“I do not abominate lovers,” I said, with a self-pitying sniffle. “I envy them. Would that I had one of my own to take to the Gebr’s back door.”
“Well, he also perpetrates another offense against morality. For those who do not have a convenient lover, the Gebr keeps two or three young girls in residence and available for hire.”
“Hm. This does begin to sound like a matter for reprobation. You did right to bring it to my attention, Nostril. Now, if you could point out that house, I would suitably reward your almost Christian vigilance … .”
And so the next day, a day when snow was falling, after he and my father had ridden off to the southeastward, and after I had made sure Uncle Mafio was well snugged in his goatskins, I walked into the shop Nostril had shown me. There was a counter piled with bolts and swatches of some heavy cloth, and also on it was a stone bowl of naft oil feeding a wick burning with a bright yellow flame, and behind the counter stood an elderly Persian with a red-hinna’ed beard.
“Show me your softest goods,” I said, as Nostril had instructed me to say.
“Room on the left,” said the Gebr, jerking his beard at a beaded curtain at the back of the shop. “One dirham.”
“I should like,” I specified, “a beautiful piece of goods.”
He sneered. “You show me a beautiful one among these country rustics, I will pay you. Be glad the goods are clean. One dirham.”
“Oh, well, any water to put out a fire,” I said. The man glowered as if I had spat at him, and I realized that was not the most tactful thing to say to a person who allegedly worshiped fire. I hastily laid my coin on the counter and pushed through the rattling curtain.
The little room was hung all about with locust twigs, for their sweet scent, and was furnished only with a charcoal brazier and a charpai, which is a crude bed made of a wooden frame laced crisscross with ropes. The girl was no prettier of face than the only other female I had paid to use, that boat girl Malgarita. This one was plainly of some local tribe, for she spoke the prevailing Pashtun tongue, and had a woefully scant vocabulary of Trade Farsi. If she told me her name, I did not catch it, because anybody speaking Pashtun sounds as if he or she is rapidly and repeatedly and simultaneously clearing the throat, spitting and sneezing.
But the girl was, as the Gebr had claimed, rather more cleanly of person than Malgarita had been. In fact, she made unmistakable complaint that I was
not,
and with some reason. In coming here, I had not worn my new-bought clothes; they were too bulky and difficult to get out of and into. I was wearing the garments I had worn while crossing the Great Salt and the Karabil, and I daresay they were markedly odoriferous. They were certainly so caked with dust and sweat and dirt and salt that they could almost stand upright even when I got out of them.
The girl held them at arm’s length, by her fingertips, and said, “dirty-dirty!” and “dahb!” and “bohut purana!” and several other gargled Pashtun noises indicative of revulsion. “I send yours, mine together, be clean.”
She swiftly took off her own clothes, bundled them with mine, bawled what was evidently a call for a servant, and handed the bundle out the door. I confess that my attention was mainly on the first naked female body I had seen since Kashan; nevertheless, I noticed that the girl’s clothing was made of a material so coarse and thick that, though cleaner than mine, it also could almost have stood alone.
The girl’s body was more fetching than her face, it being slim but bearing amazingly large, round, firm breasts for such a slender figure. I assumed that that was one reason why the girl had chosen a career in which she would cater mainly to transient infidels. Muslim men are better attracted by a big fundament, and do not much admire women’s breasts, regarding them only as milk spouts. Anyway, I hoped the girl would make her fortune in her chosen career while she was still young and shapely. Every woman of those “Alexandrine” tribes, well before middle age, grows so gross in the rest of her physique that her once-splendid bosom becomes just one of a series of fleshy shelves descending from her several chins to her several rolls of abdomen.
Another reason why I hoped the girl would make a fortune was that her chosen career was clearly no pleasure to her. When I attempted to share with her the enjoyment of the sexual act, by arousing her with fondling of her zambur, I found she had none. At the arch tip of her mihrab, where the tiny tuning key should have been, there was no slightest protrusion. For a moment I thought she was pathetically deformed, but then I realized that she was tabzir, as Islam demands. She had nothing there but a fissure of soft scar tissue. That lack may have diminished my own delight in my several ejaculations, because every time I approached spruzzo and she cried, “Ghi, ghi, ghi-ghi!”—meaning “Yes, yes, yes-yes!”—I was aware that she was only feigning an ecstasy of her own, and I thought it sad. But who am I to call criminal other people’s religious observances? Besides, I soon discovered that I had a lack of my own to worry about.
The Gebr came and banged on the outside of the door, shouting, “What do you want for a single dirham, eh?”
I had to concede that I had had my money’s worth, so I let the girl get up. She went, still naked, out the door to fetch a pan of water and a towel, meanwhile calling down the corridor for the return of our laundered clothes. She set the pan of tamarind-scented water on the room’s brazier to warm, and was using it to wash my parts when the next knock came on the door. But the servant handed in only the girl’s garments, with a long spate of Pashtun that must have been an explanation. The girl came back to me, an unreadable expression on her face, and said tentatively, as if asking a question, “Your clothes burn?”
“Yes, I suppose they would. Where are they?”
“No got,” she said, showing me that she had only her own.
“Ah, you do not mean burn. You mean dry. Is that it? Mine are not dry yet?”
“No. Gone. Your clothes all burn.”
“What does that mean? You said they would be washed.”
“Not wash. Clean. Not in water. In fire.”
“You put my clothes in a
fire
? They have
burned?”
“Ghi.”
“Are you a fire worshiper too, or are you just divanè? You sent them to be washed in fire instead of water? Olà, Gebr! Persian! Olà, whoremaster!”
“No make trouble!” the girl pleaded, looking scared. “I give you dirham back.”
“I cannot wear a dirham across the city! What kind of lunatic place is this? Why did you people burn my clothes?”
“Wait. Look.” She snatched up a piece of unburned charcoal from the brazier and gave it a swipe across a sleeve of her own tunic to make a black mark. Then she held the sleeve over the burning coals.
“You are divanè!” I exclaimed. But the cloth did not take fire. There was only a single flash as the black mark burned away. The girl took the sleeve from the fire to show me how it was suddenly spotless, and babbled a mixture of Pashtun and Farsi, of which I gradually got the import. That heavy and mysterious fabric was always cleaned in that manner, and my clothes had been so crusty that she had taken them to be of the same material.
“All right,” I said. “I forgive you. It was a well-intentioned mistake. But I am still without anything to wear. Now what?”
She indicated that I could choose which of two things I would do. I could lodge a complaint with the Gebr master, and demand that he procure new raiment for me, which would cost the girl her day’s wages and probably a beating besides. Or I could put on what clothes were available—meaning some of hers—and go across the city of Balkh in feminine masquerade. Well, that meant no choice at all; I must be a gentleman; therefore I must play the lady.
I scuttled out through the shop as fast as I could, but I was still adjusting my chador veil, and the old Gebr behind the counter raised his eyebrows, exclaiming, “You took me seriously! You are showing me a beautiful one among these country rustics!”
I snarled at him one of the few Pashtun expressions I knew: “Bahi chut!” which is a directive to do something to one’s own sister.
He guffawed and called after me, “I would, if she were as pretty as you!” while I scurried out into the still falling snow.
Except for stumbling now and then, because I could see the ground only dimly through the obscuring snow and my chador, and also because I frequently stepped on my own hems, I got back to the karwansarai without incident. That disappointed me a little, for I had gone the whole way with my teeth and fists clenched and my temper seething, hoping to be rudely addressed or winked at by some Eve-baiting oaf, so I could kill him. I slipped into the inn by a rear door, unobserved, and hurried to put on clothes of my own, and started to throw away the girl’s. But then I reconsidered, and cut from her gown a square of the cloth to keep for a curiosity, and with it I have since astonished many persons disinclined to believe that any cloth could be proof against fire.
Now, I had
heard
of such a substance long before I left Venice. I had heard priests tell that the Pope at Rome kept among the treasured relics of the Church a sudarium, a cloth which had been used to wipe the Holy Brow of Jesus Christ. The cloth had been so sanctified by that use, they said, that it could nevermore be destroyed. It could be thrown into a fire, and left there for a long time, and taken out again miraculously entire and unscorched. I also had heard a distinguished physician contest the priestly claim that it was the Holy Sweat which made the sudarium impervious to destruction. He insisted that the cloth must be woven of the wool of the salamander, that creature which Aristotle averred lives comfortably in fire.
I will respectfully contradict both the reverent believers and the pragmatic Aristotelian. For I took the trouble to inquire about that unburnable fabric woven by the Gebr fire worshipers, and eventually I was shown how it is made, and the truth of the matter is this. In the mountains in the region of Balkh is found a certain rock of palpable softness. When that rock is crushed, it comes apart not in grains, as of sand, but in fibers, as of raw flax. And those fibers, after repeated mashing and drying and washing and drying again and carding and spindling, are spun together into thread. It is clear that of any thread a cloth can be woven, and it is equally clear that a cloth made of earth’s rock ought not burn. The curious rock and the coarse fiber and the magical material woven of it, all are regarded by the Gebr as sacred to their fire god Ahura Mazda, and they call that substance by a word meaning “unsoilable stone,” which I take the liberty of rendering in a more civilized tongue as amianthus.
MY father and Nostril were gone for some five or six weeks, and, because Uncle Mafio required my attendance only intermittently, I had a good deal of spare time on my hands. So I went back several times to the house of the Gebr Persian—each time taking care to wear clothes that would not need “laundering.” And every time I spoke the password, “Show me your softest goods,” the old man would convulse with amusement and roar, “Why,
you
were the softest and most appealing piece that ever passed through this shop!” and I would have to stand and endure his guffaws until he finally subsided into giggles and took my dirham and told me which room was available.
At one time or another, I sampled all three of his back-room wares. But all the girls were Pakhtuni Muslims and tabzir, meaning that I found only release with them, not any satisfaction worth mentioning. I could have done that with the kuch-i-safari, and more cheaply. I did not even learn more than a few words of Pashtun from the girls, deeming it too slovenly a language to be worth learning. Just for example, the sound
gau,
when spoken normally on an exhaled breath, means “cow,” but the same gau, spoken while breathing in, means “calf.” So imagine what the simple sentence “The cow has a calf” sounds like in Pashtun, and then try to imagine conducting a conversation of any more complexity.
On my way out through the amianthus-cloth shop, though, I would pause to exchange some few words in Farsi with the Gebr proprietor. He would usually make some further mocking remarks about the day I had had to masquerade as a woman, but he would also condescend to answer my questions about his peculiar religion. I asked because he was the only devotee of that old-time Persian religion I had ever met. He admitted that there were few believers left in these days, but he maintained that the religion once had reigned supreme, not only in Persia but west and east of there as well, from Armeniya to Bactria. And the first thing he told me about it was that I should not call a Gebr a Gebr.
“The word means only ‘non-Muslim’ and it is used by the Muslims derisively. We prefer to be called Zarduchi, for we are the followers of the prophet Zaratushtra, the Golden Camel. It was he who taught us to worship the god Ahura Mazda, whose name is nowadays slurred to Ormuzd.”
“And that means fire,” I said knowledgably, for Nostril had told me that much. I nodded toward the bright lamp that always burned in the shop.
“Not fire,” he said, sounding annoyed. “It is a stupid misbelief that we worship fire. Ahura Mazda is the God of Light, and we merely keep a flame burning as a reminder of His beneficent light which banishes the darkness of his adversary Ahriman.”
“Ah,” I said. “Not too different, then, from our own Lord God, Who contends against the adversary Satan.”
“No, not different at all. Your Christian God and Satan you got from the Jews, as the Muslims derived their Allah and Shaitan. And the God and the Devil of the Jews were frankly patterned on our Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. So were your God’s angels and your Satan’s demons copied from our celestial malakhim messengers and their daeva counterparts. So were your Heaven and Hell copied from Zaratushtra’s teachings about the nature of the afterlife.”
“Oh, come now!” I protested. “I hold no brief for the Jews or the Muslims, but the True Religion cannot have been a mere imitation of somebody else’s—”
He interrupted, “Look at any picture of a Christian deity or angel or saint. He or she is portrayed with a glowing halo, is that not so? It is a pretty fancy, but it was our fancy first. That halo imitates the light of our ever-burning flame, which in turn signifies the light of Ahura Mazda forever shining on His messengers and holy ones.”
That sounded likely enough that I could not dispute it, but neither would I concede it, of course. He went on:
“That is why we Zardushi have for centuries been persecuted and derided and dispersed and driven into exile. By Muslims and Jews and Christians alike. A people who pride themselves on possessing the only true religion must pretend that it came to them through some exclusive revelation. They do not like to be reminded that it merely derives from some other people’s original.”
I went back to the karwansarai that day, thinking: the Church is perhaps wise to demand faith and forbid reason in Christians. The more questions I ask, and the more answers I get, the less I seem to know of anything for certain. As I walked along, I scooped up a handful of snow from a snowbank I was passing, and I wadded it to a snowball. It was round and solid, like a certainty. But if I looked at it closely enough, its roundness really was a dense multitude of points and corners. If I held it long enough, its solidness would melt to water. That is the hazard in curiosity, I thought: all the certainties fragment and dissolve. A man curious enough and persistent enough might find even the round and solid ball of earth to be not so. He might be less proud of his faculty of reasoning when it left him with nothing whereon to stand. But then again, was not the truth a more solid foundation than illusion?
I forget whether it was on that day or another that I got back to the karwansarai to find that my father and Nostril had returned from their journey. The Hakim Khosro was there, too, and they were gathered about the sickbed of Uncle Mafio, all talking at once.
“ … Not in the city called Kabul. The Sultan Kutb-ud-Din now has a capital far to the southeast of there, a city called Delhi … .”
“No wonder you were gone so long,” said my uncle.
“ … Had to cross the vasty mountains, through a pass called the Khaibar …”
“ … Then clear across the land called Panjab …”
“Or properly Panch Ab,” the hakim put in, “meaning Five Rivers.”
“ … But worth the effort. The Sultan, like the Shah of Persia, was eager to send gifts of tribute and fealty to the Khakhan … .”
“ … So we now have an extra horse, laden with objects of gold and Kashmir cloth and rubies and …”
“But more important,” said my father, “how fares our patient Mafìo?”
“Empty,” growled my uncle, scratching his elbow. “From one end I have coughed out all my sputum, from the other I have spewed out every last turd and fart, and in between I have sweated out every last bead of perspiration. I am also infernally tired of being stuck all over wih paper charms and powdered all over like a bignè bun.”
“Otherwise, his condition is unchanged,” the Hakim Khosro said soberly. “My efforts to assist nature in a cure have not availed much. I am happy you are all together again, for I now wish you all to go from this place, and take the patient even closer to nature. Up, into the high mountains to the east, where the air is more clear and pure.”
“But cold,” my father objected. “As cold as charity. Can that be good for him?”
“Cold air is the cleanest air,” said the hakim. “I have determined that, by close observation and professional study. Witness: people who live in always cold climates, like the Russniaks, are a clean white of skin color; in hot climates, like the Indian Hindus, dirty brown or black. We Pakhtuni, living midway, are a sort of tan color. I urge you to take the patient, and take him soon, to those cold, clean, white mountain heights.”
When the hakim and we helped Uncle Mafio get up and get out of the goatskin wrappings and get dressed for the first time in weeks, we were dismayed to see how thin he had become. He looked even taller in his suddenly oversized clothes than he had seemed before, when his burliness had strained his clothes at the seams. He was also pale instead of ruddy, and his limbs were tremulous from disuse, but he proclaimed himself tremendously glad to be up and about. And later, in the hall of the karwansarai, when we dined that night, he bellowed to the other diners, in a voice as stentorian as ever, asking for the latest word on the mountain trails to the eastward.
Men from several other karwan trains responded, and told us of current conditions, and gave us much advice relevant to mountain travel. Or we hoped the advice was relevant, but we could not be sure, since no two of our informants seemed to agree on even the name of those mountains east of here.
One man said, “Those are the Himalaya, the Abode of the Snows. Before you go up into them, buy a phial of poppy juice to carry. In case of snowblindness, a few drops in the eyes will relieve the pain.”
And another man said, “Those are the Karakoram, the Black Mountains, the Cold Mountains. And the snow-fed waters up there are cold at all seasons of the year. Do not let your horses drink, except from a pail in which you have warmed the water a little, or they will be convulsed by cramps.”
And another said, “Those are the mountains called Hindu Kush, the Hindu Killers. In that hard terrain, a horse sometimes gets rebellious and unmanageable. Should that occur, simply tie the hair of the horse’s tail to its tongue, and it will quieten on the instant.”
And another said, “Those mountains are the Pai-Mir, meaning the Way to the Peaks. The only forage your horses will find yonder is the slate-colored, strong-smelling little shrub called burtsa. But your horses will always find it for you, and it is also good fuel for a fire, being naturally full of oil. Oddly enough, the greener it looks, the better the burtsa burns.”
And another said, “Those mountains are the Khwaja, the Masters. And up there the Masters make it impossible for you to lose your direction, even in the thickest storm. Just remember that every mountain is barren on its south face. If you see any trees or shrubs or growth at all, it is on the mountain’s north face.”
And another said, “Those mountains are the Muztagh, the Keepers. Try to get completely through and out of them before spring becomes summer, for then begins the Bad-i-sad-o-bist, the terrible Wind of One Hundred and Twenty Days.”
And yet another man said, “Those mountains are Solomon’s Throne, the Takht-i-Sulaiman. If you should encounter a whirlwind up there, you may be sure it issues from some cavern nearby, the den of one of the demons banished into that exile by the good King Solomon. Simply find that cavern and stop it with boulders, and the wind will die.”
So we packed and we paid for our keep and we said some goodbyes to those with whom we had got acquainted and again we moved on, my father and uncle and Nostril and I, riding our four mounts and leading a packhorse and two extra packhorses loaded with a princely amount of valuables. We went straight east from Balkh, through villages named Kholm and Qonduz and Taloqan, which seemed to exist only as marketplaces for the horse breeders who inhabit that grassy region. Everybody thereabout raises horses and is continually trading breed stallions and brood mares with his neighbors at the markets. The horses are fine ones, comparable to Arabians, though not so dainty in the shape of the head. Every breeder claims that his stock are descended from Alexander’s steed Bucephalas. Every breeder makes that claim for his stock only, which is ridiculous, with all the trading that goes on. Anyway, I never saw any horses there that had the peacock tail worn by Bucephalas in the illuminations to
The Book of Alexander
that I had pored over in my youth.
At this season, the grazing lands were covered by snow, so we could not see how the verdure thinned out as we went eastward. But we knew it did so, because the ground under the snow got pebbly, then rocky, and the villages ceased to be, and there was only an infrequent and inadequate karwansarai along the trail. After we had passed the last village, a cluster of piled-stone huts which called itself Keshem, in the foothills preceding the mountains, we had to make our own stopping places perhaps three nights out of four. That was not an idyllic way to live, sleeping under tents and under our chapons in snow and chill and wind, and generally having to dine on dried or salted travel rations.
We had worried that the outdoor life would be especially hard on Uncle Mafio. But he made no complaint even when we healthier ones did. He maintained that he
was
feeling better in that sharp, cold air, as the Hakim Khosro had predicted, and his cough had lessened and did not lately bring up any blood. He allowed the rest of us to take over what heavy work had to be done, but he would not let us shorten the marches on his account, and each day he sat his saddle or, on the rougher stretches, walked beside his horse, as indefatigably as any of us. We were not hurrying, anyway, for we knew we would have to halt for the rest of the winter as soon as we came up against the mountain ramparts. Also, after a while on that hard trail, living on hard rations, the rest of us were nearly as gaunt as Uncle Mafio was, and not eager to exert ourselves. Only Nostril kept his paunch, but it looked now less integral to him, like a separate melon he was carrying under his clothes.
When we came to the Ab-e-Panj River, we followed its broad valley upstream to the eastward, and from then on we were going uphill, ever higher above the level of the rest of the world. To speak of a valley ordinarily brings to mind a depression in the earth, but that one is many farsakhs wide and is lower only in relation to the mountains that rise far off on either side of it. If it were anywhere else in the world, that valley would not be
on
the world, but immeasurably far above it, high among the clouds, unseeable by mortal eyes, unattainable, like Heaven. Not that the valley resembles Heaven in any way, I hasten to say, it being cold and hard and inhospitable, not balmy and soft and welcoming.