“Surely not,” I said. “That would most certainly be flagrant lesa-maestà, defying the Khakhan’s letter of safe conduct. And Kubilai would be furious, would he not, if we arrived empty-handed at his court, and told him why?”
“Only if we did arrive there,” my father said ominously. “Kaidu is presently the gatekeeper of this stage of the Silk Road. He holds the power of life and death here. We can only wait and see.”
We were kept waiting for some days before we were bidden to our confrontation with the Ilkhan, but no one hindered our freedom of movement. So I spent some of that time in wandering about within the walls of Kashgar. I had long ago learned that crossing a border between two nations is not like going through a gate between two different gardens. Even in the far countries, all so exotically different from Venice, to go from one land into the next usually brought no more surprise than one finds, say, in crossing from the Veneto into the Duchy of Padua or Verona. The first commonfolk I had seen in Kithai looked just like those I had been seeing for months, and at first glimpse the city of Kashgar might have been only a much bigger and better-built version of the Tazhik trade town of Murghab. But on closer acquaintance I did find Kashgar different in many respects from anywhere I had visited before.
In addition to the Mongol occupiers and settlers in the vicinity, the population included Tazhiks from across the border, and people of various other origins, Uzbek and Turki and I know not how many others. All of those the Mongols lumped under the name of Uighur, a word which means only “ally,” but signified more. The various Uighurs were not just allied to the Mongols, they were all in some measure related by racial heritage, language and customs. Anyway, except for some variation in their dress and adornments, they all looked like Mongols—berry-brown of complexion, slit-eyed, notably hairy, big-boned, burly and squat and rough-hewn. But the population also included persons who were totally distinct—from me as well as from the Mongoloid peoples—in appearance, language and comportment. Those were the Han people, I learned, the aboriginal inhabitants of these lands.
Most of them had faces paler than mine, of a delicate ivory tint, like the best grade of parchment, and bearing little or no facial hair. Their eyes were not narrowed by heavily pouched lids, like the Mongols’, but were nevertheless so very slitlike as to appear slanted. Their bodies and limbs were fine-boned, slim and seeming almost fragile. If, when one looked at a shaggy Mongol or one of his Uighur relatives, one thought at once, “That man has lived always out of doors,” then one was inclined to think, when looking at a Han, even a wretched farmer hard at work in his field, filthy with mud and manure, “That man was born and raised indoors.” But one did not have to look; a blind man would perceive a Han to be unique, merely hearing him talk.
The Han language resembles no other on this earth. While I had no trouble learning to speak Mongol, and to write with its alphabet, I never learned more than a rudimentary comprehension of Han. The Mongol speech is gruff and harsh, like its speakers, but it at least employs sounds not too different from those heard in our Western languages. The Han, by contrast, is a speech of staccato syllables, and they are sung rather than spoken. Evidently the Han throat is incapable of forming more than a very few of the sounds that other people make. The sound of r, for one, is quite beyond them. My name in their speech was always Mah-ko. And, having so very few noises to work with, the Han must sound them on different tones—high, mid, low, rising, falling—to make a sufficient variety for compiling a vocabulary. It is like this: suppose our Ambrosian plainsong Gloria in excelsis had that meaning of “glory in the highest” only when sung to its traditional up and down neumes, and, if the syllables were sung in different ups and downs, were to change its meaning utterly—to “darkness in the lowest” or “dishonor to the basest” or even “fish for the frying.”
But there were no fish to be had in Kashgar. Our Uighur innkeeper almost proudly explained why. Here in this place, he said, we were as far inland as a person could get from any sea on the earth—the temperate oceans to the east and west, the tropic seas to the south, the frozen white ones in the north. Nowhere else in the world, he said, as if it were a thing to boast about, was there any spot farther from the sea. Kashgar had no freshwater fish either, he said, for the Passage River was too much befouled by the city’s effluxions to support any. I was already aware of the effluxions, having noticed one sort here that I had never seen before. Every city spews out sewage and garbage and smoke, but the smoke of Kashgar was peculiar. It came from the stone that burns, and this was the first place I saw it.
In a sense, the burnable rock is the exact opposite of that rock I earlier saw in Balkh, which produces the cloth that will not burn. Many of my untraveled fellow Venetians have derided both stones as unbelievable, when I have spoken of them. But other Venetians—mariners in the English trade—tell me that the burning rock is well known and commonly used for fuel in England, where it is called kohle. In the Mongol lands it was called simply “the black”—kara—for that is its color. It occurs in extensive strata just a little way under the yellow soil, so it is easily got at with simple picks and spades, and, being rather crumbly, the stone is easily broken into wieldy chunks. A hearth or brazier heaped with those chunks requires a kindling fire of wood, but once the kara is alight it burns much longer than wood and gives a greater heat, as does naft oil. It is abundant and free for the digging and its only fault is its dense smoke. Because every Kashgar household and workshop and karwansarai used it for fuel, a pall hung perpetually between the city and the sky.
At least the kara did not, like camel or yak dung, give a noxious flavor to the food cooked over it, and the food served us in Kashgar was already dismally familiar of flavor. There were flocks of goats as well as sheep, and herds of cows and domestic yaks all over the landscape, and pigs and chickens and ducks in every backyard, but the staple meat at the Five Felicities was still the everlasting mutton. The Uighur peoples, like the Mongol, have no national religion, and I could not then make out whether the Han did. But Kashgar, as a trade crossroads, represented in its permanent and transient population just about every religion that exists, and the sheep is the one animal edible by communicants of all of them. And the aromatic, weak, not intoxicating, hence not religiously objectionable cha was still the staple beverage.
Kithai did introduce one pleasing improvement to our meals. Instead of rice, we got a side dish called miàn. That was not exactly new to us, as it was only a pasta of the vermicelli string sort, but it was a welcome old acquaintance. Usually it was served boiled al dente, just as Venetian vermicelli is, but sometimes it was cut into small bits and fried to crunchy kinks. What was new about it—to me, anyway—was that it was served with two slender sticks for the eating of it. I stared at this curiosity, nonplussed, and my father and uncle laughed at the expression on my face.
“They are called kuài-zi,” said my father. “The nimble tongs. And they are more practical than they look. Observe, Marco.”
Holding both of his sticks in the fingers of one hand, he began most adroitly to pick up bits of meat and skeins of the miàn. It took me some fumbling minutes to learn the use of the nimble-tong sticks, but, when I had, I found them to be notably neater than the Mongol fashion of eating with the fingers, and indeed more efficacious for twirling up strings of pasta than our Venetian skewers and spoons.