of Heaven do you come?”
“We are from under the skies of the far West,” my father replied. “And you, Elder Brother, where do you erect your yurtu?”
“Behold, my poor tent stands now among the bok of the Ilkhan Kaidu, who is currently encamped in this place, while surveying his dominions. Elder Brother, across what lands have you cast your beneficent shadow on your way hither?”