THE land continued gray, but that color got darker as we went eastward, darkening to veritable black—black grit and black gravel drifting over black bedrock—for we had come now to another desert, one too broad and extensive for the Silk Road to skirt around. It was called by the Mongols the Gobi, and by the Han the Sha-mo, both words meaning a desert of that peculiar composition: one from which all the sand had long ago blown away, leaving only the heavier particles, and they all black. It made for an unearthly landscape, appearing to be not of pebbles and stones and rocks, but of even harder metal. In the sun, every black hill and boulder and ridge glittered with a sharp bright rim as if it had been honed on a whetstone. The only growing things were the colorless plumes of camel-weed and some tufts of colorless grass like fine metal wires.
The Gobi is also called by travelers the Great Silence, because any conversation softer than a shout goes unheard there, and so does the clatter of black stones rolling and shifting underfoot, and so do the piteous whinnies of sore-footed horses, and so do the whines and grumbles of a complainer like Nostril, all such noises blotted out by the everlasting wail of the wind. Over the Gobi the wind blows ceaselessly through three hundred and sixty days of the year, and, in the late summer days of our crossing, it blew as hot as a blast from the opened doors of the fearsome ovens of the vasty kitchens of the nethermost levels of Satan’s fiercest Inferno.
The next town we came to, Anxi, must be the most desolately situated community in all Kithai. It was a mere cluster of shacky shops peddling karwan necessities, and some travelers’ inns and stables, all of unpainted wood and mud-brick much pitted and eroded by wind-blown grit. The town had come into being there on the edge of the dreary Gobi only because at this point the two branches of the Silk Road came together again—the southerly one by which we arrived in town, and the other route that had circled around north of the Takla Makan—and at Anxi they merged into the single road that goes on, without again dividing, over the interminable more li to the Kithai capital of Khanbalik. At this convergence of roads, there was of course an even more bustling traffic of individual traders and groups and families and karwan trains. But one procession of mule-drawn wagons made me ask our escorts:
“What kind of train is that? It moves so slowly and so quietly.”
All the wheels of the wagons had their rims tied about with bunched hay and rags, to muffle the sound of them, and the mules had their hoofs tied in bags of wadding for the same purpose. That did not make the train entirely noiseless, for the wheels and hoofs still made a rumbling and clumping sound, and there was much creaking of the wooden wagon beds and leather harness, but its progress was quieter than that of most trains. Besides the Han men driving the wagon mules, other Han were mounted on mules as outriders and, as they accompanied the train through Anxi, they rode like an honor guard, shouldering a path through the crowded streets, but never using their voices to demand clear passage.
The street folk moved obligingly aside and silenced their own chatter and averted their faces, as if the train were that of some grand and haughty personage. But there was no one in the procession except those drivers and escorts; no one rode in any of the several score wagons. They were occupied only by heaps of what might have been rolled tents or rugs, many hundreds of them, cloth-wrapped long bundles, piled like cordwood in the wagon beds. Whatever those objects were, they looked very old, and they gave off a dry, musty smell, and their cloth wrappings were all tattered and shredded and flapping. When the wagons jounced on the rutted streets, they shed bits and flakes of cloth.
“Like shrouds decaying,” I remarked.
To my astonishment, Ussu said, “That is what they are.” In a hushed voice, he added, “Show respect, Ferenghi. Turn away and do not stare as they go by.”
He did not speak again until the muffled train had passed. Then he told me that all Han people have a great desire to be buried in the places where they were born, and their survivors bend every effort to have that done. Since most of the Han who keep inns and shops on the far western reaches of the Silk Road had come originally from the more populous eastern end of the country, that was where they wished their remains to rest. So any Han who died in the west was only shallowly buried, and when—after many years—a sufficiency of them had died, their families in the east would organize a train and send it west. All those bodies would be dug up and collected and transported together back to their native regions. It happened perhaps only once in a generation, said Ussu, so I could count myself unique among Ferenghi, to have glimpsed one of the karwans of the corpses.
All along the Silk Road from Kashgar, we had been fording the occasional minor river—meager streams trickling down from the mountain snows in the south and quickly soaking into the desert to the north. But some weeks eastward of Anxi we found a more considerable river going easterly with us. In its beginnings, it was a merrily tumbling clear water, but every time the road brought us again alongside it, we saw that it was wider and deeper and more turbulent and turning dun-yellow with its accumulation of silt; hence the name given it, Huang, the Yellow River. Swooping throughout the whole breadth of Kithai, the Huang is one of the two great river systems of these lands. The other is far to the south of this, an even mightier water—called Yang-tze, meaning simply Tremendous River—traversing the land of Kithai.
“That Yang-tze and this Huang,” my father said instructively, “they are, after the historic Nile, the second and third longest rivers in all the traveled world.”
I might facetiously have remarked that the Huang must be the
tallest
river on earth. What I mean—and I am seldom believed when I say this—is that through much of its length the Huang River stands
above
the land surrounding it.
“But how can that be?” people protest. “A river is not independent of the earth. If a river should rise, it would merely overflow onto the land about.”
But the Yellow River does not, except at disastrous intervals. Over the years and generations and centuries, the Han farmers along the river have built up earthen levees to reinforce its banks. But, because the Huang carries such quantities of silt, and continuously deposits that on its bed, its surface level also continuously goes up. So the Han farmers, over generations and centuries and eons, have had to keep building the levees higher. Thus, between those artificial banks, the Yellow River literally does stand higher than the land. In some places, if I had wished to jump into the river, I would have had to climb a bank higher than a four-storied building.
“But big as they are, those levees are only of packed earth,” said my father. “In one very rainy year while we were last here, we saw the Huang get so full and boisterous that it broke those banks.”
“A river held up in the air and then let fall,” I mused. “It must have been something to see.”
Uncle Mafio said, “Like watching Venice and the whole mainland Veneto submerge beneath the lagoon, if you can imagine such a thing. A flood of unbelievable extent. Entire villages and towns dissolved. Whole nations of people drowned.”
“It happens not every year, God be thanked,” said my father. “But often enough to have given the Yellow River its other name—the Scourge of the Sons of Han.”
However, as long as the river runs tame, the Han make good use of it. Here and there along the banks, I saw the biggest wheels in the world: waterwheels of wood and cane as high as twenty men standing atop one another. Around the wheels’ rims were multitudes of buckets and scoops, which the river considerately filled and lifted and spilled into irrigation canals.
And in one place, I saw a boat beside the bank that had immense, revolving paddlewheels on either side. On first seeing it, I thought it was some kind of Han invention to replace man-worked oars for propulsion. But again I was disillusioned of the vaunted Han inventiveness, for I realized that the craft was only moored to the bank and the paddlewheels were merely turned by the river current. They in turn rotated axles and spokes inside the vessel to make millstones grind grain. So the whole thing was nothing but a water mill, novel only in that it was not stationary, but could be moved up and down the river, to any place where there was a harvest of grain to be ground into flour.
There were innumerable other kinds of vessels, for the Yellow River was more crowded with traffic than was the Silk Road. The Han people, having such tremendous distances over which to freight their goods and produce, prefer to use their waterways rather than overland methods of transport. It is really a sensible practice, however much their Mongol masters ridicule the Han’s disregard for horses. A horse or any other pack animal, over any distance, will eat more grain than it can carry, but the river boatmen consume very little man-fueling food to accomplish each li of travel. So the Han rightfully respect and revere their rivers; they even give the name of River of Heaven to what we Westerners call the Milky Way.
On the Yellow River there were many shallow scows, called san-pan, and each scow’s crew was a family, to whom the boat was simultaneously home, transport and livelihood. The males of the family did the san-pan’s rowing or towing upstream, and the steering downstream, and the loading and unloading of the cargo. The females did what seemed to be perpetual cooking and laundering. And among them played a multitude of smaller boys and girls, all blithely naked except for a large gourd tied at the waist, to help them float when they fell overboard, which they did with regularity.
There were many larger craft propelled by sails. When I asked our escorts what they were called, the Mongols indifferently said what sounded like “chunk.” The correct Han word, I learned, is chuan, but that means only sailing vessels in general; I never did learn the thirty-eight different names of the thirty-eight different kinds of rivergoing and seagoing “chunks.”
Anyway, the smallest of them was as big as a Flemish cog, but of shallow draft, and looked to me ridiculously cumbersome, like an immense floating wooden shoe. But I gradually perceived that the chuan’s shape is not patterned on a fish, as most Western vessels are, for a fishlike celerity. It is patterned on a duck, for stability on the water, and I could see that it floated serenely over the Yellow River’s most tumultuous whirlpools and whitecaps. Perhaps because the chuan is slow and sturdy, it has only a single rudder for steering, not two as on our vessels, and it is set amidship at the stern and requires no more than a single steersman. A chuan’s sails are also odd, not being let to belly in the wind, but latticed by slats at intervals, so they look rather like ribbed bat wings. And when it is necessary to shorten sail, they are not reefed like ours, but are folded, slat by slat, like a griglia of persiana window blinds.
Of all the craft I saw on that river, though, the most striking was a small oared skiff called a hu-pan. It was ludicrously unsymmetrical, being bent in a sideways arc. Now, a Venetian gòndola is also built with a touch of camber to allow for the fact that the gondolier paddles always on the right side, but a gòndola’s keel bend is so slight as to be unnoticeable. These hu-pan were as skewed as a shimshir sword laid on its side. Again, it was a matter of practicality. A hu-pan always travels close against the riverbank, and as its oarsman variously keeps its concave or convex side to the bending shore, it more easily slips around the river bends. Of course, the rower must keep switching stern for bow as the river twists this way and that, so his progress resembles that of an agitated water-strider insect.
Before long, however, I had something even more strange to wonder at—on the land, not on the river. Near a village called Zong-zhai, we came to a deserted and tumbledown ruin that must once have been a substantial stone edifice with two stout watchtowers. Our escort Ussu told me that it had in olden time been a Han fortress of some long-past dynasty, and was still called by its old name: the Gates of Jade. The fortress was not actually a gate, and certainly not made of jade, but it constituted the western end of a massively thick and impressively high wall stretching northeastward from this point.
The Great Wall, as foreigners call it, is more colorfully called by the Han the “Mouth” of their land. In times past, the Han spoke of themselves as the People Within the Mouth, meaning this wall, and spoke of all other nations to the north and westward as the People Outside the Mouth. Whenever a Han criminal or traitor was condemned to exile, he was said to have been “spat beyond the Mouth.” The wall was built to keep all but the Han outside it, and it is unquestionably the longest and strongest defensive barrier ever built by human hands. How many hands, or how long they labored, no one can say. But the construction of it must have consumed the entire lives of many generations of whole populations of men.
According to tradition, the wall follows the wandering course laid out by a favorite white horse of a certain Emperor Chin, the Han ruler who commenced its construction in some distantly ancient time. But I doubt that story, for no horse would willingly have taken such a difficult route along mountaintop ridges, as much of the wall does. Certainly we and our horses did not. Though the remaining weeks of our seemingly never-to-end journey across Kithai required us generally to follow the course of that seemingly never-to-end wall—and while we were seldom out of sight of it from then on—we could usually find lower and easier ground downhill of it.