“Yes, yes.”
“In ten days or thereabouts, when the remains were deliquescing, the young man had lost all love for her. We believe so, anyway. He was quite insane by then. He went away with the Russniak train, but being led on a rope behind their wagons. He still lives, yes, but if Allah is merciful, perhaps he will not live long.”
The karwan trains wintering there on the Roof of the World were laden with all sorts of goods and, while I found many of them worth admiring—silks and spices, jewels and pearls, furs and hides—most of those were no great novelty to me. But some of the trade items I had never even heard of before. A train of Samoyeds, for instance, was bringing down from the far north baled sheets of what they called Muscovy glass. It looked like glass cut into rectangular panes, and each sheet measured about my arm’s length square, but its transparency was marred by cracklings and webbings and blemishes. I learned that it was not real glass at all, but a product of another strange kind of rock. Rather like amianthus, which comes apart in fibers, this rock peels apart like the pages of a book, yielding the thin, brittle, blearily transparent sheets. The material was far inferior to real glass, such as that made at Murano, but the art of glassworking is unknown in most of the East, so the Muscovy glass was a fairly adequate substitute and, said the Samoyeds, fetched a good price in the markets.
From the other end of the earth, from the far south, a train of Tamil Cholas was transporting out of India toward Balkh heavy bags of nothing but salt. I laughed at the dark-skinned little men. I had seen no lack of salt in Balkh, and I thought them stupid to be lugging such a common commodity across whole continents. The tiny, timid Cholas begged my indulgence of their obsequious explanation: it was “sea salt,” they said. I tasted it—no different from any other salt—and I laughed again. So they explained further: there was some quality inherent to sea salt, they claimed, that is lacking in other sorts. The use of it as a seasoning for foods would prevent people’s being beset by goiters, and for that reason they expected the sea salt to sell in these lands for a price worth their trouble of bringing it so far. “Magic salt?” I scoffed, for I had seen many of those ghastly goiters, and I knew they would require more than the eating of a sprinkling of salt to remove. I laughed again at the Cholas’ credulity and folly, and they looked properly chastened, and I went on my way.
The riding and pack animals corraled about the lakeside were almost as various as their owners. There were whole herds of horses and asses, of course, and even a few fine mules. But the many camels there were not the same sort that we had formerly seen and used in the lowland deserts. These were not so tall or long-legged, but bulkier of build, and made to look even more ponderous by their long, thick hair. They also wore a mane, like a horse, except that the mane depended from the bottom, not the top, of their long necks. But the chief novelty of them was that they all had two humps instead of one; it made them easier to ride, since they had a natural saddle declivity between the two humps. I was told that these Bactrian camels were best adapted to wintry conditions and mountainous terrain, as the single-humped Arabian camels are to heat and thirst and desert sands.
Another animal new to me was the pack-carrier of the Bho people, called by them an yyag and by most other people a yak. This was a massive creature with the head of a cow and the tail of a horse, at opposite ends of a body resembling a haystack in shape and size and texture. The yak may stand as high as a man’s shoulder, but its head is carried low, at about a man’s knee level. Its shaggy, coarse hair—black or gray or mixed dark and white in patches—hangs all the way to the ground, obscuring hoofs that look too dainty for its great bulk, but those hoofs are astonishingly precise of step and placement on narrow mountain trails. A yak grunts and grumbles like a pig, and continuously gnashes its millstone teeth as it shambles along.
I learned later that yak meat is as good to eat as the best beef, but no yak-herder in Buzai Gumbad had occasion to slaughter one of the animals while we were there. The Bho did, however, milk the cow yaks of their herds, a procedure which takes some daring, given the immense size and unpredictable irritability of those animals. That milk, of which the Bho had so much that they gave it freely to others, was delicious, and the butter which the Bho made from it would have been a praiseworthy delicacy if only it had not always had long yak hairs embedded in it. The yak gives other useful products: its coarse hair can be woven into tents so sturdy that they will stand against mountain gales, and its much finer tail hairs make excellent fly whisks.
Among the smaller animals at Buzai Gumbad, I saw many of the red-legged partridges I had in other places seen wild, these having their wings clipped so they could not fly. Since the camp children were forever playing hide-and-seek with the bird, I took them to be kept for either pets or pest catchers—every tent and building being infested with insect vermin. But I soon learned that the partridges had another and peculiar utility for the Kalash and Hunzukut women.
They would chop the red legs off those birds, keep the flesh for the pot, and burn the legs to a fine ash, which came out of the fire as a purple powder. That powder they used, as other Eastern women use al-kohl, as a cosmetic for ringing and enhancing their eyes. The Kalash women also painted their faces all over with a cream made from the yellow seeds of flowers called bechu, and I can attest that a woman with a face entirely bright yellow, except for the great, purple-masked eyes, is a sight to see. No doubt the women deemed that it made them sexually attractive, because their other favorite ornamentation was a cap or hood and a cape made of innumerable little shells called kauri, and a kauri shell is easily seen as a perfect human female sex organ in miniature.
Speaking of which, I was pleased to hear that Buzai Gumbad offered a sexual outlet other than drunken rape, Sodomy and hideously punishable adultery. It was Nostril who nosed it out, when we had been in the community only a day or two, and again he sidled up to me as he had done in Balkh, pretending disgust at the discovery:
“A foul Jew this time, Master Marco. He has taken the small karwansarai building farthest from the lake. In front, it pretends to be a grinding shop for the sharpening of knives and swords and tools. But in the rear he keeps a variety of females of varied race and color. As a good Muslim, I should denounce this carrion bird perched on the Roof of the World, but I will not unless you bid me to, after you have cast a Christian eye upon the establishment.”
I told him I would, and I did, a few days later, after we were unpacked and well settled in residence. In the shop at the front of the building, a man sat hunched, holding a scythe blade to a grinding wheel that he was turning with a foot treadle. Except that he wore a skullcap, he would have resembled a khers bear, for he was very hairy of face, and those locks and whiskers seemed to merge into the great furry coat he wore. I took note that the coat was of costly karakul, an elegant garment for the mere knife grinder he pretended to be. I waited for a pause in the gritty whir of the spinning stone wheel and the rain of sparks it was spraying all about.
Then I said, as Nostril had instructed, “I have a special tool I wish pointed and greased.”
The man raised his head, and I blinked. His hair and eyebrows and beard were like a curly red fungus going gray, and his eyes were like blackberries, and his nose like a shimshir blade.
“One dirham,” he said, “or twenty shahis or a hundred kauri shells. Strangers coming for the first time pay in advance.”