As we rode farther and farther along the Silk Road, it became increasingly crowded with traffic—groups and trains of traveling traders like ourselves, individual farmers and herders and artisans taking their wares to market towns, Mongol families and clans and whole boks on the move. I remembered how Isidoro Priuli, our clerk of the Compagnia Polo, had remarked, just before we left Venice, that the Silk Road had been a busy thoroughfare from the most ancient times, and now I saw reason to believe him. Over the years and centuries and maybe millennia, the traffic on that road had worn it down far below the level of the surrounding terrain. In places it was a broad trench so deep that a farmer in his nearby bean patch might see no more of the passing processions than the flick of a cart driver’s upraised whip. And down inside that trench, the cartwheels’ ruts had worn so deep that every cart now had to go where the ruts went. A carter never had to worry about his vehicle’s overturning, but neither could he pull it to one side when he needed to relieve himself. To change direction on the road—say, to turn off to some side-village destination—a driver had to keep going until he came to a junction where there were diverging ruts in which to set his wheels.

The carts used in that region of Kithai were of a peculiar type. They had immensely big wheels with knobbed rims, standing so high that they often reached above the wooden or canvas cart roof. Perhaps the wheels had had to be built bigger and bigger over the years just so their axles would clear the hump of ground between the road ruts. Each such wagon also had an awning projecting from its top front, to cover the driver from inclement weather, and that awning was considerately extended on poles far enough so that it also sheltered the team of horses, oxen or asses pulling the wagon.

I had heard much about the cleverness and inventiveness and ingenuity of the inhabitants of Kithai, but I now had cause to wonder if those qualities might be overrated. Very well, every cart had an awning to shelter its draft animals as well as its driver, and maybe that was a clever invention. But every wagon also had to carry several sets of spare axles for its wheels. That was because every separate province of Kithai has its own idea of how far apart a cart’s wheels should be, and of course its local wagons have long ago put the roads’ ruts that far apart. So the distance between the ruts is wide, for example, on the stretch of Silk Road that goes through Sin-kiang, but narrow on the road through the province of Tsing-hai, wide again but not quite so wide in Ho-nan, and so on. A carter traversing any considerable length of the Silk Road must stop every so often, laboriously take the wheels and axles off his wagon, put on axles of a different breadth and replace the wheels.

Every draft animal wore a bag slung under its tail by a webbing around its hindquarters, to collect its droppings while on the move. That was not to keep the road clean or to spare annoyance to people coming along behind. We were by now out of the region where the earth was full of burnable kara rock, free for the taking, so every carter carefully hoarded his animals’ dung to fuel the camp fire on which he would prepare his mutton and miàn and cha.

We saw many herds of sheep being driven to market or to pasture, and the sheep too wore peculiar backside appendages. The sheep were of the fat-tailed breed, and that breed is to be seen all over the East, but I had never seen any so fat-tailed as these. A sheep’s clublike tail might weigh ten or twelve pounds, nearly a tenth of its whole body weight. It was a genuine burden to the creature, and also that tail is considered the best part of the animal for eating. So each sheep had a light rope harness to drag a little plank behind it, and on that trailing shelf its tail rode safe from being bruised or unnecessarily dirtied. We saw also many herds of swine being driven, and it seemed to me that they could have used some expenditure of inventiveness, too. The pigs of Kithai are also a distinctive breed, being long in the body and ludicrously swaybacked, so that their bellies actually drag the ground, and I wondered why their herders had not considerately provided something like belly wheels.

Our escorts Ussu and Donduk were contemptuous of the wheeled vehicles and slow-plodding herds on the road. They were Mongols, and they thought all rights of way should be reserved to horseback riders. They grumbled that the Khakhan Kubilai had not yet kept a promise he had made some time ago: to level every least obstruction on every plain in Kithai, so that a horseman could canter across the entire country, even in darkest night, and never fear his horse’s stumbling. They were naturally impatient of our having to lead packhorses and proceed at a sedate pace instead of galloping headlong. So they now and then found a way to enliven what to them was a boring journey.

At one of our night stops, when we camped by the road instead of pushing on to a karwansarai, Ussu and Donduk bought from a nearby camp of drovers one of their fat-tailed sheep and some doughy ewe cheese. (I should probably say they procured those things, for I doubt that they paid anything to the Han shepherds.) Donduk unslung his battle-ax, sliced away the sheep’s tail-drag harness and in almost the same single motion cut off the animal’s head. He and Ussu sprang onto their horses, and one of them reached down to catch up by the club tail the sheep’s still-twitching and blood-spouting carcass, and the two riders began a gleefully galloping game of bous-kashia. They thundered back and forth between our camp and that of the sheepherders, wrenching the trophy animal from one another, slinging it about, dropping it frequently, trampling over it. Which of them won the game, or how they could tell, I do not know, but they tired at last and flung down at our feet the limp and gory thing, all covered with dust and dead leaves.

“Tonight’s meal,” said Ussu. “Good and tender now, uu?”

Somewhat to my surprise, he and Donduk volunteered to do the skinning and butchering and cooking themselves. It seems that Mongol men do not mind doing woman’s work when there are no women about to do it. The meal they made was one to remember, but not with bon-gusto. They began by retrieving the sheep’s lopped-off head, and it was spitted with the rest of the animal over our fire. A whole sheep should have sufficed to gorge several families of hearty eaters, but Ussu and Donduk and Nostril, with not much help from us other three, consumed that entire animal from nose to fat tail. The eating of the head was the least appetizing to watch and listen to. One of the gourmands would slice off a cheek from it, another an ear, the other a lip, and they would dip those awful fragments in a bowl of peppered juice from the meat, and chew and slurp and slobber and swallow and belch and fart. Since Mongols consider it bad manners for men to talk while they dine, that succession of good-mannered noises was not varied until they got down to the body bones and added the sound of sucking out the marrow.

We Polos ate only the meat sliced from the sheep’s loins—well-beaten by the bous-kashia and admittedly most tender. Or we would have preferred to eat only that, but Ussu and Donduk kept carving and pressing on us the real delicacies: pieces of the tail, meaning blobs of yellow-white fat. They quivered and trembled repulsively in our fingers, but we could not in politeness refuse, so we somehow managed to gag them down, and I can still feel the way those ghastly gobbets went slimily palpitating down my gullet. After the first dreadful mouthful, I tried to clean my palate with a hearty swig of cha—and nearly strangled. Too late I discovered that Ussu, after brewing the cha leaves with boiling water, had not stopped there as civilized cooks do, but had melted into the drink chunks of mutton fat and ewe cheese. That Mongol-style cha would make a nourishing full meal all by itself, I suppose, but I must say that it was downright revolting.