Playing was much on my own mind at that moment. I would have been happy to conclude the talking and start doing other things. Nevertheless, I was also at that moment realizing a truth that I think not many journeyers ever do.
We who wander about the world, we pause briefly in this community or that, and to us each is but one flash of vague impression in a long series of such forgettable flashes. The people there are only dim figures looming momentarily out of the dust clouds of the trail. We travelers usually have a destination and a purpose in aiming for it, and every stop along the way is merely one more milestone in our progress. But in actuality the people living there had an existence before we came, and will have after we leave, and they have their own concerns—hopes and worries and ambitions and plans—which, being of great moment to them, might sometimes be worth remarking also by us passersby. We might learn something worth knowing, or enjoy a laugh of amusement, or garner a sweet memory worth treasuring, or sometimes even improve our own selves, by taking notice of such things. So I paid sympathetic attention to the wistful words and glowing faces of Sitarè and Aziz, as they spoke of their plans and their ambitions and their hopes. And ever since that time, in all my journeyings, I have tried always to see in its entirety every least place I have passed through, and to see its humblest inhabitants with an unhurried eye.
“So we ask only,” said the girl, “that you take Aziz with you to Mashhad, and that in Mashhad you seek out a karwan merchant of wealth and kindly nature and other good qualities … .”
“Someone like yourself, Mirza Marco,” suggested the boy.
“ … And sell Aziz to him.”
“Sell your brother?” I exclaimed.
“You cannot just take him there and abandon him, a little boy in a strange city. We would wish you to place him in the keeping of the best possible master. And, as I said, you will realize a profit on the transaction. For your trouble of transporting him, and your taking pains to find the right sort of buyer for him, you may keep the entire amount you get for him. It ought to be a handsome price for such a fine boy. Is that not fair enough?”
“More than fair,” I said. “It may sway my father and uncle, but I cannot promise. After all, I am just one of three in our party. I must put the proposition to them.”
“That should suffice,” said Sitarè. “Our mistress has already spoken to them. The Mirza Esther also wishes to see young Aziz set upon a better road in life. I understand that your father and uncle are considering the matter. So, if you are agreeable to taking Aziz, yours should be the persuading voice.”
I said truthfully, “The widow’s word probably carries more weight than mine does. That being so, Sitarè, why were you prepared to”—I gestured, indicating her state of undress—“to go to such lengths to cajole me?”
“Well … ,” she said, smiling. She moved aside the clothes she held to give me another unimpeded look at her body. “I hoped you would be
very
agreeable …”
Still being truthful, I said, “I would be, anyway. But there are some other aspects you ought to consider. For one thing, we must cross a perilous and uncomfortable desert. It is no fit place for any human being, not to mention a small boy. As is well known, the Devil Satan is most evident and most powerful in the desert wastes. It is into deserts that saintly Christians go, simply to test their strength of faith—and I mean the most sublimely devout Christians, like San Antonio. Unsaintly mortals go there only at great hazard.”
“Perhaps so, but they do go,” said young Aziz, sounding unperturbed by the prospect. “And since I am not a Christian, I may be in less danger. I may even be some protection for the rest of you.”
“We have another non-Christian in the party,” I said sourly. “And that is a thing I would have you also consider. Our camel-puller is a beast, who habitually consorts and couples with the vilest of other beasts. To tempt his bestial nature with a desirable and accessible little boy …”
“Ah,” said Sitarè. “That must be the objection your father raised. I knew the mistress was concerned about something. Then Aziz must promise to avoid the beast, and you must promise to watch over Aziz.”
“I will stay always by your side, Mirza Marco,” declared the boy. “By day and by night.”
“Aziz may not be chaste, by your standards,” his sister went on. “But neither is he promiscuous. As long as he is with you, he will be yours only, not lifting his zab or his buttocks or even his eyes to any other man.”
“I will be yours only, Mirza Marco,” he affirmed, with what might have been charming innocence, except that he held aside the garments in his hands, as Sitarè had done, to let me look my fill.
“No, no, no,” I said, in some agitation. “Aziz, you are to promise not to tempt
any
of us. Our slave is only a beast, but we other three are Christians! You are to be
totally
chaste, from here to Mashhad.”
“If that is what you wish,” he said, though he appeared crestfallen. “Then I swear it. On the beard of the Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him).”
Skeptical, I asked Sitarè, “Is that oath binding on a beardless child?”
“Indeed it is,” she said, regarding me askance. “Your dreary desert journey will not be at all enlivened. You Christians must take some morbid pleasure in the denial of pleasure. But so be it. Aziz, you may put on your clothes again.”
“You too, Sitarè,” I said, and if Aziz had looked crestfallen, she looked thunderstruck. “I assure you, dear girl, I say that unwillingly, but with the best of will.”
“I do not understand. When you take responsibility for my brother, my virginity is worth nothing toward his advancement. So I give it to you, and thankfully.”
“And with all thanks I decline it. For a reason I am sure you are aware of, Sitarè. Because, when your brother departs, what becomes of you?”
“What matter? I am only a female person.”
“In a person most
beautifully
female. Therefore, once Aziz is provided for, you can offer yourself for your own advancement. A good marriage, or concubinage, or whatever you can attain to. But I know that a woman cannot attain to much unless she is virginally intact. So I will leave you that way.”
She and Aziz both stared at me, and the boy murmured, “Verily, Christians are divanè.”
“Some, no doubt. Some try to behave as Christians should.”
Sitarè’s stare turned to a softer look, and she said in a soft voice, “Perhaps some few succeed.” But again, provocatively, she moved the screening clothes aside from her fair body. “You are sure you decline? You are steadfast in your kindly resolve?”
I laughed shakily. “Not at all steadfast. For that reason, let me go quickly from here. I will consult with my father and uncle about taking Aziz with us.”
The consultation did not take long, for they were in the stable talking it over at that very time.
“So there,” said Uncle Mafìo to my father. “Marco is also in favor of letting the boy come along. That makes two of us voting yes, against one vote wavering.”
My father frowned and tangled his fingers into his beard.
“We will be doing a good deed,” I said.
“How can we refuse to do a good deed?” demanded my uncle.
My father growled an old saying, “Saint Charity is dead and her daughter Clemency is ailing.”
My uncle retorted with another, “Cease believing in the saints and they will cease doing miracles.”
They then looked at each other in a silence of impasse, until I ventured to break it.
“I have already warned the lad about the likelihood of his being molested.” They both swiveled their gaze to me, looking astonished. “You know,” I mumbled uncomfortably, “Nostril’s propensities for, er, making mischief.”
“Oh, that,” said my father. “Yes, there is that.”
I was glad that he seemed not unduly concerned about it, for I did not wish to be the one to tell of Nostril’s most recent indecency, and probably earn the slave a belated beating.
“I made Aziz promise,” I said, “to be wary of any suspicious advances. And I have promised to watch over him. As for his transportation, the pack camel is not at all heavily laden, and the boy weighs very little. His sister offered to let us pocket whatever money we can sell him for, which should be a substantial amount. But I rather think we ought merely to subtract from it the cost of his keep, and let the boy have the rest. As a sort of legacy, to start his new life with.”
“So there!” said Uncle Mafìo again, scratching at his elbow. “The lad has a mount to ride and a guardian to protect him. He is paying his own way to Mashhad, and earning himself a dowry as well. There can be no further possible objection.”
My father said solemnly, “If we take him, Marco, he will be your responsibility. You guarantee to keep the child from harm?”
“Yes, Father,” I said, and put my hand significantly on my belt knife. “Any harm must take me before it takes him.”
“You hear, Mafìo.”
I perceived that I must be making a weighty vow indeed, since my father was commanding my uncle to bear witness.
“I hear, Nico.”
My father sighed, looked from one to the other of us, clawed in his beard some more, and finally said, “Then he comes with us. Go, Marco, and tell him so. Tell his sister and the Widow Esther to pack whatever belongings Aziz is to take.”
So Sitarè and I took the opportunity for a flurry of kisses and caresses, and the last thing she said to me was, “I will not forget, Mirza Marco. I will not forget you, or your kindness to us both, or your consideration of my fortunes hereafter. I should very much like to reward you—and with that which you have so gallantly forgone. If ever you should journey this way again …”
WE had been told that we were crossing the Dasht-e-Kavir at the best time of the year. I should hate to have to cross it at the worst. We did it in the late autumn, when the sun was not infernally hot, but, even without incident, that would by no means have been a pleasant trip. I had hitherto supposed that a long sea voyage was the most unvarying and boring and interminable and monotonous sort of travel possible, at least when not made terrible by storm. But a desert crossing is all of that, and besides is thirsty, itchy, scratchy, rasping, scraping, parching—the list of hateful adjectives could go on and on. And the list does go on, like a chant of curses, through the morose mind of the desert journeyer, as he endlessly trudges from one featureless horizon across a featureless flat surface toward the featureless skyline ever receding ahead of him.
When we left Kashan, we were again dressed for hard traveling. No longer did we wear the neat Persian tulbands on our heads and the gorgeously embroidered body garments. We were again loosely enwrapped in the Arabs’ hanging kaffiyah headcloths and ample aba cloaks, that less handsome but more practical attire which does not cling about a person but billows free, so it allows the dissipation of body heat and sweat, and affords no folds in which the drifting sand can accumulate. Our camels were hung all about with leather bags of good Kashan water and sacks of dried mutton and fruits and the brittle local bread. (It was to procure these foodstuffs that we had had to wait for the bazàr to restock after Ramazan.) We had also acquired in Kashan some new items to carry with us: smooth round sticks and lengths of light fabric with their hems sewn to form sheaths. By inserting the sticks into those sheaths, we could quickly shape the cloths into tents, each just of a size to shelter one man comfortably, or, if necessary, to accommodate two persons in rather less comfortable intimacy.
Before we even got out of Kashan, I warned Aziz never to let our slave Nostril tempt him inside a tent or anywhere else out of sight of the rest of us, and to report to me any other sorts of advances the camel-puller might make to him. For Nostril, on first seeing the boy among us, had widened his piggy eyes almost to human size and dilated his single nostril as if he scented prey. That first day, also, Aziz had been briefly naked in our company—and Nostril had hung about, ogling—while I helped the boy doff the Persian garb his sister had dressed him in, and showed him how to put on the Arab kaffiyah and aba. So I gave Nostril some stern warnings, too, and toyed significantly with my belt knife while I was haranguing him, and he made insincere promises of obedience and good behavior.
I would hardly have trusted Nostril’s promises, but, as things turned out, he never did molest the little boy, or even try to. We were not many days into the desert when Nostril began noticeably to suffer from some painful ailment in his under parts. If, as I suspected, the slave had deliberately made one of the camels lame to make us stop in Kashan, then another of the beasts was now exacting revenge. Every time Nostril’s camel made a misstep and jounced him, he would cry out sharply. Soon he had his saddle pillowed with everything soft he could find among our packs. But then, every time he went away from our camp fire to make water, we could hear him groaning and thrashing about and cursing vehemently.
“One of the Kashan boys must have clapped him with the scola-mento,” said Uncle Mafio derisively. “Serves him right, for being unvirtuous—and indiscriminate.”
I had not then and indeed never have been similarly afflicted myself, for which I give more thanks to my good fortune than to my virtue or my discrimination. Nevertheless, I might have shown more comradely sympathy to Nostril, and laughed less at his predicament, if I had not been thankful that his zab was giving him other concerns than trying to put it into my young ward. The slave’s ailment gradually abated and finally went away, leaving him apparently no worse for the experience, but by that time other events had occurred to put Aziz beyond threat of his lechery.
A tent, or some shelter like a tent, is an absolute necessity in the Dasht-e-Kavir, for a man cannot just lie down in his blankets to sleep, or he would be covered by sand before he woke. Most of that desert can be likened to the giant tray of a giant fardarbab tomorrow-teller. It is a flat expanse of smooth, dun-colored sand, a sand so fine that it flows through one’s fingers like water. In the intervals between winds, that sand lies as virginally unmarked as the sand in the tomorrow-teller’s tray. So fine and so smooth is it that the least passing insect—a centipede, a grasshopper, a scorpion—leaves a trail visible from afar. A man could, if he got bored enough by the tedium of desert traveling, find distraction by following the meandering track of a single ant.
However, in the daytime, it was seldom that a wind was not blowing, stirring that sand and picking it up and carrying it and throwing it. Since the winds of the Dasht-e-Kavir blow always from the same direction, from the southwest, it is easy to tell in which direction a stranger is traveling—even if you meet him camped and immobile—simply by seeing which flank of his mount is the most heavily coated with blown sand. In the nighttime, the desert wind drops, and lets drop from the air the heavier particles of sand. But the finer particles hang in the air like dust, and hang there so densely as to constitute a dry fog. It blots out whatever stars there may be in the sky, sometimes obscures even a full moon. In the combined darkness and fogginess, one’s vision may be limited to just a few arm-lengths. Nostril told us that there were creatures called Karauna which took advantage of that dark fog—according to Persian folk legend the Karauna create it, said Nostril, by some dark magic—in which to do dark deeds. More usually, the chief danger of that fog is that the suspended dust sifts imperceptibly down from the air during the stillness of night, and a traveler not sheltered under a tent could be quietly, stealthily buried and smothered to death in his sleep.
We had still the greater part of Persia to cross, but it was the empty part—perhaps the emptiest part of the entire world—and we did not meet a single Persian along our way, or much of anything else, or see in the sand the tracks of anything larger than insects. In other regions of Persia, similarly unoccupied and uncultivated by man, we journeyers might have had to be on our guard against predatory prides of lions, or scavenging packs of shaqàl dogs, or even flocks of the big flightless shuturmurq camel-birds, which, we had been told, can disembowel a man with a kick. But none of those hazards had to be feared in the desert, for no wild thing lives in it. We saw an occasional vulture or kite, but they stayed high in the windy sky above and did not tarry in their passing. Even vegetable plants seem to shun that desert. The only green thing I saw growing there was a low shrub with thick and fleshy-looking leaves.
“Euphorbia,” Nostril said it was. “And it grows here only because Allah put it here to be a help to the journeyer. In the hot season, the euphorbia’s seed pods grow ripe and burst and fling out their seeds. They begin to pop when the desert air gets exactly as hot as a human’s blood. Then the pods burst with increasing frequency as the air gets even hotter. So a desert wanderer can tell, by listening to the loudness of the popping of the euphorbia, when the air is getting so perilously hot that he must stop and put up a shelter for shade, or he will die.”
That slave, for all his squalid person and sexual erethism and detestable character, was an experienced traveler, and told us or showed us many things of use or interest. For example, on our very first night in that wasteland, when we stopped to camp, he got down from his camel and stuck his prodding pole into the sand, pointed in the direction we were going.
“It may be needful in the morning,” he explained. “We have determined to go always toward the spot where the sun rises. But if the sand is blowing at that hour, we may not be able otherwise to fix on the spot.”
The treacherous sands of the Dasht-e-Kavir are not its only menace to man. That name, as I have said, means the Great Salt Desert, and for a reason. Vast extents of it are not of sand at all; they are immense reaches of a salty paste, not quite wet enough to be called mud or marsh, and the wind and sun have dried the paste to a surface of caked solid salt. Often a traveler must cross one of those glittering, crunching, quivering, blindingly white salt crusts, and he must do it gingerly. The salt crystals are more abrasive than sand; even a camel’s callused pads can quickly be worn to bleeding rawness, and, if the rider has to dismount, his boots can be likewise shredded, and then his feet. Also, the salt surfaces are of uneven thickness, making of those areas what Nostril called “the trembling lands.” Sometimes the weight of a camel or a man will break through the crust. If that happens, the animal or the man falls into the pasty muck beneath. From that salt quicksand it is impossible to climb out unaided, or even to stay put and wait for help to come. It slowly but ineluctably draws down whatever falls into it, and sucks the fallen creature under the surface, and closes over it. Unless a rescuer is nearby, and on firmer ground, the unfortunate fallen one is doomed. According to Nostril, entire karwan trains of men and animals have thus disappeared and left no trace.
So, when we came to the first of those salt flats, though it looked as innocuous as a layer of hoarfrost unseasonably on the ground, we halted and studied it with respect. The white crust gleamed out before us, clear to the skyline, and away as far as we could see to either side.
“We could try going around,” said my father.
“The maps of the Kitab show no such details as this,” said my uncle, scratching meditatively at his elbow. “We have no way of knowing its extent, or of guessing whether a north or a south detour would be shorter.”
“And if we are going to skirt every one of these,” said Nostril, “we will be in this desert forever.”
I said nothing, being totally ignorant of desert travel, and not ashamed to leave the decisions to the more expert. So we four sat our camels and looked out over the sparkling waste. But the boy Aziz, behind us, prodded his pack camel and made it kneel, and he dismounted. We did not notice what he was doing until he walked out from among us and walked onto the salt crust. He turned and looked up at us, and smiled prettily, and said in his little bird voice:
“Now I can repay your kindness in bringing me along. I shall walk ahead, and I can tell from the trembling underfoot how strong is the surface. I will keep to the firmest ground, and you have only to follow.”
“You will cut your feet!” I protested.
“No, Mirza Marco, for I am of light weight. Also, I took the liberty of extracting these plates from the packs.” He held up two of the golden dishes the Shah Zaman had sent. “I shall strap them under my boots as an extra protection.”
“It is dangerous nonetheless,” said my uncle. “You are brave to volunteer, lad, but we have sworn that no harm must come to you. Better one of us—”
“No, Mirza Mafìo,” said Aziz, still staunchly. “If by chance I should fall through, it would be easier for you to pluck me out than any larger person.”
“He is right, masters,” said Nostril. “The child has good sense. And, as you remark, a good heart for courage and initiative.”
So we let Aziz precede us, and we followed at a discreet distance. It was slow going, keeping to his shuffle pace, but that made the walking less painful for the camels. And we did cross that trembling land in safety, and before nightfall had come to an area of more trustworthy sand on which to camp.
Only once that day did Aziz misjudge the crust. With a sharp crackle, it broke like a sheet of glass, and he plummeted waist-deep into the muck under it. He did not exclaim in fright when it happened, nor did he make so much as a whimper during the time it took for Uncle Mafio to get down from his camel and make a loop in his saddle rope and cast it over the boy and draw him gently back above ground and onto a firmer place. But Aziz had known very well that he was, for that while, precariously suspended over a bottomless abyss, for his face was very pale and his blue eyes very big when we all clustered solicitously around him. Uncle Mafio embraced the boy and held him, murmuring inspiriting words, while my father and I brushed the fast-drying salt mud from his garments. By the time that was done, the boy’s courage had returned, and he insisted on going ahead again, to the admiration of us all.
In the days thereafter, each time we again came upon a salt flat, we could do no more than make guesses or take a vote to determine whether we should venture upon it at once, or camp there at its near edge and wait to start upon it early the next morning. We were always apprehensive that we might find ourselves still in the middle of a trembling land at nightfall, and therefore have to take one of two equally unappealing alternatives: try to press on, braving the night’s dark and its dry fog, which could be much more nerve-racking than making such a crossing by day; or camp upon the salt flat and have to do without a fire, for we feared that laying a fire upon such a surface might melt it, and drop ourselves, our animals and all our packs into the quicksand. Surely it was only through good fortune—or Allah’s blessing, as our two Muslims would have put it—certainly not through any wisdom informing our guesses, but each time we guessed right, and each time got across the salt to safe sand by nightfall.
So we never had to make a cold camp on the dreaded trembling lands, but making camp anywhere in that desert, even on the sand which we could trust not to dissolve from under us, was no holiday treat. Sand, if you look closely enough at it, is nothing but an infinite multitude of little tiny rocks. Rocks do not hold heat, and no more does sand. The desert days were comfortable enough, even warm, but when the sun went down the nights were cold, and the sand under us even colder. We always needed a fire just to keep us warm until we crawled into our blankets inside our tents. But many nights were so very cold that we would rake the fire into five separate fires, well apart, and let them burn a while to warm those separate plots of sand, and only then spread our blankets and raise our tents on top of the warmed places. Even so, the sand did not for long hold that heat either, and by morning we would be chilled and stiff, in which unjoyous condition we would have to rise and face another day of the joyless desert.