WE kept on downstream along the Furat, still southeastward, now traversing a particularly unappealing stretch of country where the river had cut its channel through solid basalt rock—a land bleak and black and barren even of grass, pigeons and eagles—but we were not pursued by the Misguided Ones or anyone else. And gradually, as if in celebration of our deliverance from danger, the countryside became more pleasant and hospitable. The terrain began perceptibly to rise up on either side of the river, until it was flowing through a wide and verdant valley. There were orchards and forests, pastures and farms, flowers and fruits. But the orchards were as shaggy and untended as the native forests, the farms as overgrown and weedy as the fields of wild flowers. The land’s owners had all gone away, and the only people we met in that valley were nomad families of bedawin shepherds, the landless and rootless roamers, roaming in that valley as they roamed in the grasslands. There were nowhere any settled folk, nobody working to keep the once domesticated land from reverting to wilderness.
“It is the doing of the Mongols,” said my father. “When the Ilkhan Hulagu—that is to say, the Lesser Khan Hulagu, brother to our friend Kubilai—when he swept through this land and overthrew the Persian Empire, most of the Persians fled or fell before him, and the survivors have not yet returned to rework their lands. But the nomad Arabs and Kurdi are like the grass on which they live and in search of which they wander. The bedawin bend uncaringly before any wind that blows—whether it be a gentle breeze or the fierce simùm—but they rebound as does the grass. To the nomads it matters not who rules the land, and it never will matter to them until the end of time, as long as the land itself remains.”
I turned in my saddle, looking at the land all about us, the richest, most fertile, most promising land we had yet seen in our journey, and I asked, “Who does rule Persia now?”
“When Hulagu died, his son Abagha succeeded as Ilkhan, and he has established a new capital in the northern city of Maragheh instead of in Baghdad. Although the Persian Empire is now a part of the Mongol Khanate, it is still divided into Shahnates, as before, for convenience of administration. But each Shah is subordinate to the Ilkhan Abagha, just as Abagha is subordinate to the Khakhan Kubilai.”
I was impressed. I knew we were yet many months of hard travel distant from the court city of that Khakhan Kubilai. But already, here in the western reaches of Persia,
already
we were within the borders of the domain of that far distant Khan. In school, I had bent my most admiring and enthusiastic study on
The Book of Alexander,
so I knew that Persia was once a part of that conqueror’s empire, and his empire was so extensive as to earn him the sobriquet of “the Great.” But the lands won and held by that Macedonian comprised a mere fragment of the world, compared to the immensities conquered by Chinghiz Khan, and further enlarged by his conqueror sons, and still further enlarged by his conqueror grandsons, into the unimaginably immense Mongol Empire over which the grandson Kubilai now reigned as Khan of All Khans.
I believe that not the ancient Pharaones nor the ambitious Alexander nor the avaricious Caesars could have dreamed that so much world existed, so they could hardly have dreamed of acquiring it. As for all the later Western rulers, their ambitions and acquisitions have been even more paltry. Alongside the Mongol Empire, the entire continent called Europe seems merely a small and crowded peninsula, and all its nations, like those of the Levant, only so many peevishly self-important little provinces. From the eminence on which the Khakhan sits enthroned, my native Republic of Venice, proud of its glory and grandeur, must appear as trivial as the Suvediye cranny of the Ostikan Hampig. If the history keepers will continue to dignify Alexander as the Great, surely they ought to acknowledge Kubilai as the immeasurably Greater. That is not for me to say. But what I can say is that, on my entrance into Persia, I was thrilled to realize that I, mere Marco Polo, was setting foot in the most far-flung empire ever ruled by one man in all the years in which the world of men has existed.
“When we get to Baghdad,” my father went on, “we will show to the current Shah, whoever he may be, the letter we carry from Kubilai. And the Shah will have to make us welcome, as accredited ambassadors of his overlord.”
So we proceeded on down the Furat, watching the valley get ever more marked with the traces of civilization, for hereabouts it was crisscrossed by many irrigation canals branching off the river. However, the towering wooden wheels in the canals were not being turned by men or animals or any other agency; they stood still, the clay jugs around their rims not lifting and pouring any water. In the widest and most verdant part of that valley, the Furat makes its nearest approach to the other great south-running river of that country, the Dijlah, sometimes called Tigris, which is supposedly one of the other rivers of the Garden of Eden. If that is so, then the land between the two rivers would presumably be the site of that biblical garden. And if
that
is so, then the garden, when we saw it, was as empty of resident men and women as it was immediately after the expulsion of Adam and Eve.
In that vicinity, we turned our horses eastward from the Furat and rode the intervening ten farsakhs to the Dijlah, and crossed that river on the bridge there—made of empty boat hulls supporting a plank roadway —to Baghdad on the eastern bank.
The city’s population, like that of the surrounding countryside, had been grievously diminished during Hulagu’s siege and capture of it. But in the fifteen or so ensuing years, much of its populace had returned and repaired what damage it had suffered. City merchants, it seems, are more resilient than country farmers. Like the primitive bedawin, civilized tradesmen seem to recover quickly from the prostrations of disaster. In the case of Baghdad, that may have been because so many of its merchants were not passive and fatalistic Muslims, but irrepressibly energetic Jews and Christians—some of them having come originally from Venice and even more of them from Genoa.
Or perhaps Baghdad recovered because it is such a necessary city, at an important crossroads of trade. Besides being a western terminus of the Silk Road which comes overland, it is a northern terminus of the sea route from the Indies. The city is not itself on the seaside, of course, but its Dijlah River bears a heavy traffic of large river boats, sailing downstream with the current or being poled upriver against it, going to and coming from Basra in the south, on the Persian Gulf, where the seagoing Arab ships make landfall. Anyway, whatever the beneficent reason, Baghdad was, when we arrived there, what it had been before the Mongols came: a rich and vital and busy trading center.
It was as beautiful as it was busy. Of the Eastern cities I had seen so far, Baghdad was the most reminiscent of my native Venice. Its Dijlah waterfront was as thronged and tumultuous and littered and odorous as the Riva of Venice, though the vessels to be seen here—all of them built and manned by Arabs—were nowise comparable to ours. They were alarmingly shoddy craft to be entrusted to the water, built entirely without pegs or nails or iron fastenings of any fashion, their hull planking instead
stitched
together by ropes of some coarse fiber. Their seams and interstices were not plugged watertight with pitch, but with a sort of lard made from fish oil. Even the biggest of those boats had only a single steering oar, and it was not very manipulable since it was firmly hinged at mid-stern. Another deplorable thing about those Arab boats was the unfastidious way their cargoes were stored. After filling the hold with a load of, as it may be, all foodstuffs—dates and fruits and grains and such—the Arab boatmen might then crowd the deck above the hold with a herd of livestock. That frequently consisted of fine Arabian horses, and they are beauteous beasts, but they evacuate themselves as often and as hugely as any other horses, and their droppings would dribble and seep between the planks onto the cargo of edibles belowdecks.
Baghdad is not, like Venice, interlaced with canals, but its streets are constantly sprinkled with water to lay the dust, so they have a humid fragrance reminiscent to me of canals. And the city has a great many open squares equivalent to Venice’s piazze. Some are bazàr marketplaces, but most are public gardens, for the Persians are passionately fond of gardens. (I learned there that the Farsi word meaning garden, pairi-daeza, became our Bible’s word Paradise.) Those public gardens have benches for passersby to rest on, and streamlets running through, and many birds in residence, and trees and shrubs and perfumed plants and luminous Sowers—roses especially, for the Persians are passionately fond of roses. (They call any and every flower a gul, though that Farsi word means specifically a rose.) Likewise, the palaces of noble families and the larger houses of rich merchant families are built around private gardens as big as the public ones, and as full of roses and birds, and as nearly like earthly Paradises.
I suppose I had got it into my head that the words Muslim and Arab were interchangeable, and therefore that any Muslim community must be indistinguishable—in matters of filth and vermin and beggars and stench—from the Arab cities, towns and villages I had passed through. I was agreeably surprised to find that the Persians, although their religion is Islam, are more inclined to keep their buildings and streets and garments and persons clean. That, with the abundance of flowers everywhere, and a comparative fewness of beggars, made Baghdad a most pleasant and even nice-smelling city—except, of necessity, around the waterfront and the bazàr markets.
Although much of Baghdad’s architecture was of course peculiarly Eastern, even that was not entirely exotic to my Western eyes. I saw a great deal of that lacy filigree “arabesco” stonework which Venice has also adopted for some of its building fronts. Baghdad being still a Muslim city, even after its absorption into the Khanate—for the Mongols, unlike most conquerors, do not anywhere impose any change of religion —it was studded with those great Muslim masjid temples of worship. But their immense domes were not much different from the domes of San Marco and the other churches of Venice. Their slender manarat towers were not too dissimilar to the campanili of Venice, only being generally round instead of square in cross-section, and having little balconies at their tops, from which the muedhdhin beadles shouted at intervals to announce the hours of prayer.
Those muedhdhin in Baghdad, incidentally, were all blind men. I inquired whether that was a necessary qualification for the post, something demanded by Islam, and was told it was not. Blind men were engaged as the prayer-calling beadles for two pragmatic reasons. Being unfit for most other employments, they could not demand much pay for the work. And they could not take sinful advantage of their literally high position: they could not look down to ogle any decent woman who ascended to her rooftop to doff her veil—or more of her coverings—for a private sunbath.
In their interiors, the masjid temples differ notably from our Christian churches. In none of them, anywhere, is there ever to be found any statue or painting or other recognizable image. Though Islam recognizes, I think, as many angels and saints and prophets as Christianity does, it will allow no representation of them, or of any other creature alive or which ever has lived. Muslims believe that their Allah, like our Lord God, created all things living. But, unlike us Christians, they maintain that all creation, even in paint or wood or stone imitation of life, must be forever reserved to Allah. Their Quran warns them that on Judgment Day any maker of any such image will be commanded to bring that image to life; if the maker cannot do that, and of course he cannot, he will be damned to Hell for his presumption in having made it. Therefore, although a Muslim masjid—or palace or home—is always rich in decoration, those decorations are never pictures of anything; they consist only of patterns and colors and intricate arabeschi. Sometimes, though, the patterns are discernible as being woven of the Arabic fish-worm letters and spelling out some phrase or verse from the Quran.
(I learned these several uncommonly odd things about Islam—and I learned many other uncommonly odd things besides—because, during my stay in Baghdad, I acquired first one and then another uncommonly odd teacher, and I will tell of them in their turn.)
I was particularly taken with one form of decoration I saw in the interior rooms of every public and private building in Baghdad. I should say that I first saw it there, but afterward I saw it in other palaces, homes and temples throughout Persia and throughout much of the rest of the East. I should think it might be advantageously adopted by any people anywhere which loves a garden, and what people does not love a garden?
What it is, is a way to bring a garden
indoors,
though never having to tend or weed or water it. Called in Persia a qali, it is a sort of carpet or tapicierie made to lie on a floor or hang on a wall, but it is unlike any such work we know in the West. The qali is colored in all the colors of a bounteous garden, and its figures form the shapes of multitudes of flowers, vines, trellises, leaves—everything to be found in a garden—all disposed in pleasing designs and arrangements. (In keeping with the Quran’s ban on images, however, a Persian qali is made so that the flowers are not recognizable as any known existing flowers.) At first sight of a qali, I thought the garden must be painted or embroidered upon it. But, on examination, I found that all that intricacy was
woven into it.
I marveled that any tapicier could contrive such a fanciful thing with mere warp and weft of dyed yarns, and it was some while before I learned the marvelous manner in which it is done.